Raw Matter

Maybe we could define the [ACPI] APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Bill Gates, 1999, “the others” is Linux (Bill says so explicitly in this email, too.) Obviously, we find similar anti-Windows rethoric en masse on Linux mailing list, and obviously it's been a few years since — but I find myself asking if anything really changed in the top level of MS management, except perhaps that a few people realized that trying to make the Linux / FOSS crowd look like a ridiculous bunch of amateurs wouldn't work.

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment.

Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is.

Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking “yes but what if”...

Having stupidly, and very painfully, ruptured a ligament in my foot (while getting off a bus. Not drunk, no sports whatsoever.) I was less mobile than I wished to be and could finally make some time to watch Nikita by Luc Besson (I've not seen much he was involved in; Léon was one of the exceptions which I like very much. I've got the DVD of The Fifth Element right here, so no need to chastise me that I haven't seen that one yet.)

But back to Nikita: you may know that I like strange movies for some values of strange. Nikita obediently starts off in a very dark mood. And then suddenly turns into quite a “normal” secret service thriller with a romance element. I liked both parts of the movie very much, but it took me a bit by surprise at first.

I also like fun stuff, and so I've watched my first three episodes (9 to 11) of Kottan ermittelt, wonderfully silly Austrian whodunnits from the late 70s/early 80s. If you don't speak german (and understand it well, even I have difficulties understanding some of the Viennese dialect), you just don't know what you're missing. Or if it is translated (don't know): probably like watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis in German. Which I did, because my french is not that good, but I'll have to watch it again en français, just to get the Authentic Expierence™ of this wonderful movie.

Update: Speaking of a foot, and of movies: I don't think I've mentioned My Left Foot on my blog so far. The biography of Christy Brown, a cripple who grows up in a poor Irish working class family to finally become a famous artist. I found it just a bit corny (hmm. Not sure if that's the right word here, shows up for kitsch in any case), but still very impressive.

I've had alias net-pf-10 off and alias ipv6 off in my configuration for ages, but with recent kernels, IPv6 is apparently compiled in, so my eth0 now has a (link local) IPv6 address.

... which means that I now had Java apps suddenly fail to connect to the database. Since stuff like sqlplus (Bah!) works, I didn't immediately think about a network problem and started testing various JVM versions and hunting missing libraries etc. Only, it turned out that running java with -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true is the magic bullet.

Is there a proper fix? I know IPv6 is (supposed to be) the nice and shiny future, but currently I just don't have any IPv6 connection so it just creates problems for me right now. (Ok, let's add here that I dislike Java anyway because its philosophy, or the philosophy of most software I have to deal with, is to define its own world instead of integrating nicely with the host platform. If you look at it from another direction you may think I should have titled this “I suck”)

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for “tested on Windows”, the very old rainbow colored apple for “tested on Mac”, our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for “Debian package available”.

I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.