The large cat sniffs the planter. Your houscat snarls! Your housecat hits.

   --|--........                   Tools
   |*.(|-..|...                    l - A blessed +1 laptop named gnu
  %|/..|..'|'f**                   Armor
  .....+...f..**                   j - blue jeans
  #|@..|..{|                       t - t-shirt
  ----------                       s - socks of warmth +2

When an afternoon on the sun room begins to look like this, I swear off nethack for a few more months.

In Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10: No hardware required, Matt Zimmerman announces that from now on, "every release of Ubuntu Server Edition is simultaneously available on EC2".

Amazon's EC2 documentation says: "the ability to create and publish kernels and ramdisks is restricted to Amazon EC2 and selected vendors". Canonical appears to be one of those vendors. Their newest EC2 AMI's contain modules from an Ubuntu build of linux-xen (2.6.27-23).

Eric Hammond, who has been for a while making both Ubuntu and Debian images for EC2 says

Historically on EC2, neither Debian nor Ubuntu have had completely Debian and Ubuntu stacks from the kernel up. Instead, we've had to make do with patching the runtime on top of older kernels (2.6.16, 2.6.18, 2.6.21) built for other distros (Fedora Core).

Amazingly, we've managed to hold this together and keep it running well for a couple years on EC2.

He goes on to describe current problems with eg, Debian's new udev version and the available EC2 kernels. Furthermore, anticipating today's news:

When the point comes where I am not publishing the base Ubuntu server AMIs, it will not make sense for me to publish new Debian AMIs either.

Those wanting to run Debian on EC2 will be stuck with duct-taping together Debian with the available kernels.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Ubuntu is actually working with Debian's kernel team, and will be letting them use Canonical's access to publish AKI's of official Debian kernels. Or maybe Ubuntu is working with Debian's kernel team to include identical linux-xen kernel in Debian, so the Ubuntu AKI's could be used.

But appearances are that this is another case where Ubuntu has managed to take a situation that was less than ideal for all concerned, and turn it into an advantage for Ubuntu, while at the same time being a unfixable loss for Debian.

My mouse's perspective is that a) we maybe only have so many losses left in us (altho we did get thru that whole dinosaur thing ok!) and b) King Kong is still oddly dependent on his mammilian heritage to be up there with his head in the cloud, tearing at Godzilla and stamping on us.

The difficulty with living on the Joey sleep schedule as the year wanes is finding enough daylight to have a satisfying day.

The plan was to hike in the mountains, but my inbox said otherwise. Ugly new debhelper bugs. Looking at the hard one, I felt as if someone from 30 years ago was trying to take my day away. Why does make(1) not provide a way to discover which targets exist in a makefile? My hack to workaround that historical oversight was breaking, and make was nearly fork-bombing the system in the process. This seemed likely to eat my weekend -- I was very glad to find a quick, ugly workaround.

By then it was 2:00. I'd not get to the mountain pass til after 3:00, which was pushing it. Almost stayed home, but it was such a nice sunny day, perfect weather. So I headed out. Spent half an hour along the way talking with an old woman about a well (long story), but reached the Roan with nearly two hours of daylight.

And it was sublime.

I realized I'd never stayed up there for sunset, so I hunkered down on a rock, finished checking my email (left over from the earlier hurry), and then spent half an hour chatting on the phone with my dad, as the sun inched down a finger at a time. When it went behind the other peak, and mist crept up the valleys below, it got cold and I hurried down.

Reached the car in deep dusk, and coasted down the mountian while listening to a BBS nostalgia piece on the radio. On the way home, pulled in at the Ridgewood BBQ, and am sitting on the porch in the cold with about 50 other people, waiting for a seat (hopefully before it closes), and blogging.

I accomplished everything I wanted to today, including getting something significant done, hiking, and spending quiet time on top of the world. Though only just, and feeling I was running late the whole time. Nice thing about the Joey schedule though, is I will have seven more hours of quiet time before sleep.

This google tech talk by Ben Adida describes applications of cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs to voting, and presents a demo "scratch and vote" system designed along those lines.

The video is two years old, in the meantime we had another presidential election that of course used no such thing, but did involve a lot of paper to create a warm fuzzy safe feeling (or maybe not if you thought about it too much).

For the first time, a cryptographically secure voting system was used in a real election in Takoma Park, Maryland, just this month. And since all the data was published, that election has been independently verified.

I've very happy to learn about this stuff.

To be on the internet before 1993, you had to be in some way special or lucky. This was before the September that never ended. You were aware of this internet thing that most of the world had not heard of, and went to some lengths to get on it. If we could gather together many of the people who were on the net at a past point in time, that would be interesting company to be in.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." -- L.P. Hartley

Visiting foreign countries is a neat thing to do. Mostly to meet and interact with different people, but partly just to be there and see how things are done differently. The foreign country of internet past is archived away in various places, from the Wayback machine to Google's usenet archive. But we can't visit these archives in the same sense we can visit the current internet today. It takes effort to find things in the archive; "new" posts are not popping up to be read; there is little serendipity. Why not? Interaction aside, internet past and present is just data.

My personal mail archives go back to 1995. I have written a program to find mail in my archives that is exactly ten years old, and remail it to a dedicated account. When I visit that account, I can see messages I received ten years ago as they come in in "real time". I can also look in the Sent folder to see replies I sent. This is just a demo with a small personal archive, but you can imagine it being done by the large public archives too, to create a nearly seamless imitation of being on the internet in the past.

(I need to finish this, and update it with anything learned by watching my historical mail come in.)

First time I've been to Thanksgiving at Exchange Place. Was a pleasantly rustic setting for the big get-together of 30 or more people from our three closely knit families.

E
￿ ڿ
ᛯ ℇ ✈
🍺 ಅ ΐ ʐ 𝍇
Щ অ ℻ ⌬ ⌨ ⌣
₰ ⠝ ‱ ‽ ח ֆ ∜ ⨀ IJ
Ⴊ ⇠ ਐ ῼ இ ╁ ଠ ୭ ⅙ ㈣
⧒ ₔ ⅷ ﭗ ゛ 〃 ・ ↂ ﻩ ✞ ℼ ⌧

Reference key for the Optometrist:

LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E

THAT DAMN UNICODE BOX WITH F'S IN, ARABIC LETTER TCHEH WITH DOT ABOVE

RUNIC TVIMADUR SYMBOL, EULER CONSTANT, AIRPLANE

BEER MUG, GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND TONOS, LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH RETROFLEX HOOK, TETRAGRAM FOR DEPARTURE

CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHCHA, BENGALI LETTER A, FACSIMILE SIGN, BENZENE RING, KEYBOARD, SMILE

GERMAN PENNY SYMBOL, BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1345 (or GLIDER), PER TEN THOUSAND SIGN, INTERROBANG, HEBREW LETTER HET, ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER FEH, FOURTH ROOT, N-ARY CIRCLED DOT OPERATOR, LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ

GEORGIAN CAPITAL LETTER LAS, LEFTWARDS DASHED ARROW, GURMUKHI LETTER AI, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI, TAMIL LETTER I, BOX DRAWINGS DOWN HEAVY AND UP HORIZONTAL LIGHT, ORIYA LETTER TTHA, ORIYA DIGIT SEVEN (or INVERTED DEBIAN LOGO), VULGAR FRACTION ONE SIXTH, PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH FOUR

BOWTIE WITH RIGHT HALF BLACK, LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER SCHWA, SMALL ROMAN NUMERAL EIGHT, ARABIC LETTER PEH FINAL FORM, KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK, DITTO MARK, KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT, ROMAN NUMERAL TEN THOUSAND, ARABIC LETTER HEH ISOLATED FORM, SHADOWED WHITE LATIN CROSS, DOUBLE-STRUCK SMALL PI, X IN A RECTANGLE BOX

Now updated for Unicode 6.0!