Raw Matter

Did you know that most pan makers recently were forced to increase their prices because their pan lids (covers?) have the handle on the upper side? The reason is that the maker of our recently purchased pan lid has patented the innovative “this side down” technique and is now busy collecting license fees from pan lid makers who didn't previously have this idea.

(Yeah, sorry, the picture is crap, I didn't pay enough for my mobile phone. But if you doubt me, please have a coffee at my house and admire this high-tech implement.)

Thinking that this might be worth hacking on tail (because I felt the functionality would be better kept there than in head), I started to have a look at its source. Lo and behold! tail -n +N already does exactly this...

(Obviously a followup to Zack's comment on my previous posting.)

A script I keep reinventing again and again: installing those binary packages from a self-compiled package where the other (presumably older) version is already installed on the system. I don't have time to make this generic right now, but still...

for i in *deb; do 
    echo ${i%%_*};
done | xargs dpkg -l 2>/dev/null \
    | buthead 5 \
    | cut -f 3 -d \  \
    | while read p; do
         echo  ${p}_4.2.3-1vbi_i386.deb;
      done \
    | xargs sudo dpkg -E -i

Update: I don't know how I managed to see -E in dpkg's manpage but miss -O which is right above it. Thanks, Guillem. Josh: Either my english is just not good enough, or the manpage of debi is from a slightly different reality. I just can't make out what, exactly, the tool tries to do. (Ok, since dpkg -iOE does exactly what I want anyway I didn't try very hard either.)

Update: RTFM.

Think on the meaning of what you say if you close a bug with “could not reproduce”.

A reply to Tore, who is probably partly wrong. I don't claim the U.S. system is good or bad, I don't know it. But I don't think public (which he seems to imply means free) health care is as easy as he suggests. I'm starting at his assertion that

Very few people break their legs intentionally to stay at a nice hospital. [Health care] is not a resource likely to be wasted once people are given free access to it.

The case of a broken leg is easy. What about chronic illnesses, especially those difficult to diagnose (some kinds of back pain, psychological problems, ...)? What about bored old people who spend their days talking to doctors about how bad getting older is? Easily available (cheap or free) health care has lead to hospitals being swamped with people with minor issues to the point where people with serious problems died because hospital staff didn't get to them in time. And, because the state's budget is not infinite, hospitals become badly run institutions with always-overworked staff leading to even fewer people wanting to work there etc. This has happened in the UK, for example (I think the system I have been reading about ages ago has since been replaced by a different one.) Switzerland doesn't have this problem (to this extent) because we really care about (this means, here: throw money at) our health system, but the result is that the mandatory health insurance becomes insanely expensive. There is talk about half the population needing state subsidies to pay for their health insurance within the next few years. Which, of course, will just move the cost from the whole population (via mandatory health insurance) to the whole population (via taxes) so I don't quite see the point...

You'll note I don't propose solutions either. But I think it's important to acknowledge that health care is a difficult topic because, in the end, it always comes down to the question How much money should be spent on this person's illness? which is a very, very bad question. We try to sidestep it by only taking about statistics etc., but no matter how you look at it, you either do 20'000€ per week medications for 80 year old patients who will die soon anyway and get a system society can't pay, or you don't and you get a system where the rich are better off than the poor. Or you delegate the decision to the doctor or the insurance or ... and try to minimize the number of people who “deserve” (can you see it, the hard question didn't get away!) treatment but don't get it.

Update 20090508 - Response to comments I'd like to thank you for commenting. I didn't know (and — sorry about that — didn't care to research) that the U.S. system is even more expensive than ours, since my main message is just that health care is about hard decisions. Some people always will be left out. Elaborating a bit on the 20'000 € a week medication: partly, I agree with Adrian and Tore: patent-supported monopolies on medication plays a part. Partly, because I stipulate there will always be rare illnesses where a few cases per year worldwide will have to “pay for” all the research and production of the medication. Of course, the cost can be distributed so that the patient (or his insurance) doesn't have to pay it, but society as a whole will still pay. So the hard question won't go away easily, now it's just become Do we fund research for this rare illness with fewer than five cases per year worldwide? Of course, now we're not speaking of people anymore, but already just of cases, and we're not cutting treatment for an actual person but we're just cutting budget on research, so it may be easier on the conscience, but it's still fundamentally the same question. Conclusion? Health-care will always be a difficult topic, and it will never be free. The cost can just be distributed in different ways.

Reading Kyle's view on Konqueror and KHTML's current status: I couldn't agree more. I use konqueror instead of Firefox because I quite like its GUI, and its integration into KDE is obviously better than Firefox'. Issues with various websites prompt me to have an Iceweasel window open as well quite a large part of the time. Let's just switch to WebKit, so the market only has to care about Gecko and WebKit and can ignore one more marginal rendering engine.

I see libqt-webkit 4.5 is in experimental and a Google query on “debian konqueror webkit” at least shows an Ubuntu packaging effort of the Konqueror WebKit KPart, so the days of khtml on my Desktop are certainly nearing its end.

At this point: Kudos to the KDE folks (Debian and upstream). KDE4.2 is really, really usable, the remaining issues are really small. And, if I don't try to manually interfer like I did in my first attempt, migrating the KDE settings from ~/.kde4 to ~/.kde actually did work just fine on my netbook.

While probably nobody has missed the news of the wekk (year?) in the IT industry, I'd still like to award a small virtual prize to Jonathan Corbet for the best headline:

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Yay! I'm finally allowed to (and starting to) port the application I'm working on at work from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

Oh, and I note that PostgreSQL 8.4 (beta out yesterday) introduces support for WITH RECURSIVE queries (closures, or for you Oracle folks, CONNECT BY, if I understand the feature correctly), the lack of which has always made tree / graph type data structures a pain to work with in current and older versions. Of course, many other improvements, too.

Long time since my last movies posting ...

Just discovered the U.S. TV series Supernatural, in an episode showing the two heroes being introduced for the first time to the writer of the book series “Supernatural”, which contains the life of the two heroes. (Strangely, it showed up when I searched for Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs on a torrent search engine.) I'm not quite sure what to think about the series, judging from that episode. I read a lot of fantasy and I like the real-world / fantasy world crossover every now and then, but Supernatural is quite cheaply made. Watching this one episode was fun, but I have no idea if I would actually watch it regularly. (I find, generally, that fantasy is difficult in movies. Lord of the Rings is very well executed and mostly presents the world as “just a normal world”, and I'm forever thankful to Jackson that he shares my opinion — I think he says as much in the bonus materials on one of the DVDs — that magic with smoke and flashes mostly ends up in major silliness. I have neither read nor watched anything of the Harry Potter epic, so I can't comment on that.)

While I can't comment on Reservoir Dogs yet, I finally got around to watch From Dusk Till Dawn by director Robert Rodriguez, and with Tarantino (also co-writer of the movide, and if you watch the making of, co-director even if it's not in the titles) and Clooney as two of the main characters, together with a wonderful Juliette Lewis. That's certainly one of the movies I'll watch again, several times. Great soundtrack, too.

Yesterday, I was a bit disappointed after I watched Time Bandits; Gilliam's later films got much better.

It takes something to make a stop motion movie in today's time of cheap and easy computer animation ... so I really liked Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, if not for the rather straightforward story, but for the look and the atmosphere. The movie is also more a musical than a film, which I like very much as well.

While yesterday was April Fool's day (I guess that's why Schneier posted this on his blog), the actual quote seems to be genuine (It wasn't added yesterday, and anyway it's on Wikipedia, so it must be true...)

Prompted by the theft of Eileen, MOBA staff installed a fake video camera over a sign at their Dedham branch reading: "Warning. This gallery is protected by fake video cameras."

Quote from the Wikipedia article about the Museum of Bad Art

While I'm not terrible happy with Oracle (what decade is it? Have a look at Oracle's default sql commandline tool and you're right back when I wasn't even born. Commandline history? Tab completion? Even just navigation with the arrow keys in the commandline? The future is really cool... Yes, I'm sure nobody seriously uses sqlplus), they just scored on this: I needed to download one of their products. I tried to create an account, saw that I already had one, had the password reset and mailed to me (extra point for not just sending me the old one) and signed in, getting a page where I could confirm my data (address data and subscription to their various newsletters), and hit the “continue” button that was at the bottom, whereupon the application still remembered that I wanted to download the file and immediately delivered the requested file. The fact that I didn't remember having an account highlights that their “I don't want email from Oracle” option really does mean exactly that. I really did not get a single email from them.

All this is extremely trivial. Sadly, it makes me happy that there is at least one company that actually manages to do this, which goes entirely against my experience with other vendors' web jungles.

Just stumbled on the Optical RayTracer by Paul Lutus, a fun program to play around with optical lenses. After an initial look around, the next obvious step was, of course, to re-build an existing lens; I guess it worked somewhat. Compare the screenshot below with the block diagram of Canon's EF 50mm 1.8 lens. (No, I'm not paid by Canon, it's just the brand of the camera we own, and it's probably one of the simplest lenses around, too. Which, no surprise, we happen to own as well.)

Optical RayTracer is not in Debian yet. I've asked Paul if he'd mind if I did a package. Not within the next two, three weeks, though, sorry.

The Canon EF 50mm 1.8 re-built in Optical Raytracer

(Note to self: also look at OpenRayTrace)

As funny as these stories are for reading, any hard data is absolutely lacking. Are there similar stories which actually cite sources? OTOH the fact that even cheap main stream devices like USB sticks and WLAN routers routinely have “compatible with Linux”, often even giving a kernel version, printed on the package tells me that the stories are not that far off. Even so, I'd be curious who these Icelandic Microsoft Certified Partners switching to Linux / Free Software are (first link, the quote below also originates there).

Microsoft Access, the only database software on the planet that’s better at printing mail-merged stickers than it is at storing data.

I'm eternally confused about the state of powermanagement in Debian (or in Linux generally? Not using any other distribution seriously, I have no idea.) There are just too many scripts who interact or merely run in parallel (see my short note in my first posting about my shiny toy. While I don't actively invest time to educate myself about the situation, I've just tried to uninstall a round of unneeded packages and got rid of apmd and hibernate, which both were installed by default (or by dependencies of other stuff I've got rid of earlier?) but seem not to be necessary. At least the laptop still suspends when I close the lid. This is without rebooting or even just logging out, though, so if it doesn't work out, I'll have to update this entry.

Update: Thanks to Michael's comment, pointing to #451380. Scope for a Google Summer of Code project, perhaps? This would be 90% talk to people and get a consensus and only 10% coding, though, but I think it would be worth it so that squeeze would have a powermanagement /acpi framework where different components don't stand on other components' toes all the time.

Two small tricks that I feel should be circulated more widely, because Google only disclosed them to me after a few false starts:

To figure out which processes are writing to the disk, I eventually found /proc/sys/vm/block_dump (see also chapter 5 of the Laptop Mode FAQ) which does exactly what I was hoping to find: it shows down to the level of process and file where disk writes are coming from. (Turns out, that kded and PowerDevil are currently appending to the .xsession-errors file regularly, keeping the disk busy on my new toy. Unlimited scrollback in konsole was the other culprit, but that one is switched off easily.)

Since I want to start backup on my netbook when it comes online at home, I figured the DHCP server was the likely place to trigger this. But the “execute” feature to start hook scripts on the DHCP server (see the dhcp-eval man page) was only added quite recently, so google first showed me a huge load of discussions involving tail on syslog and parsing its output. (I also found the simple event correlator which might be useful where “run command” features are not available.)