My ideal cultural week (or so) in Paris
- 1 day in 7e, up Eiffel Tower to see whole city, then walk around Invalides and École Militaire (would have been even nicer to go into Army Museum)
- 1 day bike tour of Giverny and Monet's garden, being restored and regrown the way Monet grew it in order to paint it. Interior of Monet's house also fantastic due to the dozens of Japanese prints that influenced his aesthetic.
- 1 day Louvre to focus on the grand gallery, 19th centure and famous works of art I hadn't seen yet. Favourites include Ingrès and David's portraits of women.
- 1 day Centre George Pompidou, include main collection and special expositions (this time: Africa Remix)
- 1 day Versailles, include Grand and Petit Trianon as well as main buildings by going for the day pass
- 1 day Musée D'Orsay -- no, make that two, there's so much to see here and I really wanted to go slowly due to my interest in the impressionists and symbolists
- 1 day seeing the Galliera de Mode (not very big) and, inspired, go clothes shopping
- See the end of the Tour de France -- bonus!
- Pop into Musée Cluny for medieval textiles, tapestries, roman baths, stained glass and other cool stuff
- Every day: tiny cups of espresso at street-side cafés, baguettes, cheese, olives, pastries, and sometimes crêpes, ice cream, mussels, frites, duck, foie gras, prosciutto and rocket (roquette) salad

What I still wish I could do:
- Musée Marmottan has still more Monet works (than can be seen at Giverny or Musée d'Orsay) and it's on Bois de Boulogne which features in so many history fact and fiction books
- Rivoli Museums
- Musical Instrument museum
- Chartres
- Orangerie museum in Tuileries, Tuileries gardens themselves
- Grand Palais and Petit Palais
- More time browsing books and shops on left bank

Project Management for Sailors

Have you ever heard project managers talk like this?

We decided to take a different tack with the rollout project, after we ran afoul of the ordering processes. Julie was swamped with acquisitions paperwork and helping Sam learn the ropes, so we deep-sixed the new hardware. Office scuttlebutt is that the boss wants to cut expenditures so it's easier to go with the flow on that one. The OS upgrade project had a minor hitch, but that project is on deck now -- all we have to do is tie up the loose ends and it'll be all sewn up. That will put us on an even keel for the rollout and if nobody rocks the boat the support team will stick with us until the bitter end.

Although this is fictional I've heard all these colloquialisms in the office, and probably only recognize them as nautical because of an interest in etymology and a couple years of sailing. A non-sailor or person for whom English wasn't their native language might have a hard time seeing where these come from (and thus, how to use them properly). Herewith, a guide.

To take a different tack is a change in direction while sailing. Tacking itself means to progress by changing directions frequently, like zigzagging. This is necessary to make progress into the wind: a boat can sail quite fast when it's pointed nearly into the wind, but it can't make progress directly into the wind. Thus the boat zigzags so that the wind comes over the port side first, then starboard, then port. Don't replace with the word "tact" as Michael Rubin did.

To run afoul is to hit a snag, a complication, particularly in laws, regulations, contracts or processes. On a sailing boat a fouled rope is one which is caught up in another rope or another piece of equipment. Fouled ropes can cause quite a tangle if sailors keep doing what they're doing.

Swamped is quite suggestive, as a swamped boat is literally filled with too much water. A swamped boat is not only heavier but also sits lower in the water and presents much more drag on the water, so no wonder a swamped boat moves so slowly.

Learning the ropes is exactly what a sailor does on a new ship. Sailing ships have very individualistic rigging, often the result of years of modifications and jury rigs.

Deep sixing is burying something in six fathoms of water (a fathom is six feet), deep enough for it to be gone.

Scuttlebutt was the term for ship-board gossip. A butt is a cask of a certain size. A scuttle is a small hatch on deck. Thus, the scuttlebutt is a butt lashed onto the deck near the scuttle. Often this butt contained fresh drinking water. How a propos that today this might also be called "water cooler talk".

Go with the flow is simple -- it can apply to the flow of a river but also to the tides. Leaving harbour when the flow (the tide) leaves is much easier than going against the tide.

Hitch is a specific kind of knot tied in the middle of a rope. When winching a rope, winding it or running it through a cleat, a hitch would temporarily stop progress. However, it's not as bad as a fouled line.

On deck meant something physically on the deck of the boat, the exterior top surface where people stand. This probably migrated first to baseball where the batter going next is said to be on deck.

Tying up the loose ends meant to literally clean up the long ends of lines (ropes) hanging off a rigging once it was rigged. Loose ends were dangerous on ship, causing fouled lines and getting in the way of sailors moving around. Naturally this was always the last step in rigging, part of doing the job well.

All sewn up probably refers to the shroud around a corpse prepared for burial at sea. A corpse ought to be weighted down by something like a cannonball. The cleanest way of doing this was to put the cannonball and the corpse together in a piece of sturdy sailcloth and sew up the edges. After being sewn up there was nothing left to do before burial.

Even keel is a ship's position. The keel is the center bottom line of the boat from front to back. A ship with an uneven keel, dipping into the water more at either bow or stern, was probably badly loaded. An uneven keel meant that the ship wouldn't sail as efficiently because it would not present an optimal profile for water resistance. More generally it simply means going smoothly, steadily, without waves rocking the boat.

Rock the boat is too simple to need much explanation...

Bitter end is a very specific end of a line (rope) -- the end that goes around the bitt, a kind of deck post. I guess sailors would be told to pull on or coil the rope until they reached the bitter end.

(Sources: take another tack, deep six, scuttlebutt, all sewn up; also other pages on same sites)

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Originally uploaded by hamstermacaroni.

Mimi is the master of taking friends shots including herself. Or at least so I conclude based on a sample of one photo. This is me and Mimi at a Giants game a couple weeks ago.

This posting has also been a test of the flickr photo-blogging tools. They're impressively easy to use, at least with a blogger blog.

Kim Cameron is working on the "Laws of Identity" and discussing them on his blog. Kim defends the choice of the word "Laws" quite strongly:

I tried to explain that the laws are not what Bob Blakley calls "desiderata" - things that we would like to see. They are the objective characteristics of an enduring identity system at Internet scale.

Oh, but how often we turn out to be wrong about these seemingly objective characteristics. Kim's Law 5 on Pluralism of Operators and Technologies understands that there will be more than just one identity authority, but wishfully states that there must be one "encapsulating protocol (a way of agreeing on and transporting things)". This reminds me of a heated BOF three years ago at the IETF for a WG I ended up being heavily involved in, chartered to take the Jabber protocol and standardize it as XMPP. At the time there was already another IETF WG doing instant messaging, and a friend of mine got up at the microphone, objecting to the formation of the WG, clearly quite upset, saying:

But you can't have two instant messaging protocols! That's like -- that's -- that's like having two IPs!

Of course the irony is that the IPv6 WG was probably right down the hall working out how to co-exist with IPv4 during an extended, possibly interminable transition period. And today we have both XMPP and SIMPLE and gateways between instant messaging protocols -- not just two, but probably more like eight (including MSN, AOL and other pre-existing systems). Much as we'd like computer systems to be simple, considerations of backward compatibility and competition between aesthetic models, among other things, keep things exciting.

I finished a knitting project in March, a purple shawl in Old Shale lace pattern. I just got around to posting the pics this weekend.

America is full of fat people, right? Well, I've been subject to the same delusion. I think it took hold firmly in 1993, when I drove from Waterloo, Ontario, to Milwaukee, for a few days at GenCon, and for some reason was struck by seeing all the fat people in the streets of Milwaukee. Was that simply observer bias? Who knows. Now I live in California and it's very clear to me that Californians don't tend to be obese, but I still had the meme in my head that "Americans are fat" even if California big cities might be some fitness-oriented exception.

Well, I'm encouraged to hear I might be wrong. It seems this is a common myth, and that other well-off countries have similar weight profiles, as explained by Paul Campos in a TCS interview (I keep reading TCS for exactly this kind of myth-busting material though many articles are more boring). I wish the article provided links supporting the claims, because there were a few quite interesting tidbits from the article:

• The CDC had previously estimated 400,000 deaths from obesity in 2004 but has recently had to revise that figure significantly downward (following CDC links, I see the surgeon general now says an "estimated 300,000 deaths[/year] may be attributable to obesity").
  
• The classification of "overweight" in children is defined as the heaviest 15% of children for a particular age cohort. That would mean nearly a million children are labelled overweight because they're defined that way. According to that methodology, 15% of children in a third-world, famine-wracked country would also be overweight. I can't find evidence at CDC of this methodology but there was a study showing that 16% of teens had been found to be overweight [*].
  
• There's no strong evidence that Type 2 diabetes -- one of the diseases justifying the labeling of obesity as an epidemic -- has increased, let alone having increased due to weight factors.
• The governor of Arkansas has written legislation proposing that body weight index be part of kids' report cards. If I were in Arkansas I would write him personally to indicate my disgust at such misguided and potentially harmful interference in the family.
  

One nasty statistic I picked up myself from the surgeon general's note is that "Overweight adolescents have a 70% chance of becoming overweight or obese adults". Yikes, oh no! But combine that with the claim that 60% of adults are overweight or obese, and a sensible person will see that so-called overweight adolescents would have only a slightly higher (if measurable) tendency than non-overweight adolescents to become overweight adults. Sigh.

I completed another long-term project this weekend -- though it was supposed to take only a couple months, I dawdled for over a year. It's a silk-mohair cardign, pattern and yarn chosen to show off some really marvelous Toulouse-Lautrec buttons I found in Vienna. More details and pictures can be found on my knitting gallery.

One of the projects I've been very involved in at OSAF has been the Cosmo project, an effort to take existing open-source WebDAV server technology and turn it into an easy-to-install, easy-to-administer "sharing server" for use by Chandler -- but also supporting standards that make it easy for any client to share too. Last week, Mitch did a demo with Cosmo in the background for the first time and it went smoothly. Thanks BCM!

I have completed a big long-term hobby project, and given it away (I think it was quite a surprise) so now I can reveal what I was working on: a king-size Amish-inspired wedding quilt. It's at the top of my crafts gallery right now if you want to take a look.

I needed to cancel a credit card I wasn't using, so I called up their toll-free line and tried to navigate their voice-activated automated menu. The automated system repeated all the choices ad nauseum, misheard me, and of course didn't have an option for "Cancel this goddamn card". I tried to say "Cancel card" and "Cancel" hoping that would either trigger some bonus feature or get me out of the system and talking to a human. I tried to say "Talk to representative". At some point the system offered the option of "Help me with something else" but when I said that it misunderstood me. Finally the system gave up on me -- literally said it couldn't seem to help me -- and that it would transfer me to a live person (thank-you).

I got some satisfaction, however, when they asked me why I was cancelling their card. "Because of the automated voice assistance system", I said -- and this was typed in without comment by the operator. I only felt the teensiest bit bad for lying.

I'm concerned about conferences with serious gender imbalances, much like Kathy Sierra and Shelley Powers with their recent posts on ETech. However, it's not ETech I'm thinking of.

To put it bluntly, a knitting conference can be hostile to men. The interaction style is touchy-feely -- women walk right up to strangers and fondle their knitted garments, invading personal space. Although some have said that men aren't discouraged from attending and in fact receive positive attention for being there, this can be of the form of "How nice it is to have men attending", "Is this knitting book for your mother?" (ref) and "I'm sure your wife will love this yarn.

All the instructors at knitting conferences are female, and one wonders if the mostly-female program committee could have something to do with that. In the expos or markets, one finds patterns for shawls, purses and female garments. Although some of the market vendors are male, they are clearly there as "booth bunnies", to attract women to look at the yarn. Some of the male vendors are even pressured to wear demeaning and ridiculous knitted vests.

What can we do about it? Well, we can be more equal in our language, for a start. Articles like this, although mentioning a few knitting men, are given titles like "The yarn is flying as more women discover the joys of knitting." Vendors like Habu textiles are taking a step in the right direction, offering stainless steel yarn, which is sure to appeal to men. Joe, a male knitter, has some other great ideas, such as making the act of knitting into more of a competition.

Researching Bali, found this:

The once beautiful Bale’s and other buildings have long since fell into a state of disrepair. It was as if the villagers had ‘locked-on’ to the ring of the till from the tourist dollar. This was more than evident when I had a short but sharp conversation with one of the souvenir sellers:

Tourist: I was here 18 years ago and I am surprised at the change in the village.

Seller: (Abrupt tone) What’s wrong with the village?. Now I have a motorbike. We have TV and electricity and... a phone!

It was my point precisely! Too many cultures in this world are decimated by the tourist dollar. Not only that, the intrusion of the modern world has an overall affect upon the social, religious and political aspects of that society. So much so that it literally forces the entire socio-cultural structure to undergo a metamorphosis in order for adaptation. Having said that, tourism is good for the state of the economy in any country. However, when it has a serious affect on the core culture of that country, then it becomes disadvantageous.

Much as I'd love to visit other countries and have them be all picturesque and unique, I can't begrudge a Balinese his motorbike, TV, electricity and phone. I wouldn't give up my conveniences to live in the style of my grandmother, nor would I appreciate pressure to maintain the religion of my ancestors. A tourist like this one would have to stop being a tourist (being one of those intrusions), go back to the country of his own ancestors, give up his own conveniences etc. for me to take those sentiments seriously.

Philippe pointed me to David Berlind's list of Technology's top ten failures. Two of them are directly about calendar standards, asking for the ability to schedule meetings and share calendars. Another two are email related. Good news, David, we're working on the calendaring standards, and calendar and email implementation issues for you, already. Sorry I can't -- personally -- help you with phones and printing problems just yet.

Who is your favorite Philosopher?

Ekr points out that the question "Who's your favorite philosopher" does not have an analogue in all fields. In highly technical fields, you wouldn't ask "Who's your favorite cryptographer" or "Who's your favorite biologist". OTOH it's common for musicians to talk about their favorite pianist or favorite composer, for painters to have a favorite painter, and for writers to be asked about their favorite writer (it's a formula interview question particularly for writers). So I guess that means that in not only asking the question but insisting on it as a valid or important question, David Brooks is implying that philosophers are like artists, their work subject to aesthetic judgements, preferences and stylistic likes and dislikes. I'm not sure that's what he intended in bringing attention to the question.

There's lots of action in the online calendar world. A fair amount of it gets brought to my attention, which is lots of fun.

• Ted pointed me to Mosuki, and I hope to meet some of the creators shortly. It's more oriented towards personal calendars than the other sites but it does allow you to share.
  
• I met Brian Dear a few months ago and heard about EVDB. Now that it's announced, I can talk to others about it too. Scraping sites for event and venue information sounds like a really valuable service.
• Kragen Sitaker showed me a del.icio.us-like calendar site that seemed pretty cool. Rather than try to scrape every page, his demo let the user pick certain text, send it to the demo site and it would turn that text into an event (pulling out date, time and location if it could) on your calendar.
• Brian posts about Upcoming, a public events site with feeds to let you know about event categories you're interested in, and a way to add events you want to your personal calendar. It has a HTTP/iCalendar interface that allows users to synch into iCal. According to del.icio.us, upcoming is the biggest new thing with hundreds of bookmarks.
• So far, Trumba's newly announced OneCalendar gets a rather less enthusiastic response. Trumba consists of several ex-Visio guys according to their press release, and like EVDB they have high-powered investors so expect some noise. Already you can synch with Outlook which has got to be a highly desired feature.
  
• Of course, we are working on some of the same stuff too, only with a federated server approach. When you share your calendar with Chandler you can share it on any WebDAV or CalDAV server (see also recent article). We're working on a WebUI for such shared calendars so that the calendar owner or their friends can view the shared calendar or individual events just by going to the URL in the browser. We may do tagging just like everybody else, too.

So far I don't use any of these, there isn't quite enough "there" there, whether it's users I want to share with or features I need. My calendar is in iCal, stored locally, and I don't even share it with anybody, though I do share one other person's iCal calendar. But I don't think that isolation will last long given the exploding options.

I wonder what Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are going to do in this space? Yahoo has more of the world's calendar info than any other site at this moment, because of its excellent support for group calendars. What will Yahoo do with that data? If it does not expand its features soon, possibly allowing users to synch up calendar data on the site with their client software, Yahoo will soon see its calendar data decay and vanish. As for the two gorillas, I really don't have any idea whether they will buy, innovate, or crush.

In response to my last post, Mark pointed out that .NET's HTTPClient supports pipelining. Heikki said that Mozilla put in support for this but it isn't turned on normally because so few servers support it. Furthermore, Heikki reports that tests showed only a 7% performance increase when Mozilla uses pipelining. The Mozilla FAQ is a good start for information on this though it doesn't have the data.

The application I had in mind (Chandler) does more synchronization than browsing over HTTP/WebDAV. For example, if the user decides to work offline, and while offline moves a bunch of resources from one collection to another, then goes online again, Chandler would have to issue one MOVE request for each moved resource. With pipelining, Chandler could theoretically fire each request off and wait to start seeing the responses come back in order over the same connection. The only thing limiting throughput is the bandwidth and MOVE requests and responses don't take up that much. Without pipelining, Chandler has to wait for each response before sending the next request. Now this work is limited by latency, multiplied by the number of resources being moved.

Still, I don't consider this proof that pipelining would be useful. It would be great to see more data one of these days -- assuming, of course, that there really is a performance problem in the first place.

Are there any open source HTTP client libraries that support pipelining? Are there any open source libraries that solve an isomorphic problem with a different protocol? So far I'm not turning up anything but this is the kind of thing that is a little hard to Google for.

At the gym last night I was lifting weights and a man started this converstaion.

Man: "What are you going to do with all those muscles? Beat up the boys?"
Me: "Yup."
Man: "Well then, stay away from me.

What am I supposed to make of that? Seriously, I'm asking here.

... So this hat doesn't fit me. The question is, would it fit a guy with a size 7 3/4 head? Joe, you might or might not want to click through :)