2004-12-29
Ineke Strouken en Olivier Rieter
Irina brought this book from the library; it's a publication by the Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur, the Dutch Centre for Popular Culture. The various papers in the book investigate the difference between popular perception of traditions and the real history of traditions.
2004-12-28
Olivier Clement
The Orthodox Theologisch Vormingscentrum de Heilige Johannes de Theoloog has already translated many courses and books originally published by l'Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge. However, being chronically understaffed and overworked, the translations are given to the students as soon as the actual translation has finished. There's no time for proofing, and no time for an accurate colofon either. So I don't know to which of Olivier Clements numerous works the book I just finished belongs -- the English translation of the Dutch translation or interpretation of the French title is, more or less, "The Heyday of Oriental Christianity", and it's Church history, not a contemporary sermon. Not that oriental Christianity isn't flourishing, because it is, at least in the occidental Netherlands, where we're looking for a bigger church building again, because we simply don't fit in the building we own now.
Anyway, apart from the forgiveable typoes and the rather flowery style -- Olivier Clement is a French intellectual from the twentieth century -- this book is the goods. It is a thorough investigation of the history of theological thought in the Orthodox Church, in particular as influenced by the Western Church during the century preceding and following the Great Schism.
Clement must be a gifted writer, and the translator has done his or her level best, because even in the hasty translation into Dutch, Clement manages to make the particular issues surrounding the filioque and other thorny theological issues quite clear, often in a single paragraph or even in a well-put sentence.
It's refreshing enough to get something to read that shows the Orthodox vision of the Great Schism, but it is admirable that the author doesn't get bogged down in a defensive (or offensive) position, but manages to show where both sides were right, and where they were wrong in an objective way, while at the same time not falling into the trap of considering everything through the distortion of a contemporary set of values, nor through an anemic impartiality where no longer any moral decision is possible.
It's a pity that the Dutch translation is apparently incomplete -- the footnotes are indicated as missing, but I also fear that there are rather more than the 100 pages we were given... Next time I'm in Brussels I should ask for the French title, so I can acquire it.
Volume 13 of Studies in Church History, edited by Derek Baker
Being temporarily outwitted by some hairy coding problems in Krita, I'm trying to clear some square metres of floor space by doing Fading Memory entries on books I've read in December, when I didn't have time to write anything. And Fading Memories was, after all intended to be a faithful log of my reading so I wouldn't forget what I had already read before. So, without further ado, a few notes on this curious book I borrowed from the Church library. (Which I'm librarian of for the Western section, with Julia doing the Cyrillic section. Not that I cannot read the Cyrillic script, if there's one thing that has always come easily to me it's been learning scripts, but my Russian has really detoriated since 1992, when I spent a year learning the language well enough to read a grammar of Tangut published in Leningrad.)
Anyway, this book, published Blackwell in Oxford in 1976, is typical of its kind: a regular series where scholars in a particular discipline can publish their papers, somewhat thematically ordered, but not too much, most of them read at one particular conference. The kind of book someone who hasn't published in it buys if one paper turns out to be really interesting, against all expectation, or which you have a subscription to if it's your field.
However, it turned out to contain a nice paper by Bishop Kallistos on the secret conversion to Orthodoxy by an English peer in the first half of the nineteenth century and a really amusing account of corruption in the Greek church under the Turks -- a bishop was said to eat lakes of yoghurt for breakfast and mounds of filleted sardines for lunch. Poor man... The article by Nicolas Zernov on the Russian diaspora in the west and its effects on the Christian West is probably why my unknown predecessor in the library has bought the volume; it's interesting, but a little too self-congratulatory for my tastes. And so the collection winds to its somewhat weary end: twenty papers from the late seventies, I should not expect all of them to be interesting in 2004.
2004-12-27
All was not well with the world, this Christmas, which makes me almost feel guilty that we had a thoroughly good time, this year. Our Church was so packed that it was next to impossible for the priest to actually get far enough into the reception room to bless the table. But despite the sometimes literal crunch, everyone was relaxed and glad to be there -- but it's true that we need a new, bigger church building, as the first four people I spoke with immediately told me. We're working on that.
Our Uzbek friends have won a small victory over our immigration and naturalization department and are allowed to start a new asylum procedure. And they joined us for dinner and the singing of Dutch, English and Latin Christmas carols afterwards.
The next day, yesterday, we had only twelve people in Church, but, well, that was to be expected, on Boxing day. A nice, convivial meeting with the priest afterwards, and an equally nice evening with my father left me in a fine mettle to tackle Irina's hard disk today.
But I must admit that working on Krita was far from my mind -- fortunately Sven, Casper and Cyrille have been working hard. Casper has almost finished a rewrite of the core code that should help performance a lot and make it easier to actually get at pixels to do stuff with them. Cyrille has done a lot of work higher-level code that should finally make it automatic to use selections in tools and filters. And Sven is working on something called autogradients -- a widget that makes it as easy to define and use a gradient as it currently is to pick a color.
And tonight, and tomorrow, I have reserved for finishing the cms stuff. When I'm done, Krita will have the infrastructure to achieve feature parity with Photoshop 6 on the color management stuff, and an actual implementation that goes a long way to have all those features.
And today it's snowing...
Ruth Dudley Edwards
This book is part of the series about Robert Amiss and Jack Troutbeck -- this volume is set before Publish and be Murdered, and is another really nice read. It's clear that Ruth Dudley Edwards main intellectual contention is that abuse of language to cover up for small-minded, spiteful, fuzzy thinking is something abhorrent. And in that she's right, of course.
In this book she makes fun of the academic crowd who confuse the person who performs a certain function in a meeting with a piece of furniture, and very good fun, too. Apart from the amusing invective against the PC crowd, there are some very interesting character sketches, notable Mr. Pusey and Mary-lou, and a horribly believable plot.
On to the third installment -- one about fox hunting.
For making backups. No, it's an excellent day. Trust me on this. I had been intending to make a backup for, and I hardly dare admit it, three months. So, Friday afternoon Irina's laptop crashed when noatun tried to reads its config file -- a config file that happened to be located on a bad block. And our last set of backups was from September
You can easily determine when we have had a major system crash by looking at the dates on the backups. A period where there is a cd for every two weeks means a crash has happened prior to that period. And when the backups become less and less frequent, you can bet that we have forgotten about that crash and that a new one is imminent...
Fortunately, I found the instructions at Namesys quite clear. First, I needed to create a list with bad blocks using /sbin/badblocks, and then feed that list to reiserfsck: reiserfsck --rebuild-tree --badblocks badblocks.txt /dev/hdc1, and everything went swimmingly. Once I had disabled DMA because using DMA on a broken hard disk made the computer hang.
So now we have backups again... And Dell is going to deliver a new hard disk today or tomorrow.
2004-12-14
That was what my daughter's presentation on Linux was. She'd taken six copies of Knoppix, but could've given away twenty to her classmates (there are twenty-three kids in her form), and one to each of her three teachers. Because not just the kids, but also the teachers were mightily impressed by Linux.
While she was careful to stress the freedom message, and touched lightly on the gratis aspect, what people impressed most turned out to be:
And in that order. This is interesting because it was not just the kids who apparently like something just for being different, but also the teachers.
The no-money aspect wasn't as interesting apparently -- reinforcing my impression that for Windows users software and money don't seem to be connected at all, but the it's-legal-to-copy-and-share aspect (which is a subset of the freedom aspect, but not apparent to them, I think) was a big hit. These kids like to share, to copy cool stuff and give it a try.
Oh, and everyone was enchanted by Tux, the Gnu, the SuSE gecko and the other geek stuff...
All in all, a well-done piece of advocacy and richly rewarded by the Dutch equivalent of an A. Naomi was elated with her success. Now I hope that none of the kids has a really weird computer Knoppix doesn't work with, or all is undone!
(For statistical purposes: more than half of Naomi's is not native Dutch. Most non-Dutch kids are Turkish and there is a handful of other nationalities. The mainland Chinese boy was particularly interested.
In another news... I'm not Gill, whoever he is when he isn't designing typefaces, I'm Boudewijn :-). And I have this inkling that it cannot be too hard to recognize iso images for what they are and have k3b act accordingly... And actually my first reaction was even more user-like than I wrote down. I thought that, well, maybe the image itself was a dud so I downloaded a new one, from a different website. Only then programmer mind kicked in and constructed a mental model of what went wrong. This mental model constructing thing is something I've noticed is what's absolutely absent by people who have never programmed, and it's something you cannot take for granted.
What would help, and what I would like to have as a programmer is the kind of movies Bart made of Krita where you can see exactly what people do and how they try to accomplish it. Those two movies were really helpful, and as a result, the palettes can now slide away into the window border when not needed. Krita's slowly getting complete cms integration with littlecms, too, but the going is hard, and complicated by me not being very fit and not knowing anything about the topic.
2004-12-13
The most frequently heard argument about usability is that programmers are such a special breed that they can no longer see that's what a perfectly fine interface for them is incomprehensible to the ordinary user. At which point the fifth cavalry arrives in the form of usability enthusiasts^Wspecialists, who proceed to tell the geeks where they get off.
However, I have just discovered that while I'm a certified (okay, it's a Sun Java certification, but it's a certification of sorts) programmer, I can be a stupid user with the rest of them. A very human feeling, I'm sure.
I tried to use K3B to burn a couple of Knoppix CD's for my daughter, who's doing a presentation on GNU/Linux at school tomorrow. I thought maybe she'd like to raffle them off to her class mates. (The brave kid is only ten years old, but I digress.)
I dragged the Knoppix image I had downloaded to the the big shelf with the cd and dvd icons, and started to burn my new project. Wrong... I had actually enveloped the iso image in a new iso image or something, and the freshly burned Knoppix wouldn't boot.
Of course, I should have chosen Tools/CD/Burn CD Image -- at least, when I did that, everything worked, except it didn't actually choose the right file. The image was in /home/boud/Desktop and selected in the file panel. When I choose the Burn CD Image menu option it assumed /home/boud/. But that was soon put to rights by my enormous geek skills -- there's a nice select file button. From that point on, everything was plain sailing.
And I have added "Genuine User" to my other credentials. Or was that luser? (And I'm still not sure my diagnosis was right, in the end. Could've been a freak incident that destroyed two CD's in quick succession from a box without any other duds. Could be.)
Makes a backup of his entire CD collection before the discs start doing their famous vinyl impersonation (hiss, crack, pop, scratch, hang and jangle). I'm not particularly prudent, but after a four or five CD's became essentially unplayable, I have decided to make a backup of all my CD's. It's not that arduous a task, I've only got maybe two hundred CD's, and konqueror's audiocd:/ protocol handler makes the task easy enough, and it turns out that those databases with track names even have the track names for the music I listen to, like Camerata Trajectina. (Bah, their website doesn't work, apparently with either Konqueror or Firefox)
One thing bugs me, though. Why can't I get rid of the message box that tells me "AudioCD: Disk damage detected on this track, risk of data corruption."? I know those disks are old. Just do you best, my dear audiocd:/, and give me the data as best as you can. No need to whine about it. Just give me that nice checkbox 'Never show this message again."
2004-12-10
And I managed to buy a new power-supply for my Pismo. As the man said who sold me the thing (it's the whiter iBook version rather than the more bronze Powerbook version of the Yoyo), the Pismo is a beautiful machine. Pity about the rotten LCD panel...
But at least we'll have money for a small laser-printer this January. And given that we're still using the HP Deskjet 500 we bought for my 386sx twelve years ago, a printer that has seen about sixteen computers pass, we may well feel it's high time.
Ruth Dudley Edwards
I've got an enormous backlog in reading matter owing to having been rather ill in the last few weeks. One of the books that have helped make the week bearable was this one. A really nice detective, I call it. There's even a Wodehouse reference in it -- rather in the open, but still.