In regard to my post yesterday about Planet Debian I received the following response:
James Purser said I'm betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff and Pias feeds when they switched to atom. Planet needs to be upgraded.
Well I am using an atom feed, so this probably explains it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the Planet Debian readers, I guess that things will stay the way they are until it is upgraded.

Also when viewing my blog entry in Planet Debian I realised that much of a spam message had got pasted in to the URL field for the Planet Debian link. Oh the irony that I only found this embarassing error because of a bug in the Planet software.

This brings me to another issue, Security Enhanced X. With SE-X (before you ask, I didn't invent the acronym) you can use SE Linux to control communication between windows on an X desktop. With a modification to the clipboard manager (klipper in the case of KDE) every piece of data that's copied from an application will have a security context assigned to it and this context will be checked against the context of an application that is to be the target of a paste operation. Klipper will also have to support relabeling clipboard data. Therefore if I want to cut text from my email client (Kmail) and paste it into Firefox then I would have to relabel it with the appropriate MCS categories. This would permit me to paste text from an email into a web form with a few extra mouse clicks, but would prevent me from accidentally pasting the wrong text. Keeping in mind the fact that there are many more embarassing things that could be accidentally pasted into a blog entry than the contents of a spam this doesn't seem overly difficult.

PS Before anyone jumps to conclusions. When I receive GPG encrypted email or other material that should be kept confidential I try and avoid cutting it, and if I have to do so I clear the clipboard buffer afterwards. Keeping spam a secret is not really a priority to me so I didn't take adequate precautions in this case.

I'm getting sick of blogger. The main thing is that I'm simply not a user. Taking what someone else gives me and just putting up with any failings doesn't suit me at all. I can deal with bugs in things I control (such as Linux distributions) because I can fix the bugs I consider important at any time.

So now I'm looking for a serious blogging program. Wordpress was strongly recommended to me after my previous post on the topic of blogs, but that was in regard to a simple blog program for Intranet use. I am now after a blog program that is designed for Internet use, it must have good security, support multiple users (some of my friends will probably want to use my blog server machine), and not be overly difficult to customise (I am resigned to the fact that I will have to learn another programming language - probably re-learning PHP or Java as that is where web programming is at nowadays).

One thing that I want to do is to have the main web page that displays all recent posts display each post in a frame with a separate Adsense section. The topics of my posts vary a lot so I want to have adverts that match.

Another feature I want is to have multiple RSS feeds with different settings. One use for this is to have tags for each post to specify which channel(s) the post will end up on, another is for Adsense for feeds functionality which I want on for some feeds but off for others. I also want to generate multiple feeds for different syndication services. Ideally a syndication service such as Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia would use a unique feed for sucking it's own data and also have a unique feed address advertised on it's site for the users (if this isn't supported or desired at the syndication level then I can do tricks in the web server to serve different content for different IP addresses). That way I can track use by the different services, work around bugs in syndication services that matter to me, and change settings for post summaries, etc to suit the syndication service.

In terms of HTML editing I only need the most basic functionality. I would be entirely happy to write blog entries in raw HTML, my friends would probably desire line breaks to be converted to paragraph or break tags and basic linking functionality, but they could probably deal with entering bold and italic tags themselves (the few of my friends who couldn't manage this would probably only want to write plain-text in paragraphs).

I also want to run my own syndication software. I guess I have to consider blog server and syndication server at the same time as there may be some dependencies (EG having them both written in the same language might be handy - I don't want to re-learn BOTH Java and PHP). The syndication software would ideally automatically collect the feeds from other syndication services that I specify (although I'm sure I could write a simple Perl script to scrape them from the Planet web sites). Then I want to provide an RSS feed of that content for anyone who wants it.

Please let me know via email or comments if you have any suggestions about which software to use.

It seems that Toyota isn't alone in having non-functional web sites. In fact it's better than some, the basic information on the cars is available and it is possible to get contact information for car dealers, also they have a feed-back form on their web site (to which I submitted my previous blog post). Incidentally the Lexus site had much the same problem as the Toyota site (hardly surprising as Lexus is the luxury marque from Toyota). But I expect that if I phoned Lexus to ask about their vehicles I would get a better call-center experience which would make me less inclined to blog about them.

Daihatsu vehicles are sold by Toyota. Their web site doesn't use Flash, but it has so little content that it doesn't count.

I decided to quickly review the web sites of car manufacturers that sell in Australia for a fair comparison. I found three sites worse than Toyota, two sites that were equal (counting Lexus), and six that were better than it.

Holden has the worst site, they don't display any information if you don't have flash, they don't even display a phone number! I wonder how much Adobe pays web programmers to pull this sort of stunt. I can't imagine Holden management saying "if a customer comes to our web site and doesn't have Flash then don't display our phone number or any other contact information, they can use Flash or buy a Ford instead". Obviously some web monkey has run amok and done their own thing without following directions. Probably some people need to be sacked in the Holden web development group.

Volvo Cars has a very bad site. Most of the content is involved with Flash in some way and refuses to load. There is a mailto reference that is broken, and the overview page for the S60 seems to have a JavaScript loop (I aborted the load after it loaded 245 pictures and was still going). The Volvo page for their other business is quite functional although minimal.

Hyundai has a bad site. The front page works OK, but some of the sub-sites to display information on vehicles redirect to sites such as evolveddriving.com.au which are "optimised for 1024x768" and require Flash and Quicktime while others do strange things like changing the size of the browser window. Overall it's a very bad site, but at least I could find the contact details for my nearest dealer, and it has a feedback form.

Subaru has an OK site. The only thing I couldn't access without Flash is information on their AWD (All Wheel Drive) technology. Unfortunately they provide no email address and no form for sending feedback.

The main Ford web page claims that Flash is required, but their site just works without it. In a quick test I was unable to find any functionality on the Ford site that is missing because of not having Flash. Ford have a well designed site.

The Volkswagen site makes no mention of the fact that I don't use Flash, it does however have some strange unused spaces in the middle of the screen. I guess that it recognised that I don't have Flash and made a semi-successful attempt to work around it. I could get all information I wanted including dealer contact details.

The main Mazda web page displays a message about Flash not being installed and offers a link to a non-Flash version of the site. The Flash section is at the center and the buttons at the sides work if you don't have Flash. This seems to be a well implemented site.

Citroen has an OK site, no flash that I noticed (although there were large blank areas on the screen at times indicating that something was missing), the information was all available and browsing was reasonably easy. One thing that annoyed me was that there were movies available but only through some sort of JavaScript that tried to play them in my browser. I have never bothered setting up my web browsing machine for playing movies (among other things it has no speakers) so this is a problem for me.

Peugeot has a good site. No apparent flash and it's reasonably easy to use. It has more pictures than Kia but the JavaScript navigation stuff is fancy. One nice feature is a single page with pricing summaries for all models. If you have $X to spend on a Peugeot you will easily discover which ones you can afford.

Kia has the best site I saw! Not only is there no flash, but it's well designed, easy to navigate and it loads quite quickly. Please review the Kia site as an example of how to do it properly!

Let me know if I've missed any makes and I'll post an update.

I took on the daunting task of deploying a content management system for my fraternity; most of the concepts are pretty clear already (wiki plus moderation system), but we also need database lookups on some pages. The general idea now is to have someone with database knowledge set up views, and to use a template in the wiki to reference it, but in a number of cases, the people writing the wiki pages, who are not used to working with databases, might need to adapt the query (limit something to a time period, select fields, etc.). So I'm looking for ideas for a presentation layer that eases writing selection and sorting criteria for non-computer-scientists, without dumbing it down too much (after all, the target user group comes from an academic setting, so abstract concepts are not a problem, but a steep learning curve is).

The idea was not mine, but nobody seemed to do it, so I just did it and created openghana.org: It is meant to be a common domain name and portal for the various Free Software related groups in Ghana, especially Linux User Groups, and I hope it causes synergy effects. We are also thinking what services can be provided on that site. At the moment, there is planet.openghana.org, a blog aggregator with blogs from various members of the Ghanaian Free Software community.

Currently, there are two LUGs on openghana, but I hope that others will join as well.

I get translations for dctrl-tools from multiple sources: one translator has direct commit rights to my darcs repository, others bug me; still others use Rosetta (dctrl-tools upstream). On top of this, I just found out that there are active translators working on the Ubuntu branch of dctrl-tools in Rosetta. There have been several cases of different sources of translations having different parts of the programs translated, so it would make sense to combine them somehow. Dear LazyWeb, how do I combine translations from all these sources?

This morning, we closed on the sale of the house we've been in since 2002.

We're excited about Grandpa's farmhouse that we're having renovated, and it will be great when we get to move in there in December or January.

But it's sad to leave the place that has been home for these last few years. Terah and I got a chance to spend a few last minutes over there today.

All sorts of memories came back. We remembered our long walks up and down the driveway, hand in hand, laughing and talking. We remembered sitting out on the west edge of our property watching the sun set behind the trees. We remembered playing with our cats, having friends and family over, the excitement when we moved in, all the hard work we put into renovating the old part of the house, and so many more things.

We also been looking back and laughing at things that were really pretty annoying at the time: having no water because of ants, having to move out for a few days on Valentine's Day because of a skunk, being without power for most of a week because of ice (and having to cut my way in and out through the driveway).

We'll have memories, photos, and some small souvenirs from our old house. But we'll miss it, too, just like we missed our house in Indianapolis and its pond with attack geese. (That's another story.)

When we moved to Kansas, my grandma, who grew up a few miles away, heard our address and said, "Dutch Avenue! That's right at home for me." It was right at home for us, too.

Simon, you have a good point, but while I am not ashamed to admit that I fall on your "rating by others" end of the scale -- happy Debian users make me happy -- much of your analysis seems a bit simplistic and not mindful of the fact that scales include points in between. If Ubuntu only enticed all of our desktop users away, I wouldn't feel very threatened by it. I'd feel disappointed that we lost those users, but I'd see all the other users we have in other areas, and I could be satisfied with that. After all, Windows still has the lion's share of the desktop users, and I don't feel threatened by it. Or by OS X. However, when significant development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, when there are lots of things happening there, I do begin to feel very threatened by it. I begin looking to see if development that's happening on Ubuntu is being contributed back to Debian. I conclude that it's largely a one-way street; any improvement I work on in Debian will get into Ubuntu with nearly 100% probability, but any improvement Ubuntu makes will only get into Debian if someone goes out, reads through a patch, and finds it. See, I'm also motivated by Debian being suitable for many different purposes -- I fall on the other end of your scale too. And I know that I don't want to be today using the software and hardware I was using 5 years ago. And 5 years from now, I won't want to be using the software and hardware I'm using today. My needs will change, things will evolve, and lots of development will be needed for Debian to still be relevant, to still be suitable for all its many purposes. And if much of the development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, and if there is not even a culture of pushing improvements back into Debian, there's a very real possibility that that won't happen. And then those of us all along this interesting Scale of Superiority you describe will have to decide between giving up and going to Ubuntu, or taking up ballroom dancing. I've personally decided that if this happens, I won't be taking the former option; Debian is the last linux distribution I intend to work on.

Matthew Vona from ChemicalAnalysis.com wrote to say that they published a Quantian intro. Nice work, keep'em coming!

Wow, I finally found a way to make Google Analytics. Above the graphs that don't display (I have no flash), there is few icons beside the word Export. The first icon is text, so I can get all the nice aggregated data out of Google Analytics using the text output.

So, about a week ago I said Harper's budget looked sane. I was wrong. The cons have managed to drop two really useful programs. One is the main Energuide program and the other is the low income energuide program. Now if anyone we don't need more evironmental programs that hit every level of society, then explain the weather.

So now with obvious things to do: Bike on bike to work day and don't stop biking to work after that day.

Yesterday, I had an awesome ride to Santa Cruz, the clipless pedals were very nice to use. The ride was pretty simple, get to the top of Skyline (take redwood gulch) to down to big basin, get our water refilled, go to the top of empire grade (Jamison Creek, or some fireroad) and then down to Santa Cruz. On the way to Redwood gulch I we were stopped at a stoplight, then all of a sudden I leaned slightly towards the pedal I was still clipped into. So, yup, my first day with the clipless pedals I fell. During this fall, I managed to loosen the clips on my shoes, so I needed to stop shortly afterwards to adjust my shoes. The next adventure came when 3 of us decided to take the fireroad up to Empire Grade. The fireroad starts somewhere in HP's Little Big Basin area, and is a nice trail to hike. It was rather steep, it was sandy, it was rocky and everything in between, so we had to walk our bikes up this trail. I took my shoes off and simply wore my wool socks to hike up the trail. Coming down Empire Grade was a lot of fun, not too many cars, and one of those cars even decided that passing me was a bad idea and got out of my way.

To top off such a fun day, when I finally got back to my apt, I discovered that I had the wrong set of keys. I had my one set of keys that didn't have an apt key. Oops.

The Massachusetts race for governor has turned very ugly. Even setting my personal partisanship (and professional bias) aside, I’m certain that the blame is not equally shared on both sides. Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly says it better than I could, and I reproduce the entire editorial here:

Deval Patrick for governor During the 34-year history of Lawyers Weekly, the paper has never endorsed a candidate for elected office. This practice was borne out of the notion that the political, or societal, issues that dominate races typically outweigh issues that are of distinct interest to lawyers. But the race for governor in Massachusetts in 2006 is suddenly very much about what it means to be a lawyer. On the one hand, we have Democratic nominee Deval Patrick, whose stated policies on judicial independence and appointment of judges (among other issues) reflect a genuine understanding of the legal system. Conversely, Republican nominee Kerry Healey has launched a chilling assault on the practice of law. Healey is running a television ad that takes Patrick to task for his 1985 representation of a defendant accused of murdering a police officer — an ad that borders on the bizarre in its reasoning. “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as our governor?” the ad asks. Last week Healey added an ad that references Patrick’s one-time support of convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer. “What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?” the ad asks. With those misguided questions, Healey has insulted an entire profession. Here’s hoping she does not get away with it. What is Healey’s message? That criminal-defense attorneys somehow should be associated with, or blamed for, the actions of their clients? That protecting important constitutional rights is somehow a seedy business? Healey has resorted to the worst form of pandering, openly inviting voters to think of Patrick as someone who associates with criminals. Her finger-pointing has a flavor of McCarthyism, suggesting that anyone who has spent time in the criminal-defense arena should be identified, called out and avoided. The lieutenant governor proclaims herself a criminal-justice candidate who is tough on crime. Yet nearly everyone associated with the criminal-justice system, be they defense attorneys, prosecutors, police officers or otherwise, understand that the Constitution guarantees the right-to-counsel, and the right to a zealous advocate. Healey no doubt understands this as well, but conveniently ignores it as she paints Patrick a villain. Gov. Mitt Romney knows that diminishing the work of attorneys often makes for good politics. He rarely hesitates to criticize lawyers — or judges — if it suits his agenda. But even Romney has never sunk this low, to this crass sort of demagoguery. Healey has become the bully in the schoolyard, poking fun at the overweight children. Look, he’s a lawyer. He must be a second-class citizen. Deval Patrick, meanwhile, has quietly made it known that he appreciates the key components of the legal system. He favors giving judicial administrators more control over their budgets and pay increases for lawyers who do work for the state, including prosecutors. Patrick says he would devote much attention to selecting judges, returning power to the Judicial Nominating Commission. And the former civil-rights attorney has suggested that he will be careful before criticizing a judge’s decision. “Judges don’t go looking for hard decisions,” he has said. As to the LaGuer matter, Patrick missed an opportunity with a clumsy, disjointed explanation of the matter. Patrick could have simply stated that any efforts he made in helping LaGuer obtain a DNA test were in the pursuit of truth. As former Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin so eloquently put it in an Oct. 8 Boston Globe op-ed article, “I never thought that serving the ideals of the Constitution made you soft or tough on crime. … Respecting the Constitution doesn’t make you soft or tough — it only makes you just and fair.” One need not be defined by one’s profession, of course, and lawyers will have other important matters (i.e., education, taxes) on their minds when they go to the polls on Nov. 7. But attorneys can rest assured that a vote for Deval Patrick guarantees an appreciation for many of the ideals that lawyers deem important — while a vote against Kerry Healey sends a message that lawyers won’t tolerate her unforgivable cheap shots. Do we really want someone who defends accused criminals as our governor? President John Adams, author of the Constitution that Healey swore to uphold as lieutenant governor, defended the accused killers in the Boston Massacre trial. Do you think Adams would have been qualified to be our governor?

Just landed a sweet feature for bzr: dotted decimal revision numbers. There is a sample log (warning its 2Mb) where you can see this in all its glory. A sneak preview is here:

------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 1986
committer: Canonical.com Patch Queue
Manager<pqm@pqm.ubuntu.com>
branch nick: +trunk
timestamp: Wed 2006-09-06 00:33:01 +0100
message:
  (robertc) Add TestCase.applyDeprecated, a common-case
helper for testing deprecated functions.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1982.3.3
    merged:
robertc@robertcollins.net-20060905231840-bd95f673d0205a81
    committer: Robert Collins <robertc@robertcollins.net>
    branch nick: applyDeprecated
    timestamp: Wed 2006-09-06 09:18:40 +1000
    message:
      Change raise AssertionError to self.fail in the new
applyDeprecated test support method.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1982.3.2
    merged:
robertc@robertcollins.net-20060905230133-2c68611e38fd7922
    committer: Robert Collins <robertc@robertcollins.net>
    branch nick: applyDeprecated
    timestamp: Wed 2006-09-06 09:01:33 +1000
    message:
      New TestCase helper applyDeprecated. This allows you
to call a callable
      which is deprecated without it spewing to the screen,
just by supplying
      the deprecation format string issued for it. (Robert
Collins)
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 1985
committer: Canonical.com Patch Queue
Manager<pqm@pqm.ubuntu.com>
branch nick: +trunk
timestamp: Tue 2006-09-05 23:13:00 +0100
message:
  (robertc) Add symbol_versioning.deprecation_string, a
helper for establishing what a deprecation warning for a
symbol, version-format pair will look like.

This is really nice for users, because it lets them address revisions in a somewhat more predictable manner than the UUID each revision has. This feature is in the mainline now, look for bzr 0.12 to be able to use it - or grab bzr.dev now!

There have been quite some comments on the Iceweasel case all over the planets, and I saw several assertions, especially from the Mozilla camp, that I, as the Firefox co-maintainer, the xulrunner maintainer, and (soon) Seamonkey iceape co-maintainer, have to rectify. They broke the –enable-official-branding flag
Half-true. We just replaced Bon Echo/Deer Park with Firefox at the appropriate places in the build tree so that we could have Firefox with the “unbranded” logo instead of the official logo, as Gervase Markham gave us authorization for. You’re still free to enable the official branding, except that since the logos and stuff are non-free, we removed the other-licenses/branding/ directory from the original tarball, thus yes, the flag is half broken. Firefox logos being subject to trademarks, Debian thinks they are not free.
Trademark and copyright are different things. Mozilla has unnecessarily given a non-free license to “clarify” the trademark situation, but that is not required. To make it clear: Debian thinks the logos are not free because they are not free. Period. Debian isn t properly collaborating with Mozilla , sending unusable 100000-lines patches for validation just before releases (as seen on Lucas Nussbaum’s blog)
Let me take the firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz file, strip the debian directory from it (it only contains maintainer scripts, our set of icons and some debian specific searchplugins), and strip the configure diff that is generated by autoconf due to some changes in configure.in… that’s exactly 2654 lines of diff. Very far from the 100000-lines patches they are claiming. The Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions (from Lucas’s blog again).
So, let’s dig into our firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz:

• Changes to disable application upgrade (we want that to happen through apt-get) and change some other default preferences,
• Changes to fix “make distclean” so that it really cleans the build directory,
• Change not to build the “mangle” utility,
• Change not to call netstat to generate entropy, which is useless on linux,
• Changes to make Firefox build and work on architectures such as hppa, mips, mips64, m68k, ia64, sparc64, alpha, and arm, which the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care much for,
• Change to add a preference directory so that users can put their set of customized preferences in /etc/firefox/pref,
• Change to allow to build flat chrome without the zip utility,
• Change to allow to use system library for myspell, instead of statically linking the bundled one,
• Changes to allow to build s390 binaries on s390x host with s390 toolchain (same applies with x86 binaries on amd64 host with x86 toolchain),
• Changes to work around bugs with the hidden visibility pragma on gcc,
• Changes to make the pango backend actually build correctly,
• Changes to avoid some error messages while trying to create Makefiles from inexistant Makefile.in’s,
• Change to install in /usr/lib/firefox instead of /usr/lib/firefox-x.y,
• Change not to build useless chromelist.txt files,
• Changes to make helper applications with parameters work,
• Changes to allow builds against GTK 2.8,
• Changes to work around an Xrender bug,
• Changes to make the Gecko/yymmdddd string taken from preferences instead of being half-hard-coded (you could change it with preferences, but it would still be set to the hard-coded value at start time ; and you could change it again with preferences…),
• Change to allow mice extra buttons to act as something else than a left button,
• Change to allow to build with -Wl,–as-needed to avoid linking against a whole lot of useless libraries, without losing the link on libxpcom.so which is required by some extensions’ components,
• Changes not to shlibsign the NSS modules at build time, since we’re stripping the binaries afterwards, thus breaking the signature. We do build the signatures later, within the maintainer scripts.

That’s not that many changes, and most of them were taken from either some Mozilla CVS trunk or the Mozilla Bugzilla . And most of those that were not taken from there have been sent, except those that really don’t make much sense outside Debian. So, where are these frozen API changes ? And we’re not properly collaborating, huh ? The Mozilla project started by coming to a (admittedly uneasy) agreement with Debian for use of the name, but the Debian version diverged even further from the official version, so the permission was revoked. (from comments on Matthew Garrett’s blog) That one is really interesting, because between the time we got this understanding with Gervase and now, we are actually less diverging from the official version than by then. The main difference by that time was the extensions manager, which, in Debian, needed a lot of changes to actually act as it should, especially with globally installed extensions. I’m not saying the Debian one was perfect, it also had its own problems, but that was a whole lot less than the blatant crap that was the official one, obviously written for Windows without any thoughts for unix, and especially linux distributions. The only main difference now, between the official Firefox and ours, is that our build has the pango backend enabled, which we chose over the Xft backend for several reasons I won’t explain here. The others differences are that we use system libraries where possible, instead of the bundled libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, libmyspell and libcairo. We also build a flat chrome, instead of having everything in .jar files. Now, a little bit about differences the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care about while they really should: distributions build the Mozilla products with gcc 4.x, while the official binaries are built with gcc 3.4, as well as the extensions distributed on addons.mozilla.org. Fortunately, not a lot of extensions make use of binary components, and not a lot are linked against the standard C++ library, but when that happens (like with colorzilla), you get a component linked against libstdc++5 to load on a Firefox that is linked against libstdc++6. You are lucky if that setup doesn’t crash. Little extra from comments in Lucas’s blog:
Is it possible for the Debian Firefox maintainers to create an installer package for contrib which will install the vanilla FireFox from Mozilla s site.
How great would it be to have a package for one architecture instead of 12, and with a dependency on libstdc++5, that almost no other package uses any more. Update:
Debian is going to replace Firefox with a GNU fork called Iceweasel
Half-true. For the etch release, Iceweasel will only be Firefox with a different branding. We are taking the Iceweasel name because it was already know as a possible alternative name for Firefox when the trademark concerns have been raised more than 2 years ago (thanks Nathanael Nerode for this nice name, by the way). It appears that the GNU guys decided to start a fork with this name… that’s quite unfortunate, actually. Anyways, the plan is to get in touch with them to see what we can do together, but with the etch release approaching, we can’t and won’t do more than a rename for the moment. Update 2:
We (Mozilla ) presently have working relationships with most of the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu (As seen in several posts from people of the Mozilla Corporation or Foundation)
Very interesting. Ubuntu uses the same set of patches as Debian, with some more of their own, and even releases beta software in their official releases. But when it’s Ubuntu, it’s fine. Sorry, I forgot Debian is lame, and DDs are frustrated fanatic integrists, on top of being bloody fanatic assholes. Update 3: Added some precisions about other differences with the official binaries, and a small patch I somehow forgot.

[2006-10-13 18:00]
There is a popular saying in Spanish, "en viernes 13 ni te cases ni te embarques" - Roughly, On Friday the 13th, don't get married and don't board a ship. That makes perfect sense - I'm already married, so I'm not worried about the first part. About the second, you never now - So I'd better take the plane to a country without sea access. Bolivia, here I go. [2006-10-13 23:30]
I'm writing this blog entry as I fly out of Mexico towards Bolivia, via Panama, on Lloyd Aereo Boliviano's flight number 911. The captain just announced that dinner will be served shortly, and invited those of us who want to enjoy the meal to open the tables, in order to get a better service. I fear that if I don't open it, I might get soup served straight over my pants, or something like that. [2006-10-14 02:40]
At the Panama airport. Captain informs again: "Passengers, we inform you we will replenish fuel. Therefore, if you choose not to go out for 15 minutes, we will request you to sit down with your seat belt unlocked. You will not be allowed to walk along the ailes. The bathrooms will be closed. Please do not ring the bells." Damn, that brings quite a lot of quiet about the refueling process - Of course I went down for 15 minutes, along with everybody else. BTW, shame I didn't take my laptop with me, as the battery is now at 15%... The Panama airport has (contrary to most airports I've been to in recent years) plenty of power outlets. Anyway, maybe on the way back. It's now 03:00 (Mexico time), and I think I'll have a better use for the next four hours until we arrive to Bolivia than coding.

Debian Games won a status page : http://nana.rulezlan.org/~goneri/pkg-games/. I expect it to help us improve the global quality. Currently we need DD interested in sponsoring. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested.

Dear Bubulle, I am afraid that you do not know what you are talking about. Because you aren’t the only one in this case, here’s a short explanation of what happened. The existence of the IceWeasel fork is a reality that the Mozilla people need to accept and, optionally, understand (they also need to remember what Free Software is and how it all works). Unfortunately, some of the Mozilla people at the JDLL yesterday obviously couldn’t bear a little reminder about IceWeasel, but they were the minority. We hung the two posters in the morning, and they did not even notice them for something like 45 minutes. After what, somebody came and asked, in what can be described as an angry manner, if we knew why the IceWeasel fork got started. The answer was a plain and simple “I don’t care why the fork started. We’re going to rename Firefox in Debian so you people stop annoying us with your fucking trademark.” (which was obviously as rude an answer as their original question). At which point they just went away and never came back. They proceeded to fix the Firefox poster by adding a “TM” on it and, I think, fixing the capital “F” in the middle of the “FireFox” name, then stroke the “IceWeasel” line on the other poster. At this point, photos were taken and posted to one, then two blogs. Sam, for the sake of completeness, added the missing and markings to the Firefox poster, which the Mozilla people forgot to add. The whole thing could have stopped at that point, but Daniel Glazman, the famous Daniel Glazman, thought it’d be wise to link the first two blog posts on his blog, vomitting on Debian while he was at it. This was an extremely bad idea. His blog being syndicated on Planet Mozilla, he and the other Mozilla people are just helping spread the IceWeasel name and publicising the whole Mozilla trademarks debacle. I’m just not going to comment on the behaviour of the most vocal Mozilla supporters (no, dear Daniel Glazman, I’m not going to use the term “fanatics”, I leave that up to you), it’s just not worth bothering. Josselin linked the first blog post on his blog, so the thing made it to Planet Debian, too. This is no big news for Planet Debian readers, as the IceWeasel situation has been discussed at length on various blogs already. Now, what you Christian do not know, is that we have had several discussions about the Mozilla trademarks problems at the JDLL. Many people here were not aware of this problem and asked both the Mozilla people and us about it. We explained at length, several times, what happened, what their position was, what our position was, what had been proposed by both parties, why their proposals weren’t acceptable to us. Most of the people were quite astonished to learn that Mozilla Corporation refused the “Community Edition” idea, and most of them got our point. At the end of the day, one of the Mozilla people came and apologized for the blog posts and comments (although he isn’t the author of any post or comment, I believe), telling us that it wasn’t nice from them. Thanks for that, really. Overall, all of this is very positive for the Debian Project. We are doing the Good Thing. To everybody in Debian involved in the renaming of the Mozilla products: thanks, and good luck. Mozilla Corporation now has to face the Free Software community. It’s up to them to either come up with something that is acceptable for the community or stop whining about people complying with their trademark policy. Internet Explorer still has something like 82% of the market. You aren’t done yet, and you’re not going to progress without community support. So you’d better not lose this support now. Up to you.

Ran the annual Makin' Tracks 5k this morning in support of the athletic tracks at Concordia, a collegue two blocks up from my house. As I actually train there once a week, and as the race goes straight through my neihbourhood, it's a really nice one to do. Somehow it had gotten cold the last few days, and this morning at 8:00am it was only a few degrees above freezing--yet sunny and pleasant. Pretty decent conditions after all. I managed to run pretty fast for a new PR of around 19:2159 handstopped, or just under a 6:15 min/mile pace.