Blogging on and off since 2003
My daughter, Kate, had her first child* this morning: Tom. 
He’s shown here in a rough phone-cam picture curled up on his mum at 3 hours old. Despite dire predictions of a 10 pound baby, he was actually 8 lbs. 9 ozs., of which about a pound seems to be hair. Congratulations to all.
—
* And my first grandchild
UPDATE: There are some more pictures here. Enjoy.
Mammoth. Varley is one of those writers that I’ll buy sight unseen.
As I blogged over the last few weeks, my upgrade to the latest Mac OS, Tiger, went pretty smoothly. However I had this nagging feeling that things might be even better if I did a clean installation. For one thing, I had been upgrading this machine ever since I got it a couple of years ago, and there were a number of obsolete bits and pieces lying around. I’d also installed many, many version of different applications – all of the flavours of OpenOffice for the Mac, various releases of NetBeans, every dot and dot-dot version of Java, various bits and pieces downloaded with fink – and it was increasingly difficult to figure out which bits I could safely discard. One or two applications hadn’t survived the upgrade to Tiger as well as they should have, and I wanted to give them a fresh start. I’d started to notice a few odd error messages in the console log and when shutting down – messages about xinetd, which had been obsoleted in Tiger. And finally free disk space was down to 8GB out of 60GB, which in today’s calculus is “getting close”. (When I think about how I would have killed for 8GB of disk just a few years ago….)
So I decided to perform a clean installation of Tiger. Overall it went very smoothly, even if some of the steps took a while to complete:
Make sure I had the license information from all of the licensed apps I use – NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, iWork, iLife, PGP, SuperDuper, etc.
Turn off networking, purge caches, delete temporary files.
Clone my hard disk on a partition of my external FireWire disk using SuperDuper; boot from the clone to verify that it’s complete.
Install Tiger from the DVD, carefully choosing the bits and pieces I want (yes to X11, no to some of the more obscure printer drivers and localizations).
Plug the FireWire drive back in and use Migration Assistant to move over just the user files and network settings – NOT the applications.
Still offline, install the various Apple applications.
Now go online and run Software Update several times to pull down all of the updates for OS X, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, and so forth. Remember to repair permissions after each update.
Install the remaining applications.
Wrestle with the inevitable glitch – in this case, why aren’t the PGP actions appearing on the toolbar for Mail? Discover that I need to shut down Mail and run two commands in a terminal window:defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2
When happy with the result, make a bootable backup copy with SuperDuper.
The bottom line? More free space, the system feels snappier, no ugly console messages on shutdown. The only frustrating thing is that one particular application is still broken….
Last year a friend recommended a “curious book” to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn’t get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C’est la vie.
It’s an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn’t, and overall I was a bit frustrated.
Then there’s the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue – what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I’m still waiting.
Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that’s just fine: he’s asking the same questions that I’m interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd’s ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.
Following my colleague Pat Patterson, I’ve added a BlogMap to my blog – you can find it at the bottom of the sidebar. Click on the Bloggers nearby: total to see a map of other registered blogs. It feels slightly weird to translate this abstract web-stuff into the physical, but no matter.
I just finished Aaron Glantz’s How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz’s editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz’s account suggests is that – contrary to my prejudices – the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah…. What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.
From Publisher’s Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors’ expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn’t tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.
I just noticed what my local public television station is showing tonight: frontline: death of a princess: “It was perhaps the most controversial film in the history of public television — the story of a young Saudi princess who was publicly executed for committing adultery.” It wasn’t just controversial: it changed my life.
Back in 1979-1980, we were going through a tough patch financially. (Most people were – this was the era of “stagflation”.) I had a decent job at CMC, but I really needed something that paid a bit more. At that time most of the oil companies in the Middle East were starting to ramp up their IT and HPC activities, and the trade papers were full of advertisements for positions in Saudi Arabia. The typical deal was fairly complicated, but extremely lucrative. Contractors (male only) lived in company housing, were paid tax-free through numbered Swiss bank accounts, worked their tails off writing Fortran and PL/1, and got two 2-week vacations a year (either at home, or wherever the family wanted to holiday). The minimum contract was two years, with a nice bonus for extending. There wasn’t much to do except work, although I had an idea of getting a personal computer (a Commodore PET or similar) and doing some applications development.
I contacted one of the “body shops” that handled the contracts, went through all the interviews, and was accepted. I was perhaps a week away from giving my notice at CMC and fixing a travel date to Riyadh. And then the BBC showed Death of a princess. The next day (May 7, 1980), the agency called me to say that the Saudi government had broken off diplomatic relations with the UK and had frozen all visas for UK nationals; my contract was therefore cancelled. A few weeks later I saw an ad for a job in the USA… and the rest is history. But it could have been very different.
I recently installed the Netcraft Toolbar in the copy of Firefox that I use on my home machine. Hitherto I have mostly used Netcraft for their What’s That Site Running? service (as a remote ping or to check a netblock owner). The Toolbar is new.
Every time you hit a new site, the toolbar displays five pieces of information:
– a “risk rating” (questionable)
– the date that the domain name was first noticed by Netcraft (highly unreliable)
– the rank ordering of the site by hits
– a link to a “Site Report”
– the netblock owner
I have to say that it’s changing the way I surf the web. I find myself looking at a site’s ranking, trying to understand why it’s so high (or so low). For example, my blog ranking is (at this moment) 197836. Is that good? Well, here are the top 100. Other interesting sites: Neil Gaiman’s blog is 69787, Planet Sun is 126763, and Alec Muffett’s crypticide ranks 127559. But I’m closing in on Majikthise (182579), and I’m way ahead of Simon’s Webmink (807108). Meaningful? Of course not, but it’s fun. However it only aggregates at the domain level, so all of the Sun bloggers at blogs.sun.com are going to have to share their collective ranking of 19723….
We just announced that we’re buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 – the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging – and stimulating – for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.
The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote “to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time”. You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.