This has been delayed for a few days, for reasons I explain in another post, so my remaining debconf posts will be published quite quickly, every few hours. Monday started with me nearly asleep in the back of the Debian-Med session. Interesting stuff and I'm starting to get involved in supplying web apps to the health sector, but I must watch the session back. Then bureado's excellent debian in venezuela talk and a big shock for me when I got called out. The afternoon and evening were mentioned in the last post. Tuesday opened with me confused in the Xen session and then I went to a good-looking session on combining the debian-installer, ubuntu OEM bits, backuppc and openvpn but lkcl didn't show. (His diary suggests he was around. Wonder what happened.) I kicked the session along a bit and learned stuff from others about preseeding, FAI, backuppc, bacula, amanda and so on, but it didn't seem like anyone had plugged these together in quite the same way. At the end of the session, I bumped into Eddie Bleasdale who it seems is working with Phil Hands and lkcl on a very interesting project. He spoke more about it in a meeting the afternoon, hoping that Phil would arrive to handle the technical side. Phil timed his entry to perfection, about 30 minutes after the end of the talk. In between the hijacked talks, I went for a walk up to the top of Arthur's Seat and back with jumpula and someone else whose name I've forgotten - sorry! Oh, and what is it with all the loldebian posts this week?

The second day of debconf went a bit odd. It seemed like, apart from the first session, everything else I attended was at a different time to when it was advertised yesterday. Even my talk had moved and I didn't notice, so I turned up early and was thrown before I started. Maybe more on that later. (Summary: 2 dozen rattling around a large hall, no clock, and I really hate fixed microphones. It dragged.) Anyway, things which I didn't think would conflict suddenly did and things which I thought conflicted didn't any more - but I didn't notice the missing conflicts until too late. I bumped into Sam who seems to be tracking conference sessions on a pad of paper - I've no idea how he's managing that. The SPI half-human half-IRC board meeting was interesting to watch. I also discovered that my typing speed has dropped a little and that it's much harder to copy-type north americans than locals. I still don't know what tune was being whistled when the board stopped talking and started typing.

So that was the first day of debconf, which the schedule sometimes calls 17.06 (Ja?) and in other places Day 9 (DebCamp counted from day one, AIUI). I went to four talks today and I've sent them some feedback. I went to the welcome, CC-workgroup (Evan's not there, which was interesting), Popcon-mining and SPI. It was useful in one talk being able to relay from IRC, but I must try to keep my battery charged more. I'm planning to do four talks tomorrow, over a longer time, with some gaps for hacking and working (they're paying for me to be at debconf, so I'm not really away away). It also seems that I can't collect comments to my blog in the normal way while I'm here. I think it's network/rDNS-related, so I might figure that out tomorrow. Apologies if your comments are queued.

Just stopped off in Derby on the way to Edinburgh. It was a good move in one way, because my inbound train was running over 30 minutes late (diverted due to the floods in the Midlands) and my outbound one is only 10 minutes late... but the manager just announced flooding in West Yorkshire, so I guess we'll see. The inbound train was called Vyjaer Kernewek (or something like that), which was nice to see. Derby was useful in another way (besides a good wifi-enabled light meal at the big blue coffee shop). I bought a laptop case. I didn't plan that when I set off, but by Bristol it was already obvious that I couldn't carry all my widgets in one bag. I also couldn't get the laptop out on the train, for fear of a packing explosion. So, Derby has shops. It also seems to have a market-free market place as the focus of the city centre. There's a view up to the cathedral, a small waterfall... and the Derby Mountain Rescue. I suppose the peaks are near, but mountains? The market wasn't in the marketplace. It seemed to be under cover in two parts. One is in the guildhall and the other is in a shopping centre that seems to have an identity crisis - is it the Eagle Centre, or is it Westfield? - and also has a building site attached that greets you as you approach from the railway. Not good tourist promotion. Until the building site, the City-Rail Trail is signposted well, about 5 minutes walk, but the signposts are a bit odd. I noticed the funny ridges first and dismissed them as an anti-spin thing, but then I noticed some bronze floppy disks (I'll post a photo once I find the right USB lead). Other attachments included spark plugs and glasses. There's no sign explaining it that I saw. What the heck is that all about? Coda: No, it wasn't a good move. Apparently there's more flooding in South Yorkshire, so I arrived about midnight and this is posted the next day. At least I'm having a better time of it than damog, who's stuck in New York and I wonder whether other tales of woe will appear on Planet Debian as people find net access. Now for breakfast and planning the day.

So I'm off travelling again. I've done way too much lately, and I'm looking forward to getting home and staying there for a while. I flew from San Francisco to London yesterday for my first ever business class trip. United business class is whole different experience to United economy, that's for sure. Aside from getting ridiculous amounts of legroom, and much better cabin service, the thing I like best about the whole experience was the preferential treatment. I arrived at SFO, and there was an unholy amount of people at the economy check-in counters, so it was really nice to breeze around to the business check-in counters and wait in a much more manageable line. At Heathrow, I got to used the priority immigration line, and my bag came out pretty quickly, so I'd breezed through Heathrow and onto the tube faster than you could say "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?". Very happy with all of that. I caught a Piccadilly line tube from Heathrow to Acton Town, then changed to the District line to Victoria station. The tube (particularly the first one) was smaller than I expected. The ceiling was pretty low, the aisle narrow, and it just felt pretty squishy. The second one seemed a bit wider and taller. It didn't feel like it could really deal with peak-hour commuting, but I guess maybe the frequency makes up for the capacity... Buckingham Palace Road turns out to have pretty wacky numbering. Just because you're opposite number 80, doesn't mean the odd numbered 80's are anywhere near you. So it took me longer than it should have to find the hotel, and I wandered up and down Buckingham Palace Road for a while before I'd managed to calibrate myself to the numbering. More frequent numbers on the buildings would have helped immensely. So I've hardly seen anything, I'm really just passing through on the way to Edinburgh for Debconf, but I love what I've seen so far. The red double-decker buses. The taxis. The post boxes. The phone booth's. It all feels really really old, but still really really alive. We've got to come back and do the place properly. The office is really nice as well. Very modern looking. Very open-plan like the Sydney one. I wasn't able to sleep on the plane unfortunately (I couldn't convince my brain to switch off), so I was pretty zonked by the end of the day (got into the office shortly after 9am). I had a fairly productive day, and went to the hotel and crashed at about 6:30pm, woke up at about 2:30am and couldn't get back to sleep. Hopefully if I just soldier on through today, I'll get to sleep a bit later this evening and do something closer to a normal night's sleep. I'm catching the train to Edinburgh today (I blame Mark (who doesn't appear to believe in permalinks) for putting the idea in my head). Looking forward to another tube ride and seeing some of the countryside. I've been really apprehensive about this trip ever since I booked it. Mainly because I'm going over to Dublin after Debconf to try and apply for a new visa. For some reason, I'm just really worried that's all going to go pear-shaped. I'm feeling better now that I'm here, but I'll feel even better once the trip to the consulate is behind me. Even better still when I get my passport back successfully. Best still when I'm home again.

MJ Ray blogs about online banking, and how they're all stupid. I wish I could feel his pain (sortof...), but I don't. And that isn't because I don't have an online banking account, since I do. My bank actually thought about this stuff before implementing it. Rather than using a silly password, they have an implementation that makes use of the Digipass, a small hardware token you get as part of your contract. If it breaks or I lose it (and yes, this has happened), I go to the bank and immediately get another one, without being charged additionally for it (at least not if I don't need one digipass every other day). Their webserver implementation involves a standard HTTPS server, and a set of webpages of which I'm not entirely sure whether they're standards-compliant, but at least they've tested it on more browsers than just IE; and since they don't require any other client-side software besides a browser, it easily works on free operating systems. If I wanted to, I could also use a smartcard reader and my regular debit card -- but I don't have to. That's the good part about it. The only downside about Fortis is that they're not the cheapest. But that's okay—I don't mind paying for quality.

I'm registered with three online banking systems. (Actually, I'm probably on more, but I only use three.) Two of them use similar authentication systems. The third one uses some similar details but adds a random alphanumeric user ID and a load of restrictions on passwords and so, I just locked myself out again which has annoyed me somewhat, as well as blocking my access to some of my money. First of all, adding restrictions to passwords is stupid. It makes them easier to guess by eliminating whole regions of the solution space. If I can send the damn thing to the webserver, that should be all that matters. It also makes me more likely to either store the crippled password or details of the crippling somewhere. And it makes me more likely to lose access, like I just did yet again. How many more of the Security Myths and Passwords do they need to follow? Just put the login in a GUI transmitted unencrypted and they'd have a full house, I think. Secondly, why the devil aren't our banks using things like certificates or multi-site identity services yet? Our national government moves with the efficiency of treacle in snow when it comes to web services, yet it has been using both in its government gateway for years. It's not perfect, but they're working. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for everyone to get on the list of banks that work with GNU/Linux and I've yet to find a PGP- or S/MIME-ready bank. Online banking authentication - stupid bad technology.

My second problem with people who use the Franklin Redways papers to claim all cycle tracks are dangerous is that I don't trust the user number and preference estimates in the papers. I noticed cycle counters (sensor loops cut into in the path, attached to a grey cabinet with solar panel) scattered around King's Lynn, but I don't remember any in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes Redways and Leisure Routes: An Information Sheet includes phrases like 'It is evident from casual observation...' while noting the combination of this with other data suggests a 'paradox' - maybe there's no paradox and some of the casual observations are simply improbable? The main source of cycle use data seems to be surveys rather than counters. A survey with 120 responses has quite some potential for error when used to estimate a city catchment area of 200,000 people. An "accident rate" equals "accidents per use", so an incorrect use estimate can make a very big difference, especially if use is still sadly small. As the author says, he has no accurate usage figures for the Redways. Another survey is included in the references, so I find it surprising that no usage information is quoted from that survey. Perhaps it would help to explain the figures in some way unwelcoming to the general tone of the piece? Cyclist preferences seem to be taken from one cycle user group screenline count, rather than a cordon census or survey, which I also found surprising. I often rode parts of a trip on the 'least-bad' option for connecting the best route overall, not on the type of route I would have chosen if I had a choice. After all, when in my car, I'd probably choose to drive along a dual-carriageway from the edge of my village if I had the choice, but I don't, so I use a winding lane for the first mile or two. I don't prefer the winding lane to the alternative quarry road or the toll road: it's just a connection in a better route overall.

I was asked:

"How can I change the ways I communicate to set a good example of green-ness to company employees? Does anyone have some ideas? This is rather outside of my knowledge field. I guess anything that decreases carbon footprint is probably good?"

Most of this is obvious. We know we should be doing it, but sometimes the usual "too hard" excuses get in the way. Just doing it and making it clear why you're doing it is the biggest step. Like hand-correcting a small error in an internal note instead of reprinting, using both sides of the paper or 2-up printing, or moving to electronic communication instead of paper where possible. Two of my consumer co-operatives ( the Cooperative Group and the Phone Co-op ) take it a stage further: communicate it to others and persuade them to take similar action. tCG does this with its Climate Challenge pledge and Climate Doctor online Q+As. Phone Co-op ask customers to switch to paperless billing and put profiles of green companies into their (online) newsletters. Two more asides: Carbon footprint is not the only aspect of green-ness. It's the most important and popular just now, but there are things that reduce carbon footprint but aren't very green (nuclear power, for example). Greenwashing is a danger. I feel that communicating that you're very green when you're not really will cause you more trouble in the long run than accurately communicating limited green-ness. How else would you practice green communication?

Ben Armstrong commented:

"When trying to pin down the exact date when I joined, the keyring changelog is no help. First entry for me is in 2000, which is 3 years later. The web archive is no good, as I joined too late in 1997. Searching for me in the PTS shows my first changelog entry 6 Nov 1997, but that's a bit sloppy because that datestamp was added when the packaging process started. It doesn't reflect when the package was finally uploaded. Mailing list posts are little help. But the first file on master is Dec 8 1997 .Xauthority. So I know it was between November 6th and Dec 8th. Not too bad, but I'd love to know the exact day."

Glad it was some use. I have my suspicions that the only way to find the exact date is to get all the keyring maintainers from that time and regress them under hypnosis. Do you think we can arrange that as a BOF at Debconf next week? The "Cracking Open Minds to Discover Debian Developer Joining Dates BOF"?

PDF press release saying

"The Information Commissioner's Office is again reminding businesses across the UK not to be misled by bogus agencies that send notices demanding money to register under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The warning comes after Leeds Crown Court sentenced three men to prison on Friday 8 June for their involvement in fake data protection agencies."

They earned 62,575 before they were closed (that's a lot of 135-a-time victims) and got up to two and a half years in jail (tip to PL&B for emailing me). I feel this type of scam only works so well because most of the official advice is vague and unhelpful, while the most useful notification page is three-clicks deep in a section that few businessmen would choose unless they already knew about it.

PDF press release saying

"The Information Commissioner's Office is again reminding businesses across the UK not to be misled by bogus agencies that send notices demanding money to register under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The warning comes after Leeds Crown Court sentenced three men to prison on Friday 8 June for their involvement in fake data protection agencies."

They earned 62,575 before they were closed (that's a lot of 135-a-time victims) and got up to two and a half years in jail (tip to PL&B for emailing me). I feel this type of scam only works so well because most of the official advice is vague and unhelpful, while the most useful notification page is three-clicks deep in a section that few businessmen would choose unless they already knew about it.

Just got my copy of the Connection for June in the email today. Highlights: expansion of paperless billing and putting savings into a new sustainability fund that will be used to "green" the co-op further; profiles of Emerge, Cycle Training UK, Low Carbon Lifestyle, and Resurgence Magazine; not following BT's introductions of charges for 1571 ( 1/month), non-DD payment and late payment (up to 7.50/bill); free line transfers until end of August; new mobile phone services; previously-posted ADSL charging plan changes. (Note: I'm a member of this consumer co-op and my main company is Phone Co-op agent 471 if you'd like to join through us.) An interesting question is how that new sustainability fund will be allocated. I can't see an answer in this newsletter, but I've signed up for the extra paperless services anyway. I have mixed feelings about that: it may be helping save trees and fuel, but is it also further harming my rural post service by reducing the amount of post sent to me? Then again, it looks like the government has caused most harm to rural post offices by moving social service payments to banks and slowly reducing the number of services at rural sub-offices, while the Post Office themselves are doing "ludicrous" things like moving main post offices out of historic buildings and into the backs of newsagent chains. I care more about the offices than the delivery service and they don't seem very connected here.

In response to John Goerzen's question, I'd try the following steps: Check keyring.debian.org/changelog - this will give a near-definitive answer for all DDs joining since 19 Jan 1998. If that fails, check the web archive copies of the 1997 debian people page to find out when they first appear and which packages to check. Check as many package changelogs as possible on the package tracking system and the rest on the debian archive to find the earliest entries. (Update: for completeness, check the signature on the matching dsc and its key creation date.) Then look in their $HOME on master for the earliest timestamp. And finally, search list archives and the web for any welcome message (rare), the first use of their @debian.org address, or a signature where they claim to be a debian developer. Any other ways to guess the date?

Welcome AVRC DevBlog to Planet Koha! I've also updated the stylesheet to use h3 and divs instead of a dl for the entries, and fixed the head link to the RSS feed.

Maplin Electronics wrote:

"Maplin Electronics has launched National Solar Week (18th - 24th June) providing solar advice online and in store for eco-minded shoppers who want to do their little bit for the environment without making major changes to their lives or bank balance! The solar advice day on Thursday, 21st June [...] the government should show a commitment to the environment [...] By removing VAT on all energy-efficient products, the Government can do their bit too. We're committed to making solar technology affordable and amenable to every customer, so we're counting on you to sign our petition and pledge your support."

A tax break for renewable energy seems like a good idea to me. I recently increased the insulation of my home. Southern Electric run a funding scheme and it was charged only 5% VAT, so tax incentives for energy-efficiency are obviously possible. I've done the insulation before things like installing renewable energy collectors because the tax breaks make insulation much more attractive. Finally, I took the Co-operative Group Climate Challenge yesterday, but there seems to be little detail about it online, apart from Sam's announcement. I'll probably comment more on tCG's strange web services elsewhere soon.

Floris Bruynooghe commented:

"My experience is that European (including UK) drivers can't cope with wide roads, resulting in even more dangerous behaviour. Wide roads with on-road cycling lanes are probably pretty good. But they need to be clearly separated by a double line sort of like in Belgium, combine that with UK quality road surface (on average) and you might have someting usable. The cycle lanes on UK A roads are a joke though, a very good example of how not to do it."

I assume this means the converted edge strips that you see on some fast roads (note: not all edge strips have been marked as cycle lanes and you especially shouldn't use unmarked ones). There's one of those in Milton Keynes, alongside the A5D dual carriageway. My main complaint against them is that they are too narrow and you get HGVs passing close enough to pull you around. Also, you have to cross every slip road/ramp which is a fairly unpleasant experience at busy times. Redway Route Types The unique Redway network was built in several phases. To be fair, I can't recommend the original network for anything other than low-speed connecting use, but the later, straighter additions (the "cross-city Redways" mentioned in the 1998 paper and my introduction a couple of posts ago) to the original plan early in the 1990s improved matters immensely. Although the different types are mentioned in the introductions, this difference seems entirely ignored by the accident data, which is my main complaint against the papers. There's no way of comparing like with like, as far as I can tell. You can split the accident data for 60/70mph grid roads from the 30/40mph link roads and 30mph estate roads, but you can't split the long-distance maybe-40kph cross-city Redways from the maybe-20kph estate Redways. Based on my years cycling around the city, I expect that the difference between grid Redways and grid roads is pretty small and that local Redways are far worse than local roads, but I can't prove or disprove that from his data. What's more, none of the studies I've seen differentiate between construction phases or route types, which is like only having combined accident figures for the Fosse Way and the M1. It suggests interesting topics for further studies, but how can anyone draw useful conclusions about cycle track design in general from it?

Update: Debian, and other stuff writes about A solution for a better spell checker in firefox : a better editor Joey Hess commented:

"I'm suprised that noone has mentioned how to get a text area to fit the whole width of the browser window, no matter what width it's set to (I prefer approximatly 60 characters wide sometimes, and nearly 120 other times..): Just put width: 100% in a stylesheet for the textarea. Unfortunately I don't know a good way to dynamically scale a textarea vertically."

That's container-width, which is not window-width for my site, but I'll give it a go.

I’ve recently complain here about the iceweasel Spell checker, and the fact that it is less effective than Aspell for proposing correction for French misspelled word. I also lake the nice key binding for correction available in Emacs with flyspell. There seem to be a solution to all my problem, and it is a comment made by Josh Triplett on the MJ Ray blog that give it to me: the It’s All Text Firefox(and Iceweasel) extension give me the possibility to use my preferred editor for editing text in edit box (and yes, it is editor agnostic: you can use vi, vim, or even ed). So, thank you Debian planet, MJ Ray and Josh Triplett. I now have to try it to see if it’s really effective.

Mark Brown wrote:

"My major problem with the redways when I tried to use them was that they had very bad signage so it was often hard to figure out where you are and where you were going. The last time I walked any distance in MK I actually ended up walking along the side of the road mostly (there are very wide verges where there's no footpath) since that way I could at least tell where I was."

Well, when I was there, the signs were very good. They had a standard white-on-blue format, with major destinations in capitals and cross-city route identifiers. Sadly, it seemed lots of them could be spun around on their round posts and they went missing an awful lot. Once, I even saw a route sign being used as a washing line prop somewhere near Linford! (I'm not sure where - I was lost because so many signs had been nicked!) I think the Redways could teach us three lessons about signs: how to design a clear route sign, how not to secure the signs and always carry a route map! Michael Greb commented:

"I want pictures! I went to the Milton Keynes cycling page but all they have are some tiny thumbnails. I want to see some pictures of the various types of junctions and what not. ;) This is the first I've heard of such a system and it sounds just dreamy. I understand of course your contention that it isn't ideal but surely it beats the nothingness that we have hear in my medium sized American town."

I'm not sure. The few North American cities that I've visted had far wider roads than is typical in England (even in Milton Keynes) and the Franklin papers suggest that having no cycle tracks would be better than these cycle tracks. I suspect wide roads with cycle-friendly junctions would be the best, with some car-free cycle tracks as extras. I don't have any pictures handy and PedNet's article doesn't have very big pictures either. Next time I'm visiting MK, I'll see if I can take an hour out with my camera. Or has another kind reader got a good picture collection?