Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

It's interesting how owners of compact laptops tend to be in general agreement about matters of screen real estate.

This afternoon, I helped another ThinkPad X60s owner with some ACPI issues and in exchange, learned about some Mozilla Firefox extensions which make life with small screens more interesting.

While I prefer to use simple text browsers, the hostile WWW of today is becoming less and less navigable that way, and I'm finding myself suffering the bloat (in terms of memory and in terms of screen real estate) of Mozilla Firefox more and more.

I had already learned about TinyMenu from Jan at work. Today I learned about the Littlefox theme, which when combined with TinyMenu reduces the screen bloat of Mozilla Firefox to almost acceptable levels.

The Autohide extension improves matters even more by making the fullscreen mode of Mozilla Firefox usable.

Finally, I also learned about the Scrapbook extension. I can think of a number of uses for this, but I will need to remember to use them.

Some screenshots are probably appropriate here:

There appears to be a small bug in the Littlefox theme: it assumes that I am allowed to use the Mozilla Firefox artwork and puts the "fox" logo in the top right corner. If I understand the Mozilla Firefox licence correctly, one is only allowed to use this image on official builds. Since I build Mozilla Firefox from source myself, I don't think my build is allowed to display this image.

I love learning shiny new things. Especially if they make my life easier. :-)

As blogged yesterday I've started playing with a new window manager: Awesome. It took a bit of setting up, but I've now got it to the point that I'm pretty much happy with it. The fact that 'converting' after years of Ion use was so painless is an indication of how user-friendly Awesome is.

The only feature I'm still missing is a sensible way for showing load averages. Awesome supports progress bars and text boxes which can be fed through a socket.

After a bit of discussion on IRC, I'm hacking up a patch for more generic graphing widgets. This should find its way to git Real Soon Now[tm].

In the mean time, I already wrote a monitor to feed them. Basically, I start off by polling every ten seconds, if the values I get start to vary wildly or raise spectacularly, I reduce the interval accordingly. Still needs a bit of work, but it's much nicer than a battery-eating shellscript which polls at constant intervals regardless of load.

Watch this space -- Philip has a new hobby ... again! :-)

We saw quite a lot of polizei yesterday. In Germany, the smurfs wear green and not blue like almost everywhere else. Around the late afternoon, there was a demonstration against the German data-retention laws and pretty much a whole army of smurfs showed up. I didn't notice any tear gas or water canons, but they can't have been far behind.

Funny though. A demonstration for freedom and the police almost outnumbers the demonstrators. Hmm...

Being hungry, we didn't stick around for the demonstration. We went to a fairly nice brauhaus on the other side of Alexanderplatz station. Their Weihnachtsbock (Newtonmas brew) was particularly tasty. It went well with the steak I had.

Back at 24C3, I started downloading the videos of the presentations I didn't see. At conferences like this, I always find myself enjoying the hallway track more than the actual conference, but I do like the talks too.

More Club-Mate and some lockpicking later, we got back to our hotel around 02:00ish this morning. We were forced to drive 30km/h on a stretch of road which could easily accomodate a multiple of that because there was a smurf driving in front of us. Weirdos.

Tomorrow morning is really, really going to hurt. We plan to leave before 08:00 so we get home at a somewhat sensible hour. After almost a week of fairly late nights and slightly late mornings, 08:00 feels very daunting.

And now for breakfast!

I think I had a bit too much Club-Mate to drink yesterday because I didn't sleep very much tonight. As a result of this, I'm feeling very tired today and drinking more Club-Mate to compensate. Getting out of this downwards spiral will be painful.

Today I started playing around with the Awesome window manager Holger introduced me to yesterday.

Since the last Ion incident I have been on the lookout for a new window manager, never quite finding one I liked. So far, Awesome is living up to its name.

I originally built Awesome 2.0 from pkgsrc-wip but after playing around for a bit, I pulled the latest code from git because it has some features I want and because I can think of a number of things I wouldn't mind hacking in at some point.

It was a little annoying that the .awesomerc format changed about 100% between 2.0 and git, but it was well-worth the trouble.

One of the things I want to hack on is a load average widget. I think it's about the only thing I currently miss from Ion.

Now for more Club-Mate and then some munch munch I think.

First day of 24C3 yesterday. A blast! And chaotic as expected. I managed to see one talk: Steam-Powered Telegraphy. Pretty cool stuff. Even if the steam-engine didn't actually work. If ever I need another hobby, I could see myself getting into this.

The rest of the day I spent catching up with people I hadn't seen for a while. A fair number of people were also at CCC this summer, some I hadn't seen since FOSDEM in February (and given my load averages during FOSDEM, managed to only say hi to, then).

I took a short trip into West Berlin in the afternoon after munch munch to find a Citibank (long live global standardization of ATMs and free cash withdrawals) because Berlin is a very cash-intensive city and 24C3 a very cash-intensive conference. By "short trip", I mean "twenty minutes on the U-Bahn in each direction". Berlin is not a small city.

We're starting off a little late this morning. Last night, I managed to synchronize with Tilman (yay -- I'm not the only FreeBSD-ist!) and we went for the closest alternative to beer we could find: some mysterious coctail bar where they feel that absinthe should be consumed in shot-glasses without any water. What a strange idea.

Didn't have too much to drink, but we only got back to the hotel around 03:00ish. And not being entirely rested from Wednesday's drive over, we felt we deserved a bit of a lie-in.

Today, we're going to try to get to the Alexanderplatz by S-Bahn and U-Bahn. We'll see how that turns out. Catching the last train back might be a bit of a challenge tonight, but I think we'll manage!

It's CCC time again. :-)

After a long drive yesterday, we found our way to Berlin. The Alexanderplatz is still a construction site. Some things will never change.

We were smart and bought our tickets yesterday. This morning, there is a queue until outside the building.

Now for Chaos! Yay!

Dear developers of mplayer, thank you for catching the return value of open().

Why the bloody hell do you print "File not found" whenever it returns negative though?

This kind of error handling isn't:

[MPlayer-1.0rc2/stream/stream_file.c:145]
if(f<0) {
        mp_msg(MSGT_OPEN,MSGL_ERR,MSGTR_FileNotFound,filename);
        m_struct_free(&stream_opts,opts);
        return STREAM_ERROR;
}

Please consider using strerror(3) or similar. EFBIG is not the same as ENOENT.

Having said that -- when is Linux (and Solaris too, I think?) finally going to join the 21st century and make off_t a 64 bit quantity like sensible operating systems have done years ago? Yes it will hurt a little, but it will hurt way less than the sick and disgusting -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE hack that's now in place.

This hack was called 'transitional' in 1996 (Large File Summit). Isn't it about time we moved on?

Consider the happy scenario where I am an application compiled with the hack and I talk through a Unix domain socket to an application which isn't and I pass this application one of my file descriptors to a large file.

Imagine then that the person who wrote the application decides to ignore the return value of lseek() before writing to the file on the fairly sensible grounds that he's certain the file descriptor will exist and won't be a pipe (I will have checked it for him), and his whence argument is sane.

Things go boom. Files get corrupted. Applications become unhappy.

Some teeth grinding, cursing and debugging later:

What the FUCK is EOVERFLOW?

Admittedly, the example I give is a little contrived, because many people just don't know that you can pass file descriptors over a socket (did you? ;-)), but the problem would be just as valid had I forked a child and passed the file descriptor to it. In fact, in that case, the reasoning that the file descriptor would be valid would make even more sense: generally one's parent process is somewhat trustworthy.

All this pain would vanish in a puff of smoke if off_t were always the same -- and 64 bits wide -- as it is on BSD.

Tomorrow is Newtonmas. Our hero, Sir Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642. Around that time, people started fiddling with the calendar -- again -- so his date of birth is often given as 4 January 1643. To Newton's mother, it was 25 December though, and that's all that really matters.

Today is a good time for geekdom to remind ourselves what great things this man has done for us, and why he deserves to be celebrated while non-geeks find other excuses for celebration (something to do with cows and asses, if I'm not mistaken, and biologically unlikely reproductive processes).

Alexander Pope did a very good job, without going into much detail, with his epitaph:

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.
   -- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

I don't know this "God" person, but Pope was certainly right.

Some details are probably in order though.

Aged 23 (1665), young Isaac generalized the binomial theorem, which fascinated our other hero Blaise Pascal and started working on inventing calculus, which he needed to prove his theories about gravity. Most people would consider two fields, mathematics and astrophysics, to be enough, but like a true geek, Newton didn't stop at two and also looked into optics around this time.

In 1672 he published his New Theory about Light and Colours. Nearly blinding himself in the name of science by staring at the sun and poking his eyeballs. Unhappy with the hardware at his disposal, he also made his own reflecting telescopes which were far superior to the refracting ones others made.

Unavoidably, Newton bumped into the wave-particle duality of light, which today is still keeping scientists awake at night. Instead of spending his nights unproductively worrying about waves and particles, Newton spent time studying the occult and wrote some more about light. In particular, he wrote his Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light and later Opticks.

All fascinating stuff!

While writing Opticks (1704), Newton also came into contact with the wonders of static electricity.

Besides being a great scientist, Newton was also a very capable engineer and economist. Most people seem to forget that during much of his life (1700-1727), Newton was Master of the Mint and most of his scientific work was done after hours. Geeks with numismatic tendencies will enjoy reading Sir Isaac Newton: Master and Warden of the Mint.

At the Mint, Newton is best remembered for the invention of the milled edge coin. Until the 1690s, silver coinage were tendered by number (whereas gold passed by weight). Enterprising individuals often shaved or clipped a little silver off the edges of the silver pennies or shillings, reducing their value without reducing their status as legal tender.

Newton came up with a clever way of 'hammering' the motto decus et tutamen ("a decoration and a defence") into the edges of the coins and then came up with a sensible way of collecting the old currency and replacing it with the new. The European Central Bank used a similar mechanism to roll out the Euro three hundred years later.

Also often forgotten (and disputed) is that Newton came up with recursion. He is, in fact, attributed with the invention of the cat flap: a door within a door.

I could go on, but I recommend everyone read one or more of the many excellent biographies of this great historical geek.

Tomorrow morning, find yourself a plastic apple tree-like structure and exchange gifts of wisdom with your friends. Perhaps print out some of Newton's papers (on recycled paper) or better yet, put them on a USB stick. The Newton Project is a great source for these.

Happy Newtonmas!

It appears that after years of not quite saying "dear Dubya: I want your lovechild" while in office, Tony Blair has now left the closet and joined the Catholic church (sect, that is).

Reading through the comments on the BBC News article, this one pretty much sums up my views:

I would never have voted for him had I knew he was religious. The thought that people in power have gone to war based upon the voices in their heads fills me with horror. To not believe in fairytales is the norm, anything other than that is delusional. We need more normal atheist people to speak up for common sense. D. Johnstone, Birmingham, U.K.

I think it would be a very good idea to add as a requirement for people who stand for an election to list their religious views (if any). I don't want my country governed by believers in fairytales who listen to the voices in their heads, thank you very much.

Are you listening, Yves? It's already quite clear to me that you can't lead a country. It would not be a good idea to try to let the voices in your head do it for you!

Madness!

Work is "closed for business" this week. I don't quite understand why -- something to do with newtonmas and planetary laps around the sun, I'm told, but those hardly qualify as reasons to me. Must be something else. Or I'm just a workaholic?

Because I have nothing better to do, I decided to upgrade my laptop to Slackware 12. This went very well. Slackware remains the only Linux distribution maintaining BSD-like consistency and ease-of-use.

Since Slackware now (finally!) moved to Linux 2.6.x, the intrd image has at last become a cpio file instead of an ext2 filesystem image. This means I do not need to find another Linux machine to stick the network modules in it for PXE-booting (I don't trust FreeBSD's ext2 support for writing yet).

While I was at it, I decided to also upgrade to modular X.org by building it from pkgsrc instead of taking it from Slackware. This worked very well. I only had to set X11_TYPE=modular in my mk.conf and install the modular-xorg-apps and modular-xorg-server packages and the fonts and drivers I needed. Went very smoothly.

If you're still running older versions of Slackware, I recommend upgrading. :-) It's worth the (small) effort.

Yesterday evening, I had arranged to go to Leuven. I left home at 17:50 to catch the 18:12 train. At 18:15 - still no train. Eventually a smurf from the ticket-office walks up to me and asks me if I was waiting for a train. I thought no, you idiot, I have a mental disorder which compels me to come to train stations roughly around the time trains are expected there, and said yes, of course I'm waiting for the train to Leuven

Turns out the trains were on strike. Again!

While I fully support the workers' right to strike, I feel they're beginning to exaggerate slightly. Particularly because they're annoying the wrong people. The NMBS doesn't care if the trains don't run. The train passes have been paid for, the government subsidies to maintain the rail network too. Who cares if trains are running or not? Not having to deal with the pesky passengers is an improvement to them.

Idea for strikers at NMBS: look at what De Lijn has done a couple of times: refuse payment from passengers for a day. While this is no fun for the people with a train pass, it will hurt the NMBS - more people will take the train just because it's free. And it won't get on the nerves of the people with train passes: our train runs, we'll be happy.

Following a yearly tradition, our favourite state monopoly fiddled with its timetables again last weekend. Curiously, everyone I meet is complaining about them, but the NMBS claim that all is going very well. I wonder how that works.

I have mixed feelings about the new timetable. My "connections" have improved, but the times of my trains have seriously deteriorated. The equivalent of the train I used to take, now runs a half hour earlier. This is practically the middle of the night. Not fun. The improved connection softens the blow a bit though.

Today, I am experimenting with an alternative connection. It's not working well. I am still enjoying essid:default waiting for a train which should have left five minutes ago... This will make me miss my connection.

I guess I'll stick the the middle-of-the-night connection.

On another note: would someone please fix the online 'dienstregelingen' system on nmbs.be? It's down for 'technical reasons' (as opposed to 'emotional reasons'?) about four times out of every five I try.

Earlier this evening, a devoted reader[*] of my blog mentioned that they now have an ADHD-enabled kid in their home. The kid has been there for a while, and presumably the ADHD as well, but only recently has it been determined that the kid in fact has the ADHD-bit set.

This is not in itself blogworthy news. Though I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the newly-confirmed ADHDer to the club! :-)

What irked me however, was how it was said: "there is a new ADHD-patient among us".

No! No, no no no no no!

I don't know how often I (and many other ADHD-enabled people) have said this: ADHD is not a disease and we are not patients. If you must use a medical term, go for 'disorder', but please remember that it is the opposite of 'order', and that order is bland and boring.

Personally, I prefer to say that I have the ADHD-bit or the ADHD-flag set.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Of course, I've never had another brain than the one I currently sometimes use, but all things considered, I think ADHD does me more good than bad. Which is not to say that it's all good. Just that it is certainly and by a long margin not all bad.

I realize that the word 'patient' was not used pejoratively in any way, and that this rant is perhaps a bit disproportionate (no hard feeling though!) but I feel it can't be said enough.

It really annoys me to read articles in magazines and newspapers which classify me as 'a patient' or as being 'afflicted with ADHD' or similar nonsense. In fact, it annoys me almost as much as the writings of people who, unhindered by any serious research 'in the field', classify the medication we take as 'dangerous drugs'. Ugh!

Having mumbled all that, I look forward to perhaps adding the adventures of another ADHD-enabled kid to my blogroll. hint hint nudge

[*] It is not up to me to say who. That's up to them.

Ik maak er geen gewoonte van om over politiek te bloggen, maar dit moest er toch even uit.

Vanmorgen stond er in de krant te lezen (bron) dat CD&V/N-VA (die partij van het goed bestuur en hun vijfzetelige separatistische appendix) het de koning kwalijk neemt dat hij Verhofstadt het veld in stuurt om te proberen het land terug wat bestuurbaar te maken.

Ik vind het wel sterk dat de partij (en vooral het aanhangsel) die het land voor zes maanden gegijzeld heeft en ongelofelijk belachelijk gemaakt heeft in het buitenland haar bek nog durft opentrekken. Ik schaam me in hun plaats! Na zes maanden geklungel de pantoffelhelden gaan uithangen en verontwaardigd beweren dat de beste stuurlui aan wal staan is er toch wel heel ver over.

Hopelijk realiseren de mensen die op die kwieten gestemd hebben zich nu eindelijk wat een flater ze daarmee begaan hebben. Ik vrees echter dat velen onder hen bij de volgende verkiezingen 'foert' gaan zeggen en nog smeriger zullen stemmen, op de Nazi's van het Vlaams Blok ^W Belang.

Kijk jongens, jullie hebben zes maanden de kans gehad om jezelf te bewijzen. Die kans hebben jullie, om het zeer zacht uit te drukken, grondig verprutst. Jullie kunnen nog geen regering vormen, wat wil je dan een land gaan besturen?

Het is wel heel makkelijk om "de Franstaligen" (en dan vooral cdH) de zwarte piet toe te schuiven. Niet dat ik vind dat zij zich spectaculair soepel opgesteld hebben, maar je kan hen moeilijk ongelijk geven. Onderhandelen met een clubje (het vijfzetelig aanhangsel) dat hen liever kwijt is dan rijk, om redenen die in principe neerkomen op taalkundig racisme, kan moeilijk motiverend werken.

Ik denk dat het nu de beurt is aan ernstige mensen, mensen met maatschappelijk inzicht en ervaring in het effectief besturen van een land, om orde op zaken te stellen. Goed geprobeerd, Leterme, maar je kan het écht niet. Je kunt nog dertig formatiepogingen ondernemen, niemand wil met jou nog onderhandelen. Je hebt op zes maanden tijd de boel grondig verziekt. Dit is uiteraard koren op de molen van het aanhangsel maar het is wel een bizonder kinderachtige manier om te proberen aan te tonen dat het land onbestuurbaar zou zijn.

Het land is niet onbestuurbaar. Leterme kan het land gewoon niet besturen.

Hoewel ik niet beweer dat "paars" perfect is, hebben ze toch maar acht jaar bewezen dat ze een land kunnen besturen. In plaats van te schreeuwen dat je het beter kunt (of sterker: dat we er maar twee landen van moeten maken in plaats van een) zou "oranje" (vooral quarantaine-geel) er beter wat lessen uit trekken over "goed bestuur".

Les 1: zonder tweederde meerderheid kan je niets afdwingen, en moet je compromissen sluiten - dat wil onder meer zeggen dat je dat luidruchtig vijfzetelig aanhangel best gewoon in de kast steekt en je concentreert op ernstige bestuurlijke onderwerpen in plaats van veel tijd en moeite te steken in irrelevante thema's die voor iedereen een ver-van-mijn-bed show zijn, behalve die paar afscheidingsgezinde lawaaimakers.

Les 2: divide et impera (geen Nederlands, of "Vlaams" als je wil - er bestaan ook andere talen, feature, not bug) hebben de Romeinen ooit geprobeerd, zoek even op waar dat op uitgedraaid is.

Nu is het natuurlijk te laat. Je hebt je kans verknoeid. Tot twee maal toe.

Geheel terzijde: hoewel ik ook helemaal geen fan ben van de monarchie -- ik vind het een duur achterhaald grapje dat zijn sell-by-date al lang voorbij is -- vind ik het ook niet nodig om een 70-plusser zijn hobby te ontnemen. Laat ons de monarchie rustig afschaffen als Bere het loodje gelegd heeft. Het heeft weinig zin om ons daar nu druk in te maken. Misschien hebben ernstige mensen tegen dan een regering kunnen vormen, hoewel ik vermoed dat N-VA dat op alle mogelijke manieren zal tegenwerken.

Neh, en nu heb ik genoeg politiek gezwetst voor de rest van het jaar, ik ga me terug op software concentreren, daar zit tenminste nog een beetje logica in!

Sometimes, my built-in tendency to memorize all kinds of useless trivia comes in handy. Last night, I was invited by TASSers Jan, Gerrit and Guy to join their team (void *) in the annual TASS quiz.

We had set ourselves the goal of being "the best team from Thomson", but somehow managed to end up in second place, winning us each a nice weekend trip of our choice from a pretty nice list. Yay!

Who would have known that remembering the names of the big rocks in our solar system in order would ever be useful? Or remembering that Easter Island is a part of Chile or that Britten wrote music for A Midsummer Night's Dream?

I could kick myself for not remembering the names of Nostradamus' books or failing to recognize various kinds of tea, but Jan and Gerrit's memory for music and movies, and Guy's memory for sport amply compensated for the gaps in my memory.

Good teamwork guys. :-)

Thanks to Duane, I also learned that it is possible to fit two folding bikes in a Smart. Of course, I could have biked home from Leuven, but I couldn't pass on this opportunity for science! I think it should even be possible to fit three bikes in, with a bit of fiddling. But we only had the two with us.

It seems our favourite state monopoly has finally seen the light: they are at last looking into the idea of offering WiFi on the trains (source). The Netherlands are also looking into this. They also want to make it free, reasoning that this would convince more commuters to take the train.

While I would be happy to pay a small contribution, I believe all WiFi access should be free (and usually it is, though most users don't know this and most operators want to keep it that way, prefering to charge ridiculous prices for TCP connectivity). Offering it for a nominal fee would be a step in the right direction though.

I suggest the NMBS contact VIA in Canada to ask about their implementation. I was very happy with their WiFi offering. So happy, in fact, that I even decided to pay for it.

Volgens de krant vanmorgen, wil 35% van de Vlamingen (wat zijn dat, Vlamingen? Ik dacht dat we Belgen waren?) van job veranderen als hen dat minder file oplevert.

Jongens, neem toch gewoon de fiets! Eventueel in combinatie met het openbaar vervoer.

Wat heeft het voor zin om elke morgen de auto van stal te halen, hem op het werk (of in de wijde omgeving ervan) te parkeren en hem vervolgens 's avonds weer op stal te zetten? Met de fiets heb je nog een beetje bewogen, en op de trein kan je ook je favoriete hobbies (zoals daar blijkbaar zijn: telefoneren, neuspeuteren en lezen) beoefenen. En dit zonder het risico te lopen iemand te rammen of zelf geramd te worden.

Met een beetje puzzelen kan je zelfs nog een rustig ontbijt in je ochtendlijke transitritueel passen.

Updated: Ik realiseer me dat voor sommige mensen het openbaar vervoer en de fiets geen oplossing is -- als ze wonen of werken in onderontwikkeld gebied waar geen openbaar vervoer in de buurt komt. Indien alle anderen die wel met een beetje moeite zonder auto naar het werk kunnen dat ook zouden doen, zou het probleem voor de overblijvende auto-gebruikers een pak minder groot zijn.

It seems social networking is the cool thing these days. My mailbox (my spambox, actually) has recently been filling up with 'invitations' to join something called Pulse.

After LinkedIn and (recently, reluctantly) Facebook, I do not need yet another social networking website. I do my social networking the more authentic way: in a pub over a beer.

I find that I do not fit the profile of these sites anyway. My life does not revolve around my webbrowser.

Dear friends, please stop inviting me to social networking sites. Join me for a beer instead. You know where to find me!