the corner office

An internal dialog (on the way to work)

Me: the biggest problem with bumper-to-bumper traffic is the concertina effect.

Myself: oh jeez, here we go again...

Me: when traffic comes to a stop, people start pulling away only some time after the person in front of them pulls away. So it takes a lot longer for the entire column to get moving.

Myself: ...wait for it...

Me: the best way to avoid this, is for people to stop looking at the car in front of them. If you look at the car 2 cars ahead, and start pulling away when they move, then your movements are more in sync with the car directly in front of you. Try it, it really works. Imagine if everyone did that? It would go a long way towards reducing the concertina effect.

Myself: yeah yeah, you saw a documentary about this in LA once...

Me: I think a huge education campaign is needed, encouraging people to do this.

Me: (and telling people not to let taxis and yellow-lane cars back into the flow. Make it difficult and expensive for them, they'd be less inclined to do it in future. But that's another internal dialog...)

Myself: you know what the problem is, don't you?

Me: Hmm.

Myself: it doesn't work if you can't see past the vehicle in front of you. Trucks and 4x4s and bakkies block your view, you can't see the car in front of them.

Me: very true. You know my opinions about status symbol 4x4 drivers and slow trucks. I think the best solution is to make a law that 4x4s and trucks should be relegated to a single lane during rush hour, or kept off the road completely. Common good and all that.

Myself: lovely, but enforcement would be a bit difficult.

Me: traffic cops doing their jobs is another internal dialog... let's pretend they do.

Myself: yeah right. Even if they did, all lanes on the highway are clogged. How are cops going to be able to move around to catch transgressors and enforce those rules?

Me: helicopters... ?

Myself: ...

Me: ... with big frickin' lazer beams...

I: Hmmmm. Today is the start of the Large Pizza Special at Roman's...

No posts for a week. Reason: I discovered the joys of Eve Online.

I've been fascinated by MMORPGs for a while, but I was always too chicken to take the plunge because I was afraid it would take too much (a) time and (b) bandwidth. A colleague of mine has been carrying on about Eve for a while, and it turns out the bandwidth requirements are (fairly) negligible. So with lots of enticing by said colleague, a general had-enoughness with studying and a trial account, I finally decided to give it a try.

Wow. Wow. Wow. The game itself is great, but I think the coolest part of it is seeing and experiencing what happens when 20-odd thousand people from across the planet are thrown into a virtual world and let loose at the same time. This is undoubtedly old hat for a lot of people, but I'm still blown away.

A link for posterity. Getting this error when starting the vmware init.d script:

VMware Server is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

... is fixed by deleting /etc/vmware/not_configured. More here, via here.

People who take their time signing credit card slips at the shops.

Everything, from the half-second assume-the-position body shuffle and arm-adjustment in preparation for the glorious signing event, to the meticulous, painstaking nursery-school style writing-out of the Ridiculouslylongsurname seems geared to frustrate and annoy the 500 people behind them in the queue. What do these people want? A gold star and a Noddy badge for having a neat signature? You want to just shake these people, or kick them, or better yet, just grab the pen and sign for them.

Of course, you can't, because if you did actually tell the person to get a fuggen move on, they'd be all upset and everyone else around you would think you're a real wally, and you'd never be able to show your face at the local Woolies again. But still.

I'm in assignment crunch mode again, so not doing anything particularly not-studiously interesting, but I wanted to link to the Puakma Tornado server, which has now been GPL'd. Congratulations and good luck to Brendon Upson. It's a big step doing something like that, and I hope it brings good things.

(Once I'm up to date with assignments, I will be tinkering!)

Passed away at 60.

That's that then. Not by design initially, but I probably ended up watching more France games than anything else, and I was kinda rooting for them, especially after Germany lost. It had seemed me that Italy were the most likely winners though, and so it ended.

What was with Zidane? How strong the provocation? I'm sure there'll be quite some discussion about that in the next few days...

Next up, 2010. ZA had better start pulling finger.

Last week's Gentoo upgrade left some Java stuff wonky on my system, and I ended up in something of an upgrade hell, trying to keep up with a slew of Gentoo upgrades this week.

The first big change I got caught up in was moving to Xorg 7.0, otherwise known as 'modular X'. This is the first version of X windows that doesn't come in a single, huge tarball. Instead, the entire package has been broken up into about eleventy billion little packages, each of which can be compiled and upgraded separately. This modularity is obviously a great improvement, but the upgrade process hasn't been easy. My policy is simple: if a Gentoo upgrade requires a long, complicated HOWTO, (two, actually), it's best to avoid the upgrade for as long as possible.

Modular X finally went stable this week, so I just had to ride the torpedo and do the upgrade. Thankfully, it was mostly hassle-free. The only gripe I have is that one of my favourite fonts is now missing. The font, called 'Clean', was a really crisp terminal-friendly monospace font. No luck finding any obvious reference to the underlying font files in my backups, and I soon learned that the word 'clean' is not a useful search engine term. X fonts aren't my forte, and I'll have to make do without it until I have time to dig around and see if I can get it back.

The second big change has been an upgrade to Gentoo's Java configuration system. Gentoo has a really nifty tool named java-config, which manages VMs and whatnot. A major limitation, though, was that many Java packages don't compile cleanly with 1.5 yet, and all sorts of unholy horrors would get unleashed if you accidentally set your system VM to 1.5, &c &c. The latest version of java-config has a number of nifty improvements, and is now smart enough to work with 'generations', so separate packages can be built and/or invoked with different VM versions.

The upgrades to get to this 'generational' set-up weren't too smooth (<- understatement), but I finally have everything sane again.

Gentoo's source-based philosophy means that their Java library management gets really, really complex, because they eschew the 500-copies-of-the-same-jar-file-on-your-system approach that everyone normally follows. Instead, they aim for a more reusable, /lib-friendly set-up. I find myself a bit skeptical of whether their source-based java set-up is worth the effort, but I have to take my hat off to the Gentoo devs for keeping a handle on everything.

Finally, I'm now using Eclipse 3.2, aka Callisto. I read a 'what's new' article a few days ago, and there were no 'wow' changes that caught my attention. The main thing I wanted was a bug fix in the CDT plug-ins: the 3.1 compatible version had a frustrating bug where it would take a few seconds to close each source file window. Waiting half a minute to close a bunch of .h and .cpp files was getting a little annoying, and I'm glad to see that CDT 3.1.0 (which is for Eclipse 3.2, confusingly), has fixed this.

Now I can finally get back to doing really productive stuff.

Sir Richard Branson launched Virgin Money last week. From the M&G:

In his usual inimitable style, Branson launched the new credit card with a daredevil stunt - zip-lining 450m (equivalent to a height of 25 storeys) from the roof of the Sandton Sun Hotel into the parking lot of Virgin Money's headquarters in the plush Johannesburg northern suburb of Sandton to establish a new South African record for the longest and steepest foefie slide (sliding down a rope by means of a pulley system).

That's probably the first (and last) time I've ever seen a newspaper use the term 'foefie slide'.

As for Virgin Money, if they shake up the banking industry and make it more competitive, then good for them. Of course, I wonder how many people are going to be like me - very supportive of the idea but too lazy to do anything, and rather hoping that everyone else switches, so that my own bank is forced to sort itself out, too.