However, its being common does not make it acceptable as a fact of life — at least not when taken literally.

Today, let's try to reformulate the idea in a broader sense, to capture the abstract idea behind: individuals who chose to not contribute to society but benefit from it are parasitic and should be eliminated.

Unfortunately, this new phrasing is too general and must be specified to apply to the real world. One of the possible specific phrasings, applied to a world where work is the only contribution perceived as valuable (such as the world viewed from the middle-class), is the one in the title of this post.

Myself, I prefer to use this idea to define acceptable goals in life for individuals, that should be pursued during the lifetime to escape the state of parasite in which every child is born by default.

Some of the goals I have identified so far include:

• giving love
• teaching (as in: educating children, transmitting knowledge, etc)
• helping curing diseases
• producing food (up to the necessary quantity, not more)
• expressing emotions (including through forms of art)
• support other people through hardships

Note that the following items do not qualify as honorable goals to pursue under my model, although they can be combined with any of the above:

• working as a mean to create wealth
• giving birth
• searching for truth (either via science or religion)

Note also that people who are born with or were inflicted with handicaps that prevent them from contributing cannot be considered as “parasites” under the previous definition - the idea explicitly mentions “choice” as the selection criterion.

Quote of the day:

Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman's compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice. — Madeleine L'Engle

Last week my company sold old hardware for a bargain price. I got one, a dull Dell machine self-named "Optiplex GX 260". It gained a place in my home next to Albert — my plant — and also a new name: "fungus".

Fungus was the occasion to refresh my experience with FreeBSD. I have very fond memories of this operating system, which I used in the past for network services; this week, I wanted to extend my knowledge of the system by trying out the new features and checking its compatibility with various pieces of hardware which prove burdensome to use with Vodka-Pomme, my iBook.

Suffice to say, I am not too proud with the results.

It did begin quite well. Well, not that well. The system fails to boot with the default settings, due to a faulty hardware feature (broken ACPI) which is not (yet) worked around by software. Only some research brought me the magic string required to move to the next step: hint.apic.0.disabled=1

Damn the bogus Dell hardware.

For the installation I used the April snapshot of the 7.0-CURRENT branch, the brand new stuff scheduled to be released later this year. My purpose in using the latest and greatest (and I had to expect, also unstable) was to benefit from the recent inclusion of the ZFS filesystem into FreeBSD.

Installation went smoothly, and I could perform the following operations with much success and pleasure — pleasure to feel in known territory, pleasure to discover the changes since the last time I used the same steps:

• load updated system sources from CVS
• rebuild and install the world and a custom kernel
• install some shells and utilities
• configure some networking and connect to IPv6

Everything went smoothly so far and I could nearly believe that I was on the road to success for all my plans with Fungus: file server, webcam controller, ip6 gateway, scanner controller, and maybe some more! Spare time allowing, of course.

Before going to work last morning, I plugged in the USB flatbed scanner — CanoScan Lide 500F, based on chipset GL841 — and decided to give a try at SANE using a remote access to Fungus during the day.

It turned out that:

1. the scanner is not supported by SANE (bad)
2. it disconnects itself from the USB bus when it receives data it does not like from the driver (good)
3. my first attempt at hacking some SANE parameters to forcibly attach the closest matching driver (sane-genesys) to the scanner caused the scanner to disconnect (bad, I was 10km away)
4. my second attempt (back home in the evening) involved actually changing the source code of the driver to extend its compatibility to the model of my scanner. It was met with the scanner disconnecting again (bad) and a kernel panic. (doubleplus bad bad)

No amount of quick-'n-dirty hacking would avoid me doing the work of the developers of sane-genesys. Since I did not have either time nor knowledge to proceed, I decided that my scanner would keep its place somewhere next to Vodka-Pomme.

Next attempt was plugging in an USB Creative WebCam which I sometime use to capture short movies or interact visually with friends over the internet.

It turned out that:

1. there is no infrastructure for video capture on FreeBSD, like V4L on Linux - therefore, no standard driver interface (kinda bad, mostly inconvenient since no generic capture program is thus available)
2. the only existing driver, a port from the Linux driver using a system glue adapter, does not compile out of the box — I had to manually tweak the sources to workaround some incompatible definitions of the system call "msleep" (some time wasted, bad)
3. the driver triggers a storm of kernel messages upon load (bad)
4. no data is actually returned by the driver upon request of a picture from the camera (very bad)
5. unloading the driver after the tests causes a very verbose kernel panic (doubleplus bad bad)

At this point I decided that my webcam would also keep its place somewhere next to Vodka-Pomme, and I abandoned any hope of using FreeBSD for multimedia purposes.

It was therefore obvious that I should focus back on my main project, which was setting up a file server.

That was easier said than done. Most of the data I want to serve is stored on two mirrored hard disks connected via USB. My primary goal is ensuring redundancy at all times, so that loss of one disk does not cause loss of all the data (sorry for stating the obvious). The secondary goal is to be able to take away one of the disk at any time to access the data using a different computer if needed, and still be able to plug it back into the main system afterwards and synchronize with the first disk. This later “feature” seems simple enough to me, and this is already what I am doing with the software RAID driver of MacOS X.

For this purpose, four different mirroring systems as available on FreeBSD:

• the plain CCD driver, quite simple and basic
• GEOM vinum, “traditional” way of doing things
• GEOM mirrors (gmirror), the recommended way with FreeBSD 5 and later
• ZFS mirrors, the latest and greatest.

All four work quite well and are (in my opinion) fairly easy to implement, although I am not yet sure whether I want to go for ZFS or if gmirror is good enough for me...

At this point my primary goal was within reach with no hassle, and I could focus more seriously on the secondary goal, the ability to take one disk away while the system is running.

Interestingly enough, it works quite well if you instruct the system to “say goodbye” to the disk before it is unplugged, by means of "unmount", "gmirror detach", "zpool detach" and so on. However, that is too much of a hassle. The point of USB is precisely to be able to unplug devices and expecting the system to recover gracefully whenever possible — and disk mirroring should make this possible if the other disk is left plugged.

Unfortunately my tests exposed the final blow to my efforts: FreeBSD cannot deal with disconnects of USB mass storage devices while the devices are in use. “The full fix will require a fair amount of rearchitecting.” Yeah, right, I don't really have that time to wait.

Now, I'll let Fungus rest in peace for a while, and I'll try reviving it later and see what good can come out of it. If none, I'll go for OpenSolaris instead.

For three weeks already I am struggling with this basic requirement: overload the arithmetic operators of Python without using class methods.

Or, more specifically, delegate the implementation of an infix operator to a third-party object in a specific context. For example, I would like something like the following code to work:

def foo(a, b):
    print "hello ", a, "and", b

__builtins__.__add__ = foo
12 + 13 # use foo since __add__ is overloaded

Unfortunately, this does not work. Python optimizes arithmetic over basic types. And until now I can find no other "elegant" way to overload infix operators without specific object classes.

And no, this trick to overload infix operators is very ugly.

The following quote summarizes roughly a number of ideas I have a lot of troubles explaining. However, I feel that many people emigrate for the wrong reasons, one of them being simply unsatisfied with living in the previous place. Here it goes:

[…] Emigration is no small business. In addition to a serious commitment to somehow integrate into the new place as a citizen, emigration involves also commitment to stay, integrate culturally and contribute to the society. I have made my own commitments in this respect - I am actively learning the language; I enjoy paying the due taxes; I have a traditional housing […]; and so on. If you were to emigrate, what are your plans?
[…] When I was considering emigrating, what was most important to me was how I would feel when I would arrive to the "right" place. This had to be considered independently from my feelings as a French citizen, and more by understanding the position of the various candidates relatively to their geographical neighborhood. […] My way of making my choice was to take a map of the world and imagining myself living in various areas. Primary concern was filtering out those places I would not feel secure in. Either because I am not protected by family (financially or otherwise), because I'm gay, because I often use my right to say what I think (is bad) about things, or because I have no religion. Next concern was filtering out those places I would be considered as a stranger for the rest of my life, whatever I would do, such as because of the color of my skin or the language difference. Then I tried to match my personality with the cultural expectations, such as avoiding warm-blooded countries where lots of talking are required to get things done (in business or private life), or liberal countries where your social value as an individual is proportional to the amount of money you're worth.
Using only these ideas, not much was left standing on my world map. Most world countries, and several European countries such as Poland, Greece, or Italy were ruled out by the first criterion. France, the UK and most other "western" countries were ruled out by the last criterion. Nearly all the rest of the world got ruled out by the middle criterion. I ended up with the Netherlands mainly because Canada is a bit too close to the USA, because I do not speak German (and German-speaking countries are not very English speaking), and because I think it's a bit early (for me) to go to Scandinavia or other other northern parts of Europe - life there is easy, but it is tremendously difficult to start friendships with people and I am still very shy. And note that the Netherlands does not quite match my last criterion (very liberal, very capitalistic) so it was a match only because I had a kind of fondness for the place, fondness that grew during some trips in the past years.

Hope this helps.

In a recent study made by the NBER (National Bureau of Echonomic Research) and commented recently on Slate, it is shown that

there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day — the sum of work for pay and work at home.

Some results commented on Slate are quite interesting and positive : women and men do work on average the same in rich countries, which somehow shows a positive balance between genders.

On the other hand, the article has another reading. It states that on average men work less than women in poor countries. I would be very curious to see the relationship between the difference of work time between men and women, on the one hand, and the wealth of the country on the other hand.

Is there a correlation? Is it so that a country "gets richer" when men work more?

Lovely potential for politically incorrect stuff.

Last wednesday evening, during my Dutch class, I nearly got lynched by the 5 girls who compose the rest of my group.

My biggest mistake was to start describing my pet peeve without starting with the obvious. The obvious being:

• yes, there is a terrifyingly large number of women who are routinely and impunely abused, killed, used, exploited or otherwise mishandled by men worldwide;
• yes, many men and society as a whole psychologically pressure women and give them little freedom over their life, and male/female inequalities are far from resolution everywhere;
• yes, it is a fact that worldwide many men abandon the mother of their children, leaving them with a bleak future;

that said, I want to express my targeted disgust against a very specific category of women: the narrow-minded selfish mother-to-be hunting for male money and sperm.

This species came to my attention a few years ago when I witnessed a very sad happening. The story is as follows: an acquaintance of mine, fellow student with handsome features and a clever mind, was planning a bright future involving a period of self-discovery and enjoyment of life and opportunities, possibly followed a few years later by establishing himself at a place of his choosing and the founding of a family. Being young, clever and handsome, he was (expectedly) seeing someone — a girl met earlier than my knowing him. He would spend a weekend with her every now in a while, and his standing on high moral grounds would make him very involved in his relationship. During the end of his studies, as he was planning to move on with his career and possibly travel abroad, “it happened” that his significant other became pregnant. According to them, she one day “accidentally forgot her pill” and decided that now as well as later was a good time to start a family. His moral grounds standing, as well as a significant family pressure, supported a decision to accept this situation and make the best out of it. They were both under 25 of age when this happened. They are now living in a small city, not far from the grandparents' place, and he wouldn't find any work within 2 hours commute per day.

As I see it now, they both are very happy with their situation and are making the best out of it. That is undeniable in good faith.

However, as I see it, the girl used him to achieve her plans and he had little choice into the matter. She was not so successful with her studies, not so ambitious, and the work opportunities around her would not allow her to climb the social scale. On his side, he was planning to exercise his freedom, possibly moving and living abroad. For her, it was a very serious opportunity to try and secure her own future and create a high standing and highly recognized moral legitimacy for her existence as a woman by securing both serious revenue generation abilities (preferably from the IT industry) and a father for her children. Whether it was accidental or adequately prepared, getting pregnant at that time was rationnally an excellent outcome to her life concerns as well as a very good lifetime investment.

Now, I will not outline too precisely my opinion on this specific case in writing, but suffice to say that I was very sad to hear from her that “then was a good time to have children” and from him that “later would have been nicer, but then was ok as well.”

Since that time, I have come to meet other similar couples. A pattern became clear: the female is usually between 18 and 27, feels insecure with regard to her social situation, does not consider a career path, speaks fondly of having children, and engages only in commited relationships with men older than she is, with good revenue generation potential. The guy is usually young as well (albeit older than the female), is planning a career path but is currently considering his options, entertains a high morale valuing respect and commitment, and has a limited social circle to support him. What happens is that the female and the male engage into a relationship; the relationship becomes exclusive; the woman pressures the man to have children and “becomes” pregnant as soon as the man shows signs that he would be responsible and not abandon her immediately; then she tries to make the situation look better and he gradually accepts his new life path (decided by her), although he did not really expect children… that early.

So, I presented my conclusions to my language class. They (all females) charged me with anger and despise. They would accuse me of ignoring all those cases where the opposite situation holds (man using the woman), which are much more common — not even realizing that (some) men abusing (some) women is no rational justification for (some) women to abuse (some) men. They would not acknowledge that the indivudal freedom of the father-to-be as a single and childless man is extremely valuable and deserves as much respect as the urge to pin him down and steal his fatherhood. A serious case of denial at hand — I felt relatively powerless and I eventually dropped the conversation.

What I did not explain to them is that a female friend of mine and I have been talking extensively over the subject. She is now about 30 and she recalls an earlier period of her life when she was ready to do exactly that : find the “right” man and use him to provide her with a social situation — as a mother, accomplished woman through having children. She knows several other females in a similar situation, and she supports the idea that the female body is in its 20s subject to a large quantity of hormones which are subtly telling to the brain that now and not later is the right time to carry offprings. As time passes, the urge recedes and an intuitive respect for the man as an individual — rather than sperm carrier and revenue generator — starts to reappear. Relationships built after this period, as they say, are much more mature, honest and fulfilling — in other words, way more “loving.”

That said, in my opinion, the idea that the responsibility of the woman in the destruction of the originally-planned future of the man is somewhat lowered by the impulse of her hormones only provides a very superficial excuse to her behavior. This sort of woman deserves to be kept cloistered safely from 14 until their age of reason, at least later than 35.

It's not going to happen.

1. the cursus is not really challenging. Been there, done that already.
2. less than 6 students in the Master.
3. narrow-minded people.

I'll be looking elsewhere.

The lastest project I'm involved into is trying to get into additional studies. The initial idea was to build a network of fellow Dutch students to 1) get some kind of educational "legitimacy" in the country and 2) hang out with the natives. Of course, I could use some intellectual challenges as well.

For this purpose, I will be visiting the TU Delft tomorrow afternoon and see what kind of education I can find there. No specific plans yet, I'll just be checking out what's available.

Then there are plenty of other projects I should be involved with as well. In addition to planning numerous travel plans (only part of which I will probably accomplish) I should be:

• creating a website for a new guest house in Burgundy,
• keeping in touch with the people who count,
• writing code, tests and documentation for a Python -based project of mine,
• reading the several books I received lately, including a Treaty of Government from John Locke and some algebra theory,
• preparing some language exams that I plan to take before summer,
• strengthening my general knowledge and culture, including possibly visiting cultural places in the country.

And on top of that I can't even manage to do my laundry on time… I'm a joke.