Hello, Freddy. Please say hello to the world.
Hello, world. Please say hello to Freddy.
Jan 192025
Jan 072025
I just made up my mind.
I’ll never again respond to unsolicited theories, unsolicited requests to comment, not even from Nobel-prize winners.
Because in the end, unless I enthusiastically agree with their ideas, no matter how silly, how outlandish, it always ends badly.
It doesn’t matter how polite I am, how carefully I choose my words, how much I try my darnedest to steer them in the right direction. And it makes no difference if the person in question is just, say, a taxi driver somewhere in Asia or an accomplished scientist in Europe.
If you have a scientific idea, do the right thing: write it up, send it to a journal, publish it. I am officially not interested anymore. Sorry, but I’ve been insulted one too many times and finally, my fuse got blown. I have better things to do than nursing your hurt feelings because the science community is not treating you seriously.
In fact, chances are that in the future, I’ll blacklist all such e-mail addresses right away. My sanity is more important than your feelings.
Dec 312024
To all my friends, to all good people…
… Happy New Year!
Dec 252024
Last night, I had a disturbing dream.
I do not usually recall my dreams. When I wake up in the morning, almost always I wake up with a clean state of mind, focused on the things I am planning to do in the coming day. It is very rare that I wake up even with fragmentary memories of whatever I was dreaming while asleep.
This was one of those days. I was unable to recall the details, but I remembered that in my dream, I worked at some retail establishment. I ended up working there as a favor to someone, being paid under minimum wage. I wasn’t there for the money.
Long story short, somehow the establishment became Trump’s property. Yes, that Trump. And Trump visited the place. In my dream, I’ve met Trump previously. Still, being the polite chap that I am, I greeted him with a “good morning, Mr. President”. He looked at me and told me, right there in front of his entourage, that no, we’ve known each other long enough, just because he got re-elected, I should not stop addressing him by his first name.
I was beaming with pride. I was speechless. So much so that only after he left the business did I realize that I forgot to ask the one question that I’ve been meaning to ask: Now that I work for him, as opposed to doing a favor to a friend, can I at least get paid at the official minimum wage?
Is it really this easy to manipulate us? Through our pride, our self-esteem, our vanity? Was my dream a cautionary tale, reminding me that no, however smart I think I am, I am not immune to these things?
Dec 242024
Here’s my Christmas wish for all good people, all the good people on the good Earth: peace.
And no, not the peace of the graveyard. Not the peace of the conqueror or tyrant, the peace of oppression, imposed peace.
No… a just peace.
Dec 222024
So I asked Claude to do something for me for Christmas. Claude happily obliged.
Can you generate for me SVG code that draws a nice Christmas tree?
Certainly! I'll create an SVG code that draws a simple but nice Christmas tree for you. Here's the SVG code:
<svg width="300" height="400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<!-- Tree trunk -->
<rect x="140" y="350" width="20" height="50" fill="#8B4513"/>
<!-- Tree layers -->
<polygon points="150,50 50,350 250,350" fill="#228B22"/>
<polygon points="150,100 70,300 230,300" fill="#32CD32"/>
<polygon points="150,150 90,250 210,250" fill="#3CB371"/>
<!-- Ornaments -->
<circle cx="120" cy="200" r="10" fill="red"/>
<circle cx="180" cy="220" r="10" fill="gold"/>
<circle cx="150" cy="280" r="10" fill="blue"/>
<circle cx="100" cy="320" r="10" fill="purple"/>
<circle cx="200" cy="300" r="10" fill="silver"/>
<!-- Star on top -->
<polygon points="150,40 140,60 160,60" fill="yellow" stroke="orange" stroke-width="2"/>
</svg>
This SVG code creates a Christmas tree with the following elements:
- A brown trunk
- Three layers of green triangles for the tree's foliage
- Colorful ornaments (circles) in red, gold, blue, purple, and silver
- A yellow star on top
You can copy this code and save it as a .svg file, then open it in a web browser or an SVG-compatible image viewer to see the result. You can also embed it directly in an HTML file if you want to display it on a webpage.
The tree is simple but recognizable, with a classic triangular shape and festive decorations. Feel free to adjust the colors, sizes, or positions of the elements to customize the tree to your liking!
Can you generate for me a Lilypond tune for the piano, for two hands, to accompany this nice Christmas tree?
Certainly! I'll create a simple, festive piano tune using Lilypond that could accompany a Christmas tree. This tune will be in 3/4 time, reminiscent of a waltz, with a cheerful melody in the right hand and a simple accompaniment in the left hand.
Here's the Lilypond code for a short Christmas-themed piano piece:
\version "2.22.1"
\header {
title = "Christmas Tree Waltz"
composer = "AI Composer"
}
upper = \relative c'' {
\clef treble
\key c \major
\time 3/4
c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | g2. |
e4 g c | b2 a4 | g4 f e | d2. |
c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | e2. |
d4 b g | c2 b4 | c2. ~ | c2. |
}
lower = \relative c' {
\clef bass
\key c \major
\time 3/4
c,4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
c4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | c4 <e g> <e g> |
g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c2. |
}
\score {
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff = "upper" \upper
\new Staff = "lower" \lower
>>
\layout { }
\midi { \tempo 4 = 120 }
}
This Lilypond code creates a simple, waltz-like tune that could be played while admiring a Christmas tree. Here's a brief explanation of the piece:
- It's in the key of C major, which is simple and cheerful.
- The time signature is 3/4, giving it a gentle, swaying feel.
- The right hand (upper staff) plays a melody that moves mostly stepwise with some small leaps, reminiscent of decorating a tree or hanging ornaments.
- The left hand (lower staff) provides a simple waltz-like accompaniment, with a bass note followed by two chords in each measure.
- The piece is 16 measures long, which is enough to create a festive atmosphere without being too complex.
To use this code:
- Copy it into a text file and save it with a .ly extension (e.g., "christmas_tree_waltz.ly").
- Process it with Lilypond to generate sheet music (PDF) and a MIDI file.
- You can play the MIDI file to hear how it sounds, or read the sheet music to play it on a piano.
This tune should provide a nice, festive accompaniment to your Christmas tree SVG!
Dec 212024
For years now, one of my favorite pastimes when I needed some downtime was to play one of the Fallout games. I still cannot decide if I like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas more. Fallout 4 would be less likable, except that it has settlement building which gives the game a whole new dimension. I know, I know, building settlements is not every gamer’s cup of tea, but I enjoy it.
But then, there are the extensions. And no, I do not mean the “official” DLCs (downloadable contents) that are provided by the game publisher, but rather, the “mods” that are offered by third parties, individuals and groups of enthusiasts alike. Mods can improve a game, fix bugs, add to the experience, but in the case of the Fallout games, they reached a whole new level: Some mods rival the DLCs, or perhaps even surpass them.
Take Fallout New California. Years in the making, this mod rivals in size the very game itself, Fallout New Vegas, that it extends. Set years before the events of New Vegas, it puts the player in the shoes of a young protagonist who grew up in a Vault, only to find himself out there in the western wastelands of the New California Republic, amidst rival factions and a deadly search for some disastrous pre-war technology. The mod is just amazing: a main quest that retains some of the trademark moral ambiguity that always characterized Fallout, numerous side quests, a richly textured world, a memorable radio station from Sandy Hills, unique companions… What a game! And it seamlessly transitions into New Vegas, providing a robust back story for the player’s later identity as a Courier, and offering some perks and companions that the player can retain.
For a while, I thought New California was it, the new gold standard when it comes to fan-made mods. But then, there were rumors of yet another mod on its way: A mod of Fallout 4, that would be set overseas, in the great city of London, England.
*** WARNING: Some spoilers follow ***
I have now completed Fallout London, and the impression I came away with is that despite its rough edges, despite the fact that it still has numerous small but annoying bugs and suffers from frequent crashes, it nonetheless surpasses even New California in its breadth, depth, originality. And details and nuances! A Big Ben that chimes at 6 AM (yes, six times). A bona fide TARDIS (that, sadly, vanishes the moment you acquire the loot that it offers). A crosswalk at Abbey Road with four permanent shadows, with a pair of round glasses found in the first of the four. A “British Broadcasting Ministry” radio station that is really as pretentiously British as it can be, is just one of three unique in-game radio stations. Not to mention a post-apocalyptic British society with its snobbish Gentry, cannibalistic Beefeaters, mutant Thamesfolk and numerous other factions, in particular those Tommy conscripts who resemble in so many ways the grunts of the NCR military in New Vegas.
Yes, the elephant is in FOLON, too.
Then there’s the voice acting. It is superb, probably the best in all the Fallout universe. And the side quests? That Lovecraftian side journey that you get into after collecting those Cutethulhu dolls feels like a full-blown DLC on its own right, and a very unique and quirky one at that. Oh, and did I mention that you get a canine companion… no, not the lovable Dogmeat but an equally faithful four-legged friend, Churchill the English bulldog? (The human companions are also amazing, with rich, touching backstories.)
But then, I only have one real complaint. Namely that, after having explored all three endings of the main quest line, I concluded, like the computer WOPR in the movie War Games, that the only winning move is not to play. That is, leave the main quest unfinished. Just explore, find every location, turn on all mariner beacons, find all unusual call boxes, read all the writings Sid has to offer… but leave the main quest alone.
Why? Because no matter which side you pick, they destroy London. The London in which you wake up is far from pefect, but it is a functioning city and Westminster is in decent shape. Sure, the city could use more vertical mobility and the Gentry could be a little bit less snobbish and more accommodating, but that’s not what you get with any of the chosen outcomes. Should you side with Smythe, you end up with a city that’s intact but soulless, governed by clones and subject to unethical science experiments. The Fifth Column turn it into a kind of a fascist nightmare. Arthur’s Camelot may have more pleasant intentions, but the end result is nearly the same: Westminster is mostly destroyed, the city is in ruins, and there’s no reason to believe that anyone’s life improved as a result.
So this, then, was my favored outcome: after doing my part, helping Smythe set off an explosion at the tournament in Westminster, after freeing Reggie the crab (against Smythe’s wishes), I just let the phone continue ringing outside the London Aquarium, I avoided visiting the Fifth Column and making friends with Eve at Cable Street, and I also avoided getting better acquainted with Arthur. I now mind my own business, discovering the few remaining locations that I have not yet visited (yes, you can actually get to Blight Crater even without completing the Scylla quest—which I was never offered, due to a bug I believe—if you have the right stats and equipment, and know how to cross the radioactive waters minimizing damage), still finding amazing little details and oddities here and there, like at the Greenwich Observatory that I just finished exploring. And of course I return to my few settlements from time to time, continuing to improve them despite the somewhat broken settlement mechanics in this amazing, astonishing mod.
Or just go back to Westminster, take a taxi ride or board the city’s one remaining functional Underground line. Just for fun. There is something special about being able to ride a subway, some 160 years after global nuclear Armageddon, in one of the most iconic cities of the world, Ol’ Blighty, while listening to a worthy cover of the iconic We’ll Meet Again…
Dec 132024
\(\renewcommand{\vec}[1]{\boldsymbol{\mathrm{#1}}}\)This is probably my most ambitious paper to date. It’d be a lie to suggest that I was not worried: what am I missing?
Which is why I have to begin by showing my appreciation to the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity who, rather than dismissing my paper, recognized its potential value and invited no fewer than four reviewers. Much to my (considerable) relief the reviewers seemed to agree: What I am doing makes some sense.
One of my cats, helping me to understand gravity.
What exactly am I doing? Well, as everyone (ok, everyone with at least a casual interest in general relativity) knows, the gravitational field doubles as the metric of spacetime. And we know that the metric is a “symmetric” quantity: the distance from \(A\) to \(B\) is the same as the distance from \(B\) to \(A,\) and this does not change even when the “distance” in question is the spacetime interval, the infinitesimal proper time between neighboring events.
So we treat the metric as symmetric, which greatly simplifies calculations.
Alternatively, we may treat the metric as not symmetric. Einstein spent the last several decades of his life working on a theory using a nonsymmetric metric, which, he hoped, could have led to a unification of the theories of gravitation and electromagnetism. It didn’t.
John Moffat also spent a considerable chunk of his professional life working on his nonsymmetric gravitational theory (NGT). Unlike Einstein, Moffat assumed that the extra degrees of freedom are also gravitational and may lead to a large-scale modification of the expression for gravitational acceleration, potentially explaining riddles like the rotation curves of galaxies.
But herein lies the puzzle. A self-respecting field theory these days is usually written down by way of a Lagrangian density, with the corresponding field equations derived using the so-called action principle. In the case of general relativity, this Lagrangian density is called the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian. The field that is the subject of this Lagrangian is the gravitational field. Unless we are interested in Einstein’s unified field theory or Moffat’s NGT, we assume that this field has the requisite symmetry that is characteristic of a metric.
Except that at no point do we actually inform the machinery behind the action principle, namely the methods of the calculus of variations, that the field has this property. Rather, in standard derivations we just impose this constraint “by hand” during the derivation itself. This approach is mathematically inconsistent even if it leads to the desired, expected result.
Usually, a restriction that constrains the degrees of freedom of a physical system is incorporated into the Lagrangian using what are called Lagrange-multipliers. Why would we not use a Lagrange-multiplier, then, to restrict the gravitational field tensor so that instead of the 16 independent degrees of freedom that characterize a generic rank-2 tensor in four dimensions, we only have the 10 degrees of freedom of a symmetric tensor?
This is precisely what I have done. Not without consternation: After all, no lesser a mathematician than David Hilbert chose not to do this, even though he was very much aware of the technique of Lagrange-multipliers and their utility, which he took advantage of in other contexts while working on relativity theory.
Yet, for 109 years and counting, the symmetry of the metric, though assumed, was never incorporated into the standard Lagrangian formulation of the theory. I honestly don’t know why, but I decided to address this by introducing a Lagrange multiplier term:
\begin{align}
{\cal S}_{\rm grav}=\frac{1}{2\kappa}\int d^4x \sqrt{-g}(R-2\Lambda+\lambda^{\mu\nu}g_{[\mu\nu]}).
\end{align}
There. Variation with respect to this nondynamical term \(\lambda^{\mu\nu}\) yields the constraint, \(g_{[\mu\nu]}=0\). Job done. Except… Except that as a result of introducing this term, Einstein’s field equations are slightly modified, split into two equations as a matter of fact:
\begin{align}
R_{\mu\nu}-\tfrac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu\nu}+\Lambda g_{\mu\nu} &{}= 8\pi G T_{(\mu\nu)},\\
\lambda_{[\mu\nu]} &{}= 8\pi GT_{[\mu\nu]}.
\end{align}
The first of these two equations is just the usual field equation, but with a twist: The stress-energy tensor on the right-hand side is explicitly symmetrized.
But the second! That’s where things get really interesting. The nondynamical term \(\lambda_{[\mu\nu]}\) is unconstrained. That means that the antisymmetric part of \(T_{\mu\nu}\) can be anything. To quote a highlighted sentence from my own manuscript: “Einstein’s gravitational field is unaffected by the antisymmetric part of a generalized stress-energy-momentum tensor.“
Or, to put it more bluntly, the gravitational field does not give a flying fig about matter spinning or rotating. How matter spins or does not spin would be determined by the properties of that matter; gravity does not care.
This was a surprising, potentially profound result. Previously, authors tried to account for the presence of nonvanishing rotation by introducing a variety of tensor formalisms ad hoc. But as my derivation shows, perhaps all that was unnecessary. Matter is free to rotate, insofar as gravity is concerned: the stress-energy tensor does not need to be symmetrical.
Is this result really new? How can that be? What am I missing? These were my thoughts when I submitted my manuscript. Who knows… maybe, just maybe I was not spouting nonsense and stumbled upon something of real importance.
I expect my paper to appear on the pages of CQG in due course [edit: it just did]; I now also submitted the manuscript to arXiv, where it should appear I hope this weekend or early next week.
Dec 082024
- When you are five years old, you do as you’re told by adults. Adults know what they’re doing.
- When you are twenty-five, you do what you want to do. After all, you’re an adult who knows what he is doing.
- When you are forty-five, you wonder: Some of these people who are supposedly adults… don’t they know what they’re doing?
- When you are sixty-five, you look in the mirror and ask: I am supposedly an adult. Why don’t I know what I’m doing?
Oh, did I mention that I am just a few years shy of 65?
Oct 302024
My beautiful wife is about to leave the North American continent behind, visiting her Mom in Hungary.
The house feels a bit empty already. The cats are unusually quiet and subdued, too.
Oct 202024
I was messing with a backup server, which failed to work properly after an update. I just finished what I was doing when a call came from a strange phone number. The chap introduced himself as calling on behalf of Bell Canada, and I almost hung up (way too many phony calls!) but I am glad I didn’t: this time, the call was legit, and it concerned my Bell ADSL network connection, a service that is a bit old, a bit slow, but ultra-reliable, which is, well, the reason why I am relying on it!
He was wondering why my connection is down. I was surprised: granted, I have a higher-speed (but a tad less reliable) backup connection through Rogers so I would not lose connectivity, but still, my monitoring scripts would have warned me if there was trouble with the Bell line. But then I checked: and indeed, a few minutes prior, the Bell ADSL connection was down for a duration of about two minutes.
And they called! As it turned out, they were not sure if the connection was back up, because they were trying to ping an IP address that was not responding. We quickly sorted that out, and the chap recorded to correct IP address for the Bell equipment itself, to make sure that they know which box they ping. But we were both wondering exactly what triggered the problem in the first place.
Now I know. The backup server I was messing with at one point came up with the wrong IP addresses, conflicting with my primary server. Having two boxes with the same IP address likely confused the Bell ADSL router, which then reset itself. This is probably what they saw on their end.
But the fact that they noticed it before I did? That I received a call from a competent professional within minutes, alerting me to the problem and eager to solve it?
That’s almost unheard of, these days. My opinion of Bell Canada just went up several, several notches. This is true old school customer care. What can I say? Bravo. That VPC (virtual private circuit) ADSL line is not the cheapest, but it’s well worth the price with this level of service.
Addendum: The problem was resolved a day later. I believe it was caused by a Bell Canada residential technician, who disconnected our canceled landline service two days prior, and accidentally/carelessly hooked up some wires to the terminals that belonged to the ADSL line. So maybe my opinion of that technician is not that great. However, the business service technicians were great. Not only did they notice the problem before I did, they proactively called, addressed the problem, sent a technician… and when the technician actually called, he called only to tell me that he’d not even come to my premises, because he already identified and solved the problem, and has been monitoring the line for the preceding 30 minutes, confirming its stability.
Oct 062024
It was a stormy afternoon today.
My beautiful wife snapped this uncanny image of the stormy sky a few hours ago.
No, it is not a black-and-white photograph. These were the actual colors.
What a planet we live on. Wow.
Sep 262024
Overleaf (sharelatex) is an amazing project, an open-source Web-based editor for LaTeX projects. The software can be used for free or on a subscription basis at overleaf.com, but the open source version is available as a “community edition”.
Not for the faint-hearted, mind you, as installation is not trivial. The easiest way is by means of a docker container, setup for which is provided by the Overleaf project.
In the last few days, I managed to do just that, installing Overleaf on my main Linux server. I even managed to configure Overleaf to properly compile Feynman diagrams automatically, as this screenshot from my practice “scratchpad” file demonstrates.
I like this project very much. In fact I am very impressed by its sophistication. I first opened an Overleaf account more than six years ago, when I invited someone to collaborate. I used Overleaf a few times over the years but, I admit, I forgot that it even exists until recently, when someone invited me to collaborate and I found, much to my surprise, that I already had a valid Overleaf account.
But this time around I went far beyond just using it. I decided to set up my own installation, for several reasons, including privacy, confidentiality, limitations and last but not least, avoiding reliance of a service provider who may or may not be still in business tomorrow or next year.
And now, I find myself ready to ditch the old software that I’ve been using for nearly 20 years, and switch to Overleaf altogether for my new LaTeX projects. It’s that good, really. I hope I will not come to regret my decision.
Sep 252024
Look what the mailman just brought. Or rather, the Amazon delivery person:
It’s the third volume of Richard Bartle‘s amazing Dheghōm trilogy.
I am proud to call Richard a friend (I hope he does not object) as I’ve known him online for more than 30 years and we also met in person a couple of times. He is a delightful, very knowledgeable fellow, a true British scholar, one of the foremost authorities on virtual worlds, the world of online gaming. He is, of course, along with Roy Trubshaw, credited as one of the authors of MUD, the Multi-User Dungeon, the world’s first multi-user adventure game, which I proudly ported to C++ 25 years ago, running it ever since on my server for those few players who still care to enjoy a text-only virtual world.
When he is not teaching, Richard also writes books. Delightful stories. Among them this Dheghōm trilogy.
Dheghōm is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European name for the Earth goddess or mother Earth. In Richard’s story, told in the form of recovered fragments from documents, blog entries, and other notes, we gradually find out more about the nature of our (real? virtual?) reality and its connection with the roots of a great many of our languages.
Someone used the word “unputdownable” in their Amazon review of the first volume and I quite agree. I know that for Richard, these books were labors of love, but I honestly think they deserve to be published by a major publisher. Until then, all I can hope for is that many people will do as I did and buy a copy. Being a bit old-fashioned when it comes to books, I actually bought the paperbacks, even though I already read the third volume in electronic form when Richard first made the draft manuscript available online.
Thank you, Richard, for such a read, a trilogy that has the best qualities of good science-fiction: entertaining, memorable, thought-provoking and, ultimately, also a bit of a cautionary tale.
Aug 022024
The title of this blog post is used as the byline or catch phrase of the Canadian Centre for Experimental Radio Astronomy, a group operating a 12.8 meter radio telescope, a repurposed former NATO satellite communication facility, located in Carp, just outside of Ottawa.
One of the things they organize is a summer camp for students. Today, I was invited to talk to a small group of students, and indeed I did so, talking (mostly) about my work on the Pioneer Anomaly. It seemed like an appropriate topic, considering that detection and resolution of the anomaly was heavily dependent on radio science, specifically Doppler radio navigation.
It was fun, and my talk, I am told, was well received. I was also offered an opportunity to briefly tour the facility itself. It was fascinating, even though it was insanely hot inside the dome under the August sun. (I definitely needed a shower when I got back home.) The only memorable fly in the proverbial ointment is that I arrived late, thanks to a stupid disabled truck that blocked the Queensway, as a result of which it took forty minutes to get from Vanier Parkway to Parkdale. Fortunately, my hosts were understanding.
Jul 192024
I admit I almost lost it last night.
I was attempting to sign up as an author with a notable scientific journal (who shall remain nameless as I am cowardly and I hope to remain in their good graces.) I was confronted with a questionnaire asking about some personal details.
Okay, so they want to know about my name, e-mail address, office phone and institution. All perfectly reasonable, even though I do not have a formal affiliation which sometimes means going through extra hoops, trying to convince the software that I am nonetheless legit. Then came more personal questions such as my gender and age. But then… race, ethnicity, sexual orientation…
Sexual orientation???
I beg your pardon?
Say what? I apologize for language that’s rude and crude, but what the fuck do my scientific contributions have to do with the privacy of my bedroom and how is that your fucking business?
I generally consider my ideological affiliation left-of-center, which is to say more likely leaning towards a progressive liberal attitude. But this? Granted, there was the option, “prefer not to answer”. Nonetheless, I was beyond offended. In this context, the question is downright creepy. What are they going to ask next from prospective authors? How often do you masturbate? Do you prefer conventional or unconventional positions while copulating? Are you into S&M?
I mean, seriously, all I am trying to do is to submit a physics paper to a scientific publication. Not interrogated about my bedroom habits.
Of course I know the answer. This is checkbox-driven DEI virtue-signaling. Someone, somewhere, will write a report about how well (or how badly) this scientific publication represents various communities. Never mind that the actual science should have absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. They now have checkboxes, and no doubt, folks patting themselves on the back being proud of what they have accomplished, making the world more inclusive and all.
Except that they didn’t. Except that these forms of aggressive, self-serving episodes of virtue signaling achieve the exact opposite: instead of steering the world towards a future in which such superficial characteristics no longer matter, instead of a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character, they not only keep divisions alive, they are actively deepening them.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things anymore.
Jul 102024
Throughout her life my Mom earned a living as a artisan textile dyer in Hungary. Nothing fancy, her usual work involved bringing home to her workshop a few hundred, e.g., silk sheets, hand-dying them with predetermined, preapproved patterns (mostly fashionable headscarves, which were very popular in Europe in the 1960s, 1970s), then returning them to the warehouse, which then sent them out for further processing (steam fixing, hemming, etc.)
One day in 1984 she was asked to do something different: To prepare several silk sheets, using the designs, and under the supervision, of a well-known artist (Judit Szabó), for public display in a community hall in a small Hungarian town (Földeák).
She was reminded of this during our recent conversation. Though I had no high expectations, I searched for it using the name of the town and the artist. To our no small astonishment (and to my Mom’s great delight), I found it. The silk sheets are still there (or at least, they were back in 2021), adorning the walls of the town’s wedding hall. Not only that, someone actually took the trouble to take some decent photographs of it and publish it on a nice Hungarian-language Web site.
Jul 102024
I was so busy with things like Linux updates, I forgot to celebrate. My main Internet domain, vttoth.com, was 30 years old just ten days ago.
$ whois vttoth.com | grep "^Creation Date" Creation Date: 1994-06-30T23:00:00Z
To be sure, it’s not the oldest domain in existence, not by a longshot.
$ whois oracle.com | grep "^Creation Date" Creation Date: 1988-12-02T05:00:00+0000
But then, look at these guys:
$ whois facebook.com | grep "^Creation Date" Creation Date: 1997-03-29T05:00:00Z $ whois google.com | grep "^Creation Date" Creation Date: 1997-09-15T07:00:00+0000 $ whois whitehouse.gov | grep "Creation Date" Creation Date: 1997-10-02T01:29:32Z
So yes, I suppose I’ve been around. Here’s the earliest version of my Web site as remembered by The Wayback Machine:
Well, I suppose Web sites have become a tad more sophisticated since then.
Jun 212024
This consumed far too much of my time.
I had to update my server systems, both “on-premises” (meaning my home office) and “in the cloud” (my small cloud VM hosted by Amazon). They’ve been running CentOS 7 since 2016, and CentOS 7 reached its end-of-life. Back then, I of course anticipated that by this time, I’d have long ago upgraded my systems to CentOS 8. But that was before Red Hat decided to play hardball with all of us, turning CentOS from a robust open version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux into a bleeding edge, more or less experimental/test version.
So I had to switch. And it wasn’t easy.
I eventually opted for Oracle Linux (itself an RHEL derivative), after seriously considering both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. It seemed like the best compromise. I wanted an RHEL-compatible distribution to minimize the pain of the upgrade, and I wanted to pick the distribution that was the most likely to have robust long term support. Considering how Red Hat continues to play hardball with others, Oracle seemed the safest choice: They have the requisite in-house resources to “go it alone” if needed, and their cloud infrastructure alone appears to guarantee a long-term commitment. We shall see if I chose wisely.
And yes, it’s OL8 for now, though this time around, I plan an upgrade long before this product line reaches EOL. But first, stability.
I think everything works on my servers, and things are settling down nicely. But some other machines that I am responsible for still need some gentle care and feeding. It was an educational experience. I dare not share my detailed notes here as they contain information that probably should not be publicly disclosed about details of my configuration, but I have dozens of pages of notes detailing the quirks that I encountered.
All is well that ends well. But why do I have the feeling that this forced upgrade represents many days of my life that were lost for no good reason, days that I’ll never get back? Oh well.
Jun 072024
I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.
I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.
The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.
Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.
But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.
Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.
And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.