No Such Weblog

In the mail today: The national telephone and Internet directories. The directories are updated annually.

I decided that I, finally, can’t avoid learning a bit about JavaScript, and hence got myself a copy of The O’Reilly Book — this time, JavaScript. The Definitive Guide.. The book — at 916 pages and 1.3kg, and it’s a paperback! — begins with the words:

JavaScript is a lightweight, interpreted programming language

Makes me long for the times of Kernighan and Ritchie — 272 pages, and 650g, in the bound version.Seems like the definition of “lighweight” has changed quite a bit.

The takeover of Skype by Ebay is all the hype in the local Luxembourg press — after all, Skype’s corporate umbrella and payment processing sit in Luxembourg. Local press (e.g., the “Wort”) boasts about the commitment of the company to the Luxembourg business place. Further down the same contribution, we learn what this commitment really means: 200 people total work for Skype. 12 of these work in Luxembourg. All the development is done in Estonia, and the firm is actually lead from London.But, of course, all this speaks well of Luxembourg as a place for advanced technology, and makes us expect that Ebay will also be interested in doing more of its future busines from here.

When trying to log into Orkut today, I was prompted to link Orkut to my Google account. In practical terms, this means that Google moves even closer to linking search history, e-mail, chat, and social networking information to each other. Reading their privacy policy and FAQ, I’m irritated by not seeing a straight answer about whether or not that linkage is actually done. I’m also irritated by the “this is good for you, so we won’t give you a choice about it” attitude of the change.I’m tempted to delete my Orkut and Gmail accounts.

Coming from a country where it’s mandatory for me to have an ID with myself (Germany), but where I’m pretty much never asked to show it (often, not even when crossing borders, and certainly not when just taking some long-distance train), it’s a remarkable contrast to be in the US: Here, the national ID card seems to be a major political scarecrow — yet, I’ve never seen as many demands for “showing ID” as in the past 10 days in New England. Want to buy alcohol or tobacco? “Take it as a compliment — we ask for ID on every purchase of age controlled goods,” says a sign in the shop. Want to pay a relatively minor purchase by credit card? “Could I see your ID?”I find the discrepancy puzzling between, on the one hand, ubiquitous use of ID, and on the other hand, massive fears of the adverse effects that a national ID might have on privacy.

Despite being an xterm addict for much of what I do, I occasionally try to use the graphical user interface on my machine — I’m running GNOME for that purpose.So, yesterday, my print server (as in, that Jetdirect box from ebay that sits next to the printer) had decided to shut down a connection, and the print server software on my computer (cups) had decided to consider the printer stopped, but hadn’t bothered to alert me of that fact.I wanted to print something this morning. Nothing happens, nothing at all. I get myself a command line, type “lpq”. The printer is stopped. So, how do I restart it?First thing (and not very obvious unless you know your system): Take a web browser, connect to the local print server’s built-in web-based administration interface. “Not authorized.” Umh. That must be new with Fedora Core 4.Next thing, search for that cool GUI tool — there ought to be one, after all, this is one of the supposedly non-scary Linux distributions. The system-level printer configuration tool, unfortunately, has no interface for starting or stopping printers. The user-level print job monitoring tool — while running somewhere in the background — doesn’t bother with jobs on stopped printers.Back to the command line, then. CUPS’ version of lpc doesn’t have the traditional restart command, but at least, there’s that thing called “cupsenable.” “cupsenable” asks for my password. And again. And again. Aha. Maybe that’s this program’s way to tell me that I’m not authorized. I get myself a root shell and call cupsenable. Finally, the printer starts spitting out paper.

Now, imagine I had given a Linux box to my mother, her printer had a temporary failure, and she was supposed to print something… Fortunately, my mother has a Mac.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the more annoying properties of the Thinkpad T43 is that its fan is running almost constantly, even when the device is basically cold.

This daemon controls the fan: When a certain temperature is exceeded, the fan is turned on. When fan speed drops below a certain threshold, it’s turned off. The daemon tries to be safe by turning on the fan when it is killed or otherwise encounters an error. If that doesn’t happen, there’s an emergency broadcast through syslog.

WARNING: Turning off the fan might lead to overheating of your machine. Use at your own risk. This daemon may have bugs that could lead to this situation.

Update, April 2013: Since this code is apparently still looked at, I’ve put it on github. Note that this is completely unmaintained, eight year old code.

I’m now running a Thinkpad T43 under Fedora Core 4.The entire installation process was painless; the machine seems well-supported by FC4. Some non-obvious notes, though:

• Bluetooth is recognized as a built-in USB device. To make this work after suspend/resume, remove the modules uhci_hcd, ehci_hcd, and hci_usb before putting the machine to sleep, and re-add them after wakeup.
• The built-in Intel i915 graphics adapter is supported either by the Vesa driver, or by the i810 driver. The latter will only work if you install some recent DRI drivers.
• To make Xorg work after suspend/resume, make sure you add acpi_sleep=s3_bios to your kernel command line.

I haven’t tried the built-in modemThat said, the machine makes generally a very good impression. It’s slimmer and lighter than my old Thinkpad R40, while at the same time making a much more robust impression.The only negative observations so far: The T43 heats up much quicker than the R40, hence the fan ends up running most of the time; I wonder if this is related to the driver that I’m using for the graphics adapter. Also, probably due to the reduced height of the laptop, the keyboard has a different and, I think, more flimsy touch than the one on the R40 — that machine has probably the best keyboards (laptop or desktop) I have ever used.

Writes Kieren McCarthy, about the site of the Luxembourg ICANN meeting: That combined with the fact that the conference centre is little more than a giant truck stuck in a massive car park in the full sun, except with carpets, doors and partition walls. Asylum seekers have died in such circumstances.An EU presidency mostly failed in these rooms, quite recently.Tat said, the meeting organization does, indeed, leave some desirables open. For instance, it seems unthinkable here that breaks happen when they fit the work, and that this is maybe not precisely when they are on the schedule. “You have to respect the schedule,” told me one waiter, and hence refused to give me any coffee before the scheduled minute.The GNSO Council taking a little longer than scheduled was apparently another unthinkable surprise: As one participant put it, security personnel was kicking people out of the building once Council was done. Once people had left the building, it required extensive arguing to get back in.I’d wish conference organizers would realize that the main purpose of such a meeting is — surprise! — meeting, and that side discussions and hallway talks are key to a successful conference. Conference organizers shouldn’t put obstacles into the way of these conversations, but should rather think about what they can do to enable them.

Under “any other business”, but not unexpected:

The GNSO Council expresses its concern to the Board that the final .net agreement was not posted for public comment prior to approval, given the significant changes made to the agreement from the previously posted draft.

The motion is phrased by Marilyn Cade, after a statement, and after Bruce Tonkin wondered if a one-sentence resolution was the right thing, “for clarity.”Cary Karp objects, based on lack of consultation. Tonkin calls the vote. gTLD registries, IPC abstain; NCUC, registrars, BC, and ISPCP vote in favor. Tonkin notes that he will note the concerns raised in reporting the resolution. Lucy Nichols (IPC) seconds the concerns. Tonkin suggests that the resolution attempts to summarize the community consensus he hears from the constituencies. Discussion on what the abstentions mean — not sharing the opinion, or simply not having a clear position that would support this particular resolution. Discussion on how this be presented to the board.