This note’s for you

Yesterday I saw Neil Young playing in Colmar, France. That was an absolutely awesome concert. He started the set rocking with ‘Love and only Love’ and ‘Hey Hey My My’. It seemed like he had some technical trouble and the sound was a little crappy, at least from my place. But it was loud and rocking anyway. It was probably a little too much for the poor video screen system, which gave up during ‘Hey Hey My My’ :-). At some point he talked to the drummer and was pointing at some unknown thing in the sky. Something seemed to make him happy there. From this point everything was more relaxed, the sound was great and he played a killer version of ‘Cortez’. Then it became clear what he was pointing to: the full moon was rising behind the audience. That was great. He seemed to love that. At some point he started an acoustiv set, which was really good and featured some surprises (’Wrecking Ball’). He finished the long (2 1/2 hours) concert with another exstatic electric set, starting with two new songs. One of them ‘Sea Change’ he even played twice, just because he and the band liked it so much. Then followed the final showdown with an awesome version of ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ and a punkrocking ‘Rocking in the Free World’, where they pointed all the spotlights to the 10000 people audience, which went crazy, jumping around and screaming along. During this song I was really worried that this old man could just fall over and die ;-). The encore was a great cover version of ‘A Day In The Life’, where he almost killed his guitar. Poor Old Black…

Before and after the concert I have been chatting to a nice couple, Roman (or Romain) and Lucy (maybe Lucie). I’m a little sad now that I forgot to ask them for address or phone number, they’ve been so nice. It’s probably very unlikely, but in the case that you two read this, please contact me in the comments or by email, it would be so nice to meet you again.

Anonther nice feature of the concert was that they were showing paintings for almost every song. At some point I realized that there was actually a painter behind the drummer, who really created paintings during the concert! Very nice idea.

Find more reviews and photos and videos on Thrasherswheat.

I would like to follow up on Mario’s post about house cleaning. But from a different angle. You all know it: while doing your daily work, you end up with a heap of garbage lying around your place(s). Ok, some other (probably small but important stuff) you put on a nice stack, but handling this is not so difficult, because it is nice and ordered. Now, there are several ways to clean your rooms, which I would like to categorize as follows:

Stop the world garbage collection

This is probably the most naive and most widely used approach. You simply usually don’t care about the heap of garbage, and then you have one day (for example, saturdays, or any other day, like when your mom comes for a visit) to clean up your flat. This usually takes a while, thus preventing you from doing anything else (stop the world). This is usually good enough if you live alone, and even for couples and families this works surprisingly well. But for others, this is not acceptable.

Incremental garbage collection

This approach means, you clean up stuff all the time, in small chunks, and interleaved with your normal work. After breakfast, you clean the dishes instantly. After doing some work in the garden, you put all the things back to where they belong, etc. You get the idea. This is a little tedious and makes all your work a little less fun (unless you are a true genius and consider cleaning up fun), but it has the big advantage, that your place is almost always in a state where you can let in surprise visits from moms and girls without going crazy.

Parallel garbage collection

Ok, this is an advanced approach for couples and families only. It’s easy: if you share the work, you get it done faster. So, on the saturday, you simply do not clean the flat alone, you let your wife and kids help you and get it done faster. Everybody can clean his own rooms for example. And then you even have some spare time for a walk in the afternoon. Great. Advice: teach your kids about cleaning up early, so they can take over some cleaning tasks as well.

Parallel incremental garbage collection

This is a combination of the incremental and parallel approach and very effective, but also quite difficult. You have to get all your family members to clean up stuff all the time (directly after the breakfast, lunch, work, etc) and you do it all together. This is not so easy, because you have to share the work somehow. Maybe one can clean dishes, the other dry the dishes. Or one brings things to their places and the other clean the ground. But you see, there is a limitation doing this. It is not so easy to share up these small chunks of work. You should try it, and if it works for you, cool, if not, do one of the other approaches.

Realtime garbage collection

This is something for real workaholics and control freaks. It means, that cleaning up your place has to be finished in a guaranteed and not-too-long timeframe. It is not allowed to exceed the timeframe you originally promise (to yourself, your wife, your employer, etc). Many people consider this outright impossible, others say, just don’t throw things on a heap, only use small nice stacks. However, there are some people on Jamaica who figured out a way to actually do it. The trick is this (a little simplified): Everytime you want to throw something around your flat on the heap of garbage, you first clean up a part of this heap. How much you have to clean up depends on how big the heap already is. When there’s lots of stuff, then you have to do much, if there’s not so much stuff lying around, you are allowed to only work a little. But there’s always a hard limit on how much work is done. If this is finished, you can throw stuff around. This works pretty well and you can always give hard real time guarantees to whoever asks that. But it takes a certain discipline to actually do it.

If you also have interesting garbage collection strategies, please add them in the comments.

Dear Lazyweb. It seems to me that (on the Hotspot VM) the Java heap is always kept in RAM and never swapped out, because the GC is continually accessing the memory. For example, if I have Firefox, Evolution and Eclipse running, and then start a compilation that takes a lot of memory, Firefox and Evolution get swapped out, while Eclipse (which takes up around 1G on my machine) stays in memory all the time, thus effectively stealing memory from the compilation process. Has anybody else observed this too? Is my diagnosis correct? Is there a way to fix this? Would be nice if Java programs behave similar to other programs and don’t lead the virtual memory system ad absurdum.

Finished the project in time, yay! And first even Ok, we live in a strange timezone (compared to PST), where I want to go to bed right now, so… here are some links to older postings you might enjoy.

I don’t get it. Everybody (I know) is whining about how Flash is annoying. AJAX is all the hype, and has the potential to replace most uses of Flash using only JavaScript and CSS (I think). Applets and ActiveX thankfully is a thing of the past. Then why is it necessary to reinvent this crap. First came Silverlight (I’ve never seen a single website using it, anybody else maybe?). Now comes JavaFX. Adobe is also doing something I heard. Who needs all this superfluous stuff?

On a related note, I don’t believe anything will replace Flash, as long as it doesn’t come with a cool web-designer compatible application to create these ‘pages’, like Macromedia did. The thing about Flash is not the language or the powerful features/API, it is the fact that web-designers don’t need to know anything about all that. They can just click together these pages and annoy web users with pages that don’t feel like web, don’t behave like web, etc.

Really, I don’t get why companies invest in things like Silverlight and JavaFX. If somebody knows, please enlighten me.

Thanks Dalibor. When writing my last post about nuclear power, I was still completely unaware of the latest news about Tricastin. This is also quite amazing. There are several hundred kilograms of Uranium leaked, but the official are trying to tell us, the risk for health is minimal. Sounds a little like back in 86 to me (ok, that was a different class of accident still, but the pattern sounds familiar still). And suddenly it’s no more 360 kg, but 75kg. I wonder what happened to the other 285kg. I suppose the press department got something on their head from somebody (government? nuke lobbyists?) and suddenly 285kg disappeared. Easy, isn’t it? But the most amazing thing is that the french energy corporation EdF announced today that they plan to build 10(!) new nuclear power plants. Wow. Just wow.

Am I the only one who feels like warped back into the 80’s? Nuclear power. Ugly haircuts. Cold war. Mideast. Can somebody who is not so disconnected to the music scene like me confirm that Micheal Jackson and crazy synth music and the really bad kind of heavy metal is also hip again? I’m quite disappointed, indeed.

Let me close this article with a free interpretation of one of Johnny Cash’s best songs:

Tricastin*, may you rot and burn in hell.
May your walls fall and may I live to tell.
May all the world forget you ever stood.
And may all the world regret you did no good.

(*) Insert other nuclear plants as you see fit. Johnny Cash was actually singing about Saint Quentin, one of the more infamous prisons of USA, but nuke plants seem to fit perfectly here…

There’s some interesting discussion going on right now in Germany (and other countries too? dunno…). Some simple facts:

• Our power supplies are dominated to significant degree by nuclear power.
• Energy prices are skyrocketing
• The only energy providers that I know can keep their prices stable or even drop them a bit are the regenerative energy providers. Yes, my provider (Lichtblick) lately dropped its price by 0,005€.

Now we put that all in the big logic machine, and what comes out of it as the solution? We need to keep our old nuke plants running longer, and probably even build some new ones. Am I the only one who sees a strange twist in that logic?

Some more facts for you people. Nuclear power isn’t the everlasting, clean powersupply that the last-century power lobby wants us to believe. Uranium leaching and its preparation for use in plants is getting more and more expensive, for several reasons. Strongly growing demand from new industries in Asia and other regions (also the reason for skyrocketing oil prices), less available supplies, higher worker wages in the supplying countries, etc. Also, I question if it makes sense to let an industry depend on huge amounts of supply that it cannot produce themselves? What if the supplier countries stop supplying?

Another unsolved problem is, what to do with the tons and tons of nuclear waste? The cost of actually solving this is not even calculated into the energy price now, it is our children and their children who will have to pay for it, when it is becoming a real problem.

To me, all this looks a lot like the result of massive lobbying of the established energy industry. Of course they are very scared to loose their nuclear plants before they actually paid off, and of course, they want to leech the existing ones as long as possible. I completely understand that. But I don’t understand the logic by which they try to convince the masses that this is a good idea. Strangely enough, the masses even seem to believe them, despite the couple of accidents last year in some nuke plants.

Frankly, I think safety is not the biggest problem of nuclear energy. What I really question is, if nuclear energy makes sense from an economical POV. In my logic, it is much more sustainable to have energy that actually regenerates, and which you can produce to a certain degree in your own country. I know that the current green power options are not able yet to cover the large energy demands NOW, but at some point we have to start investing in that, because in 50 years or so we don’t have an option anymore. Even now we can see that ‘green’ power doesn’t have to be more expensive that conventional power, and even now it is actually more stable than conventional energy. Think for yourself.

If you are worried about skyrocketing energy prices, it would be a good idea to switch to green power now. (But please, look after certification. There are so many fake green energy providers, who are not actually investing in ecological energy at all.) In this capitalistic world, money is YOUR way to change the world. There’s no excuse for whining that you can’t do anything anyway against all the big political and economic machinery. You can do, and you should start now.

Lately, Madeleine and I took some photos of Jonah’s school. I think they’re nice, and the school is quite interesting.

A while ago I was pointed to Magnatune, a cool online record label. I often browse through the catalogue on the search for good music. The cool thing about Magnatune is, you can listen everything and fully online. If you like it, you can buy and choose the price yourself. Then you can download it in all formats, including OGG Vorbis and CD quality FLAC. You are even encouraged to share the files with your friends. I like that.

Lately I found something that I really like alot, the recordings of the American Bach Soloists, especially Bach’s Mass in B minor. I’ve never been much into this kind of music before, so this is like discovering new land for me. I find it really amazing how somebody can sing that way, and how complex this music is, and still perfectly harmonic. Makes me think about values of today. Who would care about sitting down and passionately diving so deep into music to make such incredible piece of art?

Speaking about music, I’ve got tickets for Neil Young in Colmar in August, yay I’m glad I’ve not went to see him in March or May this year, that would have cost me a lot more (up to 130€) and would have been several hours from here. Now it costs me less than 50€ and it’s basically around the corner from here. Yuppie! I’m really disappointed by his announcement at JavaOne though. Stupid audio snob. (And I don’t think BlueRay or anything is so much better quality-wise than CD, unless you own a 10000€ hifi and listen at insane volume levels).

I’m using the latest Ubuntu release for a while now. It has many nice improvements, resume and suspend seem to work perfectly now, even suspend-to-ram. The browser is slimmer and integrates better with Gnome (GTK widgets for forms, yay!) There has been some polish here and there.

But still, overall I’m a little disappointed. I have the feeling that there are many small regressions. For example, there’s no notification anymore after I unmounted my camera that it’s ready to unmounted (I thought that was a nice feature in one of the previous releases). I cannot access the data part of a hybrid audio/data CD (and thus can’t see the video that’s hidden there). The gnome-volume-manager settings don’t know about CDs/DVDs anymore and I can’t choose my favorite player for those. The default for ripping CDs is now Rhythmbox, which just can’t replace Sound-Juicer yet (cannot replace special chars in filenames with ‘_’). The browser locks up in some complicated situations with certificates. I think there’s many more.

My feeling is that it boils down to two unfortunate decisions: To include Firefox3 Beta and the brand new gio from Gnome. That just doesn’t feel right for an LTS release. I don’t envy the poor developers at Canonical that have to support that release for 3(5) years. From my point of view, the last series of non-LTS releases all appeared to be more stable and mature than this release. This is pretty sad. Luckily I don’t care much about LTS myself and happily await the Intrepid Ibex.