Simply incredible. There's nothing more that I can write about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjbpwlqp5Qw

...of Slashdotters gone down? Or is it just a bunch of trolls?

It seems like any article discussing the unbundling of Internet Explorer from Windows seems to *repeatedly* contain versions of this comment:

"Why isn't Apple forced to unbundle Safari? Why isn't Canonical forced to unbundle FF from Ubuntu?" - well, neither Apple nor Canonical have been found guilty of breaking monopoly legislation with the bundling of browsers.

"How is the user going to get a browser if one isn't installed by default?" - Oh come on, it's not rocket science to supply a simple tool to allow the user to download and install one of the browsers available today! Any competent developer could knock up such a tool in an afternoon including a 2 hour coffee break. It's not like unbundling the browser means the TCP/IP stack has gone, too. In any case, hardly anyone actually installs Windows, most normal users have it preinstalled on a PC, and the OEM will ship some sort of browser. OEMs are already shipping things like Google Desktop, it's hardly a big leap to add Firefox or Chrome or whatever to the image.

The best comments by far are those of they type "if the European Union punishes Microsoft for breaking EU law, then Microsoft should retaliate by pulling out of the EU market". Firstly, that sort of action would result in the instant slaughter of the Microsoft board by the shareholders (the EU market for software is larger than the entire North American market), and secondly, it would immediately and clearly demonstrate how dangerous the MS monopoly is - and cause EU companies and states to switch to alternatives. This in turn would mean the widespread acceptance of the alternatives to Windows (which in the desktop market doesn't really exist at present), and therefore damage Microsoft's markets in the rest of the world - especially the market for MS Office if everyone in the EU stopped using it.

I've been working more on my "make a useful ethernet card for the Sinclair Spectrum" (which if you don't come from these parts, the Spectrum is the home computer in the 80s, which in at least Britain and Spain occupied the same kind of position as the Commodore 64 did in the United States). The board has a flash ROM, and it doesn't just contain a socket library, but other useful things - a small memory manager, a way of adding firmware modules and the like. I also added a lightweight "virtual filesystem" layer, so that filesystem ROM modules can be written. The first naturally is a network filesystem (dubbed "TNFS" - Tiny (or perhaps Trivial) network filesystem, which is designed to be a bit better as a filesystem than FTP or HTTP, but not as hairy or as complex as SMB or NFS). After prototyping the filesystem, I made a VFS-like layer in the base firmware which exposes a fcntl-like layer with a bunch of low level filesystem I/O operations. By the use of jump tables, you can write a filesystem module to do practically anything filesystem like. It would even be possible to make a sort of "devfs" like Linux has :-)

Amazingly, it actually works. I managed to load a game (Manic Miner) from the network filesystem on Sunday.

I was watching a TV programme on rtve.es for Spanish listening practise, and an article came up about a Spanish-designed ultra low power netbook, which of course runs Linux...and lo and behold, there was a short clip of Richard Stallman speaking about the computer - in Spanish.

So once the programme was over, I had a quick dig around the 'net and quickly found an 8 minute or so segment from Spanish TV where Stallman speaks about the "fundamental freedoms":

http://tuxpepino.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/video-entrevista-a-richard-stallman/

He speaks it slowly and clearly, and I found him very easy to understand, but it was very odd hearing Spanish spoken with an American accent. (I imagine when I try to speak it, my accent is just as bad. I have to say the funniest thing I've heard while learning Spanish is someone speaking it with a Welsh accent...)

My motorbike is almost ready to put on the road, everything is done save for an oil change and changing a blown bulb, and insurance. Oh, and me getting my CBT done which is scheduled for the 22nd. My Dad will give it a testride first though.

I've been doing a bit more work on this Sinclair Spectrum ethernet card of mine. As I expected, the software is 10 times the work of the hardware. The last big bit is going in though, the network file system (naturally, all written in Z80 assembler). The prototype code actually works! I'm implementing a VFS layer, so it'll be possible to just plug in the appropriate filesystem code mount the FS, and code written to access filesystems will just work. This means getting down to all the gnarly assembly language tricks to make it reasonably fast and the code to find out the real implementation function not too long - things like self modifying code and tinkering with the stack. This is what makes coding on the "bare metal" so much fun.

Rockband 2 needs to have "Size of a Cow" by The Wonderstuff. I would *love* to drum to that.

That is all.

It's curious how we use language sometimes, and it really comes home to you how much context matters when you're learning one. The other day, I disvoered Barrapunto - and as you can probably guess - barra = slash, punto = dot. Yes, a Spanish Slashdot! (Mainly aimed at Spain, but including stories from other parts of the world, just like the English Slashdot is mainly USA, but includes quite a bit of other stuff).

Anyway, RMS (Richard Stallman, if you've been hiding under a rock) is apparently giving a few lectures in Spain in the near future. The usual talk about RMS of course cropped up, and then I encountered this: someone asked, "What does he live on, thin air?" (my translation), as in - how does he eat? There were the usual sensible responses (the lecture circuit pays), but one piece of interesting colloquialism had me totally baffled. Someone responded:

"De los tranchetes que lleva entre los dedos de los pies"

The interesting word here is tranchete. According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (which is like our Oxford English Dictionary, the reference tome to the language), tranchete means "cuchilla de zapatero", which means a cobbler's blade (some tool used by shoe makers). Which now had me totally confused, because apparently RMS lives on "the shoemaker's blades that he has between his toes".

So I asked on WordReference forums (which are excellent, by the way. I love WordReference). It turns out that in this context, that "tranchete" is actually a corruption of Tranchette, which is a brand name belonging to Kraft, of those little processed cheese slices ( http://www.kraftfoods.es/kraft/page?siteid=kraft-prd&locale=eses1&PagecRef=2300&Mid=2300 ). It suddenly became very clear. Furthermore someone posted that "tranchete" has sort of become a generic way to refer to preformed slices of cheese like this, a bit like "hoover" means any vacuum cleaner in Britain, not just ones made by Hoover. So any sort of processed soft cheese just becomes "tranchete". So you know where this is going... well, someone was referring to the goop that may exist between his toes as such.

Eww.

But from a language point of view it goes further. "Tranchette" itself turns out to be a loanword from French, "tranche" meaning "slice" in French (and I suppose "Tranchette" probably roughly means "slicelet" - I know very little French but I seem to remember -ette being the way the French form a diminutive version of a word). And "tranchete" in this context probably only has meaning in Spain, because I don't think Tranchette cheese slices are sold in Latin America.

Anyway, enough rambling for one evening.

(Actually, I think I can picture exactly what Tranchettes are. According to the Kraft page I linked above, they are those rubbery slices of cheese between film, the kind of thing you use to make cheeseburgers etc. The site says the process came from the US - a friend of mine in the US used to feed them to his dog as treats...)

So my Cagiva Mito is *almost* ready to go on the road - there's just one more bit of electrical work I need to do. I have most of the fairings back on now, and with them on it doesn't look like a puny little 125 but Pure Sex On Wheels. I will take some pics when I put the bottom fairing on.

I actually gave it a short run today (all of 200 yards, up and down the lane by my house) to verify the clutch was operating properly, and gears were getting selected properly, and the speedometer was working. (All were). It also demonstrated I need to make a proper ramp to get it out of the lane and into my back yard, I just laid an edging stone down as a (rather steep) ramp, and I needed to drive it up because it was too steep to push, and the entrance is narrow and it's surprisingly hard to get a bike up a steep gradient through a narrow entrance when the back wheel just wants to spin on the grass... actually the real solution is to put a large door in the back of my shed so I can park it in there.

Once I get the remaining jobs done, I can get it insured, do my CBT and get it on the road.

Well, I can call the sourdough starter a success. I made a pretty standard brown bread with it. My main worry about it was it'd end up being far too sour, but I think it's just about right and will go great as a bacon butty.

Of course, despite passing the butcher's shop twice yesterday, I forgot to buy bacon.

Someone at foro.speccy.org has a Spectrumera for a wife... take a look at this masterpiece of embroidery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/quenerapu/3391220093/in/set-72157613145351169/

Manic Miner...embroidered!

Sitting in the warm cupboard that also has my combi heater (hot water/central heating boiler) is the latest in my experiment in what bugs and fungi I could find in the kitchen. The sourdough dough is in there, proving, lurking like the microbial monster it is.

The starter that I made has been rising amazingly quickly in that location, and the remainder is now in a bowl in the fridge, fed with a bit more flour, where it will probably lurk for years to come *if* the bread turns out good. The starter certainly did smell rather interesting when I got a lump of it to put in the bread dough.

I'm starting off with a straightforward, simple standard bread, just made with sourdough starter rather than baker's yeast, from there I can hopefully judge whether the starter is any good.

I find kneading dough extremely therapeutic and relaxing.

...and it's called a sourdough starter. I just fed the beast for the first time tonight (actually, just building it up - I started it off almost as soon as I got back from the airport). It seems to be fermenting. By Saturday I may be able to do something with it.

I also flew my T-Rex 500 heli for the first time after rebuilding it after The Crash (caused by an improperly set gyro). Unfortunately, it seems like one of my LiPoly battery packs had died so I only had one pack to fly with. But it flies again. I was so tempted to loop it, but the blade tracking is slightly out so I need to borrow the pitch gauge from the model shop again and do some tweaking (I really don't want to try to set the tracking like with the little helis - by looking eyes level at the rotor disc while holding the heli down!) But it flies so well. I think I might need to up the head speed a little bit too, to improve responsiveness.

What do you need when you arrive home after a 10 hour transatlantic flight, 6 timezones, 2 hours schlepping across London to your connecting flight, and no groceries in the house?

A dead car battery...

Somehow I summoned up enough energy to walk to the supermarket.

By the simple expedient of typing "podcast español" into Google, I found on the first hit a Spanish podcast for people learning Spanish. The podcast is given entirely in Spanish (apart from a couple of sentences at the beginning), teaching Spanish in Spanish. Which is just what I want. I've now learned enough that I can hear all the words when spoken, even if I don't understand all of the words. So a podcast teaching more Spanish in Spanish is what I really wanted.

The podcast is at http://www.spanishpodcast.org/

I've listened to two so far. The format so far is a short "story" on some subject. For the first time, she tells the story speaking quite slowly. Then she explains some of the words and grammar constructs (slowly and clearly in Spanish), then retells the story at the speed people in Spain speak (which is VERY fast, I find. I find the news on telemadrid about 5 times harder to understand than BBC Mundo, which seems to mostly have Latin American presenters).

I've probably done most of my learning of Spanish by being taught in Spanish so far (using Rosetta Stone, which doesn't use translations, but rather images of scenes and a description written and spoken), by reading the BBC Mundo website http://www.bbcmundo.com/ and listening to their news podcast, and watching the videos. While at first it was very hard (especially trying to use BBC Mundo which is NOT a language teaching tool but the BBC's Spanish service), it's starting to pay off.

I've also been put in touch with someone from Spain who is flying for Manx2 (one of the local airlines) who needs practise at English, so hopefully I can get together with a native speaker and actually do some speaking with a real live person at some point.

So I went out again on Sunday to tinker with the car. Thinking it over, I decided that I was being far too gloomy and it couldn't have suddenly lost compression (an initial assumption) because of the total lack of catastrophic sounds.

So I took the cover off the engine and fuel injection manifold to get at the spark plugs. I was surprised to find it has only 2 spark plug wires (to the front two cylinders). The coils are bolted directly to the camshaft cover over the rear two plugs (in a compact unit with a big heat sink on top, with everything expoxied in). It looks like it takes the removal of two allen bolts to remove this.

Going for the path of least resistance, I cranked the engine and listened carefully, with the door open so I could hear any sounds from the exhaust. Hmm. Indeed, it did sound like it was firing on at least one cylinder, which made it crank over fast and sound uneven, hence my original gloomy thoughts about lost compression.

So I took out the number 1 spark plug, and it was soaked in fuel. Obviously plenty of fuel getting in but it wasn't lighting up. The plug looked in very good condition though - the electrode was in great shape, the colour was right etc. It was easy to reach the conclusion that the fault was electrical, which brightened my day a bit. Electrical faults don't tend to have too many zeros after them when you face the bill.

Still, lacking facilities to work on it, and lacking even the Haynes manual, and lacking a clue on how the ignition system and various sensors work in this engine, I had it taken to my favourite car mechanic (who has lots of clue). In the meantime I've been lent a minuscule Fiat Cinquicento (which is actually quite good fun to drive, although it's a bit lacking in the power department).

Today I got a call back from him, and to my enormous surprise, it turns out it was the... WATER temperature sensor that was stopping it from starting. I'll talk to him when he's fitted the new part - but basically, it was dumping way too much fuel into the cylinders and the mixture was overly rich. Presumably, the sensor had failed in such a way that the ECU thought the engine was at some ridiculously cold temperature and needed to start with a very rich mixture. Too rich for 10 degrees celcius...