Firefox backing up.
A bug is bugging me up, but it is unclear to me what is the cause, so no reporting or fixing is yet in sight - whenever I scroll up in Firefox using the mouse scroller there is ~10% chance that the "back" action will be executed. It has happened to me a lot of times now, and I haven't noticed similar symptoms in other programs.
Ubuntu Dapper, FF 1.5, USB mouse, HP nx6110 notebook. Any advise from the lazyweb?

Superball/bowl.
So ... I tried to understand what this american football thing is all about. What got me interested in it was an anime from Japan called Eyeshield 21 where a boy that ran errants for bullies his whole school life goes into american football as a runner with his great speed and agility. That get me thinking about looking into that sport - it looked quite interesting in the anime.
Boy was I wrong.
So I watched the Superbowl XL - the biggest and most important event in the american football year. The first half was absolutely empty - nothing happened at all. The ads were much more interesting then the game. The halftime show was ok, not as good as ads.
And the second half just showed why this is the definitive american sport in the worst meaning of that - legalese. Steelers would have lost it the judges would have not interfered so much with the game. This sport has like hundreds of tiny rules that are very dependent on interpretation by the judges - that is what I call a sport for all the american lawyers to like. Cancelling several good Seahawks trows just because some guy was holding someone on the other part of the field, that must be givin an ecstasy for every law student. Not for me though.
And even without all that dilation with ridiculous rules (what's that stupidity with running clock and two minute warning ?!?) the game itself is kind of dumb - there are just too many people in the field for anything that a regular person can really understand. Strategies that almost never work out because of the other team interfering with their strategy. Too much chaos and still each person only does a one single thing. Even more - many of the players never will get any attention in the game just because they are on a supporting position, but the quarterback will always be the center of attention.
A very unbalanced game that is even more screwed by a ton of ads, a very heavy leaning on judging nitpicks and just 3-4 nice moments in the whole 1 hour game. I'll just stick back with hockey and anime :)

Also at the school reunion I took a lot of photos - 217 to be exact. So, here are a couple of the best shots that (as I think) look quite nice even without knowing the people or the circumstances of the pictures.

Note to self: I seem to be getting good on candid portraits and architecture, but group photos, candid action photos and still life need a lot of work.

Note to my ex-classmates: dārgie klases biedri, visas manis uzņemtās fotogrāfijas jūs varat novilkt šeit, ja tas links nedarbojas, vai jums vajag kādu bildi augstākā kvalitātē - sazinieties ar mani pa epastu vai telefonu.

On the weekend I was at the school reunion and among other matters I gave my school a present of 50 Ubuntu CDs to use in school and to give out to the pupils most interested in computers. After that I talked to my IT teacher who is now an IT adviser to the principal. It seems that all that we were taught in high school (Office software) is being move down to grade school and it is currently unclear, what will be taught to high school students. It could be programming, but it would take a large pile of time and money to prepare all the teachers for that.
It is quite a food for thought - find something challenging enough to teach at 11th and 12th grade to children that have learned all of word processing and presentation making while in their 5th grade and in the same time make it very easy to prepare 40+ year old teachers to teach that material.
In this context I find the project Little Wizard very interesting - if basics of programming can be taught so easily, maybe we still have a chance of getting it into the mandatory curriculum.

On homosexuality

Listening to some recordings of the Howard Stern show got me thinking about homosexuality. I try not to have any prejudices, so I tried to view this phenomenon from a purely logical point of view with as little external data as possible, so help me if I'm wrong.

Close relationships between two persons are generally understood to contain four separate components: sex, legal matters, social matters and romantic matters.

First of all it is said that, while the percentage of homosexual people is low, many heterosexual people have had some kind of homosexual experience either as an experimentation or as an accidental exposure. It also is believed that if the person in question is not physiologically repulsed by the concept (i.e. homofobic) then they can experience sexual pleasure regardless of the gender of the partner, number of partners or even absence of such. In all we can basically conclude that while homofobia is a sexual disorder (it disorders sexual function), homosexuality is not about sex at all.

The legal perspective is very inconclusive - in some parts of the world even having homosexual relationships can be illegal, but in other parts of the world homosexual marriages are not uncommon. Also all the legal stuff is there to help people that can not help themselves, especially minorities. So the legal part should be all for the equalising homosexuality to heterosexuality unless that does direct and irreparable harm to the society (which it seemingly does not).

From social perspective homosexual couples look to be living the life very similar to the heterosexual couples - there are some that are going wild and there are some that honour strong and stable relationships for decades and love to go to theatre. It could even seem that homosexual people tend to have a higher percentage of creative people and intellectuals.

The only think left is love. Call it a quick romantic encounter or a the love of the lifetime, but that seems to be the major descriptive difference with homosexually oriented people - they just fall in love with types of people that tend to be of same gender as themselves. It could be related to behavioural predispositions or differences in hormonal perception, but ultimately we do not know enough about love to fully understand that difference.

So at this point I can only conclude that until we understand all the hormonal processes and that "love" thingy, we could just as well start counting homosexual males and homosexual females as two additional genders that can not be fully understood by other two genders, just like men can not fully understand women and the other way around. This difference is as real and as effective as the difference between male and female genders or (stretching the analogy a bit too far) like the difference between races and should be honoured just as much as these differences are honoured.

And now I coin the terms "omale" and "ofmale" as the new homosexual male and female gender descriptors and "oman", "omen", "owman" and "owmen" as terms for single homosexual male, multiple homosexual males, single homosexual female and multiple homosexual females respectively.

Just watched the DVD version of the Aristocrats. It was one of the funniest jokes ever and each person telling it really changed the joke immensely. However if your sense of humour if even a bit under very good and if you can be easily disgusted by references to strange things, then forget that I wrote anything, or just watch it anyway to try to overcome that :)

Warning: do not in any circumstance allow a republican, anyone with a weak heart, or a child under 21 hear anything from that piece - you'd risk radical democratisation, a death stroke or a head filled with REALLY strange thoughts respectively.

Otherwise, just have fun and try not to die laughing :D

Got my plane tickets to Debconf 6 yesterday. I ordered the tickets on-line, but when I came to the travel agency's office, they had lost my reservation some how. I did not complain, because the new price the offered was 10 bucks lower then the one I reserved on-line (and it was for the exact same flights). Strange.

Anyway - Mexico, here I come!

On another note, I and two of my high school classmates spent 6+ hours yesterday preparing a present for our high school homeroom teacher. We prepared a book with a page for each student with a photo and description of what each of us is doing 5 years after graduation. The Homecoming is this Saturday. Should be fun.

It looks like the first Ice Age of the 2006 is retreating. For almost a full week we had to suffer temperatures in range of -25 to -30. I can remember that kind of cold setting in for a single day ... once in 5 years or so, but here we got almost a week of that horror. And they say that it is not over yet - there will be -25 again at the end of this week. After all this cold -9 tomorrow or -2 on Tuesday will be like a blessing.
The biggest problem that I have with this weather is that it is enough to get out of the house for 10 minutes to get to the nearby store and back and by sore throat is back for another day. Irritating.

Ok, I read the first GPLv3 draft. I found multiple problems, some good, some quite bad:

• Section 2 - The output from running it is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a work based on the Program.: does this mean that documents written in Abiword is covered by GPL? (Edit: I misread the sentence here, it really states just the oposite of what I thought :P)
  
• Section 3 - Regardless of any other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.: does this mean that one can not make a locked down system where users can not write outside the homedir, make /home a separate partition and mount it with noexec parameter thus denying all simple users the right of running modified versions of these programs (at least on this system)?
  
• Section 4. - You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright
  notice;: does that mean that I have to write "Copyright by this and that and this and that and this and that" on every CD that I record in my home to give to my friends? It sounds as bad as the original BSD advertisement clause.
  
• Section 5.b - You must license the entire modified work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.: I suggest adding "legally" before "comes", because otherwise, for example, if a company is making an internal modification of a GPL program with some secret information embedded into the code (some very internal communication routine, passwords, codes, ...) and some industrial thief steals this modified code for a blackhat hacker, he can claim that he "came into possession of a copy" and thus he has all the legal rights use it and that no trade secret laws can apply.
  
• in some places "Corresponding Source" is used instead of "Complete Corresponding Source Code" (Edit: I was pointed to a place in the middle of the licence where "CS" is defined equal to "CCSC". Still, not the best style - either declare that upfront or use one style trough the document)
  
• Section 9. - it is not clearly stated that using the covered work indicates acceptance of the Licence, but it is explicitly stated for modification and propagation.
  
• Section 13. - I really do not like geographic limitations. Anyone can state "this program has a progress bar, which is patented in USA, so you can not use it in USA unless you have the patent" for basically any program thus very easily discriminating against quite a few people. If it is illegal by other means, leave it be illegal by those means - do not impose additional illegality on it via copyright. Law in some countries and patent situation can change more easily then the licence for old free software projects with many contributors.
  

I have not yet read any comments from either FSF or any other people and I am not a lawyer, but I hope that these problems will be fixed in next drafts.

I have long understood that to make a good free software project, having multiple authors/contributors is essential. To that end, while I am fixing bugs and writing a few new features into the main SBackup codebase (see Changelog), I am inviting new people to contribute to SBackup development.
Many users have a need for an essential feature - backup to removable media. With current architecture of SBackup this goal is quite easy to achieve, but it would take a lot of time away from bugfixing and some other important features that I plan to do before 1.0. Also this feature is very independent of the rest of code, so I think it would be great way for somebody else to help the development of SBackup to become the ultimate simple backup system for desktops and servers alike. I have written a specification of how the new functionality (codenamed BackupBurner) should function and there is already a half-ready Glade interface in the source code.
So - volunteers, please step forward out of the cosy confines of the lazyweb :)