I recently spent two weeks working in Barcelona, Spain. Here are some of my thoughts about the place.

Externally, the buildings exhibit some amazing architecture. It was a pleasure to spend free time simply wandering on my bike and gawking at the buildings. The architects of Barcelona certainly put a lot of effort into the aesthetics their works project out onto the street. Once inside, however, it seemed like basic considerations for the buildings’ users were not given. Most doors opened inward only, despite this being very dangerous if a building needs to be evacuated, say due to a fire. Very often there were stairs on the way to the elevator, often only two or three steps, making it gratuitously wheelchair inaccessible. This blatant disregard for personal safety and accessibility greatly lessened my admiration for the work the architects put into their buildings’ appearance once I recognized that it was a common theme throughout the city.

After a few days, I realized I was missing plants. Barcelona has very little green space. There are a ton of plazas, but they’re all done edge to edge in paving stones. The residential areas have no lawns or gardens, and there’s not even a strip of grass or trees between the sidewalk and road (instead, they park motorcycles there). I don’t understand why, but Barcelonans feel they have to pave every bit of bare dirt. In the less maintained areas plants would valiantly sprout through the gaps in the paving, but most places even these were trimmed away.

Language is interesting — the native tongue of Barcelona is Catalan, not Spanish. The Catalans call all Spanish castellano, though my Spanish was definitely not castellano but a weak mexicano. (In Spain, if you want some juice, that’s zumo not jugo!) A few people object to you not using Catalan with them — to them español mexicano in Catalonia is a no-no, as if weren’t the case that the only reason our southern neighbor uses any form of español at all is their countrymen of old imposed it upon them.

Except for the tourist areas, the entire city seems to shut down on Sunday. This was annoying, as I had mostly the weekends to explore, and for half the weekend everything is shuttered. Is Spain really that Christian and observant of the Fourth Commandment? I’m wondering if Spain can give their economy a much-needed boost by opening for all seven days.

Catalonian cuisine seemed to magnify some of the worst aspects of American cuisine: The portions are larger, more heavily salted, and have few vegetables. And they add some vices absent in American cuisine: there’s dessert at lunch, and the food is so very bland. I finally got fed up and had a chicken shawarma at a Turkish place just to have some spice, and even it was a pale shadow compared to any İstanbul street vendor. With these large, salty meals, in the summer heat, I was surprised at how small the drinks served are (typically less than 10 oz.) and no complimentary water. And the meals alone are pricey without the overcharging for tiny drinks. (Meals were expensive, but goods in shops seemed quite reasonably priced or even cheap. Faint comfort to a traveler, but better for residents.) Having enjoyed American interpretations of Spanish food, the cuisine was very disappointing.

Despite being there during record summer heat, I found biking around Barcelona to be very nice. (Just dress appropriately and stay hydrated!) The city is small enough that you can bike anywhere in it, and it’s mostly flat or gentle grades. There are many bike paths. Most streets are one-way, though you’re not allowed to turn on a red (oddly, this was adhered to, yet people would go straight on a red if there were no cross traffic). The intersections aren’t well signed, however, and this can pose a problem for navigation when you first go to an area. There are many interesting small alleys, and they don’t twist much, so dead reckoning works well. There’s very little space between parked cars and motoring ones, but this means there’s no danger from being doored, because everyone checks before opening their door, as otherwise they’ll lose it!

NASA rover lowered to surface of Mars
Curiosity lands successfully

I have nothing to say, except WOOHOO!!

— And check this out, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught Curiosity on camera during descent.

The default configuration for Ubuntu is to suspend the laptop any and every time the lid is closed, regardless of whether it’s on AC power or using an external display and keyboard, which is pretty annoying but up until Oneiric the setting wasn’t too difficult to discover and override. With Oneiric, Ubuntu reset the suspend options during the upgrade and removed it from GUI accessibility (Options are bad! Everyone uses computers the same way! No one uses an external KVM with a laptop! Gag.), but 5 seconds of web search reveals how to set it with the command line: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action nothing

Except one problem. This only affects the PM settings if you’re logged in to the primary X console. I also want to be able to use my laptop headless. What to do when not logged in was set under “system” (as opposed to “user”) options in the no-longer-available GUI, but no references I found told how to set it from the command line. This is done by running gsettings set as a system user unsurprisingly, but unfortunately, gsettings doesn’t work from sudo or su, because gsettings wants to start up dbus because … I don’t know why. And it won’t run without X, and gsettings won’t run without dbus. So, how do you run something non-graphical with dbus access? That turns out to be with the dbus-launch command, which can figure out it’s not in X unlike whatever gsettings is doing to start dbus, so what we want is sudo dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action nothing

Ha ha, no. That changes the setting for the root user, but the laptop still suspends. This turns out to be because the settings used when awaiting login aren’t root’s, but gdm’s. So that means to stop the suspending, we do sudo -u gdm dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action nothing

Ha ha, no. See, the documentation on whose settings are used is wrong. It’s not gdm’s settings that are used at all. (That’s whose was used up to Natty.) If you look at your passwd file, you’ll see there’s a new display-manager user in addition to gdm now: lightdm. What the docs don’t say is that it’s that user whose settings are used now. So, no more teasing, this is the command which keeps your laptop powered on: sudo -u lightdm dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action nothing

I observed the recent eclipse from a local park, where a bunch of people had gathered, and there was confusion about why the moon appeared on the lower side of the sun’s disk, rose over the course of the eclipse, and left off the top side, which was a west-to-east direction. (Here in North America, the sun was in the western sky for the eclipse. In Asia, the moon’s disk still moves west-to-east, but as it was in the eastern sky, that started above the sun and ended below.) This is due to a few astronomical facts: The earth’s rotation, the earth’s orbit, and the moon’s orbit are all around axes that point in roughly the same direction; the moon orbits the earth more frequently than the earth orbits the sun and the earth revolves even more frequently; and the moon’s shadow moves across the earth faster than the surface moves from the earth’s rotation. (An eclipse lasts shorter than a day, which is shorter than a month, which is shorter than a year.) Because the axes all roughly align, everything is moving in the same direction, west to east. Because we on the earth’s surface are moving west-to-east with the earth’s rotation, we see everything that revolves more slowly than the earth’s rotation as moving east-to-west in the sky. If the earth weren’t rotating, then we’d see the moon and sun move west to east in the sky, taking a month and year to complete their circuits. The disk of the moon moves through the sky over 12 times as fast as the disk of the sun, so relative to the sun we see it moving west to east.

At the park, I tried explaining this by pointing to the sky and moving my arms along west-east trajectories, but perhaps some diagrams will help. Looking down from above the north pole:

We see how the moon is moving west-to-east through space, but as the earth is rotating west-to-east with such a higher angular velocity, its disk moves east-to-west through our sky.

Now, when an eclipse happens, the moon’s shadow falls on the earth:

Because the moon only needs to pass through a tiny fraction of its orbit to sweep its shadow from one edge of the earth to the other, its shadow moves quicker than the earth’s rotation, so its west-to-east motion overtakes the earth’s surface’s, and we perceive the eclipse as starting to the west and moving east (in this case, starting in Asia and moving east over the North Pacific to North America).

At least that’s the normal case. These axes aren’t quite aligned: As the earth’s axis is tilted some 23 degrees, it’s possible for a polar eclipse to occur “north” of the north pole or “south” of the south pole:

Here the shadow is still moving “west” to “east” from the perspective an observer away in space, but our reference for east and west is the earth’s 23-degree-tilted surface, so reversed, and we’d consider such an eclipse to be moving from east to west. Looking down from above the south pole:

Here we see that the moon is still moving west to east like always, and the shadow follows the moon, but because it passes over the south pole, it goes from moving with the earth’s rotation to against it, so we observe it moving east to west on the earth’s surface.

I read this recent post by William Vambenepe on the campaign to kill RSS, and it bothered me. RSS/Atom is what makes a dynamically updating web usable, and here it as an open, decentralized protocol was being replaced by closed SaaS offerings under central control. For a reason I wasn’t sure of, it reminded me of Richard Stallman’s anti-SaaS essay “The JavaScript Trap” from some time ago. That essay didn’t sit right with me: Because your software comes from a webserver on demand, instead of being pre-installed locally, doesn’t make it or what it does any more or less free, and Stallman’s solution of blocking javascript not tagged as being under a free-software license is impractical. And indeed, in the years since, we’ve seen plenty of open source javascript code written and published, coexisting alongside a vibrant ecosystem of proprietary javascript code, just like we have with client application software.

But it finally gelled: The problem with SaaS is that it welds the data to the code.

Let me explain using “traditional” software applications as an example. You have documents you edit in Microsoft Word. These documents are .doc files which are on your disk drive and you can do anything to them that you can do with any other file: Copy it, delete it, encrypt it, archive it to tape, attach it to an email, etc. All outside of Word. If Microsoft does something to annoy you, you can even edit the documents in WordPerfect or AbiWord or OpenOffice or anything else which understands the .doc file format, which there are plenty of because file formats aren’t protectable as intellectual property.

Contrast this with the SaaS situation: You can’t give a WebDAV address to Google Docs for a document you want to edit in that webapp, and have it open and save to that file. You can’t manipulate your Docs files at all, except through the webapp. The only way you can (eg) attach it to an email is to be using Google’s email webapp, and hope that Google’s programmers have provided integration between them (at time of writing, they haven’t).

In short, if you want to use Google’s word processor, you have to use Google for its data store. You can’t say “I love Google Docs’ UI, but I prefer to use Amazon for data storage.” SaaS leverages control or preference of one aspect (the code) into use of another aspect (the data). Why should the SaaS provider have custody of your files? You can store your data with any number of hosts, and the “cloud” lets you access that data from any client machine. But not if you want to access a webapp. Then it’s only if your data is hosted with the SaaS provider. And that’s the real Javascript trap.

Update: Seems Steve Wozniak has some concerns along these lines, about you not controlling data you upload to a cloud store.

Update 2: Now Wired is sounding this alarm, with the focus on data security.

In mathematics, a function is a mapping from one set (the domain) onto another (not necessarily distinct) set (the range). Now, you can cause all kinds of weirdness if you let elements of these sets be functions themselves. Like, you can define a function k from integers to functions from integers to integers, which are the “constant” functions of that integer: if j = k(x) for some x in Z, then j(y) = x for all y in Z. j is a function which carries the x inside it, waiting to be applied to an argument, which is ignored and now the hidden x emerges. Written more densely, k(x)(y) = x for all x, y in Z.

But mathematics doesn’t allow you to do what’d be the most fun: Calling a function on itself. This is because you’d have to include a function in its own domain, and you get to an infinite regress, because the formal definition of the function includes specifying its domain which contains the function whose formal definition includes its domain … and you can’t build such a thing in set theory.

Okay, suppose I try to get around this problem by introducing a set Σ containing non-function elements which maps 1:1 to the functions from Σ to the integers Z. This can’t work because Σ has to be “bigger” than itself. So, suppose Σ only maps to a few of these functions. This seems like it should do, and I can just declare that any several functions I’m interested in have mappings to Σ, and functions obtained by Cantor diagonalization simply won’t. Let a be the function that maps (some of the functions from Σ to Z) onto Σ and b be its inverse.

Neither a nor b is a function from Σ to Z, so I can’t apply a(a) or b(b), so my attempts at self-applying need to be more subtle.
Let’s define a function from Σ to Z, and declare it to be a element of a’s domain:
    f(ξ) = b(ξ)(ξ) + 1
here ξ is a element of Σ, so b(ξ) is a function from Σ to Z, and b(ξ)(ξ) an integer, so it seems to work out.

I declared f to be in a’s domain, so a(f) exists and is an element of Σ, let’s call it θ.
Now I can finally achieve something close to application-on-itself with f(a(f)) = f(θ).
What can we say about this? Well, its value depends on b(θ)(θ).
But b is the inverse of a, so b(θ) = f, and so b(θ)(θ) = f(θ). But we defined f so that f(ξ) and b(ξ)(ξ) could never have the same value!

See what fun functions of functions returning functions are.☺

Product of all primes
Incremented won’t factor
Thus a larger prime.

 
I wonder if it’ll catch on…

I just got home from biking to the Berkeley Central Library, to find the police and fire department there, the library closed off. The BFD was non-urgently sweeping water out the doors, while the evacuated library building had its fire alarm still going. So, it looks like there was a fire there, extinguished by the sprinklers. It didn’t look like there were any injuries, but I worry about the damage to the books, hopefully it won’t be significant.

I seem to be bereft of interesting prose to spout, so here’s a link dump instead.

File-sharing based Kopimi (as in, “copy me”) recognized as a religion in Sweden. Interview with the founder.

Witness some software management failure recorded in a bug log.

Growing up in postindustrial Wales.

How the Dutch got their bike paths — they fought hard for them.

African development’s killer app: Cell phones.

Enjoy, peeps.

Ten years ago, M.P. Col. Terry Carrico became the first commander of Camp X-ray, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Now out of the military, he talks to the media about the camp he opened.

Carrico also says plainly that he believes it is wrong to keep people indefinitely without trial based on secret evidence.

America should be a nation where this never happens. That we will not imprison people without trial should be woven throughout our identity of what it means to be American. Gitmo is an open wound, self-inflicted, on our very national identity. It’s been bleeding for ten years. We must close it, or lose what being American is.

More: Story from an innocent who spent over 7 years at the camp before being released via habeas corpus. This is what we’ve done. Let’s change. Ten years is long enough to know that this experiment has failed.