Volunteering is good. But only in moderation.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/07/2384016.htm

And only last night I was discussing activist burn out...

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheSteampunkHome/~3/413855574/ron-pippins-skeletal-taxidermy-art.html

Ron Pippin works in skeletons and other remains, combining them with vintage science and electrical components in ways that are intriguing and creepy.

Happy birthday to the most wonderful Riordon in the world! Thank you for doing me the great honour of being my daughter. I love you.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CrikeyBlogs/pollbludger/~3/413822714/

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/?p=1426

No Newspoll this week, but the always dependable Essential Research weekly survey shows Labor’s lead stuck at 58-42. Also featured are prime ministerial approval ratings (56 per cent for, 31 per cent against) and questions on the Productivity Commission’s maternity leave recommendations (trending negative), party leaders’ responses to the financial crisis and government plans to tackle climate change (don’t go far enough).

I've realised that the time I usually shop for food is the worst possible time. After work, having just got off the bus, I'm often feeling a bit tired and drained. This is bad, as I'm very likely to think "eh, just get takeaway" or "eh, just get junk". If I go home and chill out for twenty minutes, I feel energetic enough to cook myself something that's actually nice.

So anyway, the new plan is to not shop except on the weekends, or when I unexpectedly run out of something. Shopping lists are being kept!

Need to come up with some snack for the late afternoon. At the moment I'm getting into work about 7.30-8.00am and leaving about 6.30-7.00pm. I'm okay if I eat some breakfast, and then lunch, but by the time I leave I'm feeling pretty snackish. Something better than the chocolate someone is selling for the RSPCA must be come up with!

Woke up this morning with a nose bleed, pretty unusual. Was late to work as a result, hopefully it's just one of those freaky once-off things, and not the start of a House episode.

This update on the boring minutia of Grahame's life brought to you by the letter Z..

I should make sure that I have Second Thoughts bout this too

But

Having not even listened to the whole thing

It's good!   Different!
Which is good
Kind of stripped down
and a bit more folky


(though maybe not as many clever lyrics)
but just as many nice images.
That's what counts!

(jesus, that man knows harmony, too.  It is...amazing that he imagines his songs whole.)

In a way (I'm reading into it too much) it's like he just took his guitar to the beach and recorded things.  Memories and Dust was about sewing, where you spend time building and building.  The Sea is about taking things away and leaving a washed away, fresh, light beauty.  It's a summer vs. winter album thing, I guess. 

On Friday morning I woke up to the sound of Rick's alarm. This is in no way unusual. However, I may have pinpointed why I failed to notice his alarm going off on the morning previous.

In my head the sound of his alarm was the sound of orcs attacking the Duke of Winchester.

Yes. That's a bit odd, you're thinking. But the strange part (okay, one of the strange parts), was that it wasn't that the orcs made a strange ringing, musical sound, but that the sound of his alarm in my ears became the sound of the orcs attack when it registered in my brain.

The mind is a freaky weird place.

And I can provide references! I'm reading Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, which, if you don't know is about the evolution of human intelligence (read, the freaky weird stuff your brain does, and why - apparently a lot of it is to do with lizards of various kinds :P)

My favourite part so far has to be a passage I found in a footnote this evening, which reads as follows:

The heads and bodies of anthropods can briefly function without each other very nicely. A female praying mantis will often respond to earnest courting by decapitating her suitor. While this would be viewed as unsociable among humans, it is not so among insects: extirpation of the brain removes sexual inhibitions and encourages what is left of the male to mate. Afterwards, the female completes her celebratory repast, dining, of course, alone. Perhaps this represents a cautionary lesson against excessive sexual repression.

The bold parts indicate the bits where I was sniggering while typing.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CrikeyBlogs/pollbludger/~3/413621634/

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/?p=1396

As much for personal amusement as anything else, I will henceforth be doing my own polling aggregates for swing states. To account for the fact that state polling lags behind the nightly national tracking polls, each result is adjusted according to the change in the Real Clear Politics national average since the date of the poll (if the polling period was more than one day, the last date is used). For example, the only poll from Indiana was a 46-all result from October 3: the RCP average has since had Obama up 0.6 and McCain up 0.2, so into the Obama column it goes. The results are also adjusted so that greater weight is given to polls with larger samples. I’ve only been doing this for a few days, so at present the only polls used are those ending October 1 or later. This means I have no data for Wisconsin, which Electoral-Vote says was most recently polled on September 23 (I’m following their lead and giving it to Obama). As you can see, Obama currently has a clean sweep of the swing states: I’ll have to reconsider which ones to include if this keeps up. (UPDATE: I’m progressively updating this as new polls come in, so much of what I’ve just said is now out of date).

As was the case last week, tomorrow I will have an open thread for discussion of the presidential candidates’ debate, which will run independently of this one.

UPDATE: Polls from Time/CNN shift Indiana to the McCain column.

Stargate! My House! Tomorrow!!!

I am totally not up for fancy schmanzy hosting, so please politely ignore the dirty floors and lack of refreshments.

Also, as an aside made a dinner resembling Southwestern Baked Spaghetti for dinner, it was pretty tasty but then again I enjoy plain spaghetti by itself :) I did add some salt to the spaghetti, though, just milk and egg seemed a bit plain. The cumin was..interesting.

One of the things about following the news fairly closely in several countries is that it becomes pretty obvious when trends don't line up. For the past few years interest rates have been one such discrepancy. I've watched Australian interest rates being raised to slow the economy and prevent inflation while American interest rates have been lowered to encourage more growth. I assumed that this basically meant that the US was probably heading for some heavy inflation.

In retrospect it looks like the Federal Reserve was turning the one knob they had to keep the housing bubble growing. As explained in the Giant Pool Of Money This American Life podcast much of the banking system depended on maintaining growth. As the pool of good borrowers thinned they had to lower interest rates to keep the loans flowing. And then we saw what happened. For a pretty picture I overlaid some Euro Area and US Interest rates graphs from the Federal Reserve of New York to give:


What we see here is from the middle of 2006 or so a shift in US fiscal policy to try to make more capital available. I know the intentions were good. Nobody foresaw what would happen when the bubble burst, but in retrospect it feels like we'd all be a lot better off if the economy had slowed in 2006 rather than exploding in 2008.

Of course, I'm pretty uninformed and very unqualified. I'm out of wine, the wife and the cat are sleeping, time for me to join them.

So I was listening to This American Life on podcast this evening and for the first time I feel like I have some idea what's been happening in American (and international) financial markets over the past few weeks. It's the most clarity I've felt since their last financial show where they explained a lot of the mortgage crisis. You should all listen to it.

This most recent program explains what's happened with the commercial paper market and credit default swaps. I'd heard of these before, but now I feel like I've got some kind of idea of what they are and what's happened with them to cause problems. Not a huge amount, but enough to at least see why a few people not paying their mortgage basically put the world's largest insurance company out of business. Finally they talked a bit about the bailout package, alternative packages, why what's been proposed by Paulson is bad for taxpayers, good for banks, and being lobbied for by banks, and interesting details about what might have slipped into the bailout bill without anyone noticing.

Oh, and speaking of huge fucking bills, apparently the legislation to prevent the regulation of credit default swaps was apparently put into an eleven thousand page appropriations bill the day before Christmas, 2000. There's something very very wrong with the way that Congress makes laws.


There were a couple of things I took away from the program. First I've believed for a while that people with boring jobs make them interesting, and as a result they do their jobs worse. In the open source software world the canonical example for me is the GNU libc and Ulrich Drepper. This should be the most boring job in the world. It's a libc that targets about two platforms (Linux and Hurd), it's functionality was basically defined by the mid 80s, and there's no need for it to change, ever. In fact any change is bad. Ulrich Drepper is a smart guy and a talented programmer, so he adds interesting features to libc. The result is that shit breaks - and the features he added were generally unnececarry. In the financial markets credit default swaps should be one of the simplest, safest, most boring commodities to trade. So the traders found ways to make them exciting - and confusing - and dangerous. Their simplicity was one of the reasons that they were never regulated and their complexity is one of the reasons that they're bringing down the finance sector.

Secondly at some point in the program Alex Bloomberg was interrogating some economist or trader or something asking "why should we be asked to bear the cost of Wall Street traders' risk taking". It's a fundamentally important question, but to me an important part of the answer (which was never given in the program) is that we shared in the benefits. Okay, so I haven't had any six-figure bonuses lately (and I'm not likely to now with the state of the economy), but we've all benefited. The financial wizardry has largely been around hiding debt so that people can borrow more. It's been easy for us to secure credit for houses and cars and random crap. It's been easy for the companies I've worked for to raise money for me to hack on Free Software. Fundamentally, we've all been part of this economic miracle boombubble thing. It's Sunday morning, the party's over, we all helped make the mess, it's fair that we all chip in a little to help out.

Earlier this year, utopos encouraged me to stop eating meat for Lent.  I attempted this and mostly did a good job, but I did slip a couple of times.

I've started to think about Lent next year and contemplating what to give up.  Something that sprang to mind is violence (this came about when I was reading up on Gandhi).  The problem with giving up violence, however, is where do you stop?  Violence pervades nearly every aspect of my life:

• Movies/television
• Books
• Computer games
• Non-computer games
• Meat
• Other animal products
• Mass-produced vegetables

Referring to the Macquarie dictionary for a definition of violence:

noun
1. rough force in action: the violence of the wind.
2. rough or injurious action or treatment: to die by violence.
3. any unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights, laws, etc.; injury; wrong; outrage.
4. a violent act or proceeding.
5. rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language; fury; intensity; severity.
6. a distortion of meaning or fact.

I think the violence that I'm referring to the most is number 2 - "Rough or injurious action or treatment".

I'm going to have to give this some more thought, especially on where I need to draw the line.  Do I stop just at violence against humans?  Violence against real or abstract sentient beings?  Violence against all living creatures?  Violence against the Earth as a whole?

Then there's the other aspect of Lent - it only lasts about 40 days.  If there is something that you are willing to give up for 40 days, why not give it up permanently?

It looks like such a beautiful day outside. Why am I indoors and working then?

There's something cruel about having to go to a bright, loud after hours GP practice to get a medical certificate for not going to work when you have a migraine.

A while ago distantcam and I did a joint amazon order, consisting largely of graphic novels and programming texts. Amazon just sent me an email about books that "people with my tastes" might like, and as might be expected I have no idea what the titles actually mean but find them amusing regardless.

I wonder if buying this would put us on a CIA watch list? :D

My twitts today:

• 23:19 back from a D&D game. #
• 13:32 lawsuits pending: tinyurl.com/5x5rqq #
• 17:30 5:30, where has the day gone. #
• 17:45 @somecanuckchick yeah, blame it on her, as usual. #
• 19:06 @chrisblizzard Earth from Above is a fantastic project that is still stunning. #
• 20:59 @jzb you lucky, I wish I could visit Tokyo again. Has been 26 years... #

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Things:

• I'll be speaking at the UKUUG Linux conference in Manchester this November.
• The ACM have chosen my article on power management from Queue last year as a shining example of such things, and republished it in Communications where you may now peruse it at your leisure. Fanmail may be sent to the usual addresses.
• I'll be in Boston from the 7th to 11th of December, and New York from the 11th to 15th. I will be endeavouring not to break any bones in the process. Might actually ensure I have travel insurance this time.
• I'll be presenting at LCA next January. Current plans involve spending a week in Melbourne afterwards and a few days in San Francisco on the way back.

Things I want to do:

• Visit Iceland. It sounds like it might be relatively cheap soon.
• Make this I²C code work.
• Get dynamic power state switching on ATOM-based Radeons working. This probably involves actually plugging the card in.

I was just wondering why Latin programs use the word tessera, which means a small rectangular tile, to mean a password. Then I found this page, which says:

Why tessera also means “password” in Latin.

A watchword was used at night and it consisted of a word or phrase that someone must say to prove that he was a bona fide member of a Roman unit or, if the authorized password was not used, he was considered an enemy.

In the Roman army, the watchword for the night was not communicated verbally, but by means of a small rectangular tablet of wood upon which it was written. One man was chosen out of each of those maniples (common soldiers) and turmae (troop of cavalry containing thirty men, a squadron) that were quartered at that extremity of the lines most remote from the Principia.

Each of these individuals (tesserarius) went near sunset to the tent of the tribune, and received from him a tessera, on which the password and also a certain number or mark were inscribed.

(It can also mean a theatre ticket.)

There's a new kind of toy that keeps showing up at the office. Laptop vendors are really starting to push multiple-GPU machines. The theory goes that you can use one low-power GPU while you're on battery, and a high-performance GPU when you're plugged into wall power. I've played with a couple of these so far and people are starting to ask about them, so I figured I'd write down what I know and what I think the plans are.

The best case is that you get a laptop like the Lenovo Thinkpad W500, where the BIOS has options controlling the GPU setup. You can pick GPU A, or GPU B, or switchable graphics. If you pick one or the other, that's all that will show up on the PCI bus, and so X will pick it up and run with it. Hooray!

If you pick switchable graphics, we'll see two GPUs on the PCI bus. And now, things get tricky. Which one is active? Well, you could look at the VGA routing bits in the PCI configuration and attempt to figure out which GPU the BIOS enabled. But on the above-mentioned Lenovo, that doesn't work, VGA is just not routed anywhere. Maybe you could look to see whether only one device has memory and i/o decoding enabled, but again, that doesn't seem to be reliable, and what do you do if there's more than one?

Ideally this is where ACPI would come to our rescue, and there'd be some platform method to call to tell us which ASIC to talk to. Maybe there is, but we haven't found it yet. Neither do we seem to get any unexpected ACPI events when switching from battery power to wall power. The Lenovo has an option in the BIOS that claims to automatically detect whether the OS supports GPU switching, but it doesn't seem to be reliable, in that if I turn detection on, I still see both chips on the PCI bus. Nonetheless this does indicate that there's some platform support there somewhere and we just need to look harder.

Of course, if you're unlucky, you got a machine like the Sony Vaio Z540, where the BIOS has no GPU options, period. If you end up in a situation where you see two video devices on PCI, just write out a minimal xorg.conf that picks the driver and the PCI slot, and hopefully things will work. If not, you have two pieces, and you can keep them or not.

Anyway, that gets you as far as doing the same boring single GPU stuff you've always done. As far as runtime switching goes, we're still pretty far off from making that a reality in the open drivers. We could hack up the relevant drivers such that we initialize them both but just only feed commands to one or the other, and then write the serialization exercise to move pixmaps and such from one to the other on switch events. Or, we might be able to start one X server on each GPU and then stick an Xdmx in front of them. In neither case will GLX work the way you expect (if at all), and there will be all kinds of fun corner cases trying to get the second chip to come up exactly compatibly with the first.

Getting this to work well should actually be a lot of fun, and there's lots of opportunity to sweep away old bad design and come up with something good.

In tangentially related news: my LCA talk was accepted! I'll be talking about shatter, which is a project to rewrite the X rendering layer to work around various hardware and coordinate limitations. This is not unrelated to the above problem, hopefully we'll get rendering abstracted far enough away from the driver to make it easier to switch among drivers at runtime.