New site

You might want to literally waste some time on my new website: riddleschannel.org. The purpose of this page is to conduct certain experiments. If you want to help, just spread around the link!

New code release: ext2frag

A master student of mine has developed a FUSE filesystem as a part of his master thesis. He needed to compare several fragmentation metrics of his own FS with that of EXT2. However, no decent programs for calculating EXT2 fragmentation statistics are available, so I set out to code one since the student was really short on time. You can get the program here.

Free society ; some tips

I've recently watched Lessig's presentation on free culture.  It has been recommended to me as an example of interesting use of slides, but it is also an excellent lecture on how copyright stifles innovation and development.  The following is the basis for the whole lecture:

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
   
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
   
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.
   
4. Ours is less and less a free society.

There's another noteworthy quote (by JC Watts, a US congressman/senator?): "If you're explaining, you're losing."

Regarding tips: perl's CPAN shell is an excellent tool to install packages and their dependencies. However, it uses active FTP by default which is more and more dysfunctional because of firewalls.  Exporting the environment variable FTP_PASSIVE=1 before running will make it use passive FTP.

Few rants...

First: I'm switching from emacs back to vim. It's nice to have everything integrated into emacs, it's calculator is especially good (reminds of HP48), but I've found emacs nearly impossible to use for C++ coding. Namely, its internal parser gets often confused, and it won't let you type a simple colon (':'). Usually closing the file and opening it again fixed the problem, but not few days ago. Emacs simply refused to allow me to type in ':' (as in 'public:'). That was too much for me, and I switched back to vim (I've anyway used vi emulation in emacs; i find concise vi-keystrokes much more accessible than emacs' endless strings of characters in combination with alt/meta..)

Second: ubuntu sucks! I have it installed on my desktop machine on work, because that's "what everyone else uses" and only ubuntu CD's are available for installation. Today I ran the latest upgrade of 8.04, rebooted the machine and I was greeted with half-functional GNOME. I.e. the gnome-panel was missing and had I not had some folders on desktop that allowed me to get access to the file manager and eventually run an xterm, it would be completely unusable (i.e. none of the keyboard short-cuts worked either). Solution? I have no idea -- I installed xfce4 to get a functional desktop. The good thing is that xfce4 does not display the annoying update notification every now and then :-D Anyway, ubuntu owes me compensation for 1.5 hours of lost work time. Talk about "no-cost" software :-P

To hell with climate change, time to speak up for the fish!

Most media are writing about the polar ice melting, polar bears being exterminated.. like anyone's going to notice that they're gone. At the same time, something much worse is happening, and it should deserve at least as much media coverage as climate change: unsustainable overfishing in the seas. This article is a very awakening and scary read. Spread the word and make politicians do something! I've never seen a polar bear, nor do I have a particular desier to see it, but i like very much to eat fish.

[PS. I think that disappearance of any species is regrettable, but I certainly prioritize a food source over some exotic animal. It's regrettable that media don't have same opinion.]