the corner office

Saw this article at IOL, about a recent PW Botha speech given to punt the release of an interview-on-DVD that nobody's going to buy. The speech itself is the usual blather in which the old geezer is still big on Jesus and without being too blatant about it, still not so big on black people or the 'new' South Africa because, well, who knows or cares anymore.

The only part of it all which struck me as interesting, in light of the Official Conservative standpoint on the evil-but-elected-neener-neener thugs known as Hamas was this:

Asked during question time whether Mandela would have been released when he was if he, Botha, had still been in power, he said he had given Mandela an opportunity to leave jail.

"I told him to renounce violence, which he did not do. He kept himself in jail at that stage."

He said he had spoken to then British premier Margaret Thatcher and German chancellor Helmut Kohl on this issue.

"One of them told me, let him go and then put him in jail again. I said no, it is for him to decide whether he is prepared to renounce violence."

As I've said before, Hamas aren't the ANC, but it's instructive to yadda yadda, shades of grey and perception, and all that.

IBM's 1.5 64 bit JDK was promising, and a bit faster than Sun's 1.5 JDK (but not as fast as IBM's 1.4 JDK), but stability... not so good. Today was my first attempt at debugging something, and Eclipse's little blue breakpoint dot turned out to be Kryptonite for the poor JVM, causing it to segfault; a term which doesn't quite do the experience justice - a more apt description would be that the JVM soiled itself enthusiastically and then fell over dead.

This isn't the first weirdness I've had, actually. With IBM's 1.4 JDK if you tried to step into a switch statement during a debugging session, the app would die. You'd expect an IBM-spawned IDE like Eclipse and an IBM JDK to get along better.

I'm back to Sun's 1.5 JDK, which is also guilty of the occasional weird crash, but allows me to do what I need to do, albeit a bit sluggishly. I'm not sure whether to admit defeat and stick with this, or try out the 32 bit JVMs.

A colleague sent me a link to this gem - something everyone secretly dreams of doing:

Johannesburg - An elderly woman crashed her car into no fewer than nine others at Rand Park Ridge here on Wednesday.

There was total chaos after 71-year-old Erika van Zijl smashed into the cars in a parking lot. Four of the cars, including her Volvo, had to be towed away.

A flabbergasted Robyn Fincham whose car also was damaged, said she couldn't believe her eyes when she saw the damage to all the cars.

Edmund Swanepoel, who heard the commotion, said he couldn't believe how much damage one car could cause in a single parking lot.

"I came out of the Lifestyle Nursery after I'd been shopping and saw the woman driving slowly into a parking bay in front of the nursery's main entrance.

"It looked like she wanted to park, but suddenly she put the car into reverse and raced backwards at a helluva speed.

"She smashed into a bakkie and a Renault," said Swanepoel.

"Then she put her car in first gear and drove forward at such speed that she spun the wheels.

"Then she hit a Toyota, but just carried on accelerating and pushed the car until it came to a halt against another car, a Mini Cooper.

"She put the car into reverse gear again and smashed simultaneously into a Pajero and an Opel Corsa.

"A security guard at the Lifestyle Nursery eventually turned up and pulled her car keys out of the ignition," said Swanepoel.

How do you explain that to your insurance company?

True to form, this month's Wine upgrade broke Notes again. Thankfully the problem had been found by others and it wasn't too hard to fix.

This post has the details - you have to specify WINEDLLOVERRIDES="usp10=n". An easier alternative to setting the WINEDDLOVERRIDES environment variable is to use the winecfg utility which sets the preference in ./wine/user.reg.. Be careful to set it to 'native' only, I originally chose 'native, builtin', and that still crashed.

Just a quick note for me for future reference, because I'll know I'll forget this (... again). Gentoo's emerge has an undocumented argument, --digest which tells emerge to bypass MD5 and file size verification (from the digest file).

Most handy with the latest ibm-jdk-bin being a little outdated in portage (link).

Wow, thanks for the feedback everyone! Looking at your comments it's clear that:

• the plain design looks cool
• the plain design sucks a bit
• the fancier design looks good too
• the fancier design also sucks a bit
• what's wrong with the way it is?

Well, to answer the last question, it wasn't something I thought about, really. I changed it because it's been this way for nearly 3 years, and because it's basically the same style as the Bloglines interface, which has become a bit off-putting. But mainly, I never really thought about it. Changing the layout is something you do every now and then. I always grumble when that happens to food labels and toiletries, and there I went and did the same thing. The first question I should have asked was "should I change the design at all?" There you go.

I was and still am most partial to the plain look. There's a certain retro-ness to the old Times New Roman thing that appeals in a "I used Netscape 1" kind of way. But then again, it was only for about a day before I upgraded to Netscape 2, and shortly after that to Netscape 3, and if I wanted an authentic 1996 experience the background would be grey and I'd need an animated .gif somewhere (and I'd have to find a way to cause everyone's browser to crash every other visit).

On the other hand, a self-rolled blog has to make a design statement in a way, and my worry was that the plain design was saying "I couldn't be arsed to set the font." Or heaven forbid, "I don't know how to set the font." I wanted something setting m'blog apart, a bit more sophisticated, yet minimalist, with a hint of danger, mystique, but stopping tastefully short of "abandon all hope."

Jeez I can talk bull.

Why not keep everyone happy, though? At the price of a cookie, which I don't think too many people mind these days, it's fairly straightforward to have JavaScript/alternate stylesheet magic which allows people to easily switch between different designs. It's also not too much effort to add a third stylesheet making the site look more like it does now, and I think I'll keep that as the default.

Hopefully, the statement I then make is "I care," in a "mysterious, but kind to puppies" kind of way.

Also, that'll make the missus happy. Thanks again for the comments!

Dear Reader

I don't like throwing questions into the ether because it's a bit soul-destroying when you don't get any answers. However, in this instance I'll risk it, and ask you, the humble reader of this blog, for your opinion, either as a comment here or as an email, or anything between.

One of the few things left to sort out with the new blog design is how it's going to look. When I first started out, I had a dark background, with a light blue text, with smaller fonts like before. I thought it was quite slick. Then, when I was rebuilding my CSS a while back, I started from scratch, which meant I had default Serif fonts and standard web colours. It was really retro, but I decided that I liked it. I used that for a bit. Then switched back, and back again, and now I can't decide which I like better, and Ronwen likes the one I'm less fond of (I won't say which is which, to avoid selection bias ;-).

(the links are long gone -- Ed.)

So here's the question: which do you think is better for the new blog design? There's:

• an old-fashioned, black on white, plain design
• a more modified, blue on black, fancier design
• something in between (for comparison, though I feel it loses the charm of both)

Which do you think is least ugly? I'll be grateful for any feedback.

As you could guess from my previous post, it's JVM muckabout time. I've been having grrrr moments with Sun's 1.5 JVM the past few nights, after finally getting around to upgrading my home box from Java 1.4. After a heap of googling and forum scouring, I've come to the conclusion that Linux AMD64 users are either all running hopelessly over-powered machines, or they don't have very high expections of Java.

The problem boils down to the fact that Sun's 1.5 JVM for 64-bit platforms doesn't come with a client HotSpot VM, only the Server version. But as Sun's own documentation says, a 'server' class machine should have at least 2 CPUs and 2 gigs of RAM. What that means is that more modest AMD64s are biting off a touch more than they can initially chew when they fire up a 1.5 JVM.

Using Eclipse is ridiculously slow - mouse juddering slow. Starting up Tomcat via MyEclipse with my collection of web apps takes about 5 seconds using IBM's 1.4.2 JVM. Using Sun's 1.5 JVM slows things down to 15-20 seconds, which is just insane. Over time the server VM's performance would even out and be the better bet, but if you're starting and stopping Tomcat a lot, which is typical for lots of edit/tweak/break/edit work, you're never going to benefit from it.

Thankfully, IBM's 64 bit 1.5 JDK has debuted in the Gentoo world, so here's hoping that'll solve my problems. Installing it (and for bonus marks, getting the java-config tool to play nicely with it) is tonight's job.

Readme file extract from IBM's Java 1.5 SDK:

IBM SDK for Linux, Java 2 Technology Edition, Version 5.0
---------------------------------------------------------


This READMEFIRST file applies to Version 5.0, and to all 
subsequent releases, modifications, and service refreshes, 
until otherwise indicated in a new READMEFIRST file.

This READMEFIRST file provides late-breaking information that 
was not incorporated into the User Guides.  This file must be 
read in conjunction with any User Guides listed below.


Currently, there are no late-breaking changes for this platform.

Woah. If you have 28 megs to spare, download this video of a 4-legged robot being developed as a mechanised pack mule for the US DOD. This thing is powered by a 2-stroke engine, and can climb 35 degree inclines, move across all sorts of terrain, and can even recover its balance after being kicked.

In the video, the legs are wrapped are in black cloth, which gives them a pseudo-cartoonish human-in-a-tracksuit look. One part of my brain is telling me it's a machine while other parts of my brain are thinking that this weird thing is moving almost, but not quite like a real walking animal. A strange sensation. I amost felt sorry for it getting kicked.

Freaky, but incredible.

(via jwz)