I feel like posting the picture below.

It's from a very rainy Friday in September 2000. I had a meeting around noon that day. Directly afterwards, I went for a weekend in the mountains with two friends, and I felt just like that.

About an hour after the picture was taken, over dinner, I explained my mood. Unless things change, I expect I'll leave in a few months. A good forecast: I gave notice four months later, ten minutes after another depressing meeting.

I didn't forecast Nokia's recent rampage, though.

This has two parts.

First, sudo, which ubuntu encourages using rather than su. Sudo can be set up to allow users to do just some things as root rather than everything, by editing the file /etc/sudoers.

Second, various Ubuntu programs that run as root. Some expect that the user's $PATH starts with /sbin and /usr/sbin, and run programs without specifying the complete file name.

If a user has limited sudoers privileges, then various Ubuntu-supplied programs can often be tricked into granting the user complete root access.

For example, sudo apt-get install foo will often run ldconfig, start-stop-daemon and more. Not always, but often enough to make it a FAQ.

I feel sure that whoever reports this will be told by the sudoers maintainers that the problem is with e.g. apt-get, and by the apt-get people that the problem is with sudoers. Both are reasonable responses, but I'd rather write code than argue. So all I'll do is publish this.

I am reminded of the Inmos Transputer.

That, as my older readers may still vaguely remember, was a freak processor in the eighties. It was designed for parallelism: Its fundamental design was for a computer with many transputers, not one with a single humongous blob. Each CPU was small, simple (the wikipedia page includes the complete instruction set) and linked to four other CPUs using bidirectional message-passing connections, and the design allowed vast CPU meshes with message routing and forwarding.

The thing that reminds me of the transputer is the way those links worked. When a Transputer received a message that had to be forwarded, it would prioritise communication over its own computation.

I am reminded of this because my mail is down. A great big failure happened during Christmas vacation. Then a routing mishap left me unable to take part in a video conference this morning. I am forced to prioritise my own programming over message passing, and it feels so good. Yesterday was great.

Tomorrow I shall apologise to borud about my unresponsiveness. But today, I plan to wallow in solitary hacking.

Actually I'll wait a few hours with publishing this. There's a chance someone might see it.

The Marcato 150 is a fine pasta maker whose manual is small enough that we lost it within five minutes of it entering our kitchen for the first time. Oops. We found it later, nestling within the pages of a cookbook, but not before discovering that where can I download a Marcato 150/180/Atlas manual? is a bit of a FAQ.

Below are the most important paragraphs. If you'd prefer to have the complete manual (containing more text, a dough recipe, lots of pictures, etc), have a look at the Marcato FAQ. (more…)

Fittingly, Germany has a federal office for protecting the democratic state against nazis and other threats to democracy. Each of the sixteen states also runs a smaller effort of its own. Some have dedicated organizations, some locate the work within a ministry, but all do something.

Because of the variety it's nontrivial to add up the cost of all this. I added up six of the biggest organizations and that came to €220 million, so I blithely estimate a total of €250-300 million.

Conveniently, there are 25-30,000 nazis in Germany (more…)

Qdoc misses many features Javadoc has. This is intentional — well, mostly. Here's a braindump of the features I dropped or decided against adding.

@author is one thing Qt had, but I dropped it due to two problems. First, it misled users who used it to answer the question who should I ask about this problem?. The problem was typically about some recent change to the file, and the original author of the file was the wrong person to ask. Second, there was some reluctance within the team about editing someone else's code, which delayed bugfixes. (more…)

Information wants to be free has turned into one of those soundbites that are believed by virtue of being so often repeated, like a cross breeding of of Drink Coca-Cola and blah considered harmful.

At least Drink Coca-Cola is an accurate summary of what the Coca-Cola Corporation said. Information wants to be free is a misleading, disgraceful misquote.

Here is Stewart Brand's entire clueful paragraph, quoted from page 202 of my copy of The Media Lab: Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free, because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

By popular request: a postscript hack to produce a four-fours advent calendar.

Each of 24 printed pages bears a label such as 4+4/4-4 or 4+4*4+4. Print, fold e.g. as shown below, insert pralines, (more…)