Aigarius Blog

“Thou shalt not whine” was written under his desk. I just discovered him recently and was presently surprised by his directness in questioning politicians and challenging them to explain things that they have said before. Like a Howard Stern of politics. Not shy to respectfully question the existing assumptions, but (unlike Howard) still remaining neutral and not drawing conclusions himself. He will be missed.

P.S. I do however feel the NBC could have included some other news in the Nightly News of the day as well. Dropping everything and just covering one man seams a bit excessive to me.

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With the cost of plane tickets approaching 2000 USD it is rather hard to sell me going to the Debconf 8 as that can be approximated as 3-4 months of my income. I did apply for travel sponsorship, but due to some kind of brainfart I misread “Amount I am unable to fund myself” as “Amount I am able to fund myself” and thus asked for far less money than I actually need. Therefore, after the Debconf team strictly stated that the requested amount can not be changed at this point, it has become clear that I cann’t come to Debconf 8.

/sadpanda

I would still love to come if there was sponsorship money to cover my fare and even suggested putting me to the end of the sponsorship priority list, but apparently that is not happening. Have fun, and see you all in Spain in 2009.

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“… Today is the first day in office for President Barack Obama … In other news, Hillary Clinton is still on the campaign trail and is not giving up …” - best ever joke about the current US election. I think it was from The Daily Show, but I cannot be certain.

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Apparently it is a political suicide in USA to make people think. Obama’s ex-preacher Jeremiah Wright is the most sane US preacher that I’ve ever heard. If you read or listen to his sermons in full length and go beyond the Fox News presented soundbites, he is 99% right. The US has long been doing extreme violence to countries around the world, so it is no wonder that such violence came back to US. Russia had the same problem with Afghanistan and Chechnya. If you try to put yourself up as ‘world police’, some people will disagree. Then he damned America’s _government_ for letting Americans down by not caring enough about the people. The only thing that I would smile and shake my head at was the statement that American government invented HIV. I doubt even they have such resources. Read this transcript for example, the sermon is just a great sermon that urges the people think for themselves. And what people put this sermon down for? Using a word ‘Negro’? Having an issue with some specific politicians? He is a pastor, pastors are meant to have a strong opinion a vision and to project that for the congregation to see. “I’m not going to stop thinking just because I love Jesus” is the summary of that sermon if you ask me. And that is the most positive religious message I’ve heard from that side of the pond for a long time. You can agree or disagree with rev. Wright, but you can still go to his sermons and enjoy it because he makes you think. I would talk to most racist bastard, serial killer or even Hitler himself if he could tell me something that would provoke my mind to think and thus improve myself. You don’t have to agree with people to benefit from speaking to them or from listening to what they have to say. Even if someone is 100% wrong and misguided, if his speeches can make you think of some good idea, it is worth it. And rev. Jeremiah Wright is not 100% wrong, from what I’ve heard he is on the money most of the time and only some of his statements I would disagree with. And he is a great speaker. If I would have not been an Obama supporter, I would become one because of Wright.

Or because of the very accurate observation by Obama that in hard times people in rural USA cling to trusted values such as guns and religion. There is nothing wrong with that.

I am amazed how such true statements can be so turned by US press and can actually reduce Obamas rating. I was starting to believe that not all is lost in the US, but if Obama does not get elected, well … it is all lost in the US.

PS. How this related to Debian? Or software is the best choice for the society in the long term. However, that is only true if we assume that people behave rationally and use it, improve it and contribute back improvements for the public good. If the general population is made weary of rational thinking and starts thinking in soundbites and slogans, then there is a ceiling to free software expansion and the whole free software movement can eventually be crushed in the interests of homeland security with strong corporate commercial software backing. (Only government approved software is allowed to run with mandatory government approved back-doors and hardware verification to prevent cyber-terrorism or something, thus also forbidding any compilers and interpreters outside government controls.)

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Most absurd religious bullshit in long time. Baby Jesus cries like being stabbed in the eye with a fork. It is like a sweet gay love orgy between baby Mohamed, baby Jesus and baby Abraham while baby L. Ron Hubbard films it all and baby Buddha gives artistic directions. Wouldn’t you want to see that Holy Trinity? Just as real and inspiring as the other one. Baby Jesus is a fictional character just like Donald Duck or Terminator, get over it.

If your personality is fully determined by several thousand years old megalomaniac fantasies to the point where you are unable to accept satire about it, you might have serious psychological issues and should seek professional help. If people get seriously offended at anything written online it is their own personal psychiatric problem. The fact that such irrational over-offensiveness is promoted in US. Opinion is an opinion even when stated as a fact or amusing expression or observation. Being offended by an opinion is a clear sign of lack of personal integrity and self-awareness. Don’t enforce your own psychological deficiencies on others or baby jesus will cry like he crapped his pants before the age of diapers.

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No Debian content here. Just like last year I decided to watch one of the largest sport events in the USA - the final game of the National Football League Super Bowl XLII (roman numerals are different for the sake of it ). I came to like the Japanese take on American football, so I watched the Superbowl last year and was appalled at the lack of any entertainment value in the game. I was told that it was one the worst Super bowls ever, so I gave it another try.

Just like last year the American football looks to be very lawyer-friendly: bundles of complex rules and exceptions. The game could have been much simpler. Like for example, a lot of rues come from the fact that the game timer almost never stops. It is good for TV companies as they can plan their broadcast times better, but horrible for the stop-go game like the American football is. Just stopping the timer on every point the ball is stopped like they do in final seconds would cut out a lot of rules. Playclock and all. Rules on use of timeouts and stuff. Of course the game time would need to be adjusted down a bit. Now you have 4×15 minutes of ‘game’ where at most 20 minutes of that is in action. That game time is a lie - most of the time people are just standing around.

Terminology irks me quite a lot. Why is it a “1st down” when there have been two “1st down”s just a few minutes ago? Something along the lines of “down counter reset” would be much clearer. And what is cryptic “1st & 10″ doing in the middle of the screen? It would have been much clearer if that info would be split: “Downs: 1/4″ and a measuring arrow between the ball and the yellow line with “10yd” written on it. And then there is an obscured “two in two” or “two for two” or “two in O” phrases which apparently means the same as “two 1st downs out of two tries” in the context. Can’t the commentators be a bit more elaborate and actually say the units of measurement? “Giants strength first tonight”? How about “in the lead”, English anyone?

The camera placing editing is just horrible - the camera direction is switching all the time and that is confusing as hell. In normal football when professional camera teams are working, you always get all the shots from one side and even one general angle. If for clarity reasons a camera shot from other side is needed (usually in a replay) they always say that the image is from the reverse side in large letters on the screen. Here a lot of close-up shots were all over the place and even rotated around inside one shot! That might look fancy, but is just crappy camera work and editing.

Then commentators start talking walls of numbers and walls of names. Unless you know by hearth who plays at what position, there is no way to understand what those people are saying. Than is just sloppy commentary. Is FOX incompetent in all possible ways?

Then again the funky rules came into play just at the end of the first quarter - I have no idea why the ball was moved to the end line. Apparently the defender did or didn’t something. Did not see anything worth penalizing the team like that at all. They dropped the term ‘pass interference’ later on. Isn’t interfering with the pass the whole point of the defense play in this game??? Lawyer game, I’m telling you. And later on, pulling on guys arm while he is catching and being tackled apparently is just fine. And holding is illegal???

On the big penalty on the Giants the judge could have just said that the ball is out of bounds. Giving a 10yd penalty for such a minor thing is just ridiculous.

The halftime show was kind of meh. Staged to extreme, but no soul nor sense. And what were all those people doing on the field? Isn’t that bad for the grass? And the commercials .. Average at best. Horrible at worst. For example a government commercial saying parents to protect their prescription medicine to .. help out your neighborhood drug dealer??? Oh and does anyone still doubt that media is controlled by republicans after that Coke commercial where the democrat is portrayed as bald and ugly and the republican is portrayed as the nice guy going for the compromise. And then they both Segway into the sunset? Brainwashing and prejudice embedded in a Coke commercial !?! WTF is going on in USA !?

The 12-man-on-the-field penalty in the 3rd quarter is another legalese bullshit in the game. It is clear that the extra player had no effect on the game so it is just ridiculous for the judge to penalize the team for that. A couple small penalties were given for Patriots as well, judge bias was not as prevalent as last year.

The camerawork stayed the same through the game - confusing, flashy and sloppy. Other cameras are in the shot line all the time. The game however did compensate for that all. The 4th quarter was very nice and exiting. I had no idea of the teams before the game, but I did like the Giants more - they just seemed to have more will and soul in their game. So I rooted for them since the 2nd quarter and it was very satisfying to see them win the game in the final seconds.

Summary: good game, great final quarter, horrible coverage and crappy sideshows (adverts and halftime show).

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A person that I deeply respect and who is very know in Latvian IT society recently said that he often uses a quote of mine in his presentations. I completely forgot that I ever said that, but it sounds very much like what I would say, so I wanted to write it down so that I do not forget about it again:

90% of the people do not understand copyright, the other 10% simply ignore it.

Heh, I must have been optimistic. There is no way that so many people actually understand copyright.

Note: most Debian Developers and FLOSS developers in general are an exception to this rule, but sadly comprise such a small percentage of the population that it means very little from a public policy perspective.

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AJ, if some blogs would support comments, I would leave my opinion there and not add noise to the planet.

1) Censorship does not stop being censorship just because the people doing the censoring don’t have the absolute power to censor the information everywhere and only block the information or opinion from the channels they can control. It can be called otherwise - editorial control, policy of political correctness, libel liability protection policy, Children-Safe Talk Initiative or Women Friendly Environment Collective. But at its heart it is still censorship of all official Debian-related channels of communication as the aim is to remove the objectionable content from all such channels.

2 and 3) Discriminating against jerks is also a discrimination against people or groups. Please do not get all DFSG-bendy on me here. DFSG is about use and distribution license of the software and not about the communication channels used to facilitate this process. I could actually counter you with a quote from the Social Contract that says that we will not hide problems. The discussion as such admits that some people consider sexism to be a problem in Debian (for example). Excluding sexist comments from Debian official channels will not make sexism magically disappear, it will be just hidden, swiped under the rag and said to sit quiet.

The only problem is that the community that is tired of such hushing is much larger then anticipated. There are people that think that men and women are different. We checked. I can’t see anything bad in the example quoted on the planet so far. Yes, the depth of the discussion is weak - we can’t be genius all the time, but I really fail to see who is insulted in there. Lesbians? Don’t think so, they are compared to a threesome quite favorably. That is not a technical discussion about interrupt timings, but that’s why it is in offtopic. Doh! Relaxed chit-chat like this is typical in all healthy and tight-knit communities. Is it offensive to women to talk about sex??? Grow up and have a good 3 hour chit-chat with some real women. Women talk about sex even more than men. Especially on-line.

Can someone really show what is the “OFFENDING BEHAVIOR” so obscene and dangerous that people want to censor out of Debian and explain what exactly they see as being so horribly bad to Debian that they see total censorship of all Debian communication channels as an acceptable countermeasure?

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Bernhard It is possible that you are not alone but nether are defenders of freedom if information production and distribution and in particular of freedom of speech. Trying to restrict what words people can or can not use (by labeling them sexist, racist or obscene) is the bread and butter of modern day media censorship. It is censorship and not “just political correctness”. While I would not want people trying to limit contributions to Debian only to “smart and educated white people” (racism) or “logically thinking males” (sexism), going the other way and excluding people from Debian because their remarks or way of thinking might offend someone is just offensive to me. That is against the spirit of information freedom that free software is built upon.

To summarize: no one should have the power to say what you can or can not say. You personally do not have to listen to what people say if you do not like what they are saying - there are technological measures that allow you to filter people out at your end. But denying them the right to speak (or segregating them to non-Debian communication channels) is clear and simple censorship that goes against the very principles of free software.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

— Voltaire

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I see that Erich is also trying to do something with AI classification of web pages. It would be interesting to find out what algorithms he is using and what the validation testing results are - I just did my Masters in a similar direction. But alas, his blog has no comments

The thing i would suggest is trying out the algorithms using some existing tool sets, such as WEKA from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. I used it in my Master’s thesis and got very nice results. I found that with non-topical categories tree based classifiers and support vector machine classifiers (in the SMO variation) produced acceptable results.

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