20th July 2002, 05:42 pm
You probably know the old game where you’re have to guess an object that
someone else is thinking about. You have 20 questions, and the objective
for you is to narrow to amount of possible objects down to only one. You
can play this over the Internet.
It’s the computer that plays against you — you have to think about
something, and the computer will guess it. It’s quite amazing how good the
computer is: it has guessed all the common things that I’ve tried. I also
tried with “the weather” as the object. The computer came very close, but
it couldn’t decide if I was thinking about “life” or “the weather” :-)
20th July 2002, 10:25 am
I just saw this huge discussion over at the Debian-devel
mailinglist
about whether or not the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License) is a
free license. That is free in the Debian sense:
it has be fulfill the
DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) before it can be
included in the main section of the Debian
archives. There’s currently lots of stuff in the archive that’s licensed
under the LPPL, but the
Debian guys would rather see that it was
distributed under another license, or that the
LPPL is changed to conform with
the DFSG.
The problem seams to be, that the
LPPL forbids you from modifying a
file and then redistributing it using the same filename. This is
important for us LaTeX folks, because one
of the promises of LaTeX (and TeX) is,
that a document processed today will look identical when it’s processed 10
years from now. If everybody is allowed to change important files, then
that promise would be hard to keep. This isn’t just a theoretical concern
— it has happened that someone changed the Computer Modern fonts made by
Donald E. Knuth and
distributed them as the original set. They thought that they were helping
people by improving the fonts, but that wasn’t how others looked at it. I
don’t know exactly what the problem was, but if they had changed the width
of a character just a little, then it could mean that lines would be broken
differently, something that must not happen. If an author has prepared a
document using his own installation of
LaTeX, then he has to be absolutely sure
that the publishers version of LaTeX will
place the letters at the exact same position on the page.
One the other hand, then the Debian guys want to
reserver the right to change the files in their
LaTeX distribution, in case they discover
a security risk or something like that. This is a very hypothetical
situation, but they want the right to do this anyway.
So, is boils down to a question of trust: do the
LaTeX community trust the users not to
cause havoc by distributing modified files from the core of TeX and
LaTeX? Apparently not, and after the
story about the improved CM fonts, I can understand their fear. I don’t
think they fear that the teTeX
maintainers would go crazy,
it’s more about the principle that people has the option of changing
those files.
I hope that they can works things out — it would be a real shame if this
“battle of principles” should end with moving the teTeX packages to
non-free, as almost everybody recognizes that TeX and
LaTeX are some of the finest examples of
free software.
12th July 2002, 04:00 pm
What have I been doing lately? Well, I’ve been relaxing and I’ve worked on
some of the projects that has been neglected for some time now. One of
those are my simulation of Rubiks Cube — I’ve tried
to make a camera system so that one can examine the cube from all sides. It
kind of works right now and it’s great fun to hack on. I’ll put the code
here later.
I’ve also been on a trip to the Danish island Møn with my Mom and Dad. We
visited my dads sister Susanne who own a summer residence there. Møn is an
interesting island with lots of beautiful sights. The most impressive thing
I saw was the Cliff of
Møn: a cliff
that reaches 128 metre at it’s highest point.