Last week I was on my first Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N), I wanted to attended this summit for couple of reasons: 1. Developer, I m part of Debian Java, working on Eclipse IDE, and as you re developing Debian, you re automatically developing Ubuntu, no? 2. DebConf11 main organizer, I really wanted to see how it s all done on corporate level, for instance we re going with hotels instead of student dorms and so on. 3. Migration to Linux infrastructure, make contacts and have some talks on this topic, because after DebConf11 in Bosnia a lot of institution will most probably open doors to open solutions such as Linux. I went to this summit without any expectations or plans, just said I ll play it by ear. This years UDS was held in Orlando, Florida before Orlando I was planning to stay in NYC for couple of days, therefor my whole plan was to get to NYC, then Orlando then head back home I NYC I spent couple of days here with my cousins and friends, as always NYC never fails to surprise me, and I ll always stop by even if it s only for couple of days I wanted to meet up with couple of Debian people as well, but unfortunately my schedule was too tight so Caribe Royale, Orlando Please note that this whole trip was crazy (in a good way) starting from Sarajevo; on my flight from NYC to Orlando I see a guy that s sitting in front of me is wearing Canonical Landscape tshirt, I approach him and it turns he was Jamu Kakar working on Landscape. Since my luggage was late we had conversations from Debian over Ubuntu to Java to everything pretty much. While we were still at the airport, we bump into two more people going to UDS. As we got to hotel, same moment we walked out of cab there he was Jorge Castro, was he there just to smoke a cigarette or whatever doesn t even matter, what matters is that even before walking into hotel building I knew where reception, my tower and bar was, everything I needed to know at that moment Hotel where everything was held was Caribe Royale and even though I looked at their website I thought there was no way it s all going to be that nice, to my delight it was exact replica. Place is All-Suite Hotel and Convention Center , which meant that both accomodation, venue and everything else was in one place which is 15 minutes later after I checked in, I was at a bar talking to Jim Baker about Java, Jython and Python, exact things I wanted to talk about at that given moment. What I said in these last couple of paragraphs sounds pretty cool eh? Well to me this whole UDS was just like this, everybody was so accessible and open for discussion, from Jono Bacon walking around offering candy to UDS reception staff Michelle, Marianna and others who were always there whether you had a complaint, problem or a praise. I really should stop mentioning names, because I ll forget somebody, and since it s just not fair because I had a feeling everybody was just there for you, whatever it was you needed. Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N) Ubuntu, Debian, DebConf, differences? Even though I said I ll play it by ear, from very beginning I thought I d be complete outsider, being part of Debian and all. Quite contrary, I was everything but outsider, and even more there was plenty of Debian people there, including current DPL Stefano Zacchiroli, Colin Watson, Riku Voipio just to name few. There was also a Debian Healt Check plenary. But overall, there are differences between DebConf and UDS. One of the things is that you can attend UDS remotely I m not sure how much is this doable on DebConf, but then again vast differences are that UDS is filled with BOF s (as we would call it in Debian) meetings of different teams, I attended a lot of these, and most of them end with some kind of conclusion. While each day there was (only?) an hour of lectures on various topics, which on DebConf we would characterize maybe even as speed talks . However, everything was high paced, and it all ended up on You think that s a problem? How do you think we could solve it? . I had a feeling even if I didn t say something out loud that someone would hear me and approach me to discuss it. Everything was straight forward, all in goal to resolve certain issue or a problem, which I absolutely loved. Fun It wasn t all work, even though Orlando doesn t seem to be my kind of city from what I saw, it s way too magical for my taste There was a lot of places where you could go to enjoy yourself. Good people at Canonical even offered me free ticket to Disney World, there was a lot of destinations to visit and transpiration was also organized by Canonical. Unfortunately I missed the notorious UDS party on Friday because I had to head home early, but possibly I ll make it next year Even though, hotel was that great and to be honest you didn t have to leave to look for party. My favorite was Universal City Walk, one night I decided to go to see Blue Man Group, best part of it was that I got pulled up on stage by one of the members and was part of one of the acts! This is definitely something everyone should see during his life, one moment you re laughing like a lunatic, while other moment you re just having goose bumps from the performance itself. Amazing stuff. After all I wrote here along with the pictures, is there even anything else I need to say? I believe that even if I didn t play it by ear, this whole trip would exceed all my expectations in every possible sense. Because that s really what happened, those three reasons I was going to UDS for? Far more happened than that. All I can say in the end is that I ll move closer to having a part in Ubuntu development, and yea, I ll try to be regular on UDS from now on See you in Budapest? If all these photos weren t enough, you can find official group photo as well as personal set of photos can be found on: UDS-N photos by 2010 Sean Sosik-Hamor

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. However, 1.5 years ago, listmasters established a well-working system to clean out spam from the mailing lists. It basically works in four steps:

1. first, spam can be "reported" by anyone meeting it. While you are reading the mailing lists, reporting spam is as simple as bouncing the offending mail to a dedicated address: report-listspam@lists.debian.org. I, for instance, use a mutt macro to set ESC-L as a "report spam" hotkey. Spam can also be reported when browsing the mailing lists archives and clicking on the "Report as spam" button;
2. when a given mail has been reported as spam more than five times, it is then "nominated" for review;
3. nominated mails must the be reviewed by volunteers in order to confirm they really are spam. The review algorithm is complex but, in short, when a mail has been confirmed as spam by 3 reviewers without being qualified as "ham" by anyone else, then it is considered spam;
4. such mails are then removed from the mailing lists archives.

Steps 2 and 4 are performed by a weekly script that runs on Sunday mornings (5:00 UTC, IIRC) How can you help? Process nominated spam We need more reviewers for step 3. At this moment 2 people are doing this on a regular basis (every Sunday with the morning coffee). Some others are working on this in a less frequent way. It seems that 1 or 2 more regulars reviewers would guarantee that we can cope with the nominated spam incoming flow. Only Debian developers can do that step. They should read instructions, ask for a password, then start reviewing. The first 1 or 2 people joining this will have a quite big amount of nominated spam to process, for their first effort. However, as most of these have been classified as spam by at least the two people doing this for months....the amount will slowly decrease. I, for instance, now only spend 5-10 minutes reviewing the nominated mails every week. Report spam Everybody can work on reporting spam. You can start by doing this on mailing lists you read by just bouncing spams to the spam report address; If you want to do more, you can join existing spam cleaning efforts, such as the one running for debian-boot or the one running in debian-l10n-french (the latter probably more for French speakers). Or you can of course start a similar effort for your pet list. To be efficient, this effort needs to gather 5-6 people who will process the mailing lists archives systematically. Let's clean out these archives!

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu / Skolelinux DVD, which is supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu working using this DVD. The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created a patch for debian-cd in BTS report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space. A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that those needing these applications are few and can get them from the Debian archive. Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages were using most space. A few large packages are well know; openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB. The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package. I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the free X driver should work. With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the DVD more useful again.

My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove. With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently. I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it. Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:

• Indexing
• Organization

Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information. Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove. And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well. So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.

Tomorrow I won't have to deal with it getting dark at a soul-crushing 5:30 pm. Nor will I have to wake up blearily an hour early in the spring. Instead I will be enjoying my new, custom time zone. It's "JEST", for "Joey's Eastern (non)Standard Time", and in JEST, there is no spring forward or fall back stress. The folly of daylight savings time (Ben Franlin's best prank ever) really becomes apparent when you have solar power. It's bad enough that the sun is setting at 6:30 without compounding that by an hour. By keeping my clock set so the sun sets in midwinter at 6 pm, I will maximise what little light there is, and minimise time spent using batteries in the dark. Of course, it helps that I'm my own boss, and that most of the people I work with are probably not in a nearby timezone anyway, and that most things are done asynchronously. Since JEST is an hour ahead of local time here in the winter, I will, at worst, tend to be running early. So I only have to change my clocks one time -- and by "change", I mean create a custom timezone in Linux. Here's how to do that.

1. Make a custom timezone file. The standard one for North America is a bewildering 3000 lines of special cases, conflicting legistlation, and historical weirdness, but I only need one: echo "Zone JEST -4:00 - JEST" > JEST.zone
2. Compile and install it to somewhere; I put it in ~/.zoneinfo zic JEST.zone -d ~/.zoneinfo
3. Set TZ to use it. Also TZDIR if it's not in the system directory. export TZDIR=~/.zoneinfo TZ=JEST

Update: Turns out it was easier than I thought, just setting TZ=FOO+4 will make date display a timezone "FOO" that is 4 hours behind GMT. So all I need is to set TZ=JEST+4 Result:

date: Sat Oct 30 21:43:39 JEST 2010
date -R: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:43:39 -0400

Previously:

• daylight savings time idiocy
• DST: no power saved
• daylight savings crime
• fall back day

My wife has been pestering me for months to get a replacement for our dead Epson inkjet printer (which didn t last long, mind you). To avoid the nightmare of printer support, which, unless you buy a high-end professional printer which does everything plus the coffee, is usually somewhere between disaster and works sometimes , we spent a long time on manufacturers websites to choose wisely the model. We chose the HP Laserjet P1102, which, according to HP, has a full support level and is even part of their recommended models. Yet, after plugging it in, it took me quite some time to understand why it would behave as a brick instead of a printer. First, I thought it was a bug in hplip. Then, I soon discovered that the printer advertised itself as a storage device instead of a printer. What, a buggy firmware? Thanks to a random question on Launchpad I discovered it s not a bug, it s a feature. It s named HP Smart Install and it turns out it s yet another stupid idea to support OSes that are too dumb to detect your printers automatically: the printer advertises itself as a CD drive, until you install the driver that will make it switch back to being a printer. What happens to those who don t want this feature that turns your printer into a 10 kg, read-only USB drive? Well, HP has a solution in the Smart Install FAQ:

25. Can I turn HP Smart Install off or on?
Yes. You can use the HP Smart Install utility to disable/enable HP Smart Install. The utility is stored on the software CD, in the UTIL folder. SIUtility.exe is for 32-bit operating systems and SIUtility64.exe is for 64-bit operating systems.

Bunch of idiots. If I buy a 100 printer, it s not so that I have to buy a 100 operating system just to activate it.

I m almost finished with sort of re-bootstrapping Debian/m68k (I can use etch-m68k as well as what was in unstable at the moment as dependencies, so it was not that much, still, 305 binary packages build from 84 source packages, most for unstable (very few for unreleased, with very responsive maintainers, thanks all, who will include the patches in their next uploads) is a bit including rebuilds with newer versions, more patches, more testing or newer dependencies installed. I ll probably upload on Sunday evening, as I ll be off for 2-4 days at least from then (see below). Ingo tried to test on real hardware, but as Murphy wants a hard disc failed we ll still try to get something done over the weekend. If you want to have a look, see my repository index (sources.txt contains a sample sources.list file, 0-NOTE.txt some hints, including the right debootstrap/cowbuilder magic and speed tricks). I ll need to learn how to use LVM and set up a buildd now I ve not been in much of a hacking mood recently all these visits to the dentist leave me in unrest and disturb my equilibrium. Hence, not much activity even in mksh even if there was need, almost none in MirBSD. This is only temporary, but I won t attend OpenRheinRuhr, or, if I come at all, it ll be for socialising only and probably only one day. Benny s done with his Doctor (in France, no idea whether it s one in Germany as well) of Chemistry and has returned to hacking some (World of) Google-Go(o) code. I expect MirBSD activity to slowly raise once we can come back. Please accept our apologies.

I ve just read the Wikipedia page about Unparliamentary Language [1]. I recommend that everyone read it, if only for the amusement value, among other things it links to incidents where elected representatives acted in a way that would be expected of primary school children. The general concept of having rules about Unparliamentary Language is that MPs are permitted to say anything in Parliament without the risk of being sued or prosecuted, but certain things are inappropriate the most common example is directly accusing another MP of lying. One of the main aims of rules against Unparliamentary Language is to prevent attacks on the honor of another member. Having just witnessed a mailing list discussion go widely off track when a free software project was denigrated, it seems to me that we could do with some similar guidelines for mailing list discussions. The aim would be not to just prevent excessive attacks on the honor of other members but to also protect the honor of the free software projects. So for example one might recommend not using a particular program because of design decisions which seem dubious or a bad security history, but saying it s crap would be considered to be inappropriate. Not that rejecting a program based on design decisions or a history of security flaws would be uncontroversial, but at least that gives objective issues to discuss so if there is a debate it will educate some of the lurkers. Note that I m not claiming to be better than other people in this regard, I ve described software as crap on more than a few occasions. But I will try to avoid such things in future. Finally does anyone have a good suggestion for a Free Software equivalent to the term Unparliamentary Language ? It seems that to a large extent the support of certain ideas depends on having a catchy name and I can t think of one.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unparliamentary_language

In the comments of the article explaining how to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package, I got asked if it was possible to apply a patch only in some distribution. And indeed it is. The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists. So what s the best way to use this? Debian should always provide debian/patches/series, they are supposed to provide the default set of patches to use. Any derivative cooperating with Debian can maintain their own series files within the common VCS repository used for package maintenance. They can drop Debian-specific patches (say branding patches for example), and they can add their own on top of the remaining Debian patches. It s worth noting that it s the job of the maintainers to keep both series files in sync when needed. dpkg-source offers no way to have stacked series files (or dependencies between them). If you want to use quilt to edit an alternate series file, you can temporarily set the QUILT_SERIES environment variable to vendor.series . Just make sure to start from a clean state, i.e. no patches applied. Otherwise quilt will be confused by the sudden mismatch between the series file and its internal data (stored in the .pc directory).

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After last fixes during yesterday evening, I've decided to put new website online today. It matches layout of my blog, uses same technology underneath (Django). The biggest change is probably simplification of the structure and also cleanup of old unused stuff. I tried not to miss anything, but I'm sure something will be discovered in next days. With this change, I've also shutdown my SVN server as all things has been migrated either elsewhere (usually Debian's collab-maint SVN repository) or are now using Git either on Gitorious or repo.or.cz.

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The Russian l10n team is the first team to reach one of our translators' Grails: all debconf templates translations are now fully translated in Russian, in testing. Russian is the first language to reach this ever (I formerly announced 100% completion for a few languages, but that was in unstable: we never tracked testing up to now). It means that, in theory, on can do a full installation of all packages in squeeze (in case some crazy folks want to do this!) and always be prompted in Russian. French and German are lagging very close to this, the only missing bit being the udev package, which had two consecutive urgent uploads that couldn't include a full translation coordination. For these, we're indeed waiting for another udev upload, but I already nagged Marco about this..:-) Portuguese should make it, though I still have to track 7 packages for it. Swedish is only missing 2 packages. I'm less sure that Czech and Spanish (the other two teams working hard on 100% completion) will make it.

Thank you, Tim.

My latest patch for Org mode has been accepted by Carsten today. It adds support for custom category icons in all views, like agenda or todo. You just need to configure org-agenda-category-icon-alist and it will work out of the box.

rotflmao. Dear Oracle, MySQL is Open Source. By making it even more of a toy than it already is, you're just asking people to create a fork. On the other hand, perhaps nobody will actually do so, and this will kill off MySQL for good. Which wouldn't be a shame; so if that turns out to be the case, then thanks. Love, Wouter. Update: the above links to the non-GPL versions of MySQL only. There is still a "community version" of MySQL under the GPL. Seems I missed some things. Whoops.

My fellow Republicans and I got a nice early Diwali present on Tuesday. ~65 seats in the House ~6 in the senate, ~18 governorships and control of ~20 state legislatures. (Some races haven't been formally called yet.) A few disappointments though. no majority in the Senate and Harry Reid and Barney Frank were not defeated. Still overall its an election to celebrate. Here are a few thoughts. The Election System Is An Embarassment Once again there are several races where the outcome is in doubt because of technical problems with voting. Whatever politics we have, can we agree that it is damn stupid that we still can't get something as simple as counting ballots right? Prediction: The 2012 Republican presidential candidate will come from the Tea Party. While I may be a Republican, I am also a Cosmopolitan East Coast Elitist so the Tea Party didn't move me much. There were a couple of cases (NY and DE atleast) where their candidates were subpar and cost us victory but the best of the new Republicans also came out of this movement. I would rather vote for one of them than Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Gingrich etc. (With the exception of Sarah Palin who is just too polarizing I'm afraid.) The Tea Party itself will subside in a few years as all populist movements do. (Ask the Hope'n'changers.) Young People Are Dumb Part of leftist mythology is the idea that one day "the kids" are going to rise up against the mean old corporate overlords. It ain't going to happen. There was a huge upsurge in first time voters in 2008 but that was because Obama was a novelty act not because they had suddenly discovered the merits of Keynesianism. Now Obama is old and busted so they won't vote anymore. (Not until they have kids and a mortgage sometime in the future.) They'll spend time make cool ironic signs for the Rally to Promote Comedy Central but even the prospect of legalizing pot won't get them to the polling booths in sufficient numbers to defeat the oldies. Why? Because young people are dumb. Prediction: War With Iran If you're President Obama what do you do now? Bipartisanship? Yeah right. Look at what happened to Rep. Cao of Louisiana, the only Republican to vote for Obamacare and one of only two GOP congressmen to lose on Tuesday. Obama actively campaigned for his challenger. Any of the new Republicans who try and compromise with the President will end up under the bus sooner or later as they well know. The President could go full retard with the socialism (progressivism, liberalism whatever. It's all the same.) All his initiatives will be shot down but he can claim to be a martyr to the party of No. (Who will be joined in the Senate by Lieberman and whatever centrist Democrats who are up for reelection in 2012.) But this seems to be the path to a one-term presidency to me. Maybe that's what he wants. He could retire comfortably to the deanship of some Ivy League law school and make a lucrative killing on the rubber chicken circuit. But lets assume he wants to get back in the White House in 2012. One way to get back in touch with the voters is to start getting serious about foreign policy which has either been a joke (Remember the reset button?) a travesty or just copied from the Bush administration. In particular the Obama administration has completely failed in stopping Iran from gaining nuclear technology, sponsoring terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and oppressing its own people. War with Iran would enhance his standing with Conservatives (hey it works for me!) most liberals would go along with it and the extreme Code Pink type loonies can safely be ignored. I say it happens before November 2012.

About a month ago, at the end of August, I finished a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. This was probably one of the more extreme activities I have ever participated in, and it's well worth a blog post. I found out about the course in a ridiculously trivial way, by following a link in a Reddit comment (I wonder if I could track down that comment...). The website referenced by the comment contained (almost) no new-agey mumbo-jumbo and looked legit in general. I also appreciated the fact that this was a relatively serious and intensive course, which should be enough to form a reasonably founded opinion on meditation in general. When learning sporadically, in small bits, it is hard to say whether the material itself is no good, or you just do not understand it yet and need to study more; I was quite skeptical towards the practice, but wanted to give it fair trial. I was quite impressed that there was a course available in Lithuania, a few hours by train from where I live. Finally, the course was free (by tradition Vipassana is taught without monetary compensation). I went ahead and signed up for a standard introductory 10-day course. Vipassana (also called insight meditation) is a meditation technique allegedly coming back from Gautama Buddha himself (well, all the traditions like to claim that origin...). It has been experiencing a renaissance, partly due to an organization set up by a meditation teacher S. N. Goenka which has founded meditation centers all over the world. The essence of Vipassana is a method of teaching your mind to act instead of merely reacting to outside stimuli such as pain, anger of other people or hardships. The technique provided is to monitor your sensations, watch them with equanimity and suspend any reaction, and slowly it sinks in that all things are temporary and you can choose what to react to and how. That's the basic idea; I don't want to go deep into exposition of Vipassana as there is plenty of information about that (also at the same time the information is almost useless because you have to experience it to really understand it). Instead, I will sure some of the more personal remarks and experiences. The course took place in an cottage near Kretinga, housing around 50 people. The living conditions were absolutely great, and this would have been a true holiday if not for the regime and the rules. The day would start very early, at 4 AM (ending at around 9:30 PM), and we'd do about 12 hours of meditation in total inbetween, with occasional breaks, but the most gruesome part is that no communication at all was allowed with anyone except the manager of the camp (and the teacher during a specified time). That gets to you after a few days, but still, there are people around you, so it's bearable; on the other side, the senses (touch, smell) become very acute. The food was taken care of by volunteers (students who have finished the course), and I could say it was quite good actually. The goal, of course, was to keep the environment from interfering with meditation, and I think it was done very well. The presentation of the actual technique also did not disappoint. Each day a new step would be introduced, with the whole day to practice before moving on. Looking back, the pacing worked well. Every day in the evening there were lectures on theory. They were somewhat informative, but also sometimes annoyingly primitive and verbose. The little mistakes, holes in logic and slight doses of mumbo-jumbo almost drove me nuts by the middle of the course, until I learned not to react to them. Despite the shortcomings of presentation, the simplicity and lucidity of the practice and lightness of theoretical baggage really appealed to me. The whole organisation in general gave the impression of complete transparency, with no strings attached, no financial interests in play and no agitation for further involvement. While there are many meditation techniques, I am happy that I've gone with Vipassana in particular for one reason: Vipassana meditation uses no artificial tools to help you concentrate, such as mantras, visualisations, counting, etc. Such methods make concentration much easier, but they also create a dependence on the methods themselves. I appreciate the purity of Vipassana in this regard. Not everything in the practice is roses though. First, a particular worldview supported by Vipassana is presented as "scientific" and supposedly "the right way to live", and if even if you don't agree, "the truth" of Vipassana will become obvious to you with time. This is a distinctive mark of ideologies. The thing that makes everything break is the reincarnation, which is generally assumed as true, even if it's not shoved down the student's throat. Every rationalization of a world view has a "white lie" (usually related to the concept of eternity somehow) at the core, and in this context reincarnation is it. Given what we know now about the relationship between the mind and the body, reincarnation is absolutely ridiculous and completely untenable, and that breaks all "moral" reasoning for practicing meditation as opposed to doing something else. I'm not the first to bring up this problem, there's plenty of material about it online. The second slippery idea is that the concept of "negative happiness" is central in Vipassana, that is: happiness is defined as lack of suffering. This point is not that unreasonable actually, from personal experience I could indeed call the state of non-suffering happiness, but there is definitely something missing when compared to the state of mind when I'm truly, positively happy. Whether you consider that something important or not, it's definitely there. Third, Vipassana suggests that it is only you who is at fault when your inner state is disturbed; the world affects you as much as you let it, and in order to find happiness you should learn to control the "interface" rather than the outside world, which will usually not behave as you want. This may be correct, but sometimes it could just be easier to fix the world rather than change yourself, and I have the suspicion that it this is much more frequently the case in the modern world compared to the pre-modern environment. (This is one of the points which break when reincarnation is rejected, as with reincarnation you have the whole eternity to fix yourself.) While the complaints are serious, they do not mean complete rejection of Vipassana but rather integration among the various other techniques available. The actual meditation technique is still great for gaining and maintaining mental composure, reducing anxiety and improving well-being. Now, if I could only get used to meditating regularly... If you have the chance, I highly recommend you try out an introductory 10-day course. There is little to lose and a lot to gain. And if you do go ahead, I have two hints. First, do not even think about leaving the course before it's over. Any hardships are temporary and will be overcome quickly. Second, use the time with the teacher, those interactions were very helpful to me. Also, given the "noble silence", talking to someone once in a while will not hurt.

Gnash has moved from bzr to git, at least for the moment - Savannah's bzr setup is slow and unlikely to improve, so the choice is git or Launchpad, apparently. (Thinking selfishly, I'm a lot more familiar with git than with bzr, so I hope it stays this way.) My instructions from July have changed only slightly:

git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/git/gnash
cd gnash
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-renderer=agg \
            --enable-media=GST \
            --enable-gui=gtk \
            --with-plugins-install=system
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-plugins

Buried near the end of the bug reports wiki page is a useful tip for debugging - export GNASH_OPTIONS=writelauncher before starting the browser, and gnash will write out the instructions for starting a local copy. In practise, these instructions seem to appear as a file called /tmp/gnash-debug-1.sh, and that will reference a file matching /tmp/gnash-cookies.* - so don't bother trying to dig through the debug log. With this tip, it's possible to get the browser out of the loop, and focus on debugging gnash (which should be enough for most problems). At least, that's what I hope - I've spent the last hour or so just figuring this stuff out. Hmpf.

Those of us who work in technical areas like to believe that because we are engaging in technical endeavors rather than social endeavors, our work is defined and predictable. This hints that we know the future. I think Scott Adams captured the thought well:
We should not be so cocky. While the technical world is more structured and predictable than other areas, it has its limits too. One can only see so far down into complexity before predictability is lost in the detail. That s where we get so called Heisenbugs . Looking out to the future we can only see so far as well. Recently I ve been reading The Black Swan. It is a useful reminder that the future isn t as linear and predictable as we d like to pretend it is. One idea that has stuck in my head is the idea that in order to take something into account that one will know in the future in one s predictions, one must already know it. There is an inherent limit to how far we can see. How is this relevant to distribution developers? Each time we set off to develop a new release, we make an assessment of how to best expend the available resources (our own, our company s, our group of people we can talk into doing stuff) to make things better . We do the best we can, but we must always be mindful of the fact that we press forward using our best engineering judgement, but as we look into the future, eventually this is all just liquor and guessing too.

During my recent trip to Massachusetts for CalConnect XIX I passed back via New York, surfing a few nights on the couch at the Washington Cube Garden¹. This was just enough time for my new Davis VantagePro2 to arrive by UPS ground (phew!) causing me much consternation, as the box was about twice as wide as I expected it to be. On opening it I discovered that the reason for the size was the physical dimensions of the rain gauge, leading me to realise that I had actually bought exactly what I wanted: a high quality weather station. Also leading me to wonder how the hell I was going to get it halfway around the world with me the next day. Unfortunately that extra wide carrying case was in no way going to fit inside my suitcase. Fortunately it came with a handle. And those wonderful people at Air New Zealand gave me a Koru Gold upgrade for a 50th birthday present, so it was time to put it to the test... Travelling on the subway out to JFK was it's own little adventure, but I made it out to terminal 5 and wandered around a bit before concluding I needed to be in terminal 7. Once I was in the right place I found the fancy people's check in counter and the nice lady there was only too happy for me to carry it to New Zealand, though she did aver that perhaps the security scanners would be dubious. Not a hitch there though: I guess they're used to letting everything through that's not specifically denied, so weather stations are fine because nobody would be silly enough to even think of doing that... Being Koru Gold really helped at this point though, because it enabled me to queue jump use the priority boarding line when getting onto the plane, and every airline in the US seems to have gone all-out for this "checked baggage costs more" approach, so the planes all fly with empty baggage holds and totally overstuffed overhead lockers. If this progresses I shouldn't wonder that the planes will get so top-heavy they roll over, but through the miracles of priority boarding I was able to commandeer all the locker space I needed before anyone else had even made it past row 40. I confess that I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite such plain sailing getting through LAX. I mean we all know what reputation this delightful little exit port has. In the event it was totally anitclimactic. If it has a handle on it, and it's about the same size and shape as a largish carryon then it's fine. There have been no recorded stabbings with wind vanes anyway - at least on aeroplanes - so clearly they are perfectly safe. Finally back in my country of birth, thinking I was home free, I breathed a sigh of relief transferred my bags and nipped off to the Koru lounge for a much needed shower and change of clothes after I snuck the station through another scanner. By now the handle had broken, so it was looking decidedly more 'box' like and less 'carryon' like, and when I eventually rolled up at the gate with my boarding pass the attendant made a valiant attempt to relieve me of it, but she was too slow and I danced around her and swanned up the gangway to take my seat. I was slow, this time, having missed the first boarding call, and all overhead lockers were crammed full. There was no seat in front of me to put the weather station under. Fortunately a nearby cupboard proved fit for purpose and it was secreted there and we were underway. At this point the guy two seats over said "didn't I see that weather station in New York?". Of course being bright yellow does make it a little conspicuous I guess, and I'm not renowned for my own inconspicuousness myself. So that's how I got my new weather station home, and you can see right away that doing things the easy way would never even occur to me. Possibly this is why I run Linux: there just isn't enough challenge when you run a different operating system. On Windows someone has always written a program for your new weather station, and a Mac user wouldn't be seen dead with it because it's black and beige and comes in a bright yellow box! So now I had to find some code to write. I looked around and very rapidly discovered that some software called vproweather was available, which would happily talk to my weather station and download the data from it, write web pages, stuff it into a MySQL database and so forth. All, obviously, far too easy, so I thought aha! I could convert that to PostgreSQL, and then I would be happy and relax with the thought of a job well done. So I downloaded the code in question an impressive several hundred kb of C code, cranked open a text editor and started to crawl through it and see where I could add the magic pixie dust to make it work with PostgreSQL. But it was not to be. My eyes glazed over or scales fell from them or something, and I realised that this particular edifice was beyond my help. Back to square one. I downloaded the Vantage Serial Protocol docs from the Davis Instruments website did some quick googling and decided I should write a module to talk this protocol. And I should write it in Perl (it was a Thursday, and Perl always seems more sensible on a Thursday, and not because of Douglas Adams, either). I beavered away into the night. Rain threatened, so I raced outside and installed the new weather station on the roof in the hopes that it's magnificent rain collector would collect. I raced back inside and was able to count the first (and so far, only) tip of the bucket. And so I now release upon the world Davis::VantagePro my first perl module. Well, the first one I care to share with the world, anyway. I have stressed it with very little testing, lumbered it with no planning or design whatsoever and so I feel it only fair that I should cast it upon the world with very little thought for it's survival or existential goals.

¹ I seem to recall one night we came up with some fantastic names for Micah & Biella's Washington Square apartment, but I couldn't remember any of the good ones and had to slap a new one on there. I should also mention my stay at the Acetarium in Boston, which was a fabulous few days, but it would pad this blog post needlessly, and I've already done that.