the corner office

Take on a lion with your bare hands - that's hunting, that's manly. Stupid, but manly. If you vanquish the beast and feast on its heart, it's yours man, you earned it.

If you track a rhino for days in the veld and eventually get so close you can take a photo of the pimples on its arse, and then take a photo instead of putting a slug of lead through its brain, that's an achievement, and it is worthy of respect. That's hunting.

But when you have a geriatric with a shotgun blowing quail to bloody bits, it's not hunting. It's not even close. It's just deriving pleasure from idle slaughter for its own sake. No matter how you try to dress it up, it's just a sad old man shooting birds.

And that is all I have to say about Dick Cheney's 'hunting' 'accident' this weekend.

If I tried to turn these into posts it would take another week...

Tech:

• VMWare Server is free. That sounds pretty cool, but how does Server differ from Workstation, which isn't free? Can you fire up a Notes client or MS Office in a VMWare Server session?
• An express version of IBM DB2 is also free. This is also a cool thing, but who's the target market? Will open-source RDBMS users make the change? I'm not sure. Will lots of would-be SQL Server users make the change? I've always thought of DB2 admins as the kinda dudes who wore pocket protectors. Big tin and no sunlight five floors below the basement in a bank somewhere. DB2 and SMBs should be a decent marriage. Is there much of that currently? Will there be more?
• Those poor buggers: Borland are saying OKBye to JBuilder et al. Eclipse: the open-source IDE that out-cooled everything else. Aka Creative Destruction: it ain't pretty.

Politics:

• The Google China censorship isn't cool. But how is Google different to any other Western corporate that does business with China?
• Thabo Mbeki hasn't said anything inflammatory about the Cartoon saga because like most people, he just hopes it'll go away. Insulting someone's religion is a bit like insulting their music: no matter how justified it might be, they're going to think you're an asshole, and this is why politicians and public figures never diss music and always act like they give a shit about relijun. That ain't cool, but that's the way it is.
• Commentary just got two links because even if I heartily disagree with lots of their content, they are the political blog in SA. One of the few places where people from across the spectrum duke it out, usually civilly. They are cool, and they'll deserve another good placing in the 2006 SA Blog Awards.

Personal:

• The rain this morning was insane. I love rain, and I love really heavy rain even more, ergo, it was cool.
• If we have lots more rain over the next few days that would be cool too.
• I wanted to cancel my cell phone contract and move to prepaid. My contract expired ages ago, but the bastards still want me to go through a 90 day notice period. I got very indignant but came home and read my contract, signed 6 years ago, and there it was in black and white. Rule 1: read the fine print. Rule 2: avoid Nashua Mobile if a 90 day notice period is an issue for you. In fact, avoid them anyway, because one of the managers was supposed to phone me back and never bothered. So Nashua Mobile are not cool.
• We watched Serenity last week. It was orders of magnitude more cool than normal cool.

I don't know if it's me being squeamish, but I find myself feeling uneasy looking at photographs of Isabelle Dinoire, the world's first face transplant recipient. Perhaps it's because seeing her, you know that she's 'wearing' someone else's face, and it doesn't like quite 'right'.

Having said that, wow. Given how strongly people must have reacted to her in her disfigured state, this must be a new lease on life for her, a miraculous gift. According to the article, she isn't out of the woods yet, but this is a world first, and a very promising thing for disfigured people the world over.

A busy week of studying and work. I'm spending some time with SOAP, (and Apache Axis in particular), which is what all the cool kids are playing with. It doesn't take long to realise that flinging basic xsd:string parameters around is pretty straightforward, but that complex types are a whole 'nother ballgame. There are tools which autogenerate WSDL from Java and Java from WSDL, but the generated code isn't always that pretty (or robust).

Axis allows you to work with SOAP across the entire spectrum of abstraction, from generated stubs to XML manipulation, right down to raw streams. The one thing that the multitude of articles and tutorials don't cover, is just what point in the spectrum makes sense depending on what your performance/complexity/maintainability requirements are.

Update: apropos - today's Dilbert.

This is the coolest discovery I've made this weekend: IEs4Linux is a tool which downloads and installs Internet Explorers 5, 5.5 and 6 on Linux. It sets up separate .wine directories for each install, so you can run 'em at the same time without the usual Windows world hassles, and the installs don't mess with your normal Wine setup. It also installs Flash 8 and can grab a few others things as well. The wine directories, the downloaded installers (about 250 megs, from evolt.org) and everything are in one directory, so it's easy to shuffle everything around. Wicked.

Two other howtos I found while looking around:

• Gentoo Wiki: How to install IE 6 SP 1

• A HOWTO at the Gentoo forums. There seem to be a few ways of doing it, depending on the version of Wine installed.

Needless to say, after finding ies4linux, I didn't bother with the tutorials themselves.

The upgrade also updated my Wine installation to 0.9.5. At first, it caused Lotus Notes to crash with the following error (if launched from a terminal):

colin@mirkwood ~ $ wine "c:\lotus\notes6\nlnotes.exe"
wine: Call from 0x55a1e7c0 to unimplemented function usp10.dll.ScriptCacheGetHeight, aborting
ERROR (0): NetUserEnum failed: err=5 - (131) Negative seek
Host Name       : mirkwood
User Name       : colin
Date            : Sat Jan 28 19:17:04 2006
Windows Dir     : c:\windows
Arguments       : "C:\lotus\notes6\nsd.exe" -dumpandkill -termstatus 1
OSVersion       : Windows 98 4.10 (Build 67766446), PlatID=1,  A  (1 Processor)

The usp10.dll file is the culprit. I found this Howto which advised deleting the file /usr/lib/wine/usp10.dll.so (on my AMD64 machine that's actually /usr/lib32/wine). I did that, and it works fine again. I notice that the 'missing cursor' from my last install has been fixed, as well.

Aside: it seems that I can't copy & paste text from Firefox into Notes (a text field, obviously) - it gives me an error message "Only text can be pasted into this type of field." Pasting from the URL bar works, and pasting from other apps like the console and gedit works, so what I do is paste into a gedit text document and then c&p into Notes from there. Bit of a schlep for blogging, but not the end of the world.

The monthly Gentoo upgrade, since it's nearly monthend and I have a heap of bandwidth left. Just as well, emerge world chomped nearly 300 megs. There's always something that goes wobbly.

This month's gripe is that Gnome got upgraded from 2.10 to 2.12, and the Nautilus browser, which I still don't like but still plod on with, has changed the way it scales fonts in its list view, so now I'm stuck with either huge icons or unreadably small text. I did a bit of digging around, and these notes are just here for me to come back when I'm done with exams.

• A post on the Gentoo forums also griping about Icon view font sizes in 2.10. Contains a suggested patch to fix the way Nautilus does its scaling. I'm sure a similar change can be made for List views.
• A follow-on bug on Gentoo's bugzilla.
• Same issue on Gnome's bugzilla.
• File where the scaling seems to get done: fm-list-view.c (method: fm_list_view_scale_font_size)

Is it worth writing CSS that plays nice with IE versions prior to 6? I took a look at my site stats and I do get a few visits from IE5 and IE5.5.

I was checking out the new blog's design in IE5 and the 2 column layout just wasn't working. I backed up my old CSS file, dug up a few tutorials, and started playing around with a clean slate. There are hacks to get IE5 playing nicely with a 2-column layout, but then I realised that something as simple as an overflowing PRE tag causes the whole thing to fall apart. Setting an overflow:hidden property for the wrapping DIV takes care of that but it's still something I'd rather not do, since I've already got the usual PRE word wrap cross-browser sludge in place. I feel like I'm slapping mud patties on top of mud patties just to keep some crufty old browser happy.

Is it worth it? I feel guilty/sloppy about not doing it, but it is a major PITA.

Oh, what a joy it is to be prepared for an exam, and to get an exam set for those who're prepared. Went pretty well. If the curve is kind to me, it'll be a decent mark.

Next paper is in over 2 weeks' time, so I'm temporarily free.

Not something I would have expected: Linux-Watch has an analysis of recent Wine benchmarks. The devil is in the details, obviously, but in some circumstances, and a respectable number of them, Wine outperforms XP. The analysis is well worth a read.