Planet Tyler

On Tuesday, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) announced a number of grant awards at the Polytechnics 2012 conference, including the new Industrial Research Chairs for Colleges (IRCC) grants. I am honoured to be selected as the chairholder for the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Open Source Technology for Emerging Platforms in the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College.

This five-year renewable applied research grant enables me to continue and expand upon the work that I have been doing, along with a talented team of research assistants, with Fedora ARM and related projects. My goal is to bring the wealth of open source software currently available for x86 PCs and servers to emerging ARM based general-purpose computers. Although ARM architecture chips are the most popular CPUs made (more ARM chips shipped last year than there are people on this planet), most of these went into dedicated devices, and ARM chips are just starting to appear in general purpose computers. In order to make the transition to general-purpose ARM systems viable, industry-standard software stacks are needed. Fedora is a perfect fit for this purpose, because it encompasses both a large collection of cutting-edge open source software and a vibrant community, and it feeds many downstream distributions and projects.

My work in this new role will start with an expansion of existing work, including operating the Fedora ARM Koji buildsystem and improving the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, but I will additionally be focusing on Fedora on ARM server-class systems. In future phases, this will encompass working with the Fedora ARM project to promote ARM to primary architecture status, extending existing open source system management (and possibly virtualization/cloud management) frameworks to manage high-density ARM clusters, doing field trials of ARM-based data centre solutions, and bringing Fedora to the next generation of ARM technology.

Although the majority of my activity will shift from teaching to applied research, I will continue to teach the SBR600 Software Build and Release course in order to bring the research experience back into the classroom. I'll also continue to participate in the TeachingOpenSource.org initiative. As an Industrial Research Chair, I will also have a bit more of a public-facing role, representing CDOT and advocating the use of energy-efficient systems to local SMEs.

Many thanks to Red Hat for partnering with Seneca on this initiative, and I look forward to (continuing to!) work closely with Red Hat's incredible technical staff. I also thank the many companies and organization who wrote letters of support for the grant application, and look forward to collaboration and possible future partnerships with those organizations. And I particularly want to thank Seneca for its support of applied research, my colleagues at CDOT for their encouragement and for creating such an awesome environment to do applied research, and for the team that wrote the grant application under intense pressure and tight deadlines last November.

Watch this space for updates!

I just finished reading all of Jane Austen's novels.  She only wrote six, and they are relatively short, compared to, say, Charles Dickens' novels.  Still, I did it. 

Other authors I hope to read the complete works of include:

Charles Dickens (still 4 I haven't read)

Bronte sisters (5 unread  3 unread)

George Eliot

Thomas Hardy

D. H. Lawrence

Joseph Conrad

John Steinbeck

Ernest Hemingway

F. Scott Fitzgerald

William Faulkner

And the complete plays of:

William Shakespeare (finished!)

Christopher Marlowe

Ben Jonson

Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus

Moliere

Ibsen, Strindberg

G.B. Shaw

Element 14, the web presence of one of the Raspberry Pi distributors, Farnell,  operates a wonderful forum system. However, there is one significant problem with their system: under their terms of use, a person who is under 13 is prohibited from using the forum (and those between 13 and 18 from using it without their parent's explicit consent).

This understandable requirement, probably a result of US legislation (and perhaps legislation in other jurisdictions?), is at odds with the Raspberry Pi's stated focus on children (hence the "considered harmful" jab).

I'd encourage the Raspberry Pi community to use forum and wiki systems that don't exclude the device's target audience from participating! Perhaps Element 14 would consider a revision to their Terms of Use, or a dedicated forum with special rules that would enable children to participate. In the meantime, the Raspberry Pi Foundation's forums and the E-linux Wiki do not have age restrictions on participants.

Andrew Smith has released his Open Source Translation Database project, which contains thousands of open source translation files and can populate new translation files based on previous translations. In the released form this in incredibly useful -- and he has ambitious plans for new features and capabilities such as suggesting strings to be used in new projects based on the number of available translations.

Congratulations, Andrew, on this launch!

The Raspberry Pi hardware went on sale last night, and as with every other event related to the Pi, pandemonium ensued!

The educational, tech, and mainstream media is starting to take note. Here are some links to local coverage of the Pi and our work on the software for it:

• CBC.ca
• Toronto Star
• IT Business

Update 2012-03-03 - additional links:

• Radio Canada International - Masala Canada
• CBC News - Lang and O'Leary Exchange (segment starts at 47:05)

Update 2012-03-10 - additional links:

• MindShare Learning Report - March 2012

To clarify Seneca's involvement, because it may not be clear from the press coverage:

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation created the Raspberry Pi hardware, and has licensed its production to a pair of UK-based production and distribution companies, Farnell (which has wordwide subsidiaries including Newark here in Canada) and RS Components (Allied Electronics in Canada).
• The Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) within Seneca College works with the Fedora ARM group within the Fedora Project to produce a build of Fedora for ARM devices. One of our roles is the creation and operation of the build system, a cluster of more than 60 ARM-based computers used to build the ARM software.
• My research group at CDOT and my Software Build and Release (SBR600) classes at Seneca worked together to produce the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, which takes the Fedora ARM software and adds a small number of additional software packages needed for use on the Pi. We tested the remix on an alpha (pre-production) board provided by the Foundation.

Information about the Remix may be found on the Seneca CDOT wiki.

The computer education, hardware hacking/maker, and open source worlds are all eagerly anticipating the release of the $35 Raspberry Pi computer before the end of the month. In preparation for the hardware release, tthe Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix 14 distribution is being released this Wednesday, February 22.

Full details of the event are on the CDOT wiki. Everyone's invited, and I hope to see you there!

Update: Fixed link above.

My grandmother used to have a fridge magnet that said, "We get too soon old, and too late smart."   In the past decade I have gotten a lot older, and a little wiser.

I've learned something about people: the way they treat others, is the way they will eventually treat you.  If someone you know is lying to other people, don't think, "Oh, but we're friends.  He won't lie to me!"  Of course he will, and probably already is.  Or if a friend is always talking about others behind their backs, count on it that she is talking about you too.

Credibility, once lost, is almost impossible to restore.  Everyone tells a fib or two, now and then.  But there is a line.  A friend of mine posted a resume which is about 80% fictional.  The 20% which is true might as well be fictional too, because no-one who knows him will believe even that.

It's amazing how self-aware most people are not.  Especially those who have really bad characters.  But almost everyone is blind to their own character flaws, minor or major.  (I, of course, am the exception...) 

Going to the CBC this morning, I found this:

I have three problems with this:

1. The CBC is our public broadcaster, funded in large part by tax money. It should support wide access.
2. I'm not running IE, I'm running Firefox. The ad is lying to me. If they're able to detect I'm not running the latest version of IE, they should also detect that I'm not running IE at all. My browser is not old, either -- I'm running the latest release of Firefox, which contains several features not yet supported by IE.
3. IE does not run on my platform (Linux). The ad is a waste of time for me and a waste of money for the advertiser. The pages to which the ad links are all specific to Windows, with no consideration for those running Mac OS/X, Linux, or any other platform.

The ad text seems to imply endorsement. Does the CBC actually endorse the position that the only acceptable end-user computing platform is Windows on an x86 computer? Is increasing the monopoly of a foreign corporation a suitable goal for a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster? I trust not.

The challenge for 2011: Charles Dickens.  So far, I've read 5 of his novels: Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.  If I read 12 more of his novels (1/month) I will have read ALL of his novels.

So, in 2011 I will try to read:

The Pickwick Papers (Finished)

Martin Chuzzlewit  (Finished)

Nicholas Nickleby  (Finished)

Hard Times  (Finished)

Barnaby Rudge (Finished)

Christmas Books (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, etc.)  (Finished)

Little Dorrit

The Old Curiousity Shop

Bleak House (Finished, January 4, 2012)

Our Mutual Friend

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Finished)

Dombey and Son

.

NOTE:

Well, as you can see, I didn't read all 12 of the books on my list, but I did get through 7 of them in 2011, and one more-- Bleak House-- by January, 2012.  Considering most of the novels were 700-900 pages long, I think I did fairly well!

It's a fine day.  One of those days when everyone asks, "How are you?" and you answer, "Fine."

Really... fine.  No problems aside from the problem that it's Monday and Mondays suck.  Life goes on and round and you wonder what's the point and you want to quit everything but its 5 days to the weekend and 2 months to the next holiday and god help me I don't think I can make it that long.

I find myself wishing for a catastrophe.  Just so I'd have something to genuinely complain about.  Just so something would happen that didn't happen yesterday, and won't happen tomorrow.

I find myself wishing I was an alcoholic.  I'm not, and I would never drink at work, but I wish I was and I did.

I hate it when I complain and people offer solutions.  If I wanted advice I'd ask for it.  Complaining is not asking for advice.  I know the effing solutions already anyways.  Who doesn't?  Who ever really got advice that they hadn't already thought of? 

Being bored doesn't mean you have nothing to do.  Boredom and busy-ness are not mutually exclusive.  The most bored I've ever been is when I had a lot to do, but nothing fun to do.

It's just Monday.  It's just work-life.  The slow torturous death by a hundred thousand slivering seconds.  Ennui, nothing more.

A recent article in the New York Times described how entrepeneurs who wanted to start their own restaurants, but couldn't get a loan from a bank, turned to the Internet for investors.  The amount they borrowed in each case was tiny:  less than $20,000 in most cases.  But it's a trend with great growth potential.  What online shopping did to music and book stores, online financing may someday do to banks.

Everyone despises banks, and for good reason, especially after the recent financial crisis.  They charge borrowers high interest, and give depositors almost no interest-- just high service charges.  What if they could be circumvented?  What if you could get a mortgage, personal loan or small business loan from the public?  The borrower could pay lower interest, with more flexibility, while the lender could get a much higher return on their investment than if they just stuck the money in a savings account.   Of course, the risk would be higher, especially for the lender.  But the rewards would be greater, too.

The change is coming.  If banks are smart, they'll get ahead of the trend, and start their own direct loan websites.  If they don't... well, let's hope they don't.  I'd love to see the big banks go out of business.

What happens when you combine a $25/$35 computer, a major Linux distro's secondary arch effort, and a college that's deep into open source?

You get Fedora-ARM running on the Raspberry Pi at Seneca CDOT!

Here's a tiny video peek...

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There's a lot of optimization still to be done (including X11) but look forward to a Raspberry Pi Fedora image (spin/remix), Fedora 15 for ARM, and the Raspberry Pi device itself all being available next month.

(In or near Toronto? There are three talks related to Fedora ARM and/or the Raspberry Pi at FSOSS next week).

The 'Western Canon' (a highly controversial term) as listed by critics like Harold Bloom, runs to thousands  of books.  I don't think even Harold Bloom has had the time to read them all.  So here I will give a list of what I consider the 'essential' works. 

A few notes.  First, not everyone will agree with my list.  No two such lists are the same, and this short list must necessarily exclude many great works.  Second, following Mr. Bloom's example, I have excluded many religious or philosophical books, unless they are also important books of literature.  Third, I have chosen books largely for their cultural and literary influence.  These are books which have changed the way later authors wrote, or had an important impact on western culture.  Finally, I have not included any poems, unless they are book-length, with the exception of the 'Leaves of Grass' collection.

This list is roughly chronological.

1. The Iliad by Homer

2. The Odyssey by Homer

3. Oedipus the King by Sophocles

4. Medea by Euripides

5. The Socratic Dialogues by Plato

6. The Histories by Herodotus

7. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

8. Lives by Plutarch

9. The Aeneid by Virgil

10. The Metamorphoses by Ovid

11. The Book of the Thousand and One Nights

12. The Divine Comedy (esp. The Inferno) by Dante

13. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

14. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

15. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

16. Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

17. Utopia by Sir Thomas More

18. Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

By William Shakespeare:

19. Hamlet

20. Othello

21. MacBeth

22. Julius Caesar

23. Romeo and Juliet

24. A Midsummer Night's Dream

25. The Tempest

26. The Merchant of Venice

27. Twelfth Night

28. Henry V

...

29. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

30. Paradise Lost by John Milton

31. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

32. The Life of Johnson by James Boswell

33. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

34. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

35. Tartuffe by Moliere

36. Candide by Voltaire

37. In Praise of Folly by Erasmus

38. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

39. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

40. Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

41. The Red and the Black by Stendhal

42. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

43. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

44. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey

45. Frankenstein by  Mary Shelley

46. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

47. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

48. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

49. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

50. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

51. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carol

52. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

53. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

54. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

55. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

56. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

57. Middlemarch by George Eliot

58. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

59. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

60. Dracula by Bram Stoker

61. The Barsetshire Chronicles by Anthony Trollope

62. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

63. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

64. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

65. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

66. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

68. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

69. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

70. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

71. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

72. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

73. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

74. The Trial by Franz Kafka

75. Pygmalion by G. B. Shaw

76. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

77. Ulysses by James Joyce

78. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

79. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

80. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

81. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

82. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

83. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

84. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

85. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

86. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

87. 1984 by George Orwell

88. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

89. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

90. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

91. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

92. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

93. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

94. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

95. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

96. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

97. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

98. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

99. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

100. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

You've heard the statistics, that women have fewer accidents than men, and are therefore better drivers.  But what that statistic doesn't take into account is that men drive more than women.  74% more, according to one source.  (Think about it: whenever you see a couple in a car, who is usually behind the wheel?)  If we compare number of accidents relative to distance driven, suddenly the statistics look very different.  In fact, women have slightly MORE crashes than men do. 

'Overall, men were involved in 5.1 crashes per million miles driven compared to 5.7 crashes for women'

source:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/06/980618032130.htm

So, in fact, women are worse drivers than men (if we are going to generalize).  Now, if we can just convince insurance companies to stop discriminating- illegally- against male drivers, as they have for decades.

Recently I read The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.  It is one of the first histories, and it is an engrossing tale of a war that involved all the Greek states (and a few non-Greek states as well).

But what I found really interesting about Thucydides' account is the opposing philosophies of Athens and Sparta.  Both cities championed freedom, but of two different kinds.  Athens was an imperialist state that treated her 'allies' as junior partners at best, and often as little more than vassal states.  So Sparta championed the independence of the Greek city states.  Freedom, to the Spartans, meant freedom  of the state from external control, and especially Athenian imperialism.

Athens, unlike Sparta, was a democracy.  That meant that power was in the hands of the common people.   The lower and middle classes in other city states were inspired by Athenian democracy, and the approach of the Athenian fleet was often the cue for the masses to rebel and overthrow the local oligarchy/tyrant.

Today, Athens and Sparta are represented by the West and Russia/China respectively.  That is, western countries (especially the U.S.)  encourage freedom (human rights and democracy) within developing countries.  But Russia and China support the 'freedom' of developing countries from meddling foreign powers.  Intranational freedom vs. international freedom.   While the West is sometimes hypocritical in its support of human rights and democracy- demanding change in one country while ignoring problems in another- Russia and China oppose international intervention in cases of human rights abuse for their own reasons: they are afraid of being criticized for their own poor human rights record.

Greece today is a single nation state, and a democracy, with Athens as its capital.  So even though Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, in the end it was Athens that triumphed.  It is too early to say, yet, whether the modern Athens (U.S. and allies) or modern Sparta (Russia and China) will prevail in the 21st Century.

Since I became a father, just 6 months ago, I have noticed a strange transformation.  On the one hand, as I expected, I have become less selfish.  Or less self-centered.  It's not about me and what I want anymore: my wife and son come first.   Instead of saving for my next travel adventure, I'm saving for my son's education.  I go to the mall- not to sit in Starbucks, as I used to, but to buy diapers.  Most of my plans and dreams are now about my son's future, not my own.

On the other hand, I have become more selfish.  When my student or colleague is coughing, instead of sympathizing: "Oh, do you have a cold? I'm so sorry."  I shy away from him or her, thinking I don't want to get a virus that I'll take home to my son.  I don't give as often to homeless people, or loan money to friends, because I want to save that money for my own family.  

Have I become a worse person, or a better one?  I don't want to set a bad example for my son, so for his sake I'll try to be more generous and think of others outside my family.  But my family comes first.

Every morning 

she makes for me

a hot and steaming mug.

It tastes like coffee

and it smells like coffee

but it feels like love.

I've been intrigued by the Gnome 3 desktop and the design decisions that the Gnome project has decided to test. Hearing some members of the Gnome community explain the design decisions in person was very interesting, and helpful when transitioning to the Gnome shell. And I'm proud that the Fedora Project is continuing to lead by incorporating new technologies and designs First.

But I've been using Gnome 3 in the Fedora 15 alpha and beta releases for a while now, and I'm convinced that Gnome 3 is not ready for prime time yet, at least as implemented in Fedora 15 (and this is completely separate from the issue of whether the Gnome 3 design changes are good or bad, and whether the Gnome community is ignoring the needs and wants of the users and downstreams -- both subjects of much debate). As one example, multi-monitor setups are not working as expected, at least for me. In fact, it's a stretch to say that they're working at all:

• On my laptop/netbook, logging in with an external monitor connected results in Gnome 3 running in degraded mode, with Gnome 2-style menus. Logging in without an external monitor connected, and connecting it after login, results in a usable configuration - at least all of the real estate is accessible.
• I run with the external display above my laptop. Maximizing a window on the external display results in it filling the rightmost 1/3 of the screen. Unmaximized windows may be moved, but only to positions where the right edge of the window is within the right-most 1/3 of the screen. You can fill the screen by placing the window all the way to the right and dragging a corner to the left side, though. There are many other behaviours which are just weird.
• The Activities button is on the laptop screen, but the touch-to-activate-Activities corner is on the external monitor.
• Rearranging the position of the monitors using the Displays setting tool results in badly torn, messed up images. They resolve to something that looks almost usable a fraction of a second before the Does this look right? dialog gives up and reverts me to the original configuration, with my desktop backgrounds missing.

This is 2011, and multi-monitor configurations are not a novelty any more. In fact, they're the norm where I work, and I use external monitors with my laptops and netbooks all the time

Perhaps some of these issues are video driver problems, and Gnome 3 isn't to blame. But the problems with Gnome 3 are not limited to just multi-display configurations; for example: GDM's list of users does not scroll properly when the list is long (I went to file a bug on that one, but was disheartened searching through the 253 other open Fedora GDM bugs to see if it was already reported). If something goes wrong during the login process, a message appears telling you that something went wrong, but offering no way to find out what went wrong -- not even through a "Details..." button -- and the only action available to the user is to click a button marked "Ok" (I can't login? It's definitely not OK). The icons at the top of the screen respond to left- and right-click in the same way -- except for the iBus icon -- where's the consistency in that?

I don't want to be a gloomy Eeyeore (though I understand the temptation to become one) but I really don't think we're close to release-ready with Gnome 3 in F15.

The inclusion of broadband-for-all-Canadians in the Liberal platform is an important step in the right direction. And while reliable rural broadband access is an obvious priority (as David Humphrey notes), the Liberal strategy does not go far enough: even current broadband access in our cities falls well short of what is needed to be globally competitive.

Canada's low average population density makes any broadband rollout a challenge. But there is an opportunity here: it's time for a leader to step up and set a realistic and challenging next-generation broadband goal, in the style of Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech. Setting a goal of 1 Gbps to every household in the country within three years would show real leadership. It would be a huge challenge, but we have the technology (wired and wireless), and it's where we need to go to stay in the game.

Four years ago today, I got on a plane bound for Liberia. I'd signed up with a group of people I barely knew to attempt the impossible.

The participants in the GNOME documentation hackfest led a great lunchtime talk on Friday, introducing GNOME 3 to about two dozen Senecans.

GNOME 3 embodies a complete re-design of the desktop. Clutter has been replaced with discoverable behaviours, visual cues, and generally streamlined operation. It's a bold experiment that has already attracted some detractors, but it was fascinating and enlightening to hear the environment explained by members of the community that created it. I'm looking forward to using GNOME 3 in the upcoming release of Fedora 15.

There were many who expressed an interest in attending but were unable to do so. Here are a couple of links:

• GNOME 3 site, with features, screenshots, and FAQ: http://www.gnome3.org/
• Main GNOME site: http://www.gnome.org/

Many thanks to the GNOME documentation team for the talk.

For the next six days, CDOT is hosting some members of the of the GNOME documentation team for a documentation hackfest in preparation for the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release. On Friday we're holding an informal lunchtime talk to introduce the Seneca and Gnome communities -- and if you're in the greater Toronto area and are free, you're welcome to join us!

Debt is bad.  Right?  Yet debt is intrinsic to our economic system.  Everyone, it seems, is in debt.  More money is created by commercial banks loaning money or guaranteeing lines of credit than by the central banks which print the currency.  Debt makes the world go 'round.

Still, nobody likes to be in debt.  We spend much of our lives paying off student loans, then the mortgage, the second mortgage, car loans...  From a personal point of view, debt is bad.  Governments, too, struggle to balance their budgets and reduce the national debt.  Yet what is often bad for the individual is good for society, and vice-versa.   For example, if I wreck my car, I have to pay the deductible and subsequent higher insurance premiums.  Which is not good for me.  But it means employment for a tow truck driver, mechanic, insurance adjuster, car salesman (when I buy a new car), autoworkers, etc.   Not to mention paramedics, nurses, doctors and flower sellers if I'm injured.  My car accident might actually be good for the economy!  In the same way, while it will certainly benefit the government and taxpayers to eliminate the national debt, whether the economy will benefit is less certain.

The problem is,  only one side of the equation is being examined.  What about the lenders?  If there were no national debt, where would the investors who put more than $20 trillion into the national debts of the world's 194 countries put their money?   If they put it into the New York Stock Exchange, for example  (current valuation: 14 trillion), stock prices would more than double, creating a massive bubble.   Where else could they invest?  Gold?  There's less than $10 trillion worth of gold in the world, at the current near-record-high price.   The fact is, wherever this bonanza of cash flowed: natural resources, land, F.D.I.- there would be a massive speculative bubble.

How would that affect interest rates?  (lower, I assume) Inflation?  (skyrocketing)  These are questions- theoretical in the foreseeable future- that economists should consider.   I have little sympathy for the billionaire investors or multinational financial institutions who have bought government bonds.   I'm very much in favour of eliminating all government debt (especially in my home country, Canada).   But we should be prepared, if we do so, for the financial tsunami if trillions of dollars, euros, yen and rubles are suddenly shifted out of government bonds and into other markets.   So far, I have heard no discussion among economists on this issue.

In 2035 I will be 65 years old and ready to retire (hopefully).  Before then, I would like my 'Books I Have Read' entry (below) to look like this:

I. Pre-modern Literature and Drama

Ancient Literature: 4 or 5 works.

Greek Literature: 50+ works.  Complete Plays of Athenian Dramatists.  Complete works of Plato and Aristotle.

Latin Literature: 20+ works.  Sample works of major authors (Horace, Seneca, Ovid, etc.).

Medieval Literature: 30+ works.  Especially works in Middle English and a 'cycle' of plays.

Norse Sagas: 5 or 6.  Including Ngal's Saga, Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.

Renaissance Lit: 20+ works, not including Shakespeare.  Esp. Jacobean drama

II. British and Irish Literature and Drama

17th and 18th Century: 20+ works.  Esp. by  Samuel Richardson, Laurence Stern.

19th Century: 150+ works.  Complete novels of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.  Major works by Sir Walter Scott and Anthony Trollope.

20th Century: 75+ works.  Complete novels of  James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad.  Complete plays of G. B. Shaw.

III. American Literature and Drama

18th Century: no additions?

19th Century: 50+ works.  Complete novels of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton.

20th Century: 150+ works.  Complete novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Henry James.  Major works by Eugene O'Neil.

IV. Canadian Literature

25+ works. Including major works of W. O. Mitchel, Mordechai Richler, Lucy Maude Montgomery, Timothy Findley

V. African-American Literature

20+ works.  Especially by more recent authors, such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

VI. International Literature

French Literature: 30+ works.  Major works by Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, etc.

German Literature: 4-5 works.  Esp. by Franz Kafka.

Italian Literature: 4-5 works.

Russian Literature: 30+ works.  Complete novels and plays of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Pushkin. 

Spanish Literature: 15+ works.  Major works by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca.

Other European Literature: 15+ works.  At least one author/work from every major European country.

Chinese Literature: 15+ works.  The 'Four Classic Novels'.

Other International Literature: 15+ works from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

VII. Philosophy, Politics and Military Theory

50+ works.  Especially economic theory (Adam Smith, John Meynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, etc.)

VIII.  Religious Works

20+ works.  Especially the Koran, Talmud, Book of Mormon and works of St. Augustine.

IX. Biography and History

20+ works.  Long histories, such as Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire',  Livy's 'History of Rome' and Winston Churchill's 'The Second World War'.

X. Classics of Science

4-5 works.  Especially by Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.

The PandaStack I mentioned previously - a stack of PandaBoards mounted on threaded rods, powered by a modular ATX power supply - is now a fully-functional part of the Fedora ARM project koji buildsystem.

For anyone interested in building a similar stack, here's the parts list and assembly instructions:

• 15 PandaBoards (or whatever quantity you wish to stack; the photo here shows 11 boards, since we have temporarily removed 4 for various device driver test projects)
• 15 barrel connectors
• 1 ATX 750W modular power supply (note: higher-rated power supplies may not have more current available on the +5v rail, which is what is used in this project)
• 4 threaded #4-40 stainless steel rods. (Note: BeagleBoards accept a #6-32 thread, but PandaBoards have smaller mounting holes).
• 1 pack (100) 0.25" nylon spacers
• 1 pack (50) 1.25" nylon spacers
• 2 packs (10) stainless steel acorn nuts
• SD cards, ethernet cables, network switch
• hacksaw, soldering iron, solder, wire strippers, heat-shrink tubing, heat-shrink gun (or embossing craft gun), multimeter

Cut the threaded rods to size with the hacksaw. Stack the boards on the rods, reversing the orientation of every second board so that it is upside down with the ethernet jack facing the opposite side of the stack; this will result in ethernet and power jacks down two opposite sides of the stack, with serial ports on another side and no connectors on the remaining side (which is the "bottom" of the stack). Use the 1.25" spacers between adjacent boards in a right-side-up/upside-down pair, and the 0.25" spacers between pairs. The grounding strips on the top of each ethernet/USB connector tower will just touch the plastic cases of the LED drive transistors on the adjacent board in each pair. Fasten the stack with the acorn nuts.

Gather the barrel connectors in groups of five. Connect each group to the +5 volt (pin 1) and ground (pin 2/3) leads of a molex connector from the ATX power supply (cutting off the cable connected to the molex connector, and ensuring that the barrel connectors are wired center-positive). Solder, then insulate with shrink-wrap tubing. Take the motherboard connector of the power supply, pull off all of the leads except pins 8 (PWR_OK)  and 16 (PS_ON), solder those leads together, and insulate with shrink-wrap tubing. Plug the molex and motherboard connectors into the ATX supply.

Place the stack on its side on a wire shelf for convection cooling. Test the power supply leads to ensure you're getting a solid +5 volts, burn and insert your SD cards, connect your ethernet cables, and connect the boards one at a time to the power supply unit with the barrel connectors.

Enjoy your silent tower of computing power!

The Fedora ARM secondary architecture project reached a significant milestone last week with Paul's announcement of the beta 1 release.

Interested in ARM but lacking ARM hardware? Not a problem! Fedora includes support for ARM virtual machines, and I'm packaged up a preconfigured ARM VM for your convenience:

• ARM virtual machine package: http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/armvm/noarch/armvm-f13beta1-15.fc13.noarch.rpm
• Repo config for staying up-to-date on ARM VM releases: http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/armvm/noarch/armvm-release-1-1.fc13.noarch.rpm

The armvm package will install a preconfigured ARM virtual machine named "f13-arm-beta1" with a 2GB image and a 128MB memory footprint. Since x86_64 processors don't provide hardware support for ARM processor virtualization, the ARM VM will run slowly compared to i386/x86_64 VMs, but the performance should be tolerable on most machines (Atom netbooks excepted). You can manage the VM with virsh or virt-manager. I've tested these packages on F13 and F14, but not on F15 Alpha yet. (By the way: the root password on the VM is "fedoraarm").

Enjoy!

(Please don't forget that both the Fedora ARM beta release and the armvm package are very definitely at the pre-release/beta stage of maturity. In particular, updating the armvm package will REPLACE your arm VM with a new image - beware!).

Today, the ATX power supply for the PandaStack I described in my last post is working happily. I have no idea what changed... which is a bit worrisome.

Our "PandaStack" of PandaBoard builders (shown here with 9 of the 15 builders installed) is now ready to run as part of the Fedora ARM build farm. However, I've run into a weird problem -- the ATX power supply I bought to power the boards works fine with 1-3 boards, but Something Bad happens when a fourth board is connected. It's not a capacity issue as far as I can see; it seems to be related to noise. Time to borrow a scope and take a close look at waveforms ... in the meantime, we'll power some of the boards with the ATX supply and some with stand-alone power bricks.

My top 4 favourite poems that I've written and posted to this blog over the years:

4: Sheer Beauty.

This poem describes in a generalized summary, a place that I had the privilege of experiencing this summer. A place that I have many fond memories of, particularly of being able to enjoy silence to the full extent of the word.

3: My Place.

One of the first poems I wrote, this poem describes another fond place in my heart, again with great memories.

2: The View from Up Here.

This poem mashes together a bunch of ideas and experiences. I had taught high ropes this summer at a camp I volunteered at, this is partly referenced to with the idea of being high up. Additionally, this summer God opened my eyes to see things in a different light, so again that plays into the reference of height.

1: In this moment.

I wrote this poem when I was going through a bump in my road of life, it basicly expresses my wish to do something different with my life.

We're adding a group of dual-core, 1GHz, 1GB PanadaBoards to the Fedora-ARM build farm.  Paul Whalen and I hacked up the PandaBoard builder filesystem at FUDCon and I tested it with the farm on Thursday -- so far, it appears to build about twice as fast as the older GuruPlug builders. The PandaBoard's randomly-assigned-at-boot MAC addresses did force us to take a new approach to builder identity, though, because our previous approach of serving the identity via DHCP was no longer practical.

We ordered a total of 15 PandaBoards; 12 have arrived, and the others should be shipped shortly.Two are being set aside for testing, and we'll get the other ten building as soon as possible.

Our plan is to stack the boards on threaded rods, powered by an ATX power supply; the stack will be run on its side (with the boards oriented vertically) to aid in convection cooling. More photos to follow as we get this running! (Yes, that is a Powered by Fedora badge on there )

So I've safely arrived at FUDCon. Oddly, our plane was delayed for two reasons: the inbound flight was late due to a storm in Winnipeg (not so odd), and there was a "Coyote Strike" by a plane that landed just before we took off -- so they had to check that the runway area was animal-free before we were cleared for takeoff.

Coyotes in Arizona, yes. But Toronto?!

Looking forward to a great day of talks tomorrow! Hope I have two brain cells awake to rub together -- doubly so for the students, who are now on the prowl for food...

My colleagues in the Centre for Development of Open Technology have been doing some amazing work enhancing the open web. One of their libraries, Popcorn.js, enables web video to move beyond being a box on the page to become a part of the hyperlinked, dynamic web. With a ton of frantic hacking by the Popcorn team which began on Tuesday morning (!), PBS launched an interesting web page that night showing analyst's comments synchronized to a video of the US President's State of the Union speech. PBS comments about the effort are posted on The Rundown.

You should check out what these folks are doing with 3D on the web -- the Javascript port of the Processing data visualization language, Processing.js -- point cloud data -- and web audio!

Update: Dave Humphrey has blogged about the work that he and his team did on the SOTU page with PBS.

This semester is the fourth time that I've run the Software Build and Release (SBR600) course at Seneca College, and we have record enrollment – a full house! This course is one of a number of open source courses connected with the Centre for Development of Open Technology; it is a professional option in our Computer Systems Technology program, which focuses on network and system administration, and it has two goals:

• Teach software build and release (aka Release Engineering/Build Team) principles, technology, and skills
• Teach how to contribute effectively in an open source community

In this course, I use the Fedora build and release process as a illustration of how large-scale build and release works, something which is only possible because of the transparent nature of open source processes. I also use Fedora as a community which is open to worthwhile contributions from any interested participants. In these first three weeks of the course, we've examined building from source, RPM packaging, the use of mock for build dependency testing, the use of koji for multi-platform testing, signing packages, and creating package repositories. The remainder of the semester is largely project-based.

The students are currently researching and selecting projects from a short list of potential projects which have been screened for manageable size and practical real-world value. This semester, many of these projects are focused on the Fedora ARM secondary architecture, since the ARM buildsystem is physically located at Seneca, but some projects are related to different areas within Fedora (or, in one case, Fedora+Mozilla). In all cases, the students are expected to work with the community, use community communication tools and practices, and ultimately, advance the state of the respective area to which their project contributes. That means that if new software is packaged, it will be put through package review and end up in Fedora; if scripts or programs are written, they will be reviewed and committed upstream; and if documentation is written, it will end up in an appropriate and accessible place such as the wiki.

On Friday, ten SBR600 students will be traveling with Paul Whalen and me to FUDCon Tempe – eight students from the current semester and two from the previous semester. They're looking forward to making connections with other Fedorans, hearing about the latest and greatest technology, hacking, and generally starting down the road to becoming active contributors.

Please join us! -- I invite you to check out what we're doing, either in the usual Fedora places or in the #seneca channel on Freenode, on the Seneca wiki, or on Planet CDOT.

Lights flicker,
sparkling across the water
Laughter is heard,
echoing off the shores,
The moon illuminates everything in sight,
it guides me to my resting place
I sit upon the rock,
the cool misty breeze blowing gently across my face
I stare into the night,
amazed at all that surrounds me,
sheer beauty.

Life a highway,

with road blocks,

one ways,

narrow paths,

wrong turns

Life is a highway,

of learning,

of the unknown,

the unexpected

Life is a highway,

full of no absolutes

Finally!  I finished War and Peace.  1,455 pages, in my translation.  Back when my eyes were better, I could have read that in a couple of weeks.  Now, it took me 2 months!

Despite its daunting length, it's worth it.  Really.  Tolstoy is a great storyteller, and his characters- Prince Andrei, Pierre, and the Rostovs, are unforgettable.  I also learned a lot about Napoleon's Russian campaign- and the novel really made me want to learn more.  Fascinating history.

My next reading project, which I will expound in my next post, is to read the complete novels of Charles Dickens, next year.

This entry is just for myself, to keep track of what I've read, and have still to read. These are not ALL the books I've read, obviously, just the books I would consider "classics" by my own snobbish definition. I'm not trying to boast here (well, maybe just a little) It's still very thin in some fields- especially international literature.

A college instructor once told me that my generation was "not very well read". I took that as a personal challenge, and began to read some serious classics, starting with the Illiad and Paradise Lost. (If you really want to look pretentious, try carting around the Illiad for a couple of months). A few years later, I started to compile this list:

Books I Have Read

(All foreign language works in translation, except Middle English.

Unabridged, except where noted.)

# Read more than once.

I. Ancient and Classical Literature

Ancient Literature	anonymous	Gilgamesh the King
Ancient Greek Literature and Drama	Aeschylus	Agamemnon#
		The Libation Bearers
		The Eumenides
		Prometheus Bound
	Aristophanes	Clouds
		Lysistrata
	Euripides	Medea
		Trojan Women
	Herodotus of Halicarnasus	The Histories
	Hesiod	Theogeny
		Works and Days
	Homer	The Illiad
		The Odyssey
	Lucian of Samosata	The True History
	Sophocles	Antigone#
		Oedipus Rex#
		Oedipus at Colonus
	Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War
	Xenophon	The Anabasis
Latin Literature and Drama	Aurelius, Marcus	The Meditations
	Cicero	On the Gods
	Ovid	The Metamorphoses
	Plautus	The Menaechmi
	Seneca	Medea
	Terence	The Girl From Andros
	Virgil	The Aeneid

A. 17th and 18th C. British and Irish Literature	Boswell, James	The Life of Samuel Johnson
	Bunyan, John	Pilgrim's Progress
	Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe#
	Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
	Goldsmith, Oliver	The Vicar of Wakefield
	Milton, John	Paradise Lost
	Sheridan, Richard	The Rivals
		The School for Scandal
	Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
		A Modest Proposal
B. 19th Century British and Irish Literature	Austen, Jane	COMPLETE NOVELS
		Emma
		Mansfield Park
		Northanger Abby
		Persuasion
		Pride and Prejudice
		Sense and Sensibility
	Bronte, Anne	Agnes Grey
	Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre#
		The Professor
	Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
	Collins, Wilkie	The Moonstone
		The Woman in White
	Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness#
		Lord Jim
		The Secret Agent
		The Secret Sharer
		Typhoon
		Youth
	Dickens, Charles	Barnaby Rudge
		Bleak House
		Christmas Books
		David Copperfield
		Great Expectations
		Hard Times
		Martin Chuzzlewit
		The Mystery of Edwin Drood
		Nicholas Nickleby
		Oliver Twist
		The Pickwick Papers
		A Tale of Two Cities#
		A House to Let (with other authors)
	Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan	Sherlock Holmes (complete stories)#
		The Lost World
	Eliot, George	Middlemarch
		Silas Marner#
	Haggard, H. Rider	King Solomon's Mines
		She
	Hardy, Thomas	The Return of the Native
		Tess of the D'Urbervilles#
	Hope, Anthony	The Prisoner of Zenda
	Kipling, Rudyard	The Jungle Book
		Kim
	Maughan, W.S.	The Moon and Sixpence
	Orczy, Baroness Emmuska	The Scarlet Pimpernel
	Scott, Sir Walter	Ivanhoe
		Rob Roy
	Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein#
	Stevenson, R.L.	Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde#
		Kidnapped
		Treasure Island
	Stroker, Bram	Dracula
	Thackeray, William Makepeace	Vanity Fair
	Trollope, Anthony	The Warden
	Walpole, Horace	The Castle of Otranto
	Wilde, Oscar	An Ideal Husband
		The Importance of Being Ernest
		Lady Windermere's Fan
		The Picture of Dorian Gray
C. 20th Century British and Irish Literature	Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
	Buchan, John	Greenmantle
		John McNab
		The Thirty-Nine Steps
		The Three Hostages
		Prester John
	Chesterton, G.K.	Father Brown stories
		The Man Who Was Thursday
	Joyce, James	Dubliners
		A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
	Orwell, George	Animal Farm
		1984
	Shaw, George Bernard	Arms and the Man
		Major Barbara
		Mrs. Warren's Profession
		Pygmalion
	Synge, J.M.	The Playboy of the Western World
	Tolkien, J.R.R.	The Hobbit#
		The Lord of the Rings#
	Wells, H. G.	The Invisible Man
		The Island of Dr. Moreau
		The Time Machine
		The War of the Worlds
	Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse

A. 18th Century American Literature	Franklin, Benjamin	The Autobiography
B. 19th Century American Literature	Alcott, Louisa May	Little Women
	Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
	Cooper, James Fennimore	The Deerslayer
	Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
	Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter#
	Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth	Evangeline
	Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
		Typee
	Poe, Edgar Allen	Complete Stories
	Stowe, Harriet B.	Uncle Tom's Cabin
	Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn#
		The Adventures of Tom Sawyer#
		A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
		The Prince and the Pauper
		Puddin'head Wilson
	Wharton, Edith	Ethan Frome
C. 20th Century American Literature and Drama	Bradbury, Ray	Fahrenheit 451
		The Martian Chronicles
	Capote, Truman	Breakfast at Tiffany's
	Cather, Willa	My Antonia
	Dickey, James	Deliverance
	Faulkner, William	Light in August
	Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
		Tender is the Night
		This Side of Paradise
	Golding, William	The Lord of the Flies#
	Hammett, Dashiel	The Maltese Falcon
	Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
	Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
		The Old Man and the Sea
		The Sun Also Rises
	Henry, O.	Short Stories
	Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
	Irving, John	The Cider House Rules
		A Prayer for Owen Meaney
		The World According to Garp
	James, Henry	A Turn of the Screw, other stories
	Kerouac, Jack	Big Sur
		The Dharma Bums
		On the Road
	Kesey, Ken	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
	Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
	London, Jack	The Call of the Wild, other stories
	McCullers, Carson	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
	Miller, Arthur	All My Sons
		The Crucible
		Death of a Salesman#
	Miller, Henry	Tropic of Cancer
	Pinter, Harold	The Dumbwaiter
	Salinger, J.D.	Catcher in the Rye#
	Steinbeck, John	East of Eden
		The Grapes of Wrath
		Of Mice and Men
	Updike, John	Rabbit, Run
	Vonnegut, Kurt	Slaughterhouse Five
	Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
		A Streetcar Named Desire
	Wolfe, Tom	The Bonfire of the Vanities

VI. Canadian Literature

	Atwood, Margaret	The Edible Woman
		The Handmaid's Tale
	Davies, Robertson	The Deptford Trilogy
	Laurence, Margaret	The Diviners
		The Stone Angel
	Lowry, Malcolm	Under the Volcano

VII. African-American Literature

A. Slave Narratives	Douglas, Fredrick	The Education of Fredrick Douglas
	Jacobs, Harriet	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
	Truth, Sojourner	The Narrative of Sojourner Truth
B. Other African American Literature	DuBois, W.E.B.	The Souls of Black Folk
	Johnson, James W.	Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
	Washington, Booker T.	Up From Slavery (abridged)

VIII. International Literature

A. French Literature	Balzac, Honore de	The Girl with the Golden Eyes
	Camus, Albert	The Stranger
	Dumas, Alexander (Pere)	The Count of Monte Cristo
		The Man in the Iron Mask
		The Three Musketeers
	Hugo, Victor	Les Miserables#
		Notre Dame de Paris
	Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac#
	Verne, Jules	Around the World in 80 Days
		Five Weeks in a Balloon
		From the Earth to the Moon
		20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
B. German Literature	Goethe, Johann Von	Faust, Part 1
		The Sorrows of Young Werther
C. Italian Literature
D. Russian Literature	Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
		The Three Sisters
	Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
	Pushkin, Alexander	Boris Godunov
	Tolstoy, Leo	Anna Karenina
		War and Peace
E. Spanish Literature
F. Other European Literature
Modern Greece	Kazantzakis, Nikos	Zorba the Greek
Norway	Ibsen, Hendrick	The Master Builder
Sweden	Strindberg, August	The Father
Switzerland	Wyss, Johann	The Swiss Family Robinson#
G. Non-European Literature
China	anonymous	Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai
	Confucius	The Analects
Iran	Omar Khayyam	The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Trans. Edward Fitzgerald)
Nigeria	Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Mexico	Diaz, Bernal	The Conquest of New Spain
Colombia	Marquez, Gabriel Garcia	One Hundred Years of Solitude

A. Classical	Aristotle	Poetics
		Politics
	Aurelius, Marcus	The Meditations
	Cicero	On the Gods
	Plato	The Death of Socrates
		The Dialogues
		The Republic
B. Medieval and Renaissance	Bacon, Sir Francis	The New Atlantis
	Erasmus	In Praise of Folly
	King John, Others	The Magna Carta
	Machiavelli	The Prince
	More, Sir Thomas	Utopia
	Sun Tzu	The Art of War
C.Enlightenment and 19th Century	Descartes, Rene	On the Origins of Human Understanding
	Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Essays
	Hume, David	Principles of Human Understanding
	Mill, John Stuart	On Liberty, Other
	Nietzsche, Friedrich	Thus Spake Zarathustra
	Paine, Thomas	Common Sense
	Rousseau, Jacques	The Social Contract
	Thoreau, Henry David	Walden, essays
	Voltaire	Candide
	Wollstonecraft, Virginia	Vindication of the Rights of Women
D. 20th Century	Guevera, Dr. Ernesto (Che)	On Guerrilla Warfare
	Diamond, Larry	Guns, Germs and Steel
	Huntington, Samuel P.	The Clash of Civilizations
	Mao Ze Dong	On Guerrilla Warfare

X. Religious Works

A. Christian	various authors	The Bible (incl. Apocrypha)
	unknown	The Didache, or The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles
	St. Augustine	Confessions of a Sinner
	Brother Lawrence	The Practice of the Presence
	Kempis, Thomas A	The Imitation of Christ
B. Other Religions	anonymous	The Bhagavad Gita
	anonymous	Popul Vuh (a Mayan text)
	Confucius	The Analects

XI. Biography and History (selected works)

A. Classical	Aristotle	The Life of Alexander
	Caesar, Julius	The Conquest of Gaul
	Herodotus of Halicarnasus	The Histories
	Lucian of Samosata	Instructions for Writing History
	Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War
	Xenophon	The Anabasis
B. Medieval and Rennaissance	Diaz, Bernal	The Conquest of New Spain
C. Modern	Amundsen, Raoul	The South Pole
	Boswell, James	The Life of Samuel Johnson
	Franklin, Benjamin	The Autobiography
	Lawrence, T.E.	The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Swaying in the breeze,

hanging from a tree branch,

head upside down,

arms dangling down,

the view from up here is rather obscure

unlike the view from the ground,

my view is fresh,

a new perspective.

the people on the ground look oh so different,

and so it makes me wonder,

if I always held this view, would I always feel this way,

I hope to never loose this view,

Lord, thank you for keeping my eyes open

please guide me in keeping them so,

as I get weary,

Amen.

Just for a fun challenge, I decided to learn to count to 10 in 10 languages, besides English.  In most languages, if you know 1-10, you can say just about any number.  Eleven, for example, being 'ten-one', literally.  

I've also learned a few greetings:  'hello', 'goodbye', 'please', 'thank you' and 'sorry' in each language.

Now I have accomplished this in:

European Languages:

         French, Spanish, Greek, German, Italian, Russian

Asian Languages:

        Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Japanese

(Originally, I had planned to learn 20 languages, but I have decided that 10 is enough, for now.)

A friend introduced me to a new author.  His name is Nassim Taleb.  He is- according to the bio on the first page- "Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts.'    He has also been a Wall Street trader, so his ideas aren't merely theoretical.

Taleb wrote two books: Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.  His thesis is that success is far more often due to random luck than skill, in many professions- most especially business and economics.   He talks about 'survivorship bias': that is, we only see the winners, and not the losers- so we get a false sense of how easy it is to succeed.  And how much of that success is simply due to chance.   The book is highly entertaining and thought-provoking, as it shows the foolishness of conventional wisdom about business and investing.

But what I like best about Taleb is that he shares my general scorn of economists, whom he calls "charlatans at best" and equates with astrologers, tea-leaf readers and other con-artists.   He's my hero!

Anyways, I highly recommend 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan'- they are the most intelligent books I've read in years.

In a previous entry I listed airports I have visited, so in this post I will list seaports I have entered or exited (or both).

PORT	ENTER/EXIT	NOTES
Canada
Vancouver	Enter 2x Exit 2x
Victoria	Enter 2x Exit 2x	Spectacular scenery on passage through the islands from Vancouver.
United States
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii	Exit	Great view of the wreck of the USS Arizona.
San Diego, California	Enter
Europe
Dover, England	Exit	Left Dover by Hovercraft,  famous white cliffs of Dover behind us.
Calais, France	Enter
Helsinki, Finland	Exit and Enter	Beautiful cruise through small, rocky islands which reminded me of Muskoka (except it's saltwater).
Talinn, Estonia	Enter and Exit	Odd, Soviet-era pier, with heliport.  Not very welcoming.  Old Talinn is worth the visit, though.
Piraeus (Athens), Greece	Exit and Enter
Heraklion, Crete, Greece	Enter and Exit	The old Venetian port is more interesting than the modern port, where the ferry comes in.
Africa and Middle East
Hurghada, Egypt	Exit
Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt	Enter	Very barren, desert coast
Asia
Hong Kong, China	Exit	Travelled by hydrofoil to Macau.
Macau, China	Enter
Mokpo, South Korea	Exit	A small fishing port, it had many shops selling anchors and marine supplies.
Jeju Do, South Korea	Enter and Exit	Jeju Island is the most unique part of Korea.  Fascinating.
Busan, South Korea	Enter
Incheon, South Korea	Exit
Qingdao, China	Enter	Qingdao is a pretty little seaside city, which reminded me of Victoria (except it's much larger).

I'm going to play a little game.  

I've noticed that the Australian dollar, over the past 2 years, has fluctuated between USD$0.88 and USD$0.91.  Actually, it's gone much higher and lower, but it has passed both markers several times.   Right now, the Australian buck is at $0.883, which means its probably a good time to buy. 

My plan is to buy the Aussie dollar (on paper, not in reality) and "sell it" at USD$0.910.  I will "buy" again if (and when) it reaches $0.880.  I will repeat this process as often as I am able over the next 2 years (I expect to do so at least 4 times), and add up the profit.

So, here goes:

August 25, 2010    USD$10,000 at AUD$1.13155 ($0.883743) = AUD$11,315.51

September 3, 2010  The Australian dollar has climbed to USD$91.09, so it's time to sell.

                                       AUD$11315.51 = USD$ 10,307.29   (USD$307.29  profit)

The latest fad amongst opinionators seems to be to compare China's recent, rapid economic assent to Japan's former economic 'miracle'.  I just read an article opining that the cure for the American trade deficit with China is to encourage Chinese companies to build factories in the U.S., the way Japanese companies such as Toyota did in the '80s.  The article was written by several 'experts', including a former U.S. trade negotiator (who should have known better).

I'd like to point out one itsy bitsy problem with that idea: Chinese companies do not export to the United States.  Let me repeat that: Chinese companies (with a few exceptions) DO NOT EXPORT to the United States!   The products which are exported from China are either:

a) made by foreign companies in China

b) made by joint enterprises in China

c) made by Chinese companies under contract, or licensing arrangement, with foreign companies.

Think about it: can you name a single Chinese brand?  I bet you can name a dozen famous Japanese brands: Sony,  Toshiba, Toyota, Honda, etc.  You can probably even name a few South Korean brands: Samsung and Hyundai, for instance.  But there are no famous Chinese brands (at least, not yet).   So where are these Chinese companies which are going to build factories in the U.S.?  

The Chinese economy does not resemble Japan's in the '70s and '80s, except in it's growth rate.  It's a completely different situation.  So please, spare us the facile and misleading comparisons.

More than 60 years ago George Orwell, in his classic dystopian novel, 1984, spoke of a new type of English called 'newspeak'.  

Well now, thanks to the U.S. military, we have 'warspeak':

Assassinations are now called 'targeted killings'.

Torture is now 'enhanced interrogation'.

Refugees are now 'displaced persons'.

Civilians killed- deliberately or by accident- are 'collateral damage'.  Unless they are killed by the enemy, then it's 'terrorism'.

Rebels against communist or unfriendly (to the U.S.) regimes are 'freedom fighters'.  Rebels against U.S. occupation or puppet regimes are 'terrorists'.  Even if their tactics are identical.

Congratulations, Orwell.  You were truly prescient.

My apologies to anyone experiencing a large volume of build notifications from the fedora-arm koji system. We're attempting to build F13 and are experiencing a lot of build failures (as expected).

I've added some dependency checking to the build script (big thanks to Seth Vidal for the yum code snippets!) which should make it a bit smarter about build order. Build notifications have been turned off until we get the failures down to reasonable levels.

The 9th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS, "eff-sauce") is coming up on October 28th and 29th, here at Seneca College in Toronto. This is a great event with a wide-ranging, eclectic mix of workshops and presentations.

I've been involved in planning FSOSS for the past few years, but stepped back a bit to catch my breath this year. Mary Lynn Manton has stepped up to the task of chairing this year's event with Rose Saliba, who is co-chairing for her third year.

FSOSS is still looking for interesting workshops and presentations on a variety of open source topics. If you're working with open source in any way, this could be a great opportunity -- please check out http://fsoss.ca and submit a presentation proposal right away!

The theme of our Internet scavenger hunt is "Australia".

Students: find information on the following:

1. The cheapest return flight from Beijing to Sydney, Australia tomorrow (July 16, 2010).

2. Where is the best place to see wild kangaroos?  (More than one answer is possible.)

3. Who is the Prime Minister of Australia, and where does he live?

4. What is the address of the Korean Embassy in Australia?  (There is only one EMBASSY.)

5. What is the name of the train that runs between Sydney and Perth?

6. If you exchange 10,000 RMB (Chinese yuan) into Australian dollars, how much money would you have?

7. What is the nickname of Australia's national rugby team?

Please write your answers as comments to this entry (include your name).   Have fun!

A pair of economists recently published a book entitled "This Time Is Different."  They studied 800 years of speculative bubbles, economic collapses and financial stupidity.   Their research is exhaustive, their arguments convincing- they have proved that history does, indeed, repeat itself.  Over and over again.

Yet mainstream economists pride themselves in ignoring history, or even current events.  They care only about creating ever-more complex and 'elegant' economic models, which are more akin to metaphysics than science, as they are not  grounded in any form of experimental method.  Their formulas are like a delicate crystal vase: beautiful to look at, but almost completely useless.

I hate to sound utilitarian, but an economic theory which does not explain the present economic situation, and help policy makers and businesses prepare for the future, is no more useful than a Sudoku puzzle.  It's an intellectual exercise, perhaps, but nothing more.  A mere game.

Much more useful than any model is an actual examination of the historical record.  I'm sure if economists had been more familiar with past speculative bubbles they could more easily have recognized the housing bubble which just burst in the U.S.     

History offers innumerable examples of countries which have faced economic collapse and social and political upheaval  because of unmanageable debt.  Yet many governments- encouraged by economists- have acted, in the last two years, like teenagers with their first credit card.   Only now- trillions of dollars too late- have they sobered up.  Yes, we avoided a long recession.  But at what cost?   We avoided two years of recession by accumulating debt that will take 20 years (optimistically) to pay back.

Our ancestors made many mistakes.  We could learn from them.   Or we could ignore history, and make the same mistakes all over again,  while we create elegant and useless economic models which explain nothing.   If economists don't get serious about studying the real economy, they should step aside, and let historians do their job.

There's one last document I need before I can leave: my police clearance from Canada. To process a clearance from overseas (ink prints), the website says it takes four months. I'd hoped, initially, that meant up to four months. Turns out, it means at least four months. Which would mean I'm stuck in Liberia until early October, or two and a half months beyond when I'm supposed to start work in Seattle.

At sunset we wait for the sky to darken, wait for the stars to appear, on the valley road.  

"There's one!"

"And there's another."

And where's the moon?  We search the sky.  The big dipper, faint.  A few other stars.  Satellites and a jet going west toward the sunset.

"It's getting dark.  You warm enough?"  Nods and we turn homeward.  The road is dim and we are flashlightless.   A car passing in the darkness- a tunnel of light in the gloom.

Rounding the mountain, the moon suddenly orange and huge, round and heavy in the sky.   A portent.

Then home at last, the three of us.

Fedora 13 was release a few weeks ago. We're going to celebrate the release at a release event in Toronto on July 5th. Here are the details:

• Who: Fedora Community -- and anyone interested!
• What: Fedora 13 Release Event
• Where: Seneca@York, TEL Building, room T1009
• When: Monday, July 5, 6 pm
• Why: To celebrate the release of Fedora 13 "Goddard", distribute Fedora 13 discs and discuss its new features, and meet up with other Linux contributors and users
• Wiki URL: http://bit.ly/f13-toronto

Please join us if you're interested. I hope to see you there!

Sugar on a Stick is a project which aims to create a live learning environment on a USB stick. This environment is a Fedora spin hosting the Sugar environment (the learning software original created as part of the OLPC project).

In previous versions of SoaS, the activities were not thoroughly screened before inclusion in the Spin, and so the SoaS Activity Criteria were introduced. I've been working with some other POSSE RIT participants to try and get three activities - Abacus, Maze, and Memorize - to the point of meeting the criteria. It's been a frustrating experience, but we've made some progress:

• Abacus
• Performed a package review (not passed, but close) of Peter Robinson's sugar-abacus package in Fedora
• Created a basic page for recording smoke test results
• Maze
• Filed a bug against the sugar-maze package in Fedora (apparently missing an essential .py file)
• Memorize
• This activity meets most of the criteria, but we weren't able to save to the journal (know issue) and could not confirm that collaboration works (might have been our Sugar configuration or networking)

It's apparent that the Sugar project needs more contributions, including wiki gardening, testing, and documentation -- all of which are areas in which new contributors can become quickly involved.

Dear G8 Protesters:

I understand and totally sympathize with your disgust of globalization, multinational corporations and the whole rot of global capitalism.  I hear you, brothers and sisters!  Down with the New World Order!   Stop Global Warming!  Hug a tree!

But the next G8 summit is in my old hometown (well, one of my hometowns).  It's a quaint, backwoodsy little place- which is probably why they chose it (easier for security).  It's not New York, or London, or anywhere close to the centers of power.   Nobody who knows Huntsville would ever mistake it for Wall Street.   This is cottage country: where people go to get away from all of that money-grubbing, rat-race nonsense.   A 'blackberry' in Huntsville is still something you make jam out of.  Now, ironically, this little town is going to be the global financial epicenter-  at least, for one day. 

So please, oh protesters, be kind.  Don't burn down our little innocent town.  (Why not just protest the Muskoka way, and moon the world's leaders?)   There will be other summits.   Other chances to get arrested (with nicer jails than Huntsville's... ew!) and other ways to  'fight the system'.  Why not skip this one?  

Yours Sincerely,

S. Tyler 

Thank you, Greece.  You have made plain, finally, the folly of having a common currency, the Euro, without a common economic policy to back it.  And of course a common economic policy is impossible when economic decisions are being made by a dozen different governments, with conflicting social and economic priorities, representing countries with different levels of economic development.  One government is worried about inflation, another with high unemployment, yet another with rising deficits.  Each country is using the Euro, yet each country's government is independently implementing contrasting or even conflicting economic policies.  This cannot work.

It reminds me of my neighbour, who built a tree house supported both by the living tree and by poles.  While the poles remained fixed in the ground, the tree grew, slowly tearing the tree house apart.  The same problem is presented by a common currency used by the large, highly developed economies of France, Germany or Italy, and the smaller, less developed economies of Central Europe, Spain and Portugal.

This crisis will be a turning point for Europe.  The status quo has failed.  Europe must either create a unified economic policy, implemented by the European Union, or discard the Euro (and any dream of a future European State) to return to the use of francs, deutsche marks and lire.  The latter would be a disaster, both economically and politically, for Europe.  There is really no choice but to move forward. The E.U. must create a European Department/Ministry of Finance to set a single, E.U.-wide economic policy. 

If the E.U. controls economic policy, it will mean a loss of sovereignty for  European nations.  But this was always the inevitable result of adopting a common currency.  The E.U. has acted, up until now, as a confederation of independent states.  No one is a citizen of the E.U. or pays taxes directly to the E.U., although representatives to the European Union are now directly elected (a sign of a federal, rather than confederal system).    Confederation, however, is no longer adequate, and the slow and halting evolution of the E.U. towards federation must be accelerated.   Fence-sitting countries, such as the U.K., which have not adopted the Euro, must decided whether they want to be part of the federation, or not.  In or out.  Because in a federation, unlike a confederation, you are either citizens, or you are not.

HTML5 provides <audio> and <video> tags for sound and video content. However, every browser seems to support a different combination of codecs and containers for these tags. Open source projects have of necessity only been able to support open formats, but proprietary vendors have been reluctant to throw their weight behind those open formats.

At GoogleIO today, Google, Mozilla, Opera, and 30+ other partners announced WebM, an open source mashup of the Matroska container format, Vorbis audio codec, and newly-open-sourced VP8 video codec. The intention here is to provide a "safe", open-patent-grant format that both open source and proprietary products can integrate. To that end, the WebM code is licensed under a BSD + patent grant license. And, of course, with Google/YouTube supporting this format, there will be a lot of content available.

So how does this touch Fedora? It looks like current Firefox nightles support WebM, and gstreamer support is in the works; hopefully, this will land in time for Fedora 14. For rpmfusion/ffmpeg users, WebM support is in today's upstream ffmpeg release.

Mozilla uses CentOS for their Linux builders. They have up to this point also been running their unit tests on CentOS, but Armen has now switched the Linux unit tests over to 32- and 64-bit Fedora. This is a great win, because it means that Firefox will be tested against a more-current environment.