Oblomovka

2003-02-02»

Paul Ford quotes Ullman, on coders endlessly feeling their way forward:

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else densely unaware of himself.

The BBC News site has gathered together a panel of experts to answer questions on the Iraqi war. They're answering queries that range from straightforward but rarely answered ("Why isn't Saddam called 'Mr Hussein'?") to the slightly tougher ("Can NOT going to war be unethical?", answered by Julian Baggini, humanist moral philosopher).

Looks like WINE, the Windows non-emulator for Linux, is going to have some problems making the shift to glibc2.3. WINE has its own implementation of threads, which glibc doesn't know about. Part of the act of splicing this implementation into the old glibc involved gently pursuading the library to look in a different location for system error result codes. That hack doesn't work in the new glibc.

It looks like the solution may be to port WINE to libc threads, which is a bit terrifying. Previously, it's been out of the question, because there just wasn't a good match between pthreads system and the Windows model. A combination (I think) of the new kernel's thread implementation and improvements in pthreads itself may fix that, but it's still a big leap.

If WINE does make the move, a few other bonuses fall out of the work. Firstly, Mono, the Unix port of .NET, would be able to re-use WINE code for its graphics and UI libraries. And because WINE would no longer be bbolting strangeness onto glibc, the project would be able to use Valgrind, the open-source memory debugger for x86-Linux.

There are political ramifications also. The WINE project is in a curious configuration at the moment, with several groups keeping their own mildly forked versions (either for business reasons, or because of disagreements over licensing). They're all going to have to come together to co-operate with this - and in pretty smart order, because Redhat ships with the new glibc in a few months.

These are the kind of shifts that often utterly devastate private programming projects. They can be pretty stressful for open source endeavours too. If you are at all curious how free software copes with major logistical challenges, this would be a good project to watch.

2003-01-31»

Phil "Samuel Pepys" Gyford has re-animated an old project of his, Byliner. It keeps track of online publications like Salon, the Guardian and the NYT, and mails you when new articles appear by your favourite authors. It's a great resource - can't wait for when Phil implements RSS feeds too. The Daypop stylee most popular stories and authors page is fun.

Looks like there's a reasonable chance they would have been shredded, along with as many as 90,000 other applicants. As Robin says, how many of those INS detainees were held as a result of this, or some less deliberate bureaucratic foul-up?

2003-01-27»

I'm forever getting half-way through what I think is one of Doc Searl's posts, then abruptly realising that I'm actually reading Samuel Pepy's Diary. "Met with Tom Newton, my old comrade, and took him to the Crown in the Palace". Oh, oh, I think: he means this palace, not this palace.

The talk I gave at the SDForum meet has now been slotted into the archive. It's an hour long. I wouldn't bother listening if I were you - I can give you the juicy bit in a nutshell.

I spoke about the old idea that Europe is approximately 18 months behind the US in terms of PC and Internet tech. My position was that this was true from about 1994-2001, but that this was a temporary blip, spurred mostly by the geographical and cultural advantage the US had in Internet adoption. Here's the really fun graph:

I stole most of the stats for this graph from this paper. As you can see, between 1984 and 1994, PC ownership as %age of the population in the UK was higher than the US. The US sneaked ahead during a burst of computer ownership in the late nineties (I think perhaps spurred by faster Net adoption), but since then the distance between the two curves has narrowed. Or at least, I think it has - I had to a bit of extrapolation for some of the points on that last bit of the curve.

Here's the other graph, which shows the narrowing of the "18 month" gap between the UK and US a bit more clearly.

Reading Doc Searls' entry on how American TV is changing, I think about my impressions about how slow, hide bound and expensive American TV networks appear compared to the UK networks. UK television is caught between the need to be very cheap (small country, higher costs) and the requirement to keep up some semblance of quality (big, well-funded BBC with high values). Now add to that a recent market-liberalisation-through-technology: Brits get dozens of channels via broadcast, digital satellite (23%) or digital terrestrial (6%), digital cable (8%), or analogue cable (7%). Forty percent of British TVs have some kind of interactivity feature, 80% of them have Teletext. (Stats grabbed from the ITC

Setting up a TV channel in Britain is surprisingly cheap: at the most basic level, you just pay for a satellite transponder, which can be less than a million quid. Of course, turning a profit in that multi-channel market isn't easy, but the low barriers to entry and fierce competition does encourage innovation. Well, the innovation that leads to Millionaire, Robot Wars, and dozens of below-the-radar cheap-and-cheerful throw away shows, anyway. Your typical market competition, in other words. The BBC, curiously, doesn't rise above this bear pit: much to the dismay of some its more patrician elements, it wades on in, fists flying, grabbing for audience share in an attempt to justify its license fee.

I don't think one system is particularly better than the other. I am, however, surprised how it turns out. It seems to me that the slow-moving, top-heavy, seasons-and-repeats American model leads to the high production values, low risk, staid and cumbrous epics that you'd expect from a public service broadcaster. By contrast, the British market benefits from competing with the BBC, producing exactly the sort of bright, popular scrappy cheap tat that a more liberalised market is supposed to provide.

Doc's piece is about how Reality TV is changing the American model - encouraging them to dump the expensive season and repeats model for a more lively, staggered run, with cheaper shows. I'm not surprised that a lot of those reality shows were forged in the furnace of the UK market.

I've switched around my desktop a little, to see if it will encourage me to write more blog entries. I now have a tab on my terminal window dedicated to my latest blog entries, like Dave does, only with less outlining and more vim.