Musing among the vegetables

Boris Grebenschikov on authors' rights

2010-10-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Boris Grebenschikov on author's rights, in an interview at Lenta.ru:

У меня могут быть какие угодно цитаты из кого угодно. Я за это извиняться не буду. Я использую те слова, которыми я пользуюсь в жизни. Я не собираюсь согласовывать свою песню с комитетом по охране авторских прав, потому что я не признаю авторских прав. И все мои песни могут любыми людьми расхищаться, как им это нравится, потому что мы все звенья одной цепи. Те, кто знают, как пишутся песни, знают, что это естественный процесс. У всей музыки – один источник. Никто ни у кого не собирается красть. Т.е. есть люди, которые специально берут и крадут, потому что им нужно заработать денег. Мы пишем песни не ради денег. Поэтому, когда я пишу, я использую тот материал, который мне доступен.

I can have any quotations from anyone. I'm not going to apologize for that. I use the same words that I use in everyday life. I'm not going to run my song by some Committee on Authors' Rights, because I don't recognize authors' rights. And all my songs can be freely looted by anyone in any way they like, because we're all links of the same chain. All music has the same single source. Nobody can steal anything from anyone. Of course, there are people who intentionally steal because they need to make some money. We don't write songs for money. So when I write, I use the material that is in front of me.

Boris Grebenschikov (Борис Гребенщиков) is a quintessential founding figure in Russian rock of the late soviet and post-soviet period. Together with his band, Aquarium (Akvarium, Аквариум), he pioneered the pay-what-you-can approach to music distribution on Kroogi.ru with his recent albums White Horse (Лошадь Белая) and Our Life From The Trees' Point of View (Наша жизнь с точки зрения деревьев).

RIM: Bug-fixing, platinum edition.

2010-10-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, I filed an issue with RIM's issue tracker, TOOL-118, detailing my experience of trying to connect to Blackberry JDWP tool with IntelliJ IDEA. JDWP tool is the proxy to the simulator or actual mobile device that implements the Java Debug Wire Protocol on the outside, allowing an arbitrary JDWP-compatible debug tool to connect for a remote debug session. IntelliJ IDEA is the best damn Java IDE in the world, period.

The problem was basically that RIM's JDWP tool apparently wasn't fully compliant to the actual JDWP protocol, choosing instead to focus narrowly on its compatibility with Eclipse's debugging implementation. After some screwing around, it seems that RIM's JDWP tool expects something along the lines of jdb's "resume" command after the connection is established, otherwise it just keeps the simulator/device's JVM in a suspended state indefinitely.

Well, they promised to look at it, and this morning, roughly half a year later, their work was complete.

twindsor updated TOOL-118:
----------------------------

Status: Investigation (Closed) (was: Investigating)
Resolution: Fixed

JDWP with other development environments is no longer officially supported.

Only the use of JDWP with the Eclipse plugin is currently supported.

Because, you know, "we want to meet you on your turf, we want to make it easy for you to use the tools you're already using". Thank you RIM, I love you too.

(to Tim Windsor, the developer liason who helped me initiate the issue: no offence, I understand that you're not the one making decisions such as what IDEs and dev environments to support. Thanks for your help.)

Faktur

2010-10-05T23:25:00.000-07:00

Someone make a monospaced Faktur please... I would use it!

There is one out there actually, Erika Mono Faktur, but doesn't seem like it's publicly available. Credit: Andreas Brietzke

Blue jerboas have arrived

2010-09-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

My beautiful and extremely industrious wife has finally put together a blog where she's constantly putting up her works that she's doing at the Academy of Art. Here she is:

And here's the kind of stuff she does:

I have no idea how long it took her to do all those stripes.

Inter's multiethnic Ukraine

2010-08-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

Just stumbled upon something really cool. One of Ukraine's prime TV channels, Inter, shot a series of video clips for Ukraine's 19th anniversary of independence (24th of August, today). Each of the clips is dedicated to an ethnic group living in Ukraine -- it starts with a short scene in the language of the ethnicity in question, and ends with the representatives of that ethnicity singing the Ukranian National Anthem, translated into the language of the ethnicity. There's also a caption that says how many of the representatives of this ethnicity live in Ukraine (e.g "there are 150,000 Ukraininan Romanians who call Ukraine Motherland") and it ends with a tagline "We're different, but we're all one!".

Here are the links to youtube videos that I spotted:

Pretty darn great. I was really pleasantly surprised to see this. Those of you who know me also know my peculiar attitude to national matters, but this is just fantastic. This is the best I can possibly wish to Ukraine in the years to come -- and with that, happy birthday, Ukraine!

Russian government uncovers secret documents related to Katyn

2010-04-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

The scanned originals are here on the RusArchives site (in Russian). That's big. The Poles should've discovered those natural gas deposits of theirs earlier, I say -- these documents would've been public for years now.

Guido van Rossum and David Pollak on Scala

2010-04-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

There's an insightful blogpost and thread followup on Guido van Rossum's blog from 2008 on Scala. Guido skims through the Programming in Scala book and comes out nonplussed:

I have to agree with Steve -- if this is what it takes to have compile-time type-safety in a language, I'll take dynamic typing any day. There's got to be a better way -- perhaps Haskell? Haskell is a pure functional language with a fast implementation that seems to have solved the I/O problem of functional languages well -- while its Monads are truly deep and take real work to create, their use seems quite straightforeward.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment in Scala is that they have so many rules to make it possible to write code that looks straightforward, while being anything but -- these rules all seem to have innumerable exceptions, making it hard to know when writing simple code will work and when not.

David Pollak, the guy behind Lift web framework then makes a valuable point that I think I agree with very much. Scala is about tradeoffs, and getting the compiler involved in validation of your library design while keeping the glue code / code that uses the library pretty and transparent.

Unlike any other language I've used (C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Ruby, etc.), the kind of thinking I have to do as a library consumer and library producer are radically different.

As a library consumer, I rarely concern myself with Scala's type system... or most of the other language complexities. My consumer code looks and feels a lot like my Ruby code did. I've got great DSL support. For the most part, the types that the compiler doesn't infer are the ones I need to document anyway. But, unlike my Ruby code, I only need 50%-60% test coverage (vs. 95% coverage) to have stable, deployable code.

As a library producer (http://liftweb.net), I spend a lot of time reasoning about the types of parameters. This allows the compiler to flag illegal types (e.g., passing an Int into a query against a VARCHAR column). The type system also allows me to reason about my code and how the consumers will use my libraries in a way that I could not do in any other language I've ever used.

Nostalgia in Times Square

2010-03-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Yea, I was hanging out in Times Square, reminiscing to the rhythm of the city.

Walking up and down Broadway, checking out all them fine babes.
Dancers on their way to class. Birdland, the jazz corner of the world!
Yea, I played with Mingus at Birdland one night. I said, Charles, can I play one with you?
He said yeah, come on, man. As long as the union don't bust us.
Well, no sooner said than done, Mingus counted off Charlie Parker's "Coco", fast as he could play it.
And man, that was fast.
Well, I got off two choruses without getting too bruised. And then when the set was over James Hoodie came over and gave me a big hug, and said, man, you made it! Made me feel real warm. Gave me the courage to keep on keeping on, Jack. Yeah! Well, I sure felt good that night.

The Mingus Big Band, "Nostalgia in Times Square"

Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester: party like it's 1929!

2010-01-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

"If you are in a mood to party like it's 1929, then the anachronistically dapper Max Raabe can take you there with his revival of Weimar-era cabaret and tin pan alley classics. While the lyrics of tunes like "You are my Greta Garbo" betray a sense of irony that is surprisingly in tune with our times, Raabe's dedication to the sound and spirit of these old songs is fully in earnest." -- German Missions in the US

Here's a little sampler of their tunes from their website.

Also, search for Max Raabe on Youtube for another set of their gorgeous performances.

Another BlackBerry™ BIS outage.

2009-12-23T13:53:00.000-08:00

CrackBerry reports there's been another BlackBerry BIS outage yesterday. Yay! A Christmas reminder to the devs: avoid BIS like the plague in your apps. I do.

IntelliJ Idea 9.0 is out!

2009-12-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

Good news, everybody! IntelliJ Idea 9.0 is out! Go grab it, there's enough for everybody!

In case you didn't know, this year's release comes with a Christmas present for all you good-behaving boys and girls: an open-sourced Community edition. There's a ton of goodness in the Community edition, and a ton more in the Personal $249 edition ($149 if you're upgrading). If that sounds like a lot of money, compare ingredients and price with the MS Visual Studio.

So ditch your Eclipse into the gutter right now, and run to get your very own copy of Idea!

Speaking about Austria

2009-12-03T00:37:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I jokingly mentioned that we shouldn't be surprised if Austria follows the Swiss lead on banning the minarets. I don't claim to know much about Austria, but it turns out I wasn't exactly wrong here. Farid Hafez has an article (Google English translation) in Austrian Der Standard on 30. Nov which argues, very reasonably, that the Swiss ban is only a manifestation of a much more serious phenomenon of widespread paneuropean islamophobia. He also mentions that whereas in Switzerland it looks like an absurd paradox, a very controversial decision with no unified majority behind it, in Austria the support for such hypothetical measures has much more of a consensus behind it. An in fact, an Austrian land has approved exactly such a ban a minarets, although more covertly, two years ago in 2007:

In fact, Austria was the first country where such a ban was implemented. While a resolution of the FPÖ in the first half of 2007 was soundly defeated in the National Assembly still took advantage of the Carinthian governor a chance, a mosque and minarets of launching. Such however, could not use the votes of his own party alone prevail. Thus, the Austrian People's Party agreed with Carinthia.

But what's even more worrying is true is the fact that a party of the "center" in another state, this law still half a year earlier decided. While in Carinthia, the law on 18 December was implemented in 2008, was in Vorarlberg ÖVP under a majority, 20 June 2008, the first mosque in Europe and Minarettbauverbot blessing. All these laws were in Austrian style of course less clear and direct than in Switzerland (change of Ortsbildpflege Act and the Building and Regional Planning Act formulated). It turns out that even in this part of the political elite of the "middle" such a ban is supported. A consensus of the parties, churches and civil society against such a ban in Switzerland can not be found. On the contrary, the Feldkircher diocesan bishop at that time supported such a mosque and Minarettbauverbot. Even members of the Federal Government appropriate arguments were heard.

Sorry about the automatic translation -- maybe Greg can provide a better one.

Swiss Antics

2009-12-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Greg Levonian has a post on Switzerland's recent referendum results banning construction of minarets. (as per a BBC article, there are only 4 currently in Switzerland)
An, Schweize Volks Partei... even in their xenophobia they're so warm and cuddly.

But seriously, don't be surprised when the neighboring Austria does something similar. The good news is that Vatican has quickly condemned this, and I think it's going to sparkle a new wave of public discussion in Europe. And that's going to end up in one of two ways. Either Switzerland is shamed to death, or all of a sudden all those xenophobic masses in other European countries have their "aha" moment and do the same thing. With the current level of racism & xenophobia in Europe, you just never know.

But also, it's kind of interesting how Switzerland doesn't have any overarching constitutional legislation to prevent this kind of referendum from succeeding.

Meanwhile, embarrased Swiss officials are trying to lighten up the mood (from here):

Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said: "Concerns [about Islamic fundamentalism] have to be taken seriously.
"However, a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies."
She sought to reassure Swiss Muslims, saying the decision was "not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture" (emphasis is mine).

The Evil Møøse Pays Back For Years of Abuse With a Sharpened Stick

2009-11-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

BBC News is reporting a very curious story today:

A Swedish man who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife has been cleared, after police decided she was probably killed by an elk.

The Møøse's lawyer had this to say about his claim that the Møøse is innocent:

No realli! She was karving her initials on the møøse

with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given

her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and

star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo

Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst

Nordfink"...

The Møøse's defence might be complicated by the fact that, according to the prosecution, the murder was committed in the state of alcohol intoxication:

The European elk, or moose, is usually considered to be shy and will normally run away from humans. But Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.

Blackberry Internet Server Infrastructure Down Across North America (again)

2009-11-16T18:23:00.000-08:00

For about two hours I thought I was going crazy when the application I was debugging stopped loading data from the servers. It just so happened that today is the second day after the rollout of the app onto Blackberry App World, and the user comments started flowing in about being unable to load data.

Turns out, after testing app and BB browser on 5 devices (3 local, 2 remote), and numerous timeouts in BB AppWorld client, that we're dealing with another North America-wide BIS infrastructure failure.

There are numerous confirmations on the twittosphere, and online magazines and websites are starting to pick it up (here's one). Last two such outages seem to have happened on Sep 9th and 22nd of this year, according to the same resource.

This is just mind-blowing. Not the fact that the failure occured, but the fact that in this day and age RIM continues to support the BIS system, which effectively routes the vast majority of browser and 3rd party app traffic on Blackberry through Waterloo.

Just mind-blowing.

Testing solutions for BlackBerry and other mobile devices

2009-11-12T18:46:00.001-08:00

It's interesting that quite a few sponsors of this year's BlackBerry Developer Conference had something to do with testing solutions. Now, it's a very interesting and practical topic, and something that I get asked a lot by clients — so here's a quick survey of the companies that had a presence at the conference and have interesting solutions to offer.

DeviceAnywhere is the one solution that's probably most well-known. They provide remote access to a bunch of physical devices on a variety of carriers that are physically located in the US, Europe, Asia, and have a pretty robust solution with client that works on both Windows and OSX. Many people have found their solution very useful.
Perfecto Mobile is a competitor of DeviceAnywhere and provides a similar remote-access solution. They are based in Israel and less known around these parts, but a quick look at their website shows that the scale of their operation and range of devices/networks is very similar. They, like DeviceAnywhere, have a set of automation features, which they claim are more advanced than DA's. One significant difference between them and DA is, according to the rep I talked to, that their way of capturing screen and injecting keypresses/etc is non-intrusive and thus they can more quickly swap devices in and out, and, importantly, give developers easy access to pre-launched handsets. If that is true, that's a big advantage, because I have stumbled into issues of DA not providing access to new devices quickly enough. Definitely worth checking out.
bsquare is in a different niche. Their solution provides QA depts with a way to automate testing on real devices — once you hook a device up to the Windows machine running their product, you have the ability to create automatic test cases that include the information on both how to execute a test scenario and how to validate that a test has passed. Their solution seems very flexible and powerful. The $10K per-seat price tag seems fair, but it also means that their customers are going to be either enterprise app developers or bigger consumer app developers who have the money to make the investment (Google is reportedly one of their clients). They might do well to offer their technology to the pay-per-use solution providers like the two above, or offer their technology on a subscription license.
Intertek is a large global company that provides testing services in many industries, and the people at the conf presented the mobile branch. Quoting their rep, "our prices per hour are similar to DeviceAnywhere, except we actually do the testing". The price, of course, I presume, varies wildly depending on whether you choose to do testing in India (overnight, too!) or in Europe or US. You might presumably choose to use the Indian resources while having them use DeviceAnywhere or competitors to access the US devices.

Breaking news almost live from BlackBerry Developer Conference Keynote

2009-11-09T18:06:00.000-08:00

Breaking news! Only 7 hours late!

OpenGL ES and 5.0 widgets were impressive, but most impressive of all...
They showed a jaw-dropping demo of reloading an application in the simulator without restarting the simulator and waiting for ages for the bloody thing to start up! Good morning freedom!
Another demo from RIM research dungeons: a too-good-to-be-true demo of a completely Java-based simulator, and they teased all of us poor souls with a screenshot of it running on Mac OS X. Now, of course, my gut feeling is it's not going to be available for at least half a year — but at least they are moving in the right direction.
New Eclipse 1.1 plugin looks spiffy. I just might start running Eclipse in parallel with my beloved IntelliJ Idea, an IDE of unparalleled beauty and power. Still better than running JDE on VmWare in parallel with IntelliJ Idea on OSX. And now for some delusionary dreaming: now that Idea is open-source, how about a full-scaled BlackBerry™ plugin for Idea? Pretty please?
First glance at visual editor for GUI in Eclipse plugin: I'm looking forward to how badly it's going to screw up when faced with manual edits to its generated code and slightly-more-complex-than-trivial layouts.
Flash, Webkit: right direction, but meh for now: mention it when you actually have something to show.
Payment system and ads: huge in impact, but of course in no way innovative. Still a welcome addition.
Triangulation-based location failover: nice, but again, RIM is catching up here.
Overall: lots of nice incremental changes, right attitude towards developers. But I should've gotten more than 3 hours of sleep before that keynote.

Obligatory sarcastic remark:

Java 1.5 language support: nowhere in sight.

Childbirth and social responsibility

2009-11-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

Having children is such an emotional issue that we will never have the majority voluntarily start thinking about personally challenging their gut feeling about having kids (which is to have them). Only when we get much farther, after the first-world country isolation barrier is no longer able to buffer us here from the real effects of overpopulation, and the misery and effects of resource wars hit home, will we have the by-then police states of western countries step in and impose seemingly draconian restrictions. And everybody will feel bad. That's the human way. (Hopefully countries like China will keep being smarter than the hypocritic first-world and will keep gently revving up the already existing policies)

Take a look at the comment trails here and here.

And finally, a relevant comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Ramblings on population growth

2009-09-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

Global population growth has been a hot topic recently, for example, with this Economist article arguing that birth control should be considered an effective "green" technology.

I especially like this quote from the above article:

Sir Julian Huxley, the first director-general of the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation when it was established in 1945, remarked that death control made birth control a moral imperative.

Getting back to the idea of birth control as a green technology, well, it's not new. I don't have the source, but some Chinese spokesman presenting at some UN environment protection conference has recently remarked that, of all world countries, China's contribution to environment protection has been the greatest, with its one-child-per-family policy preventing more than 400 million births since the 1970s. I'm quoting from memory, but it's a pretty darn good argument which should hopefully make all those people condemning China for insufficient attention to the environment a bit more humble. Compared to the kind of environmental impact that 400 million extra people translate to, we really have to admit that there's no other country which has done so much for the environment.

National Geographic ran a feature on population growth a few months ago -- it's a nice sensationalist topic to run a feature on these days. The problem is, everybody who writes on this subject says things like "in the next X years, we will need to increase food production tenfold to meet the projected demand". To give justice to the NG article, it does mention Thomas Malthus and his simple, brilliant idea that population, that grows exponentially, will always be limited by food production, which grows linearly or in the best case polynomially -- but it doesn't go into the grimy details of exactly what this means.

I mean, nobody wants to write, "in the next X years, we have to drive global population growth rate down to 0 and, potentially, negative numbers". It is much nicer to write with a troubled expression on one's face, "in the next X years, we have to increase food production tenfold". Yeah right, good luck with that, especially once you discover that by doing that you've just dug out an even bigger pit for yourself.

I say, we need to have a serious, non-emotional discussion about our global attitudes to reproductive policies and, having done that, abandon for good the cute-and-furry notion of "reproductive rights". There's no such thing outside the social context, and it's about time we start talking about it.

This just in: Gordon Brown makes an official apology to Alan Turing on behalf of British Government

2009-09-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

This here is nothing short of fantastic. Kudos to all UK citizens who signed the petition and to Mr. Gordon Brown and whoever else worked to make this happen. This goes a long way towards better recognizing Alan Turing's wonderful legacy and the appalling way in which he and the rest of the LGBT community was treated for too long. I'm impressed and heartened by this current British Government's gesture and think that, despite many other problems that currently plague European societies, this is one of many things that show the dramatic social progress that was won since the middle of last century. The good will for actions like these is one of those things that helps Britain continue setting, albeit imperfectly, an example for the rest of the world.

Update: resistant on Slashdot: "It's nice to see a politician who can actually pass the Turing test."

Update: Another good idea: people, why stop at this? Let's use the momentum and have Mr Alan Turing knighted posthumously!

Campaign to have British Prime Minister issue an official apology for persecution of Alan Turing

2009-08-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

The Register has an article today about a petition to have the British PM or parliament issue an official apology for persecution of Alan Turing in 1952 for his homosexuality, which put an end to his career at Bletchey Park and ultimately contributed to him committing suicide.

I say, apology is long overdue.

Code lives with data, but not always is that union blessed.

2009-07-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

Re: How to think about OO

I really don't buy the "code lives with data" thing. With this approach, after a while you get the octopus of a User class, aware of everything going on in your application -- authentication, the fact it's a web app, transaction management, parsing of itself from xml, marshalling itself into xml... where do you stop applying this "code lives with data" principle? And, actually, the classic separation of concerns, together with testability-oriented thinking, produce a lot of nice small classes, logically self-contained, easy to understand, use, and, yes, reuse. But reusability is not the only reason why you don't clump together concerns -- it's just one such reason.

Sure, if this is a tiny singular occurrence in your app (say, the only place in a tiny app authentication is ever dealt with), go ahead and put this method as a convenience. But surely we're not talking about such cases? Small unimportant apps can take a certain amount of clumping together of code dealing with different concerns before they become a complete nightmare to work with -- but who cares about those apps?

High-definition television

2009-07-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Via mi3ch, credit: Christian Science Monitor, Bennett

Vonage, Protectron: nasty hidden fees, deceptive practices, bad experience

2009-07-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

This is just to document my horrible experience with Vonage customer service and hopefully put a little dent into Vonage PR. While Vonage may seem to be a pretty cool service at first, turns out they have a clause in their terms of service (which is completely hidden from view of a customer at the time of account creation) that there's a $50 disconnection fee if the account lasted for less than 2 years (that's given the fact that they don't subsidize the equipment and their service is absolutely overpriced compared to Skype or other VoIP providers). I'm going to dispute those charges through VISA chargeback, but as a note to anybody considering Vonage service: look to some other company, or be stuck with mediocre service from Vonage and be prepared to discover unexpected charges when you need to cancel the service.

Same goes for Protectron, a security alarm company providing services in Canada: I was deceived by the representative of the company, Jeff Friend, about the terms of service. I was lead to believe that the service was month-to-month with no term obligations: a call to Protectron after a year of shelling out $55/mo for their service (not including equipment, which we paid for competely) revealed that they apparently have a clause that says that if you cancel before 48 months (48 fucking months!!!), you have to shell out all of the money ($55/mo times number of months remaining) upfront. Not to mention that this is ridiculous, it's also completely unjustified since the company doesn't subsidize the equipment in any way, either. Once again: stay clear of Protectron with their deceptive practices.

I hear that the consumer protection agencies are working here in the States to stop the practice of lock-in cell phone contracts -- well, we should really have the same thing in Canada, and it should also apply to any other service company, like Vonage or Protectron, who abuse the trust of their customers and should hopefully not survive the economic downturn. Meanwhile, stay away from them if you can.

Gøt sübtitles?

2009-07-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

CRRC-Caucasus has a great article today (via gl) about Georgia's parliament contemplating introduction of more sub-titling of foreign movies and tv (as compared to dubbing, which is widespread in GE and other countries of the region, including Russia). This article lists exceptionally interesting research indicating that countries with widespread subtitling have better foreign language knowledge, in general. Worth a read - thanks Greg.

By the way, I hate dubbed movies with all my heart -- and now there's an objective reason why.
Version originale, sous-titlé: that's the way to go.

Speaking of other things I hate: I jüst cän't stand thøse decorative dîacriticals and foreign letters ußed in english branding. E.g.: Яed Dawn, Göt2b Glued and, finally, Toys'Я US. Like those babies can read russian!