Gigi and I have been in Istanbul for the past two weeks, and last night, in her parents living room we got married. Huzzah! Honestly, after more than 13 years of first dates (also known as "last dates") ending with "You're nice, but...", I didn't think such a day was ever going to come. But here it is -- now, along with all my other titles and accomplishments, I can now add "Husband".

Mind you, oddly enough our marriage isn't really "official", so we're being quiet about advertising it in some quarters. Our wedding last night was a simple traditional Muslim religious wedding which, while recognized by Gigi's friends, family and surrounding community, isn't legally recognized here in Turkey (and thus, from what I understand, isn't really recognized by Canada either). For the sake of her Canadian Permanent Residency application, we're calling it a "commitment ceremony", and we'll pursue an official wedding in 2009, once her PR is approved (as she can't leave the country while it's in progress).

Still, I feel married. Our series of weddings and receptions and such may not be traditional (in either of our two countries of origin), but it's uniquely ours, and we're pursuing it together, so I couldn't be happier, and am proud to introduce Gigi as my wife and partner for life.

Yaz.

18th October, 2007, we lost a dear old friend, a (mostly) Siamese cat yclept "Gwai-loh." Gwai was quite vocal, as are many Siamese; he also had some strange characteristics, for instance you could hold him upside-down on the ceiling and he would walk around - inverted - for as long as you were willing to hold him up there. For years, we kept him around the office, and he had a habit of coming up for affection when whoever he was approaching was on the phone. So he'd come up to you, get right up to your face (and the phone) and let loose with a really loud meow. Which you would then have to explain to the customer. One time I was on the phone with a rather famous Hollywood special effects dude when Gwai let loose with this, we had a good laugh over it. Eventually, we put up a web page on our site with a .wav of Gwai's signature meow, and a picture of him staring at a screensaver on a ginormous (for the time) monitor. A surprising amount of the code in WinImages was written with Gwai warm and settled either in my lap or across my arms.

Well, eventually, the old boy's liver failed, and I put out a rather startling amount of money to see if we could get around that, and amazingly enough, it worked. We got two more years of Gwai, all of it of quite high quality, before he finally laid down for the last time. His last couple of days were spent purring and head bumping while all the while refusing to eat or drink... finally, he just didn't wake up.

I miss him terribly. Sometimes it hits me right between the eyes and I can't even think straight. I can't dig over a decade and a half of unconditional love and affection out of my system with any amount of rationalization or any other flavor of self-bullshittery. Here's to my grizzled old friend. I only hope he knew how much I loved him in return.

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

Well, I've survived through eight full days of my first Ramadan, and so far I've maintained the fast. So this is a quick status report.

First off: I'm freaking hungry! Please, oh please, someone send me some food!

Okay -- that's not exactly fair or accurate. Indeed, our home is chock-full of food right now. The problem right now is that we spend 14 hours not eating or drinking any of it, so most food items are lasting longer than they would otherwise. We have two meals a day -- dinner (which is now at about 1920), and "breakfast" (at around 0430, and really should be renamed from "breakfast" to "gobble-up-all-you-can-cause-the-fast-starts-...now!"). We snack almost constantly in the evening, but because of the fast (no energy during the day or evening (until the first food is mostly digested), and the need to get up early the next day), Gigi likes to go to bed early. So this snacking doesn't last all that long.

Most days I either feel like I'm seriously hungry, or like I'm going to be sick. One morning I felt I was close enough to tossing all my cookies that I stayed in the bathroom for at least half an hour until the urge subsided. And on the days that I don't feel sick, I feel like I'm unable to work on anything requiring any significant concentration (which has been a problem, as I'm supposed to have been working on two papers these past 10 days, one of which is only now 95% complete (and it was at least 85% complete before Ramadan even started), and the other of which I haven't even started. The teaching is working out fine (fortunately) -- in fact it's usually the two times during the daylight hours in the week that I feel my best (as my mind is sufficiently occupied I forget about how hungry or crappy I'm feeling).

Fortunately, my difficulties with Ramadan and the fast haven't affected Gigi and my relationship at all -- even though she's always telling me I should stop the fast, and that I don't have to do it, I know that she's glad we can do it together. Which is really the whole reason why I'm doing this in the first place.

Fortunately (and unfortunately) Gigi is going away to the mainland on a training source all next week. It's unfortunate because I'm going to miss her every moment she's away (and I know she will too), but it's fortunate because I can eat again. There really isn't a whole lot of reason for me to continue while she isn't here.

However, at this point I haven't quite decided wheter I should give up or not. I'm not the type of person to give up on hard things just because it's convenient to do so, and while Gigi tells me she knows I'm not that sort of person, I want her to see it for herself. Still, I need to get some serious work done toward finishing this Masters degree, and being able to take the quiet time when she's not here to concentrate at my fullest to finish off my survey paper (which is written, but I want to improve the conclusion and my use of references in the text), and writing up a new proposal paper (more on this in a future Journal entry) -- and being well fed is integral to thinking clearly and being able to concentrate on the task at hand. So at this point it boils down to whether my practical side or my stubborn side wins out.

Fortunately, for five of the days of the week nobody cares if I sleep in past noon. If Gigi didn't already know better, I'd have to invent some sort of fake Canadian festival/holiday where you're supposed to pull down your pants and slide on a frozen lake in the middle of winter, as a form of revenge ;).

Yaz.

As those of you who have followed my Journal probably already know, I'm an atheist, and Gigi is Muslim. Beyond the whole God issue, however, Gigi and I perceive the world in much the same way -- she isn't so much religious as she is spiritual. She doesn't pray five times a day (or even once a day) or anything -- she just feels that there is a Supreme Being, it initialized the Universe a long time ago, sent a prophet, sends bad people to hell after they die (and good people to heaven), but otherwise stays out of the affairs of humanity. Some sort of cosmic voyeur I suppose. We've agreed to disagree on the subject, and get along fantastic.

Yesterday was the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic lunar calendar. Gigi's family back in Turkey has always observed Ramadan (just as my parents have always observed Christmas in a secular way), so she has a cultural attachment to it that I can honour and appreciate.

Now for those of you who don't know, one of the central practises of Ramadan is the fast. From dawn through to the end of dusk, you're not allowed to eat anything (unless you're too young, too old, or your health simply doesn't permit it), you're not allowed to have sexual contact, and you're not allowed to swear or have bad thoughts (at least in the manner in which Gigi and her family practise the holiday). As Gigi practises things, she can't even hug, kiss, or brush her teeth during these times. Of course, once the sun is down the feast begins, and we can stuff ourselves until the sun rises again.

"She" isn't exactly the right word -- what I really mean is "we". I didn't think it was particularly decent of me to be doing any of the things she can't (read: won't) do during the daylight hours: it wouldn't be particularly understanding of me to be eating in front of her 80% of the way through a long day of fasting. So I'm observing Ramadan as well.

We're just finished day one, and here's the basic schedule:

1. Wake up at 0400: Last chance to eat before the sun comes up. I was up earliest, so I made us a big breakfast. We had to be finished by 0448, and once we were (and after a quick tidy), it was time to...
2. Go back to bed at ~0500: we were tired. I pretty much didn't sleep at all the night leading up to breakfast, so it was my chance to get some sleep.
3. Avoid eating, drinking (even water), swearing (something I never do anyway), having sexual contact (difficult when our workplaces are ~10km apart anyhow :P), or having evil thoughts for about 14 hours, until:
4. Dinner at 1939: Let me tell you, after 14 hours of nothing to eat or drink (with at least a dozen instances of me walking to the 'fridge to pour a cool drink, only to remember I can't do that and head back to my laptop thirsty and dejected), I was ready to pig out. We had a pretty good sized meal (although just prior to working on this post I had to have a bowl of late night cereal because I'm hungry again), but if I'm going to fast all day every day for the next month, I'm going to need dessert of some sort. We didn't have the time (or too many ingredients) to make anything tonight. We are however trying a number of Turkish dishes I've never had before (Gigi found this brilliant website of traditional Turkish dishes, written by a fellow Canadian (and Turk) here, so we're giving them a go. Tonight was "Kadinbudu Kofte", but as we didn't have egg noodles, we did the very, very Canadian thing and substituted Kraft Dinner instead).

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now the good bit of news: fortunately, as it is September, the days are getting shorter. In fact, every day we start breakfast two minutes later, and dinner two minutes earlier. By the end, we'll be fasting for approximately two hours less than we had to on day one. Whew!

I know I'm a really lucky guy to have Gigi in my life -- she's the sweetest, gentlest, silliest, and most loving entity I've ever encountered, and I'm more than happy to support her during this special time. I know that participating with her means to world to her, so I'm going to keep it up, and refuse to let her down. Still, if I did believe in $SUPREME_DEITY, and if we were also doing the traditional prayers, I can imagine that by the third round of prayers, I'd be praying for $SUPREME_DEITY to send down a truckload of tacos, or maybe some cedar planked salmon or some-such.

So day one is finished. It's just after 0100 local time, Gigi is sleeping soundly, and I'm going to have yet another bite to eat before I join her. The next 28 days are basically going to be repeats of today, but I'll post up any interesting tidbits as we continue.

(And I haven't forgotten about my promised review of the Weird Al Yankovic concert we attended on Tuesday -- I'm still amazed and happy that we got to meet him, shake his hand, and thank him for the amazing show).

Yaz.

So I wake up this morning, and Putin has dissolved his government.

Then, same morning, Russia announces a bomb with nuclear-level destructive capability. But they say they're not escalating.

Then, later the same day, the US announces they have a matter-antimatter (proton/positron) annihilation laser, which, they say, is to normal lasers as nuclear weapons are to normal bombs.

At the same time, Bush, old "We'll never pull 'em out", is about to announce a troop pullback in Iraq.

Oil's hovering around $80 a barrel. The dollar is in the outhouse, and we've basically had many of our civil rights eliminated or made irrelevant.

Did I miss something here?

Gigi and I are going to see Weird Al tonight. I've been following Al's music and career pretty much since he started issuing albums in the early 80's, but I've never actually been to one of his concerts. Gigi found out about it earlier this summer, we bought tickets right away, but were still only about to get 9 rows from the front, right against one side. Oh well -- I'm still excited, and I still expect it to be a really good show. I was tempted to try to e-mail Al to offer him $5 and a bag of doughnuts if he'd only play Nature Trail to Hell, but figure the guy gets bugged by enough strange people as it is. But here's hoping...;).

Yaz.

As always, there are rumbles of discontent from the scientific community with regard to global warming. This article (vile email registration required) from R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, lays the overriding mechanism of climate change squarely at the feet of the various solar cycles. In the article, he explains that solar energy impacting the earth is part of the mechanism, while the sun's solar wind drives cloud formation in a complementary cycle that enhances the effect of the actual heat input. But that's not the kicker. The interesting part is he is predicting global cooling, rather than warming.

But wait; there's more. This months Discover Magazine (print version also) has a lengthy article about this same mechanism, that is, cloud formation driving the climate and the sun driving cloud formation by way of modulating the effect cosmic rays have, by Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

Svensmark says that we are in a warming trend, so his conclusions are at odds with those of Patterson; but they both agree that CO2 isn't nearly the looming threat that it has been made out to be with regard to climate change.

Just a quick note to let everyone know -- Gigi and I are getting married!

We were both surprised that, after two months of grumbling, her father gave us permission to wed two weekend ago. So we're starting to make plans. First up has been shopping for an engagement ring -- she's picked out a nice one, and we're just waiting for the diamond we're looking at to arrive (it's in a white gold version of the ring she likes, but if she wants it we'll have them set it in the same model, but in 18K yellow gold/platinum instead).

All of which means I need to get a move on and finish up my research work so I can graduate. We're flying to Istanbul this December for the official engagement ceremony (and I've already bought the airline tickets), and hope to be married July 2008.

So little time, so much to do. I really should be wasting less time here and spending more time writing the papers I've started, but between the engagement, teaching, and trying to get over a nasty summer head cold, and other projects I've been rather busy. But I can't complain -- I've had a lot more money than I do now, but I've never been happier. Isn't the adventure of it all grand sometimes?

Yaz.

Gigi and I decided to get out and see a movie tonight, and caught "Transformers" on its opening night here in Victoria.

I can't say that I've had a really good time at the movies for a while. It has just taken me 10 minutes to remember the last movie we saw (Pirates of the Caribbean 3), and I have no recollection of what we saw previous to that. Movies have just been so forgettable as of late.

But Transformers was fun. The special effects were top-notch. My main complaints (which don't really detract from the fun factor) are:

• It was sometimes hard to follow combat sequences due to the fast motion and really short camera sequences.
• Due to the fast motion, there seems to be motion blur involved with some of the Transformers. I'm not sure if this was intentional, or a side-affect of the cold I'm suffering affecting my visual acuity somehow, and
• The signals analysis/"hacking" scenes. Yeah, they Hollywooded-up the computer displays and the overall process in a manner only a really hard-core systems nerd would notice is just plain wrong

Something to watch for: the use of Macintosh computers and displays everywhere, and not hiding the fact (I'll note here that other series use a lot of Apple hardware -- the new Doctor Who series being a good example, but in many such cases the Apple logo, especially on laptops, is covered over with a circular sticker). I wonder what Apple paid for that product placement.

Overall, however, we had a lot of fun. It's probably the first movie in a long time that I'd actually be tempted to go and see again, if seeing a movie didn't cost a significant portion of my income (and as it is, Gigi has to see the new Harry Potter movie next week -- we've already bought our tickets for it). I don't buy a lot of movies, but I might be tempted to pick this one up on DVD when it is released.

Yaz.

For the past few days, Gigi and I have been completely unable to send e-mail from our Mac laptops at home. Mail.app will try to send messages, but by and large they don't go anywhere. I have been having a certain amount of luck using Gmail's SMTP server, but it's a minor pain to try to send a message from one of my University accounts (which I use for the third year OS course I'm teaching this term), or from my .Mac account (my mail personal account), only to get an error dialog a minute or two later asking me to select a different server. Gigi hasn't been so fortunate -- she can't send anything at all.

Tonight I decided to look into this, and as it turns out, without announcement or fanfare two or three days ago my ISP decided to block all access to external port 25 requests. Thus, I had to try and find alternate ports for my .Mac and University servers. .Mac supports SSL, so that wasn't too hard to find, but the University only lists port 25. After some experimentation trying some SSL and SSL alternate ports, I discovered by chance that they also accept SMTP connections on port 26 (which might be new to allow people around the local cable monopoly's port 25 blocking, in which case they ma not be advertising the new port yet).

In the end, everything is working again. The cable company claims it's being done to try to fight spam, but really it seems to me that if more providers do this, there will be organizations that instead of implementing SSL and authentication for SMTP simply do what the University has done and make the service available on port 26, simply shifting the problem to a different port. And even with SSL and authentication for SMTP, does anyone think its going to be difficult for botnet creators to simply query the necessary connection credentials from Windows users Outlook settings and just use them?

Thanks a smegging bunch-a-roonie, Shaw Cable. You've just caused problems for millions of customers for absolutely nothing.

My box is fixed. Gigi's box will have to wait until tomorrow so I can get her to authenticate so I can change her SMTP settings.

Yaz.

Recently, Montana legislators made news when they passed legislation outlawing Real-ID, calling it a threat to privacy and liberty. Now, legislation making the taking of property by eminent domain for the purposes of increasing tax revenues illegal has been passed and signed into law by Montana's governor. For more on why this is a serious issue, check out the Supreme Court's "Kelo" decision, named after a Connecticut woman who (unsuccessfully) fought to keep her home from city plans to arbitrarily take it and subsequently turn it over to private developers with the objective of collecting higher tax revenues from the property.

Montana has a 2% unemployment rate at present, and maintains a balanced budget, something the feds might want to give some consideration to. I have to say that although I am typically very cynical about government, and although Montana has made some very serious mis-steps in terms of liberties in the last few decades, the state seems more interested in doing the right thing than the wrong thing at this point in time, and I am feeling very pleased with my representatives right now as a long-time resident.

I just finished up a rather large project implementing a robotic blimp. We based the system on at Atmel AT90USB Key device, which is a really flexible little development board with a ton of connectivity. We wired in motors, sonars, a digital compass, and a 2.4Ghz radio. We started off with absolutely no software, so we wrote a Real-time Operating System, device drivers for all the hardware, a protocol stack for the wireless radios, an RS-232 driver, and even an ANSI/VT-100 driver. We built the blimp ourselves (a company donated a massive roll of mylar), and even made our own tool for sealing mylar sheets together.

As you might be able to imagine, this resulted in a lot of output. We wrote tons of documentation, tons of code, had reams of experimental output, and even had a set of digital videos showing various parts of the system in action throughout development (you can see web-friendly versions of them here).

So today, with my team and myself finishing up the last of the documentation, I decided to put it all on a DVD. I grabbed what's left of the spindle of single-sided DVDs, and took them to my G5 in my lab.

I recall my first CD burner -- a 4x4x16 Yamaha SCSI CD-RW drive (I still have it, installed and running in an old machine). Back when I got it in the mid-late 90's, it was just barely on the cusp of becoming a semi-common peripheral. A year or two after I got it, suddenly every computer manufacturer was tripping over themselves to include a CD writer.

These days, the vast majority of systems sold come with CD/DVD burners. They are everywhere. The media has good capacity, and is easily and cheaply available.

And yet today, as I burned the first DVD, I really couldn't remember the last time I had burned a disc. That spindle of DVDs I brought to the lab with me has been in my possession for at least a year and a half, and I'm still not all the way through them.

Thinking about it, I don't have much need for optical media anymore. There are only two cases where they come in useful: burning video DVDs (such as I did today, and burning the occasional MP3 CD for my car MP3 CD player. Both are very infrequent events. For everything else, I use either my laptop, a USB flash key, iPod, or network storage. For files that I need easy access to anywhere, I can put them onto my iDisk. For large capacity, I have a file server with 300GB of storage. Ten years ago I was so excited at being able to store 650MB on a single disc, but now I rarely even use optical media for much of anything (even though I have a dual layer DVD burner at my disposal, and hence can store 8.5GB of data on one disc).

So how about you? Do you burn as many optical discs as you once did, or are removable disc media a rarity in your life as well, supplanted by network storage, USB keys, and iPods?

Yaz.

In reference to http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/31/0623246 I posted over on Bob's site:

Mr. Squidoo said in response to Cringley's article:

I certainly do not think that a 3rd party notice from someone other than the copyright holder are grounds for YouTube to remove my clip. Even a notice from Oregon Public Broadcasting would have to be considered an "alleged infringement" claim from a copyright holder.

What's so great about copyright is there isn't any alleged infringement. It works like this: did you distribute some work? Yes. Are you Oregon Public Broadcasting? No. You are infringing. Now you'll probably argue that your case is an example of Fair Use -- but get this -- Fair Use is an affirmative defense. If you claim Fair Use you are affirming "guilt" (copyright infringement) by making the defense. At which point a judge decides against the four point test if your infringement is Fair Use, or not. With copyright you are essentially* infringing until proven Fair Use, i.e., "guilty" until proven "innocent"!

In short, Fair Use isn't a right, it's a defense. Copyright isn't a right either; it is a limited-time** State-granted monopoly on distribution. For more info, check out 17 USC 107 and also http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

*Since you can't be non-infringing without being sued and winning!

**One day short of forever, is inexplicably constitutional to some Supremes. Extention every time new works are about to reach the Public Domain still counts as "for a limited time"; See Article 1.8.8.

And just now I left this over at Moyer's new blog re:'Open source journalism':

"As long as source materials are kept private and as long as the final product is copyrighted, it is incorrect to call something open source. Critiquing an article or emailing a suggestion is not nearly enough to justify the title of "Open-Source Journalism". It actually has to be open source." --DR (above)

I feel like I'm back on Slashdot right now! You are misunderstanding what "open source journalism" is, or claims to be. The swarm of emails, posts, crossposts, hat-tips, comments and cross references that coalesce across the 'net to form a "story" is the phenomenon described as "open source journalism". In this respect bloggers (Josh Marshall included) are both the journalist and the audience in the same fashion that open source coders are both the developer and the end-user. It's the many eyes and the feedback-loop that produce the refined results. The phrase open-source journalism doesn't describe the (absolutely critical) goals of either the FSF or the Creative Commons, though.

It needs to be said, in direct response to the quotation above that both the CC licenses and the GPL rely on copyright -- so to claim that because something is copyrighted it is not open source is absolutely incorrect. The difference between written journalism and (most commercial) software applications is that writing is distributed as source already. AV is a different story, one that Creative Commons is going to great lengths to address (remix and reuse without the chilling effects of rampant copyright litigation).

I wanted to say "RTFA", as the episode in question and the post go into detail about what "open-source journalism" is (and you can watch it right there on the site :-D).