I noticed some skk packages had maintained by Kawamura-san were orphaned because he became MIA. Unfortunately I dunno why he became such a status, but his packages, especially skk is very important for me and many users. It's hard and painful for me to input Japanese without SKK backend system (I'm using ddskk on Emacs and uim-skk on X as a frontend). So I picked up skk packages from orphan sea with Junji Yamashita-san and improved some parts of them. BTW I uploaded new CUPS 1.2 snapshot, svn r4841 to experimental.

I wish there was a better way to handle conffile renames than the method outlined at dpkg.org. Be nice if there was a way to pressed the checksum, so the conffile handler could just be used naturally, instead of bypassing it with a bit of a hack. Makes me a bit uncomfortable to just accept the users changes without prompting him on upgrade (as would happen with this recipe). If anyone has a better idea, it would really help me with #345112. Reading Jacobo's post makes me wish I had proposed a DebConf talk, BoF, whatnot on Trademarks and Free Software, and maybe promote some better discussion than the last time this was on the mailing lists. ndusart is coming for the weekend! Haven't seen her in two months, so I'm understandably, ridiculously excited. Better lend mricon my earplugs.

Just killed all the remaining comment spams (I hope) and implemented a simple regexp based blacklist which should get most medicaments, potence pills, casinos, lotteries and other frequently posted junk. I hope, it does not hit too many valid posts. If you have problems posting comments, feel free to contact me by e-mail or on IRC. In other news, I installed the blosxom plugin comments_recent and adapted the mail feature of writeback notify to my (in the meanwhile heavily modified) instance of the comments plugin v0.6. I also made it symlink-safe for use with multcat.

So after feeling motivated again, I’ve updated my old Galician translation of Mozilla Firefox 0.8 for Firefox 1.0.7, I have some people testing the translation and will soon update it for Firefox 1.5. As I’m keeping my translation strictly unofficial (I want nothing to do with upstream Mozilla), it’s possible that I’ll receive some messages about how I’m infringing on the Mozilla Foundation’s holy trade marks, and how I’m not keeping the standards of extremely high quality that the Mozilla Foundation guarantees, yadda yadda yadda., so I’m already prepared for that eventuality: I don’t know the English idiom for “tocar las narices”, but if they do it to me, I’ll adopt this name and logo for my translation. And then, if I translate Thunderbird, I’ll call this one “Thunderchicken” :-)

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

The response I received for my post from last night was remarkable. Thank you, all I’m not going to respond individually, and I’m probably going to drop off the net for a day or two altogether, since I just discovered I have a cold, and I most definitely need to rest.

I made a w3m patch for mingw environment to use emacs-w3m on Meadow, an emacs variant for Windows. My patch is really ad-hoc because the purpose is for emacs-w3m only, so it only works with -dump option. It can't use fork() on Windows environment, and some functions like saving buffer, uncompressing network stream, handling local CGI depends on fork(), so such functions were disabled by my patch. Anyway, I submitted the patch to the mail list of w3m.

Not every day you get an email like this:

link is the result of my work making mooix multilingual. It is twenty seven thousand lines. It assumes my VServer patch. It allows allows multiple users to communicate with the same mooix session at the same time in different languages, without ever seeing any language but their own unless that language is being spoken (via the "say" command or similar) by another user. This is, the two different users will be typing different commands in different languages, and seeing different languages (but hopefully the same semantic content!) in the output. Example runs are at link and link These two scripts (the first in English and the second in Lojban) each have their users doing exactly the same actions, in effect, but with totally different results. Note that unless each specifically asks for the other language, the English user never sees Lojban, and vice versa.

Lojban! Mooix! Incredible.

darcs record behaves exactly as bzr shelve And I agree that it's really a cool feature.

So I've been in the US for just over six weeks now, and I thought I'd reflect on the trials and tribulations of bootstrapping oneself in a foreign country. The Social Security Number is the primary key from hell I already had a fair idea of the importance of obtaining a Social Security Number (SSN). So much so, that after dumping our luggage at our temporary accommodation, the Social Security Administration office was the first place Michael and I went to, so we could lodge applications. We subsequently learned from another Australian who was about two weeks ahead of us, that you're apparently supposed to wait ten working days before lodging the application, to allow your immigration records to percolate through the bureaucracy that is the US Government. Our applications were duly accepted without any mention of waiting a bit, but we were sent away with a letter and a tracking number, saying that the SSA had to verify our existence with Immigration (this is despite the fact that we're standing in front of them with a passport with an I-94 stapled in it) and that it would take up to four weeks. So it's been six weeks, and still no sign of an SSN. Enquiries with the office are met with the same response - waiting on information back from Immigration. Apparently it can take up to three months. It's a real shame you can't start the application process when your visa is granted or something, as in order to apply, you need to quote your "alien registration number" (I still chuckle at how the US Government refers to me as an "alien" in all their paperwork), which is the number on your I-94, which you only get when you enter the country. So, whilst the SSN application remains pending, I cannot be paid, I cannot have my health insurance paperwork lodged by my employer, and whilst I'll be covered for health insurance retrospectively, I'm not technically covered right now, if I were to require medical treatment. Going back to how the SSN is the primary key of All Things... Next step is to open a bank account. We chose Citibank, because I've been told it's slightly easier to import money back into Australia with them. Fortunately we were able to open an account sans SSN, but it's called an "NRA account" (NRA standing for Non-resident Alien). We were told that we were only eligible for an ATM card until I had an SSN, yet they mailed me out a debit card about a week after we opened the account, and happily ordered one for Sarah, and a cheque book when we asked after opening the account. About the only thing it seems we can't do at the moment is transfer money back to Australia. No big deal, it's all coming the other way until I can get paid... Driver's licence requires an SSN ideally, so that's out of the question for the time being... Electricity, telephone and cable were all able to be provisioned with an SSN, although I think for credit-rating purposes, again, it is the primary key. We had to pay a deposit for the electricity, which is fair enough. The lady I spoke to on the phone when I got it connected said that they just treated us aliens like teenagers straight out of home with no credit history. I don't have a problem with that. It's just a shame that you can't import your credit history. Getting a cell phone account appears to be nigh on impossible with an SSN though. It was a battle just to get a prepaid SIM card for Sarah's phone, and this makes a great story of how much hoop-jumping is required. We walked up to a Cingular stand in a shopping mall to see what we could and couldn't do. I explained our situation (lack of SSN, lack of credit history, etc etc) to the sales droid, and he assured us it wasn't a problem to get a prepaid SIM card. He proceeded to take about 30 minutes to organise the SIM card. I watched as he entered a dummy SSN into the computer, and used his own driver's licence number. He was clearly battling the computer system to be able to do it. When we got home, and Sarah called up to try and put some credit on the phone with our Australian Visa card, she was told they only accepted credit cards with a US billing address. (So much for Visa being accepted worldwide). So we headed off again to Safeway to purchase a prepaid Mastercard. Funnily enough, when Sarah called up to activate that, she was initially asked for an SSN, so we almost had a dependency loop that we couldn't break, just to get a US cell phone. Fortunately they could cope with no SSN, so she successfully ended up with a prepaid Mastercard, with a US billing address, so she could put credit on her prepaid SIM. From what I can work out, a lot of the places that do request the SSN seem to using the last four digits as an authenticator, much like everyone just uses name and date of birth back in Australia, so I'm guessing for these organisations, I could probably just quote any old number that fit the pattern and they'd be happy. Just so long as they don't go trying to run a credit check against it... Foreign credit cards As I said earlier, a credit card with a non-US billing address is fine for most face-to-face purchases, but an amazing array of mostly telephone transactions will not accept them. Most notable was trying to add credit to a calling card for making international telephone calls. Couldn't be done. So it meant I had to forego any discounts or bonuses for topping up, and buy a whole new calling card. Car insurance and registration I'm not sure how this is going to go yet. Our Prius is supposed to be available around the 18th of January. I'm hoping I'll have my SSN by then, otherwise we'll have to import a heap of money to pay for it. I'm sure you can get insurance and own a car without an SSN, because you hear of people who do driving holidays across the US, buying a car on one coast, driving it cross-country, and then selling it. It might be more expensive, and I again, you can't import your driving/insurance history, so you have to start off at the bottom of the ladder again... In summary, I think you need to have relatively deep pockets to bootstrap yourself over here. You need to be able to function without getting paid for up to two or three months, and you need to understand that credit-wise and insurance-wise, you're going to be back at square-one again, irrespective of how good you might have been in your home country. The sooner you come to terms with these, and appreciate that you are moving to a foreign country, the sooner you can get on with enjoying the experience.

Our DSL modem finally arrived today. Well, it kind of involved accosting the UPS guy in an adjacent street whilst walking back home from 7-Eleven acquiring ice cream, but hey, we got the thing in the end. I went with Sonic on advice from guys from work, and I have to say I've been totally impressed with their customer service to date. Today I got an email from them because I'd reached my activation date, but they hadn't seen any ADSL traffic from me yet, and they just wanted to check that everything was okay. We had a free dialup account for use while we waited for the ADSL to be provisioned (and the delay was with receiving the modem over the holiday season, not the ADSL provisioning itself). Also, their account management website allows an impressive amount of self-control over aspects such as spam filtering and firewalling. I'm a very satisfied customer so far.

Jamie recently created a drupal site for cheese aficionados. So far the main feature is the blog, but it’s coming along quite nicely. Jamie has had some pretty hair-raising cheesemaking experiences, including a near death brush with mozzarella (photos). Curdnerds is clearly ready for the world. The question is whether the world is ready for Curdnerds. Time will tell.

I have a local hack that makes docdiff a bit more whizzy than it is.I embed ctrl-A to the current location in emacs buffer, hand it over to docdiff, and docdiff will change that to an HTML anchor.That way, I can jump to the current editing location when the target docdiff is quite large.Here is the patch with an accompanying elisp.

Today is a bunch of quickies about random stuff.

Sleeping.. ..and subsequently waking up. I have been trying out the advice of How to Become an Early Riser recently, after discovering it about a week ago from some people. I had been sleeping from about 4am to noon or 1pm, depending on the day. I decided to go all out and set my alarm clock for 5:30am, never to be reset again. It didn't work out the first couple days, but after three days of getting up on time, my body is definitely adjusting well to it, and I get a bunch of work done in the morning before I head off to work at 9. Debian packages-arch-specific vgrabbj finally got out of packages-arch-specific hell and is building on almost all architectures. I think the addition of a new person to the team maintaining packages-arch specific helped a bunch, because shortly after I emailed the new maintainer movement occurred after two months of nothing from the other two. I don't know if they had to actually check out the package itself efore removing the line, but it seems like something as simple as removing one line from a file in cvs shouldn't take that long. Planet issues For some reason, the posts from my blog which are syndicated to PlanetDebian are showing up on the planet 2 times for every post I make. If anyone has some insight as to why, and whether it's a problem on my end, I'm all ears. Diana Diana makes me happy like a bright sunny day after a long cloudy winter week.