It's often the case with technology that serious changes occur at a particular price or performance point in development. Something has small use until it can be developed to a certain combination of low price and high performance that everyone demands.<br /><br />I believe that USB flash devices are going to be used for many interesting things starting about now. The reason is that 2G flash devices are now on sale for under $100. To be more precise 1G costs $45AU and<br />2G costs $85AU.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.coker.com.au/hardware/usb.html">http://www.coker.com.au/hardware/usb.html</a><br /><a href="http://www.coker.com.au/hardware/usb.html"><span class="" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"></span></a><br />The above page on my web site has some background information on the performance of USB devices and the things that people are trying to do with them (including MS attempting to use them as cache).<br /><br />One thing that has not been done much is to use USB for the main storage of a system. The <a href="http://laptop.media.mit.edu/">OLPC </a>machines have been designed to use only flash for storage as has the <a href="http://familiar.handhelds.org/">Familiar</a> distribution for iPaQ PDAs (and probably several other Linux distributions of which I am not aware). But there are many other machines that could potentially use it. Firewall and router machines would work well. With 2G of storage you could even have a basic install of a workstation!<br /><br />Some of the advantages of Flash for storage are that it uses small amounts of electricity, has no moving parts (can be dropped without damage), and has very low random access times. These are good things for firewalls and similar embedded devices.<br /><br />An independent advantage of USB Flash is that it can be moved between machines with ease. Instead of moving a flash disk with your data files you can move a flash disk with your complete OS and applications!<br /><br />The next thing I would like to do with USB devices is to install systems. Currently a CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux install is just over 2G (I might be able to make a cut-down version that fits on a 2G flash device) and Fedora Core is over 3G. As Flash capacity goes up in powers of two I expect that soon the 4G flash devices will appear on the market and I will be able to do automated installs from Flash. This will be really convenient for my SE Linux hands-on training sessions as I like to have a quick way of re-installing a machine for when a student breaks it badly - I tell the students "play with things, experiment, break things now when no-one cares so that you can avoid breaking things at work".<br /><br />The final thing I would like to see is PCs shipped with the ability to boot from all manner of Flash devices (not just USB). I recently bought myself a new computer and it has a built-in capacity to read four different types of Flash modules for cameras etc. Unfortunately it was one of the few recent machines I've seen that won't boot from USB Flash (the BIOS supported it but it didn't work for unknown reasons). Hopefully the vendors will soon make machines that can boot from CF and other flash formats (the more format choices we have the better the prices will be).

In a mailing list to which I subscribe there is currently a discussion on US politics with the inevitable discussion of <span style="font-weight: bold;">wasted votes</span>. As I don't want to waste my writing on this topic on a closed list I'm posting to my blog.<br /><br />There is ongoing discussion on the topic of <span style="font-style: italic;">wasted votes</span>. As a matter of principle, if a vote is considered to be wasted, then that should be considered a failure of the electoral system.<br /><br />Having representatives for regions makes some sense in that a regional representative will have more interest in the region than a central government with no attachment to the region. I expect that representatives of regions were initially used because it was not feasible for people to vote for people that weren't geographically local. Now there is no real requirement for geographical locality (only a very small fraction of the voters get to meet the person they are voting for anyway) but having a representative for a region still makes sense.<br /><br />The requirement for a regional representative means that if you live in a region mostly filled with people who disagree with you then your vote won't change much. For example I live in a strong Labor region so the REAL fight for the lower house seat (both state and federal) occurs in the Labor party room.<br /><br />My vote for the senate counts as that is done on a state-wide basis. So of the two votes entered in one election one of them can be considered to not be <span style="font-style: italic;">wasted</span>.<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br /><br />For the US system, the electoral college was developed in a time when it was impossible for the majority of voters to assess the presidential candidates, and it solved the requirements of those times reasonably well. Today it is quite easy to add up all the votes and use either a simple majority or the "Australian ballot".<br /><br />Currently there is some controversy over the actions of Senator Joe Lieberman who lost the support of his party and then immediately declared that he would stand as an independent candidate. I believe that this illustrates a failure of the electoral system. It should be possible to have multiple candidates from each party on the list. In the Australian system it is possible to do that, but as they are in random order on the voting cards no-one would be sure of which candidate of the winning party would get the seat unless there were actual reasons for preferring one candidate over another (which sadly often isn't the case). This is good for voters (the minority of voters who care enough about internal party policies to prefer one party candidate over another should make the decision) but not good for the candidates who want a better chance of winning without actually demonstrating that they can represent their voters better than other candidates.<br /><br />The Australian government system has nothing equivalent to the US presidential election. The prime minister is voted in by the members of parliament. So there is little chance of getting multiple candidates from one party contesting one position. For the US presidential election I think that the best thing to do would be to have an "Australian ballot" and permit multiple candidates from each party. For example you could have Bush and Cheney running as candidates for president with each promising to make the other their VP if they get elected. With the Australian ballot it wouldn't matter if you put Bush and Cheney as the last two votes on your ticket, the order you use for them will still matter.<br /><br />I think that with the US presidential and state governor elections there is enough knowledge of the candidates among the voters to make it worth-while for each of the major parties to run multiple candidates.<br /><br />One of many advantages of having multiple candidates is that you might have real debates. If the main candidates from the two big parties have a set of strict rules for their debate that prevents any surprise then the people who are the less likely candidates from those parties (and who therefore have less to lose) could go for a no-holds-barred debate with a selection of random members of the public asking questions.<br /><br />Of course none of this is likely to happen. Any serious change would have the potential to adversely affect at least one of the major parties, and any improvement would necessarily have a negative impact on most of the current politicians. Votes ARE being wasted, and most politicians seem to like it that way.

I attend many presentations and have seen many that had a lower quality than they should have. Some things are difficult to change (for example I have difficulty speaking slowly). But there are some things that are easy to change that many people seem to get wrong and I will list some that stand out to me.<br /><br />Unreadable presentation notes. You have to use a reasonably large font for it to be read by most people in the room. This means probably a maximum of about 16 lines of text on the screen. I have attended some presentations where I couldn't read the text from the middle of the room!<br /><br />Too many slides. On a few occasions I have heard people boasting about how many slides they are going to use. An average of more than one slide per minute does not mean that you have done a good talk, it may mean the exact opposite. One of my recent talks had 8 slides of main content plus an introductory slide while waiting for people to arrive and a Q/A slide with my email address and some URLs for the end. The speaking slot was 30 minutes giving an average of a slide every 3-4 minutes.<br /><br />Paging through slides too quickly. If you have 60 slides for a one hour talk then you will have no possibility of going through them at a reasonable speed (see above). Even if you have a reasonable number of slides you may go through some of them too quickly. On one occasion a presentation included a slide with text that was too small to read, I tried to count the lines of text but only got to 30 before the presenter went to the next slide.<br /><br />Using slides as reading material for after the lecture. Sure it can be useful for people to review your notes after the lecture, and it's generally better to give them the notes than to have them be so busy writing notes that they miss somehting you say. But if you want to have something verbose and detailed that can't be spoken about in the lecture then the thing to do is to write a paper for the delegates to read. Serious conferences have papers that they publish (minimum length is generally 4 solid A4 pages) which are presented by a talk of 30 to 60 minutes. That way people get a talk as an introduction and they get some serious reference material if they want to know more. Also people who miss the talk can read the paper and get much of the value. Is it not possible for slides to take the place of a paper.<br /><br />Bad diagrams. Diagrams should be really simple (see the paragraph about readable text). It is OK to have diagrams that don't stand alone and need to be described, a lecture is primarily about talking not showing pictures.<br /><br />When simplifying diagrams make sure that they still represent what actually happens. Simplifying diagrams such that they don't match what you are talking about doesn't help.<br /><br />Animations. The only thing that is animated in the front of the room should be the person giving the presentation. Otherwise just do the entire thing in flash, publish it on the web, and don't bother giving a talk.<br /><br />Staged content, particularly when used as a <span style="font-style: italic;">surprise</span>. Having a line of text appear with every click of the mouse forces the audience to stay with you every step of the way. This may work for primary school students but does not work for an intelligent audience. Give them a screen full at a time and let them read it in any order that they like. This is worst when they someone tries to surprise the audience with a punchy line at the end of every paragraph. Surprising the audience once per talk is difficult. Trying to do it every paragraph is just annoying.<br /><br />One final tip that isn't as serious but is not obvious enough to deserve a mention. Use black text on a white background, this gives good contrast that can be seen regardless of color-blindness and with the bright background the room is lit up even if all the lights are off. The audience wants to see you and sometimes this is only possible by projector light. Also the more light that comes out of the projector the less heat that builds up inside, it can really mess up a presentation if the projector overheats.

We're still in wt:Copenhagen today, but we head out this afternoon for our tour of the Baltic Sea. We've had a great time in the city so far, mostly due to staying with longtime Wikitraveller wt:User:Elgaard, who generously offered us the extra room in his apartment for the time we're here. There's something about staying in an actual human being's home while you're travelling to really recharge the batteries. After a week in hotels and restaurants, a little time in a real house can make you feel a lot more human. We took our time getting to Copenhagen from wt:Odense at the end of the Wikisym conference, mostly because I was really hung over. I'd spent the last night of the event drinking at the Irish pub in the pedestrian area, and I probably had 1-5 pints too many. Paul Yount calls Irish pubs "the first Open Source franchise", and it's true: you can expect certain things at a pub no matter where it is in the world. Although we started out with about 30 people, the crowd thinned through the night. I had a good time talking with Brion Vibber and Chuck Smith about the state of Esperanto-language wikis on the Web -- in a mish-mash of English and Esperanto, of course. (In case you were wondering: the state is "fine".) I also chatted Wikimedia Foundation politics with Angela Beesley; we both think Erik Moeller is going to make a good addition to the WMF board. After the pub shut down, I headed to the deathly silent casino in the sub-basement of the Radisson of Odense. The bar was eerily silent, and the gaming tables were intense and serious; I don't think people could have been more somber if they were organ harvesters gambling for body parts. The last hangers-on were Andrea Forte of Georgia Tech, Alex Schroeder of CommunityWiki, Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, and Eugene Eric Kim, of Blue Oxen and HyperCore. In other words, some of the smartest people in the wiki world today -- we talked wiki politics and theory until the wee hours of the morning. They all switched to mineral water while I was still slugging down pints of Carlsberg Special, which is probably where I went wrong. Wikisym, for me, was one of the best conferences I've been to this year, and I've been to a lot. It capped off a long summer of conference-going, and this fall should be relatively tranquil. Which is great: I have a lot of work to do, based on the ideas I've picked up this season. tags: wikisym2006 odense copenhagen wiki

sterbro All of which is to say that I was feeling pretty crufty the next morning as we got on the train. Kindly Maj got us a late checkout and let me sleep in late, which helped a lot; a falafel sandwich around 11AM also cleared my head a bit. The train ride from Odense to Copenhagen was great, and by the time we got to Niels Elgaard Larsen's house in sterbro (a neighborhood of Copenhagen) I was pretty refreshed. Niels took us out to an early dinner at a restaurant called Pixie in a square by his house. Copenhagen has some pretty strict traffic laws, and the number of cars on the street is possibly the least I've ever seen for a major metropolis, leaving a lot of room for sidewalks, bike paths, and open parks and plazas. We got to chat with Niels over a fresh pasta dinner, and thence home to his house for beers and more talk. One great thing about visiting Wikitravellers is that they tend to be a) very smart, b) well-travelled, and c) interested in Free Software and Free Culture. Niels is no exception; he's active in the Danish and European Free Software and information freedom communities, and he's extremely interesting to talk to on the subject. We shared travel stories and talked about Open Source and Open Content later than I would have thought, based on my earlier-morning hangover. Probably the high point of the evening, for me, was when Niels shared a brilliant idea for a way to distribute Wikitravel guides in digital form for a very wide array of users. We've had a hard time settling on a mobile document format for Wikitravel guides, since mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones support standards so poorly. It's one of the most requested features for Wikitravel, but it's going to take a huge amount of work to cover even a fraction of the mobile device owner community. Except Niels had a genius idea for how to distribute guides in a simple, standard format that works on a mobile digital device many if not most travellers carry with them every time they travel. The idea: make guides that are downloadable JPEG images which can be copied to a SD card or Compact Flash or Memory stick or whatever, then stuck into a digital camera. If the camera supports zooming on images, and has a decent screen for review, the guides might be useful and readable. I'm going to try to do some experiments with the idea -- I think it could be a real winner. Adding 30-40 images to a camera today is pretty cheap, and if they're just text I think some aggressive compression can work well. tag: jpeg sterbro niels copenhagen wikitravel mobile

Copenhagen on foot Yesterday we did a big tour of the city on our own. In the morning, we had some breakfast at the Laundromat Cafe right next door to Niels's house, and I took the opportunity to clean a week's worth of dirty laundry. Nothing like a stack of clean clothes to make you feel more like a decent citizen. I was down to a bathing suit and the ICANNWiki t-shirt Ray King gave me at Wikisym. Then we headed out on the town to do some sight-seeing. First we hit the Kastellet, a fortress in northeast Copenhagen that's the oldest operational military base in Europe. It's got the distinctive star-shaped outline typical of old fortifications, and is surrounded by a lovely park with ducks and swans. We had lunch at a nearby caf , with large beers. (Gee, I'm getting worried about the pattern here.) After lunch we made an unscheduled stop at den lille havfrue -- the famous Litle Mermaid statue in the harbour. It was miniscule and surrounded by perhaps 100 onlookers, crammed into a tiny swatch of sidewalk. We stopped about half a mile away, took some pictures of the crowd, and moved on. We then hoofed it down through the harbour and across Nyhavn and a bridge to Christianhavn and Christiania. We'd both heard about the city-within-a-city run on anarchist principles -- kind of like a giant squat -- but neither of us had been there before. It was an interesting place -- packed with people, lots of food cooking a beer-drinking, caf s and restaurants all over the place, interspersed with art installations and little gardens. But it had the unkempt scumminess of a big squat, too -- especially on the main drag -- and there were a few too many pitbulls and gutterpunks for my tastes. Overall a good experience but I don't know if I'll go back. After our long walk we took the metro back to Niels's, where we napped until he and wife Chiquita got home. Chiquita is an investment banker from wt:Toronto who does a lot of business in Europe, where she met Niels a few years ago. They were married last year and have had a long-distance relationship -- visiting each other a week or so out of each month -- for the whole time. She's moving here this year, which I think will be nice for both of them. We had a good dinner at a place called Thomas's -- a buffet, which seems to be very popular here -- and then back home for a nightcap and bed. Amita June was overtired by the time we got her to bed, and she let us know that we'd pushed her too hard with a quarter-hour of heavy crying. But we all got to sleep pretty well afterwards, and at least the parents know that we should take it easy in the future. tags: copenhagen kastellet christiania little mermaid

Evaluating programming languages for playing with Debtags Since having workable bindings for the C++ Debtags libraries seems to be still a bit in the future, I'm planning to build a bit of native infrastructure in some higher level language. First step is seeing what language I could start playing with. The problem At the most basic level, in Debtags we have a number of packages, each of which have a set of tags. The way I usually save tags is a file with the format:

package1, package2: tag1, tag2, tag3
package3: tag1, tag2

That is, every line has a list of packages with the same tags, and the list of their tags. Since any script I'm going to write has to at least be able to parse the data into something like a package -> tags hash, then print it out. Let's see how perl, python and ruby perform. Tests C++ The reference point for the experiment will be the C++ implementation, tagcoll:

$ time tagcoll copy package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m0.421s
user    0m0.412s
sys     0m0.000s

Perl First attempt is with Perl, creating the script that parses into a hash of package => set of tags and prints the result. There are set modules for Perl on CPAN, but I have none handy at the moment. However, since they are implemented using hashes, I can approximate them by using a hash. Note that I also want to have a different copy of the tag set for every package, so that I can manipulate them in the future without unwanted side effects. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my %db;
# Read the tag database
while (<>)
 
    chop();
    my ($pkgs, $tags) = split(': ');
    # Create the tagset using keys of a hash
    my %tags = map   $_ => undef   split(', ', $tags);
    for my $p (split(', ', $pkgs))
     
        # Make a copy of the tagset
        $db $p  =  %tags ;
     
 
# Write the tag database
while (my ($pkg, $tags) = each %db)
 
    print $pkg, join(', ', keys %$tags), "\n";
 

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.pl package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m0.448s
user    0m0.436s
sys     0m0.008s

Not so bad, comparable with tagcoll. Python Then comes Python. I'm not much of a Python fancier, but I'm rather attracted by the new set native type introduced with Python 2.4, which seems to have most of what I need nice and done. Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
input = sys.stdin
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    input = open(sys.argv[1],"r")
# Read the tag database
db =  
for line in input:
    # Is there a way to remove the last character of a line that does not
    # make a copy of the entire line?
    line = line.rstrip("\n")
    pkgs, tags = line.split(": ")
    # Create the tag set using the native set
    tags = set(tags.split(", "))
    for p in pkgs.split(", "):
        db[p] = tags.copy()
# Write the tag database
for pkg, tags in db.items():
    # Using % here seems awkward to me, but if I use calls to
    # sys.stdout.write it becomes a bit slower
    print "%s:" % (pkg), ", ".join(tags)

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.py  package-tags  > /dev/null
real    0m0.418s
user    0m0.376s
sys     0m0.036s

I'm pleased, very pleased. Using the native set seems to be not only handy, but efficient. Ruby Finally, Ruby. I like to use Ruby. In this case, however, it lacks a native set implementation, although it has a set module which is implemented using a hash. Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'set'
infile = ARGV[0] ? File.new(ARGV[0]) : $stdin
# Read the tag database
db =  
infile.each_line do  line 
    line.chop()
    pkgs, tags = line.split(": ")
    # Create the set using the Set module
    tags = Set.new(tags.split(", "))
    pkgs.split(", ").each do  p 
        # Is this a copy or a reference?  I need to find out.
        db[p] = tags
    end
end
# Write the tag database
db.each do  key, tags 
    # Ouch, Set does not do join by itself
    print key, ": ", tags.to_a.join(", ")
end

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.rb package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m1.637s
user    0m1.572s
sys     0m0.052s

I hope I got something wrong in the script, but I can't see what. Results As much as I don't fancy Python, it looks like it's currently the best choice for playing around with Debtags. I hope the native sets will bring me joy. If in the future I'll be asked "how come you chose Python for this Debtags thing?", I can point to this page.

Talking about logic, and where people fail at understanding it... Fun with stupid Google queries - Is there any page about Google and not Google? Wonder how big the Google index is? Google OR -Google. (I'm aware that the count is imprecise, it's just funny that this query is actually processed.) Now let's look at MSN. google 64741016
-google 4669973284
okay. that should make "4734714300"... google OR -google 5156927770 - oops, magic new hits.
-google OR google 68735504
So where are the 5 billion pages that have "google or -google" but not "-google or google"? And how about MSN OR -MSN - there can be only one. askdjfhsakdf OR -askdjfhsakdf - top result for this garbage word: Google! askdjfhsakdf OR -askdjfhsakdf Google results are consistent. I wonder what their sorting is in this case... random? hash function? age? Remember Googlestossen? Like Googlewhack, but with scoring. There must be only one hit with both words; score = # of hits with word 1 * # of hits with word 2

(and what we want to do to avoid similar problems in the future) A few days ago, a broken xserver-xorg-core was uploaded to dapper-updates. This caused, unsurprisingly, a large amount of bug reports. A fixed package was uploaded about 12 hours after the first bug report came in. We also pointed all the $countrycode.archive.ubuntu.com (se.archive.ubuntu.com, au.archive.ubuntu.com, etc) to archive.ubuntu.com to speed up the propagation of the fix. Even so, it hit far, far too many users. Incidentially, the distro team is currently in a sprint in Wiesbaden, Germany and we had a large discussion this morning about both how to handle such situations when they happen (and recover from them, mostly in the technical sense) and how to prevent them from happening in the first place. The latter is obviously more important as we won't have to recover if there is not a problem in the first place. Note that those ideas listed below were ideas and not finished procedures and we are going to write up a proper policy document. Ideas for prevention ranged form using $distro-proposed and explicit call for testers of that to getting more code review for updates. The current review process for updates to $distro-updates is a review by the release manager who accepts it into $distro-updates. This update passed that review even though the update was faulty, so even if we had another reviewer, it might have passed that review too. Using $distro-proposed does not prevent the problem from affecting anybody, it just changes the group affected with the goal that the group choosing to enable $distro-proposed will hopefully be able to recover more easily. Recovery ideas ranged from being able to put an update onto a user's machine whether he wanted it or not to snapshot/rollback support and having some kind of a "safe mode" where it would give you a kdrive-based VESA X server and tools to fix your system. I'm not sure what we would do if we managed to break one of those tools (or the "safe-mode" X server), though. We all agreed that being open about the problem, the cause of the problem and how we are working to solve it is important. Downplaying the severity or making jokes or sarcastic comments about the fix ("Ooops, we did it again") is bad and something we shouldn't do. (And I don't think we did it this time either.) No response is equally bad and something we should work hard to avoid. Hopefully, we will have a procedure in place in a little while which tells us how to handle such an emergency when it happens and we will be deploying safeguards to prevent it from happening again while not ending up paralysing us and making us unable to deploy updates to $distro-updates as this is something we need to be able to. While this post is fairly critical of the current set of policies and procedures, I have tried hard to avoid pointing fingers at anybody in particular. I would much rather have us have a positive and constructive discussion about how to avoid similar problems in the future than a discussion on who is to blame. The points and views in this post is also those of my own and not any kind of official communication from Canonical or Ubuntu.

I spent the first 12 days of August at the German Junior Bridge camp^[*] in Rieneck. The reason I'm blogging about that in the "debian" section is that it felt very much like DebConf - lots of weird just-like-you people. We played about two tournaments per day, always using different scoring methods or other ways to make up pairs of players - we were not supposed to play with the same partner twice, though Frederic, my flatmate, and I were casted together for a second time in a young-plays-with-old tourney. In this sport, you are a junior until well past 30, and he was just above the cut of 35 of this event. We also bribed the good fairy to let Eva and me play together in the final masterpoint tourney. We didn't score especially well since we were quite tired, but hey :* The site is an old castle, now operated by a German Scouts organization. Somehow, the castle operates in a different time zone, breakfast was served at 12am, lunch at 7pm, and dinner at 11pm. DebConf should consider adopting that :) It would also be interesting to see if we could have a "performance" at the end, and who would run for Miss and Mister DebConf... The pictures I took are in my gallery. Sadly I didn't take a picture of the coffee tally list where one guy made two ticks in the "flatrate" column 8-) [*] beware, this is ugly html Update: Next year's bridge camp will be from July 26th to August 5th - please pick a disjoint range for DebConf...

Short summary: Server down.

Isn't Murphy absolutely lovely? Hardware will, of course, break on weekends.

The light in my kitchen's ceiling stopped working a month ago. I changed the light bulb, a week ago, but it didn't help, so on Friday I asked H ctor to take a look at it. Absolutely low priority. The cable was literally roasted, so he asked me to cut the power off, in order to replace the cable. I did, without remembering to propperly power off the server. What are journalling filesystems for anyway? The UPS battery used to perform much better, oh the decay, so the server is abruptly shut down after a couple of minutes. As H ctor was not able to "quickly" fix the kitchen light, and I was not in a hurry, and do not really care about the damn light, we just didn't look at it any further. So far so good.

Some hours later, at midnight (maybe that's technically Saturday, but it really felt like a Friday, I swear to the allmighty vegetarian spaghetty monster with no meat balls whatsoever), I try to power the machine up. And a sadly familiar ritual is about to be performed. Since I moved the server into "the run down attic I call home" I dreaded the moment I had to reboot the machine. It would come up, you could see the blue case fans light up and spin, the hard drives and CD drives be initialized, but no beep, no POST, no nada.

The ritual dance would consist of me submissively kneeling down to power on and off in a random sequence the back switch, the front one, the UPS, the reset buttom, curse, turn it completely off for random amounts of time, pull the cable in and out, curse some more... never really finding out when or what would make it fully come to life. But eventually it did, after 5, 10, 15 minutes, without any reproduceable pattern, it did. Not on Friday night. Or saturday. I spent most of the night (until 6 am) performing the ritual, googling like crazy, fustrated and eventually plain angry. All I could find was "the mobo is b0rked, exchange it". But I knew it was not. I knew the CPU was fine, the MoBO was fine, the memory was fine, because when I finally managed to get it to power up, all worked well!

But Miry came home and helped me out, coming up with a valuable clue: The mobo was not getting enough power form the PSU, so I got a spare PSU from H ctor and swapped them. The baby came up instantly. So I was very pissed off.

The good thing about it all is:
- I learned that power supply units sometimes fail. Even my wonderful, 100 EUR BQuiet! PSU.
- I missed completely all of the udev fun. Well, at least on my machines, but there's a couple of people I needed to help out today.

On Monday I got a new power supply, it is a joke of a plastic, for SM's sake! plastic!?, PSU with a couple blue fans. Pics of old nice one and crappy new one here. My sitting room looks like a space craft, and sounds like a plane is about to take off. The cats have not complained yet. They have not disconnected my land line (yet).
Update: The reason I bought this PSU is I have quite a big case, a case I can ride! So I needed Log cables. And I had to go for a cheapo modder plstic thingy, simply because I could not afford anything better.

I hate hardware.

Another thing that I want to do with Xen is scan systems for rootkits. For that, I'd like to create a snapshot, mount that and scan. However, the snapshot usually has dirty filesystems whose journals will be played back when mounting, I wonder if that could be used to escape detection; also, LVM will make the snapshot persistent, and refuse to bring up the LV in question after a reboot unless dm-snapshot is loaded, which it usually isn't. So I'd like to have temporary snapshots that get deleted after a reboot or when inactive for some time, so a bug in my scripts does not leave old snapshots around, or, in the worst case, stops my system from booting because my initrd does not have dm-snapshot. Also, because of potential bugs, I'd prefer that my scripts either don't have permission to delete snapshots they haven't created, or, if that's not possible, at least not have any mention of lvremove at all. The precedent for this would be temporary tables in SQL, so perhaps it might be an idea to introduce a session concept to LVM.

Evan, you ignorant slut. Using a macro to capitalize the names of other macros where used? What crap are you on? "Who's writing C anymore these days". Err, let's throw out the kernel, the X server, GNOME, perl, and python, shall we? All of those are written in C. As are many other things, but these are just the more popular bits. If a key sits in your way, allow me to point you to xmodmap, or just the XKB extension. That's what it's for. Personally, on my keyboard I have mapped \ to the (totally useless) key that has printed on it. Finally, a modal keyboard is useful, if only for ergonomics. Having to hold down bucky bit keys for long sequences of characters is very bad for the joints in your fingers... This post brought to you by an inofficial member of the International Society of Caps Lock Fanciers. 7 lower case characters were hurt in the production of this entry, but no finger joints)

Evan, you ignorant slut. Using a macro to capitalize the names of other macros where used? What crap are you on? "Who's writing C anymore these days". Err, let's throw out the kernel, the X server, GNOME, perl, and python, shall we? All of those are written in C. As are many other things, but these are just the more popular bits. If a key sits in your way, allow me to point you to xmodmap, or just the XKB extension. That's what it's for. Personally, on my keyboard I have mapped \ to the (totally useless) key that has printed on it. Finally, a modal keyboard is useful, if only for ergonomics. Having to hold down bucky bit keys for long sequences of characters is very bad for the joints in your fingers... This post brought to you by an inofficial member of the International Society of Caps Lock Fanciers. 7 lower case characters were hurt in the production of this entry, but no finger joints)

In 2003, I needed to write a PHP site that would need to be internationalized, and decided to use gettext() for this purpose. While PHP has proper support for gettext, it unfortunately does not have any builtin way to easily convert the data in the Accept-Language and Accept-Charset HTTP headers into something that can be understood by gettext. So I sat down, and over the course of an afternoon, I wrote 83 lines of PHP code (excluding comments) that would do just that: parse the above two headers, and return a gettext string which represents the best match out of a set of strings specified. It's pretty easy in use, and was written quite generically, so I put a GPL tag on top of it, put it online, added a comment to the documentation of the gettext stuff in the PHP manual advertising the URL, and stopped thinking of it. The project that I wrote this file originally for eventually wasn't even finished; today, I don't even recall what it was. In early 2005, I received a mail from Matthew Palmer thanking me for the code, and telling me that he'd incorporated it in IRM of which he's part of the development team. Which reminded me of its existance. For a short while. Today, I was cleaning out my INBOX, and stumbled upon this old email again. Which got me curious, so I started googling for those 83 lines of code that I'd entrusted to the Free Software world three years ago. I must say I'm pleasantly surprised. My file accept-to-gettext.inc seems to be used in a variety of free software projects, including of course IRM, but also the GnuCash website, or in this french educational thing called SLIS. It seems to be quoted in its entirety on some turkish PHP-related forum. It has been adapted to support different translation systems. And so on... the list is rather long. Can't say I'm not proud. And yet, the code contains a rather silly bug: the assumption that character set encodings are somehow linked to translations. They are not; gettext is perfectly capable of transparently transcribing one character set to another. Oh well...

Argh... trying to get caught up on this journal in the wee hours of the morning here in wt:Odense. I've had pretty bad jet lag this trip -- I've never been particularly good with time changes, and the North-America-to-Europe switcheroo really throws me off. So by 2PM I'm falling down on my feet, but at 4AM I'm rarin' to go. Odense has been a particularly nice place to visit. We got into wt:Copenhagen a few days ago, and crashed at the Airport Hilton there. It's actually attached to the airport -- you can just walk right in. Maj got a good deal on a room, and we figured it would make sense to sleep with the baby right there, rather than fight the train system to find another hotel in the city centre. After a free brunch including many different kinds of pickled fish, and a looong nap, we took the train into the Central Station in Copenhagen, right by Tivoli Gardens. There were lines around the block for the amusement park, but we skirted them and headed into the pedestrian area near City Hall. Based on a recommendation in Wikitravel, we went to the line of caf s and restaurants off of Nyhavn, a sliver of water poking into the heart of the town. It was a great walk, and we had a casual sidewalk dinner at a place called Carl's Corner. The canal was lined with boats that had been converted to restaurants -- we may try one when we go back to Copenhagen this week. tags: travel copenhagen jetlag nyhaven

Wikisym The next morning I got up at dawn and got on a train to Odense for Wikisym. I missed my connection at the Central Station, and all the trains were running late, so I got real confused about where to go. The fact that I was carrying all of our luggage didn't help matters. But a few false starts later, I managed to get myself oriented and on my way. The train ride was beautiful -- wt:Denmark is a very pretty country, with rolling grassy hills and clusters of small, peak-rooved houses by the tracks. The trip from Copenhagen to Odense takes you from wt:Zealand to wt:Funen, across a long rail bridge. Very impressive. Once I'd landed in Odense and got myself organized, I slipped into the back of the room for Wikisym to catch the last few minutes of Angela Beesley's keynote address. Angela might be the hardest-working person in Wikidom -- she's a tireless community organizer not only for the Wikimedia Foundation sites like Wikipedia but also for Wikia's sites. After her talk, we did an wp:Open Space session, which continued throughout the day, interlaced with the academic presentations. I'm getting to be a big fan of Open Space; it was really effective for RecentChangesCamp, and I think it works well for organizing a conference. Ted Ernst led the sessions, with the help of Gerard Muller of the Danish Open Space Institute. Probably the most productive Open Space session for me was the one about non-text wikis -- using wiki techniques for video, audio, image and visual language editing. I'm fascinated by this stuff, and it's great to hear that some people are working with SVG and SMIL to do in-browser multimedia editing. The consensus is that the technologies Aren't There Yet but are around the corner. The other major thing I think I picked up from this session was Eugene Eric Kim's discussion of Wiki Ohana. Ohana is the Hawaiian word for family; the Wiki Ohana is a project to develop some interoperability and a transmission of our Wiki principles to new members of the family. I think it's a great idea and I'm going to try to get involved further. tags: wikisym2006 wikisym open space wiki ohana

Odense We had a great walk around Odense's core pedestrian area. It's not exceptional for Northern European towns -- it reminds me of the Netherlands, and Maj of Switzerland -- but the car-free cobble-stone walking areas are a real relief after years in North America. We have some pedestrian areas in Montreal, of course, but not in the same way. Odense is the childhood home of wp:Hans Christian Anderson, and the city is decorated with statues of HCA, and of characters from his stories (the Tin Soldier, Thumbelina, etc.) It gives a kind of fairy-tale air to the town. I'm not sure they should feel so proud of being Anderson's childhood home, though -- from everything I've read, his childhood was nightmarishly cruel, and his abysmally poor family was harshly treated by the society here. But, of course, that's in the past. Now, we had a real nice time walking around. Amita June likes tottering along on the cobblestones, and shouting really loud in the small streets to hear the echos. We ended up having dinner in a place called the Cuckoo Caf -- great food under a spreading tree in a little square. This morning -- no, yesterday morning -- Maj got up and took the first sessions, and Amita June and I slept in. We went off into town again to find a bakery, and shared a chunk of brunsviger, a sugary pastry that will probably rot out her tiny teeth. I had a cup of tea, which was less than satisfying. I've been trying to cut caffeine out of my life, so we've been having decaf at home, but they don't seem to serve it in caf s here. I'm a creature of habit, and I like the taste of coffee even if it doesn't have the caffeine oomph. tags: odense amitajune decaf hca

CAPS LOCK SUCKS In response to Lars's defense of CAPS LOCK: Lars, you ignorant slut. Caps lock has been the bane of online culture since the invention of mixed case in the late 1960s. It is a hallmark of clueless newbie-ism for people who are too analphabetic to remember the exceedingly simple English capitalization rules. The only legitimate purpose for CAPS LOCK is for doing C macros and defines, but hey, who writes in C any more? Anyways, that's just lazy programming. A real programmer would write a macro to capitalize the names of other macros where used. That's just good programming practice. Another important point is that CAPS LOCK is Eurocentric and imperialistic. What value does CAPS LOCK have for someone writing in Eritrean, Malayalam or Ojibwa? None at all. Yet dead white males like Lars Wirzenius want to force their CAPS LOCK cultural hegemony on an increasingly global culture. For shame. The worst thing about CAPS LOCK is that it squats in the middle of the most important letters on the keyboard, like a rat trap waiting to spring. Big and ugly, it always catches your left pinky when you're reaching for Ctl or Shift or Tab or A or whatever. Key-chording is here to stay, and CAPS LOCK not only ignores this important UI development but actively interferes with it. Modal interfaces are rightfully extinct, and CAPS LOCK needs to go the way of the dinosaur. It's time to eliminate this obsolete key once and for all. (This message brought to you by The Taxpayers Against Caps Lock Coalition. I, Evan Prodromou, endorse this message.) tags: caps lock ignorant slut

Debtags tag clouds Erich Schubert has been popping up my gaim today with the idea of making a Debtags tag cloud. Indeed, it was missing, so we made it. Firstly, I added a new feature to tagcoll and generated the tag statistics. Then, Erich created a python script to generate the tagcloud, on which we then hacked a bit together. Finally, we came up with two tag maps: one nicely organised by facets, and one folded in a big cloud. Look at the cloud: this is what Debian is made of. Cool ideas come out, like making subclouds given a tag selection. It's just a simple matter of programming, so they say. Would they fit in the back of the Etch CD/DVD case?

Get it while it’s hot! It has been uploaded to Debian and will get to the mirrors in a day or two, but if you really want it now, then grab 0.10 release from Sourceforge. The last version of SBackup was released in last November so this has been long overdue, that is why I want to extend many thanks to Jonh Wendell, who reignited my motivation for SBackup. A large part of this release is his work. We finally have two out of three most requested features: i18n and purging of old backups. Now the progress indication is the big thing people still want to see. And also lots and lots of small cornercase bugs have been fixed, some of them required rewriting chunks f the code, some others were oneliners that bothered many people. I am very proud of this release and I am looking forward to what we can do for 0.11, one small step at a time. P.S. I have already received emails of congratulation about the release and a bug report requesting the new version in Debian. Needless to say that the package has been uploaded and will go out in the next mirror push.

A major problem I have with gcc is that exceptions are pretty heavyweight because the call to __cxa_throw is a library call. I can see the point in trying to conserve memory, however it would be really cool if an attempt at "inlining" that was made; in the case that the throw statement is within an inlined function and the catch is just outside of it, it would be a lot cheaper to avoid setting up the exception handling tables, and doing the unwind by hand.

I like the Caps Lock key. My fingers automatically turn it on whenever I need to type more than three consecutive upper case characters. For example, when I type C code, and need to define a new FILE variable, hey, there was Caps Lock. Or a NULL constant. Or, heck, EWOULDBLOCK. I touch type. I spent a lot of time and energy in the 80s to learn to touch type. Using Caps Lock is fully automatic, to me, and it is quite a helpful key. (This log entry is part of the "Save Caps Lock" campaign brought to you by the International Society of Caps Lock Fanciers. No upper case characters were hurt in the production of this entry.)

Well, it's Friday and i've tons of small Debian related things in my TODO list for the weekend. I'll probably just stop to watch F1, oh wait there's no F1 race this Sunday!<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Gnome 2.14 in Debian<br /></span> There are some others around but i like watch this <a href="http://www.0d.be/debian/debian-gnome-2.14-status.html">status page</a>, i was there from the start so it's easier to me see the progress. Hopefully i'll join the team helping with gnome-media maintenance, until now i helped tracking <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=stratus@debian.org;tag=gslice">some application bugs</a> and i plan to start a small transition from gtkhtml3.6 to gtkhtml3.8 that seb128 suggested. Well, some builds during the weekend, opening bugs with patches when necessary.<br /><br />Before you ask about metacity and composite, the answer is no. The package won't be built with a useless flag. If in doubt, please read the configure.in into metacity code, see:<span style="font-family:monospace;"><br /></span>(...)<br />echo "Not building compositing manager by default now, must enable explicitly to get \<span style="font-family:monospace;"><br /></span>it. And it doesn't work, so don't bother unless you want to hack on it..."<br />(...)<br /><br />By the way, if you want to help with GNOME 2.14 sarge backport drop me a comment. I'm unsure if i've enough time to do that, but with more people around probably yes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">mess deployment</span><br />Debian aims to be a universal operating system so we should at least understand that probably LTSP has its use cases and FAI, d-i preseeding and others has its own different use cases. <a href="http://natalian.org/archives/2006/03/24/mass-deployment/#comment-10214">mess deployment sucks</a>!