Safe as Milk

Brian: It always gets my wick a bit when gun-loving Americans roll out this hoary old NRA-fed chestnut.

The key word in your phrase there is “responsible” – of course a gun isn’t responsible for its actions. If you change that to “is a major factor in..” it stays true for guns, but becomes patently ridiculous for your exam example. With fewer guns, fewer murderous people would have a tool available to them that makes their job easy.

Put another way, there would be an awful lot fewer high-rise buildings in the world if there were no industrial cranes or scaffolding. Cranes and scaffolding aren’t responsible for high-rise buildings, but without them things become a lot more difficult.

I will be giving a 2 hour practical introduction to the GIMP in Lyon, France, at
the Bibliothèque La Gryffe, 5 rue Sébastien Gryffe, Lyon 7e from 15h to 17h this
coming Saturday.

I will cover basic topics like color correction and the use of layers and
channels, with a very definite practical side. I will work through a number of
examples, and if there are enough computers, everyone will have the chance to
repeat the tasks themselves.

If you’re around Lyon and are interested, please bring your laptop if you have
one, since the library in question does not have any computing facilities.

Oh, and it’ll all be in French 😉

Murray:
One of the things I actually like about ClearCase is their branching (as long as it doesn’t go any more levels than trunk + TEMP branch) – I find it really cool to be able to develop on a branch for a couple of weeks while I continue to see what’s happenning on the trunk by updating regularly.

Basically, every time I update I do a merge from the trunk without actually having to merge from the trunk (well, unless I have a conflicting file). Which means that when I get to the end of the branch, I have a tiny merge to do before retiring the branch, rather than a biggish one.

Granted, it’s a small thing to like, outweighed by a big bunch of stuff not to like, but at least there’s that.

Rich: Being the parent of an almost-3-year-old, I’m currently learning the joys of early speech myself these days (bilingual speech at that, which is a whole ‘nuther kettle of fish).

The field concerned is called “Language Acquisition”, and aparrently Noam Chomsky is the field’s main mover and shaker. The interesting thing about children’s speach is that instinctively, kids figure out the important words in a sentence – and not just the important words, but the important parts of them. So suffixes, prefixes, conjunctions, and helper versbs all get left behind and all you get are action verbs, nouns and names. “Thomas go plouf” is a particular favourite of ours right now that we’re trying to talk him out of (it’s bath related).

Changed my mind… just submitted my candidacy for the foundation board. I noticed that the meetings are typically at 20/21h UTC, which works out at 21/22h here, and that suits me fine.

I’m really excited about working on the board although I’m sure it’ll be hard work (and of course I need to get elected first).

The main thing I would like to see is the foundation acting as a central conduit for all of the regional projects that are cropping up, from Bangalore to Chile and Brasil, right through France, Germany and Spain. Those local organisations offer something the foundation doesn’t, geographical proximity and local knowledge, and the foundation can be a central point for all of those organisations to communicate and present their news to a global audience.

GNOME Foundation Board elections

So far I count 6 nominations, and most of the outgoing board haven’t declared. I considered presenting myself for election seriously, but I will soon be changing jobs, and won’t be available for board meetings at 6pm on a weekday, which means I basically wouldn’t be able to do the job.

I am wondering why there are so few people interested in the board, though. Perhaps people just feel that it’s a sucky job that they don’t want to do…

France’s Iron Man

I’m not a triathlon fan unlike some other GNOMErs, but you have to admire the dedication and athleticism (and stubbornness) of people who swim 5km, cycle 180km and run 42km (a full marathon) in the Iron Man triathlon every year. One of the competitors in this year’s triathlon will be Frenchman Xavier Le Floch, who finished last year’s race in 14th position, 25 minutes behind the winner. What is extraordinary about this is that 4 months prior to the race, Xavier was involved in a plane accident, and had 2 vertebrae in his neck broken. Normally, such an injury requires 6 months of heavy physiotherapy. Xavier was back training for the Iron Man after 6 weeks.

This year, he’s back, and in the best form of his life. And he expects to win, even if he is not the favourite. Yet another inspirational example from the world of sport.

I was looking at (work-related) news stories, when I happened upon the LA Times’ “State of the race” map (click on the map to open it up).

The cool thing about this is that it’s a clickable flash map – you can change state colors in function of who you think is going to win the states, and work out virtual results right now.

I figured out that if Bush holds the South, Kerry keeps New England and the Western seaboard, that it’s going to come down to 6 states, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio. Between them, they have 75 electoral college votes, and Missouri (leaning Bush before the debate) has voted for the president in every election since the 2nd world war.

Currently, Bush is up in Wisconsin, Kerry in Michigan, and Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio are too close to call. Anyway, this is probably miles off, but I have enjoyed myself for a few minutes deciding whether we will have the 43rd or 44th President of the USA in January.

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it’s too close to call.

Sven this is because in some locales the alphabet is ordered “AaBbCc….Zz”, and in others it uses the ASCII ordering of “ABC…Z…abc…z”. This depends on the LC_COLLATE environment variable (usually specified as part of LANG). I remember having a discussion about this a while backon the ILUG mailing list, but I don’t remember when or with who.

For this reason, using A-Z for caps is usually ill-advised. You are better off using the character classes [:lower:] and [:upper:] if they are supported (they’re a posix thing and most old seds won’t have them). The alternative way is to use ‘[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ]’ which isn’t that long for a regex…

Mayo got thrashed. And I didn’t even get to see the match because the only Irish pub in Lyon with an Irish satellite subscription (illegal) has been having problems and the guy on the other end of the mobile phone number they have for “service” didn’t fix it in time. Double bummer.

Update: Interesting experiment – I just set LANG to fr_FR and put a bunch of characters in latin-1 (like â, ä, Ã&plusmm;) into a file, and they are all matches by the [:lower:] character class (try it – one character per line, then run grep ‘[[:lower:]]’ testfile). With a similar file, try grepping for ‘[A-z]’, ‘[a-z]’, ‘[A-Z]’. It seems like sed here collates properly for a-z, but it doesn’t pick up anything for A-z. Funny, that.

Update 2: Not funny at all, actually – it seems that fr_FR collates lower-case letters before upper-case letters, with the result that ‘[a-Z]’ picks up all the letters.

Update 3 (the last one, I promise): I should have read PlanetGNOME more closely – looks like Mr. Love got there first.

I finally got around to getting my holiday photos off the camera. The great thing about holiday photos is that you smile and go right back to the places you were photographing, and somehow the memories are even better than the real thing. The worst thing is realising that the camera’s lens had a stain during the entire holidays, so all your photos are slightly blurred, with a ghost-like figure hanging around the top left corner. That sucks.