Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Another thing that kept me busy over the last few days was enhancing, tv_grab_nl_upc, my program for fetching television guide data for UPC's digital cable network in The Netherlands and outputting the results in XMLTV format.

Of all the stuff I've written, this is possibly the most obscure and least useful to anyone else (of course, I've said that before and been wrong). Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of invention, and I need this program, so I've been working on improving it over the Christmas period.

Specifically, this new version uses some heuristics to try to derive a subtitle for the programme in question. Ideally, this should be the episode name for a series, the destination city/country for a travel programme, etc. Sometimes, UPC includes this kind of information as part of the programme's description, but programmatically determining whether the first sentence of the description is suitable for use as a subtitle is a tricky business; hence the many man hours that have gone into the 0.5.0 release, as I had to perform a fair amount of textual analysis and parser refinement before reaching the point that plucking text from the description to use as the subtitle was logical enough to be more use than hindrance.

Anyway, 0.5.0 of tv_grab_nl_upc is now out, even if I'm the only one who cares.

It's been some time since my last entry (an obviously true statement, if ever there was one).

After Fenella, Tim and the junior Oatleys departed, there was nary a moment to spare before we, ourselves, embarked on the annual Christmas pilgrimage to Providence, to celebrate Yuletide with Sarah's folks. Well, when I say celebrate, I'm talking mostly of Sarah; I'm more of a spectator, really. Christmas isn't really my bag, atheist and purist that I am.

We've been here for two weeks and are leaving tomorrow, bound for Iceland, where we'll spend five nights before returning home to Amsterdam. I'm looking forward to soaking our bones in Bláa Lónið and eating lots of skyr.

Sarah's new T60 Thinkpad turned out to be very unstable and had to be returned to Lenovo. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to order her a new one and have it arrive before we have to leave. Bummer. Since you can't order Lenovo products on line in The Netherlands, I'm not sure what we're going to do now. I hate the prospect of having to settle for an inferior, more expensive machine, such as the Sony Vaio, but it may come to that. Waiting for the next time we're in the US isn't really an option.

We've been blasting through the sixth series of The Sopranos this week and I must comment on how great it has been. For me, series five represented something of a slump, but the sixth series is back on form with a vengeance. In fact, as far as my recollection goes, it's one of the best seasons of all six. We'll be watching the twelfth and final episode tonight, after Eloïse goes to bed.

Speaking of the small, red-haired one, she's had some kind of stomach bug over the last few days, which resulted in diarrhoea. This, in turn, led to a nasty case of nappy rash, which caused some sleepless nights for the whole family, but she seems to be getting over it now. Thank goodness. It's truly hellish when your child is sick, in pain and distressed, yet you can't do anything to help.

What else?

Lumines II for the PSP came out and managed the rare feat of being a sequel that surpassed the original. This is even more laudable, when you consider how good the original was.

Lumines II keeps the magic alive by not trying to reinvent the game. Essentially, the game play is identical in this new title; the differences are in the details. The game has been jazzed up with lots of new skins, a new soundtrack and a bunch of music videos providing animated backgrounds. The only problem with this is that some tracks are vastly better than others, but since one is caught up in the frenetic game play, one scarcely notices the pop videos behind the playing field.

And that's it, really. Our lives really are quite dull and predictable these days, but we have nothing to complain about.

I hope that 2007 will see us travel a little more extensively than in 2006. Although we had a fabulous two month trip in the summer, that was pretty much it for our European travel last year. I'm hoping we'll be able to travel to a few more destinations this year, if Sarah's inburgering allows.

Anyway, Iceland, here we come! This will be Eloïse 's 12th country.

We made it to Reykjavík early this morning, after a surprisingly short 4h 40m flight from Boston. Eloïse shocked us by sleeping all the way there; then by not grumbling when she had to walk off the plane, through passport control and down to baggage reclamation; then once again when we boarded a coach from Keflavík to Reykjavík and she simply sat on Sarah's lap and mumbled not a word; then one final time when we had to change to a small minibus at the BSI bus terminal. All the way to the hotel, there wasn't a peep out of her. Amazing. That girl travels so well.

Happily, our room was already available, even though it was only 08:00, so we checked in, drew the curtains, stripped off and crashed.

Unfortunately, we slept exactly as if we were on EST, so we didn't awake again until 14:00 (the bells chiming 2 o'clock on Austurvöllur woke me up). A rapid shower ensued, clothing was tugged on and we dashed outside, eager to enjoy the dying embers of Iceland's short daylight.

Ninety minutes later, it was all over, and we were plunged once again into darkness.

Reykjavík has even more charm in the winter than in the summer, if that's possible. Every café and restaurant positively beckons to you, with its soft lighting, condensation-drenched windows and relaxed clientele, to come in from the cold and enjoy a sandwich and a cup of some of the finest coffee I've sampled anywhere in the world. So, that's exactly what we did.

An amble around a couple of shops, especially 66° North, was about the only other thing we felt like doing today. Eloïse wouldn't have had much patience for more activity than that, so we took it really easy. She'd had a long day and had been on her best behaviour, after all.

Dinner was at the wonderfully cosy Galileo, an Italian restaurant we'd eaten at on a previous trip.

The meal was fabulous, but prices around here continue to reflect the amazingly high standard of living to which Icelanders are accustomed. I think tonight's meal is the most expensive we've ever eaten, and you have to believe me when I say that this was a great restaurant, but definitely not an extraordinarily expensive establishment.

No matter. As I said, the food was outstanding, so we were more than happy to pay a just reward for it.

Outside, it was now raining, cold and pitch black. Somehow, it only adds to this city's irresistible charm. We stopped to buy skyr on the way back to the hotel.

Time for me to go back upstairs, before Sarah gets the hump with me for being gone for too long.

There are far too few places in this world where one can enjoy a candlelit breakfast, whilst watching the sun rise at 11:15. Who the hell needs daylight, anyway?

I bought two albums by Ragnheiður Gröndal today, after listening to them in the very relaxed surroundings of the 12 Tonar record shop on Skólavördustígur. They let you sit down on these big couches, pour you a cup of fabulous espresso, and give you a personal CD player to listen to anything in the shop for as long as you like. If more towns had old-school record shops and service like this, we wouldn't all be buying on-line at Amazon these days. I just wish I had more time to hang out there, but with a little girl in tow...

We spent a king's ransom at 66° North today, but Eloïse now has a very nice jumpsuit as a result. The shop has moved since the last time we were here, and is now located on Laugavegur.

No plan for tomorrow yet. Eloïse is a bit under the weather again, so we'll have to wait and see.

You've problem heard of the global issue of street children, right?

Well, Iceland has them, too. However, these are not helpless, wee bairns left to fend for themselves in the harsh sub-Arctic climate by their parents; rather, they are quite deliberately left outside the city's many cafés and shops whilst their parents eat, drink and shop around inside.

You see, here it's still 1900. Not in the sense that one has to go without any mod cons here: quite the contrary. No, I mean that Iceland apparently has no nutters, no disenfranchised, dispossessed fruitcakes with a need to vent their spleen on the society that (admittedly) created them.

Icelanders enjoy such a high standard of living, that there is seemlingly (perhaps even factually) no serious crime here; and there is certainly no crime involving the kidnapping of children. A host of Icelanders have confirmed this to us.

As a consequence, parents feel quite at ease as they park their prams outside the city's various establishments, mostly invisible from view inside, and then enter to go about their errand or recreation. Perhaps they still leave their front doors unlocked here, too. What about car doors? I haven't tried one.

Anyway, "When in Rome...", as they say, so we've also taken to the habit of parking our little girl outside each of the places that we visit. The rucksack and the camera are removed from the pram's base, because somone might steal them, but a human child? No commercial value, I guess. Try searching eBay for "Icelandic baby": you won't find any real ones.

It's a shame it's not safe to do this anywhere else in the western world, but that's the fact of the matter. It just goes to show how civilised this country is, whereas most others are either stuck at barbarism or have already passed civilisation and descended squarely into decadence.

Given the lack of crime, the lack of an army (which means that Iceland has made few enemies abroad), the lack of problems stemming from rampant non-western immigration, and the lack of pollution, one is left pondering the mystery of why one hasn't yet sold up shop and moved here post haste.

I'm sure there's a downside, too, but it's not readily apparent. Time to start reading in detail about Icelandic society, I think.

Eloïse still has diarrhoea, but it doesn't seem to be affecting her spirits. As a precaution, though, we spent another lazy day in Reykjavík.

Tomorrow, though, we're off on the South Shore Adventure excursion. We could've hired a car and done it solo, but this seems easier this time around, all things considered. Otherwise, we'd have to deal with picking the car up, bringing it back, getting the baby seat installed, etc.

So, it's an early start tomorrow and a long day ahead, as we take in the Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss waterfalls, the Reynisdrangar and Dyrhólaey rock formations, and the village of Vík. We've been to all of these places before, but are eager to see them again in the midst of the untamed Icelandic winter.

Speaking of winter, it snowed for a good part of the day today. How appropriate for a country with ice in the name. The city took on a new dimension, which only added to its charm. It's not difficult to tell that I have a great fondness for Reykjavík, is it? If you've been here, though, you'll understand that that fondness is not misplaced and why.

Dinner tonight was at the superlative Tveir Fiskar. It's a famous Icelandic restaurant, down by the harbour, and the food was quite frankly a gastronomic orgasm. Seriously, I think I've just eaten the finest meal I have ever had in Europe. In fact, only Mama's Fish House on Maui even comes close, but that meal was too long ago to judge objectively against this evening's. It's just possible, however, that I've just eaten the best meal of my life.

The night sky is ablaze with fireworks as I write this. It's been a week since the New Year was welcomed in, but not everyone seems to have exhausted their supply of fireworks on that occasion. Having seen photos of the celebrations of New Years gone by, I can only continue to hope that we will one day make it out here in time for New Year, which seems to go off in inimitable style.

Time to get some rest ahead of tomorrow's early start.

The alarm went off at 07:30 this morning, not the kind of time I usually like to get up, but we had a ten hour excursion planned for today, so time was of the essence. We couldn't have picked a better day, since Reykjavík dies a death on Sunday.

Eloïse slept for most of the first phase of the journey, as we headed out of the capital and down along the south coast.

In addition to the sites I mentioned yesterday, our driver was cool enough to take us to the Sólheimajökull glacier, which this particular tour usually only stops at during the summer months. We'd been there before, but it was great to go back and compare it in the winter.

The light on the snow-capped mountains down there was very eery, first with a blueish tint and then a faint orange hue before sunset. The sun barely made a visible appearance, crawling just to a shallow angle above the horizon.

I won't go into detail on the trip here, so suffice it to say that it was a great day out and Eloïse was a trooper throughout.

Back at the hotel at just after 19:00, there was scarcely time to make dinner reservations and head out the door. Dinner tonight was at Þrír Frakkar, which means Three Frenchmen, named after the former owners. Yet again, it was a fabulous restaurant, serving a wide variety of fish dinners in a homely atmosphere. It also serves up puffin breast starters and gigantic whale peppersteaks, neither of which I can (hypocritically) bring myself to eat, but I'm sure they're delicious.

We were considering another excursion for tomorrow, but Sarah's pretty knackered, so I think we'll just lounge around and try to get into the frame of mind that we live here, and try to accurately sense what that would be like. I think we're actually getting pretty good at that now, with this, our third trip to Iceland.

Incidentally, Iceland is full of Russians at the moment, most of them apparently members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Quite an effort is made by Iceland to attract them for their church's Christmas, which actually falls on 7th January. This effort has evidently been hugely successful.

Our final day in Reykjavík was suitably lazy; until the evening, that is.

At 19:30, we were picked up for from the hotel and driven to another bus for the start of our Northern Lights tour. We did vaguely get to see the lights, but they were so faint that our driver said he didn't really count it as a sighting.

That was a real pisser. The driver, a really nice expatriate Englishmen, drove us half the way to Þingvellir to get us away from the city lights of Reykjavík and improve the conditions for viewing. Up there in the hills, it was bloody freezing, about -16°C with wind chill factored in. A thick Icelandic jumper, thick jacket, scarf, hat and gloves left me feeling as good as naked up there. I was chilled to the marrow of my bones, all for naught.

Eloïse , on the other hand, tramped around happily in the snow, snug and warm in her new jumpsuit and balaclava, both of which had been purchased just a couple of days before. She looked entirely suited to the conditions.

Speaking of the conditions, they were actually perfect for viewing, we were told: freezing cold, clear skies (no moon, but starlit so clearly that I can't remember seeing a night sky like that before) and a place far from the city lights. Such conditions give one a 90% chance of significant activity, but we were fated to fall into the other 10%. Oh well. There'll be a next time.

With no Northern Lights to view, there wasn't much else to do, except chat to the driver and gain his perspective of Iceland as a foreigner living there. It was very interesting to hear what he had to say, and he answered many of our questions about the society, its politics and the language.

We didn't get back to the hotel until after midnight, which, after packing, allowed us about three hours of sleep before we had to get up again for the bus ride to the airport at Keflavík. Getting up at 04:30 is no fun at all, especially when one has to lug big, heavy bags back and forth, soothe a cofused baby, change buses, etc.

Our flight took off on time at 07:50 GMT and got us back to Amsterdam at 11:50 CET. We were outside our front door by 13:00, so we made very good time.

The weather here is strange. It was 13.2°C today, a full 23°C (or 41°F, if you're still in the dark ages) warmer than in Reykjavík. Whereas my thickest layers of clothing weren't enough to keep me warm last night, I'm removing layers here to stop myself sweating. Coming straight after Iceland, it feels like spring here.

It took quite some time, but I finally finished preparing the photos of our summer trip whilst in Providence. If you have any interest in visiting Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary or Austria (well, Vienna, anyway), you may be interested in looking at these.

I have removed many of the poorer ones, but I should probably prune the collection down a lot more. We were gone for two months and took a huge number of photos.

Whereas it took us five months to get the photos of our summer trip on-line, it's taken us only a week to prepare the photos of our most recent trip to Iceland. It definitely helped that there were several thousand fewer of them.

More than ever before, Sarah and I felt very comfortable in Iceland on this trip. It's very easy to imagine living there at some point in the future. The language is the only major obstacle, but that, too, is surmountable, of course.

In fact, I purchased a couple of books from a Reykjavík bookshop to help me learn Icelandic. I already knew it to be a difficult language, essentially unchanged from the Old Norse spoken 1000 years ago, but now I've seen the grammatical evidence. With its multiple genders, declensions and inflections, Icelandic is going to be a major challenge to learn, especially at a distance (where I have no opportunity to speak it or have my mistakes corrected). It remains to be seen whether I can summon enough discipline to dedicate enough time to the endeavour.

I upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.34 today and installed mod_fcgid, a FastCGI implementation, which should hopefully provide a few performance improvements.

I wish it was easier to merge the latest versions of the default templates with my older versions, which I've customised quite a lot. Unfortunately, the new templates make use of a radically revised set of stylesheet classes, so it's not possible to cut and paste my customisations into to the new templates. A lot of work would be required to figure out how the new ones work and it's just not worth it for a site like this.

Even though it was a slow and painful process (and one I said I wouldn't bother to endure), I moved the blog over to the latest Movable Type templates in the course of yesterday.

The hardest part was getting the three column look that I favour to work properly. Even though Movable Type's styles-site.css stylesheet contains styles whose name suggest that everything should just fall into place, that's not the case; or, at least, not for me, as I don't know how to apply them properly.

In fact, whilst Movable Type's site is definitely not short on reasons why you should upgrade to the latest version, it falls down on telling you how to actually do so. All of the instructions are aimed at first-time installers. The only upgrade instructions refer to migrating from the standard version to the Enterprise product.

Apart from twiddling with the stylesheet, the biggest debugging headache was trying to figure out why the archives wouldn't rebuild. Apache kept returning HTTP 500 errors. I debugged this by removing chunks of MT tags from the archive templates until they could successfully be rebuilt.

However, once I'd found what I thought was the culprit, starting afresh with an archive template and removing just that one tag no longer fixed the build problem. It was starting to seem as if the quantity of MT tags, not the type, was the issue.

I suspected some kind of time-out problem, possibly with mod_fcgid, so I turned to Google and eventually came across documentation that mentioned the IPCCommTimeout configuration directive. This controls the time-out when waiting for a response from a fastcgi application. Since the archive build process takes longer than this directive's default setting of 20 seconds, mod_fcgid abandons the task, causing Apache to return an internal server error.

Simple, once you've localised the problem, but it was actually quite a bit of work to turn that up.

The next step will likely be to move the blog's data from Berkeley DB files to MySQL, which should considerably improve its performance.

The migration of our blog data from Berkeley DB to MySQL is now complete and the performance of the site has, as expected, improved somewhat. By how much depends on what you're doing: reading, commenting, searching, etc.

I'm sure I'll find a few minor residual glitches here and there over the next few days, but the major work is now complete.

Some time ago, I turned off the ability of unauthenticated users to comment on entries made to this blog. Registered TypeKey users could still comment, but apparently it was too much trouble for a lot of people to register with this service. After all, who cares about being able to comment on what I say?

Well, in case you do care, I've now switched unauthenticated commenting back on and moved to a CAPTCHA-based scheme for distinguishing between human and automated users. If you want to comment on an entry now, you just have to answer a simple question with a one word answer and your comment will be accepted for publication.

Note, however, that if you are a registered TypeKey user, nothing changes. You can continue to post comments as an authenticated user without having to jump through any hoops.

You've got to hand it to the American Democratic party, when it comes to backbone, they don't have a vertebra between them.

Tens of thousands of people marched in Washington yesterday against Bush's illegal war in Iraq. Guess how many of them were Democratic politicians. Any idea? The answer is: one. That's right, only one of them had the balls to stand up and be counted.

Why not more? you may be wondering. Well, the answer is as simple as it is depressing.

You see, many of those involved with yesterday's march are calling for Bush to be impeached. After all, he lied to the world in an attempt to morally justify an illegal and bloody war against the people of Iraq, selling it to the gullible American public and his reluctant European allies under the monicker of freedom and democracy, when really it was a quest to secure oil supplies.

That's pretty despicable, I think, and pretty much everyone I know seems to agree. So, given that this man has disgraced his nation worldwide and contributed to the image of America as a greed-ridden playground bully with more brawn than brain, you'd think his political opposition would be making the most of a demonstration against his continued pursuance of oil for blood, wouldn't you?

But they're not. The Democrats don't want to burn their fingers on calls for Bush's impeachment. No-one wants to bite off that much political commotion to chew. Perhaps it's a case of people in glasshouses not wanting to throw stones, but I can't see it as anything other than what it appears to be at face value: rampant cowardice.

So, whilst the Republicans went all-out to impeach Clinton for the actions of his penis and his lies concerning those actions, the Democrats are not prepared to return the favour for Bush, whose actions have left more than 3000 American soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Whose is the greater crime? I ask you. A man with an errant penis who lied under oath, or a man whose actions have left more than a hundred thousand dead in their wake and rendered the entire world a less safe place to live for all of us?

Don't get me wrong. I have no respect for Bill Clinton, but the damage he did whilst in office pales into insignificance next to the war crimes perpetrated by Bush and his puppet-masters.

Whilst raging against the Democrats, an honourary mention must, however, be made of Dennis J. Kucinich, the Democratic representative for Ohio, who was the sole Democrat to turn up and even speak out against the bloodshed. Good for him.

But where was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?

And where was Senator Barack Obama?

Both of the above are presidential hopefuls for the next general election and yet neither of them has the backbone to stand up for what is right. No, there might be too much of a political backlash to such a gesture. The cynical Democrats know that concepts such as the truth and justice are double-edged swords. They can be used to further one's own career or, if wielded clumsily or in the wrong situation, can impede that same career. As such, noble concepts become political expedients, just more weapons in the arsenal of hollow rhetoric to which we've become so accustomed. Fortitude and integrity are nowhere to be seen.

When you apply this knowledge to the Democratic party as a whole, you quickly realise how the current American government obtained carte blanche for their rampage of terror, torture and bloodshed from the deserts of Afghanistan through the plains of Iraq to the bunkers of Guantanamo Bay.

Sometimes, it's difficult to know who I despise more, the Republicans or the Democrats. Are the accessories to the crimes not just as guilty as those who perpetrate them?