Replicating memes

I’m worried about the EURO’s M3 if a European version of the IMF (a EMF) is to be installed.

Nonetheless, I think the European community should do it just to strengthen Europe’s economy. I’m not satisfied by Europe’s economic strength: I want it to be undefeatable.

We must not let the IMF solve our problems. Europe might be a political dwarf, but we Europeans should show that we will solve our own problems. We’re an adult composition of cultures with vast amounts of experience. We know how to solve any imaginable problem. And let’s not, in our defeatism, pretend we don’t.

A EMF is a commitment to future member states: Europe often asks them fundamental changes; economic strength is what Europe offers in return. This needs to come at a highest price: Greece will have to fix their deficit problem. Even if their entire population goes on strike. Greece will be an example for countries like my own: Belgium has to fix a serious deficit problem, too.

An EMF comes at an equally high price, and that frightens me a bit: I don’t want the ECB to go as ballistic on money creation as the FED has been last two years. I want the EURO to be the strongest relevant currency mankind has ever created. No matter how insane the rest of the world thinks that ambition is: I believe that keeping the EURO’s M3 in check is a key to creating a wealthy society in Europe.

Politically I want European nations to negotiate more and more often. The European Union is a political dwarf only because finding agreement is hard. But in the long run will our solution be the most negotiated, most tested on this planet.

Together we can deal with anything. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy; it has never been easy: just seventy years ago we were still killing each other. We’re all guilty of that one way or another. And before that it wasn’t any better. Today, not that many people still care: “it wasn’t me”, right? So stop being a bitch about it, then.

It’s time to let it be. It’s time to start a new European century that will be better. With respect for all European cultures, languages, nations, nationalities, values, borders and interests.

But also a European century with economic responsibilities for each member. It’s our strength: we figured out how to keep our population wealthy: let’s continue doing so in the future.

(More available at the flash preview widget’s page 21)

– Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel’s first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.

I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain’t this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I’m recommending to just buy the book.

You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog’s readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.

Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:

What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.

– Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007

I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.

Tinymail’s co-maintainer Sergio Villar just released Tinymail’s first release.

psst. I have inside information that I might not be allowed to share that 1.2 is being prepared already, and will have bodystructure and envelope summary fetch. And it’ll fetch E-mail body content per requested MIME part, instead of always entire E-mails. Whoohoo!

You know about those guys that use your software against huge datasets like their entire filesystem, with thousands of files?

We do. His name is Tshepang Lekhonkhobe and we owe him a few beers for reporting to us many scalability issues.

Today we found and fixed such a scalability issue: the update query to reset the availability of file resources (this is for support for removable media) was causing at least a linear increase of VmRss usage per amount of file resources. For Tshepang’s situation that meant 600 MB of VmRss. Jürg reduced this to 30 MB of peak VmRss in the same use-case, and a performance improvement from minutes to a second or two, three. Without memory fragmentation as glibc is returning almost all of the VmRss back to the kernel.

Thursday is our usual release day. I invite all of the 0.7 pioneers to test us with your huge filesystems, just like Tshepang always does.

So long and thanks for all the testing, Tshepang! I’m glad we finally found it.

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy.

– Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010

We both agree that Nigel Farage is a complete moron.

Perhaps we should put a damp rag like the one he mentions in his mouth next time he opens it?

Nigel Farage, you’re an disgrace to yourself. The European parliament is no place for personal attacks, and you aren’t fit to carry the title Member of the European Parliament. Please keep the honour to yourself and resign.

Every sensible person outside of the U.K. thinks you should. Even the Euro skeptics do. You’re an embarrassment for your country and its culture, so I hope for the people in the U.K. that they’ll kick you out of politics.

I fear you’re just playing the populist card, and that you’ll even get votes for this from other morons.

I don’t decide about Tracker’s release. The team of course does.

But when you look at our roadmap you notice one remaining ‘big feature’. That’s coping with modest ontology changes.

Right now if we’d make even a small ontology change all of our users would have to recreate their databases. We also don’t support restoring a backup of your metadata over a modified ontology.

This is about to change. This week I started working in a branch on supporting class and property ontology additions.

I finished it today and it appears to be working. The patches obviously need a thorough review by the other team members, and then testing of course. I invite all the contributors and people who have been testing Tracker 0.7’s releases to tryout the branch. It only supports additions, so don’t try to change properties or classes, or remove them. You can only add new ones. You might have noticed the nao:deprecated property in the ontology files? That’s what we do with deleted properties.

Anyway

Meanwhile are Martyn and Carlos working on a bugfix in the miner about duplicate entries for file resources and on a timeout for the extractor so that extraction of large or complicated documents doesn’t block the entire filesystem miner.

Jürg is working on timezone storage for xsd:dateTime fields and last few days he implemented limited support for named graphs.

By the looks of it, one would almost believe that Tracker’s first new stable release is almost ready!

This (super) cool .NET developer and good friend came to me at the FOSDEM bar to tell me he was confused about why during the Tracker presentation I was asking people to replace F-Spot and Banshee.

I hope I didn’t say it like that, I would never intent to say that. But I’ll review the video of the presentation as soon as Rob publishes it.

Anyway, to ensure everybody understood correctly what I did wanted to say (whether or not I did, is another question):

The call was to inspire people to reimplement or to provide different implementations of F-Spot’s and Banshee’s data backends, so that they would use an RDF store like tracker-store instead of each app its own metadata database.

I think I also mentioned Rhythmbox in the same sentence because the last thing I would want is to turn this into a .NET vs. anti-.NET debate. It just happens to be that the best GNOME softwares for photo and music management are written in .NET (and that has a good reason).

People who know me also know that I think those anti-.NET people are disruptive ignorable people. I also actively and willingly ignore them (and they should know this). I’m actually a big fan of the Mono platform.

I’ll try to ensure that I don’t create this confusion during presentations anymore.

In line with what I usually do at conferences, I lost my glasses at the GNOME Beer event this year. If somebody found it, and maybe even has it, please let me know. It’s kinda hard to see presentations without it.

This is to let Rob Taylor and David Schlesinger know that they better start organizing S.M.A.S.H.E.D.

Not all discussions are easy. If discussions were to be easy, the bar wouldn’t be high enough for your bullshit filter to be effective here.

During dark hours of discussions the nineties syndrome of wanting immediate results plays its role among spectators: It’s not a popular job to be a dissident. It’s not popular to be critical about a (the leader of a) popular idea. This is illustrated by the intellectually absurd criticisms David Schlesinger receives.

Yet is the critic who monitors the organs of a society key to that organ either producing for its stakeholders, or failing and dragging the entire society it serves down with it.

In Western Europe we traded Kings and Popes for a government that is held accountable by an opposition. Many countries and cultures adopted this system of governance. That’s because it undeniably works. If you have a better system in mind, that can be put to the test, please come forward.

It is good that the GNOME foundation board has decided to increase the amount of surveys. But I have one request which I didn’t succeed in raising before the end of last year:

Although I accept the decisive role a group of leadership has to take, I want foundation board members and employees to be held accountable for the decisions they make. Especially the ones where they go against the results of such a survey.

But this is not up to me.

*edit* They are showing an old episode of Married with Children on TV, I’ll be back in half an hour!

This is the kind of stuff that needs a forward on the planets:

From: Roberto -MadBob- Guido

This is just an update about tracker-miner-rss effort, already mentioned in this list some time ago.

Website, SVN, Last release (0.3)

Since 0.2 we (Michele and me) have just dropped dependency from rss-glib due some limitation found, and created our own Glib-oriented feeds handling library, libgrss, starting from the code of Liferea and adding nice stuffs such as a PubSub subscriber implementation. At the moment it is shipped with tracker-miner-rss itself, in the future may be splitted so to easy usage by other developers.

Next will come integration with libchamplain to describe geographic points found in geo-rss enabled feeds, integration with libedataserver to better handle “person” rappresentation (suggestions for a better PIM-like shared library with useful objects?), and perhaps a first full-featured feed reader using Tracker as backend.

Enjoy :-)

Roberto is doing a demo on FSter at FOSDEM during our presentation. My role in the presentation will be light this year. I decided to give most of the talk away to Rob Taylor and Roberto. I will probably demo Debarshi Ray’s Solang and if time permits his work on the Nautilus integration. Regretfully Debarshi can’t come and so he asked me to do the demo.

Thank you for trying to forbid the burka. I hope my country will also forbid it. We need to protect (but not overprotect) the women of Muslim cultures, cultures who are massively migrating to Western Europe at this moment, against the oppressive anti-woman and religious nature of the burka.

I don’t believe, at all, that the burka is an expression of free speech. I believe it’s an instrument to oppress woman, and that this is its only purpose. There is no place for that in Western European culture. None. And we must be assertive about it.

I’d also like to ask Muslim countries to stay out of the debate: we decide about Western European values, you don’t. Equality between men and woman is a Western European value. If you don’t like that, sorry, it’s not negotiable.

For the last few weeks has Debarshi Ray contributed to Tracker’s Nautilus plugin and worked on Solang, a photo manager that will start using Tracker’s SPARQL capability to get a language to query for metadata about the photos and the photos themselves.

Debarshi explains it all very well himself on his own blog.

We’ll probably do a lightening demo during our Tracker presentation at FOSDEM about how Solang did this integration. We’re also planning to demo the code of a few other applications that are working on integrating with Tracker’s store.

Somebody should port Solang to the next version of Maemo!

Two posts ago I wrote that something like The Real news is quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media.

Today I found an interesting double interview on AlJazeeraEnglish by Riz Khan titled Has the mainstream media in the US replaced serious coverage with “junk news” and tabloidism?

Brzezinski

In the third segment of The Real News‘ interview with Dr. Brzezinski, Paul Jay asks him about Israel’s threat to bomb Iranian Nuclear facilities and the American strategy towards Iran.

Brzezinski talks about how this might force the U.S. out of the region in the short term, how it would affect the price of oil, how the U.S. would be militarily involved and how the U.S. would be alone in this. And what the fundamental consequences for Israel would be.

You can find all three parts of the interview and their transcripts here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Politics, skimming facebook

It’s Sunday so I skim Facebook a bit. I came across Lefty’s link to a 100 quotes every geek should know blog. Artwork like humor often represents a philosophy. I think this first quote on that blog is a very good meme, also for foundation boards:

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
— Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I’ve been watching The Real News for some time now. It claims to be “the real news” but the reality is that it’s fairly left-wing pro-unions most of the times. Most of their documentaries and interviews are very interesting, though. Nor do they make it difficult to filter out their own bias. It’s quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media to have something like The Real News.

This week they are interviewing Brzezinski. People who know Brzezinski, know that that’s a huge interview for them. Watch part one of the interview. Knowing The Real News, part two will probably be released in a week.

Youtube video

Hello Astronomers

it is Solstice.

(this from Wiki)

Of the many ways in which solstice can be defined, one of the most common (and perhaps most easily understood) is by the astronomical phenomenon for which it is named, which is readily observable by anyone on Earth: a “sun-standing.” This modern scientific word descends from a Latin scientific word in use in the late Roman republic of the 1st century BC: solstitium. Pliny uses it a number of times in his Natural History with the same meaning that it has today. It contains two Latin-language segments, sol, “sun”, and -stitium, “stoppage.”^[2] The Romans used “standing” to refer to a component of the relative velocity of the Sun as it is observed in the sky. Relative velocity is the motion of an object from the point of view of an observer in a frame of reference. From a fixed position on the ground, the sun appears to orbit around the Earth.^[3]

To an observer in inertial space, the Earth is seen to rotate about an axis and revolve around the Sun in an elliptical path with the Sun at one focus. The Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit and this axis maintains a position that changes little with respect to the background of stars. An observer on Earth therefore sees a solar path that is the result of both rotation and revolution.

The component of the Sun’s motion seen by an earthbound observer caused by the revolution of the tilted axis, which, keeping the same angle in space, is oriented toward or away from the Sun, is an observed diurnal increment (and lateral offset) of the elevation of the Sun at noon for approximately six months and observed daily decrement for the remaining six months. At maximum or minimum elevation the relative motion at 90° to the horizon stops and changes direction by 180°. The maximum is the summer solstice and the minimum is the winter solstice. The path of the Sun, or ecliptic, sweeps north and south between the northern and southern hemispheres. The days are longer around the summer solstice and shorter around the winter solstice. When the Sun’s path crosses the equator, the days and nights are of equal length; this is known as an equinox. There are two solstices and two equinoxes.^[4]

We used to observe and celebrate this event widely, the Romans moved the birth of Christ to Solstice to usurp it .

Now people celebrate fiction instead of fact ..unless your an Astronomer that is.

Praise the Laws and Happy Solstice.

– Ordono Mundi

ps. I think Solstice was yesterday, but oh well..

The discussion with Richard Stallman ended with requested silence.

I’d like to ask people to use the following meme for future such discussions:

La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti, ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée préconçue, ni à quoi que ce soit, si ce n’est aux faits eux-mêmes, parce que, pour elle, se soumettre, ce serait cesser d’être.

– Henri Poincaré, University of Brussels (1909-11-19)

As for the conclusions. I believe this survey result and this analysis are conclusive.

I would like to dedicate this moment to this version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters.

Jono, our Metal fan, probably agrees with me that even the toughest person in the world of Metal can be brought to his knees, crying.

It’s a moment of reconciliation. What is it that we want?

I think more than ever, we do understand each other.

I don’t know.