Search Results: "ana"

23 August 2006

Evan Prodromou: 6 Fructidor CCXIV

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

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

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

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

22 August 2006

Steve Kemp: Y know it ain t right when its all wrong

Peter Nuttall is my personal hero for running with my idea to limit N consecutive posts on a planetplanet installation - if you’d like test it and apply it to planet.debian.org, or elsewhere, find it here. (Note: Patch is reversed). Bad day at work today. I spent half the morning wrestling with xen on my laptop - it seems that linux-image-2.6.16-2-xen-686 or linux-modules-2.6.16-2-xen-686 panics on boot in some weird Xen way. (ie. before initrd.) I upgraded to these packages yesterday afternoon, and the problem only showed itself by a failure to boot this morning. Since the laptop is fairly new none of my install CDs were capable of booting it with networking. In the end I downloaded knoppix, broke a window whilst waiting for it to download, and finally installed a non-Xen kernel so I could work. I’ve reported a bug against the kernel package (with a bogus email address which I’ll need to fixup afterwards) but it hasn’t shown up in the bts yet. There isn’t anything obvious in the bootup message just a panic after “disabling trace buffers” so I’m not sure the report will be terribly useful. In other “worky” news four months after making the request I got a second phone line installed in my flat today, so I can get another network connection. Neat. Now I need to track down somebody to replace / fix my window. Thats going to be pricy, but it will have to be done before the weather turns or I’ll freeze in my house. The problem is frustratingly mechanical - the window “handle” is jammed in such a way that I can’t turn the handle and close the window - so it is permananetly open about four inches. The frustration comes primarily because if the window would open more, (it won’t), I could use a screwdrive to unscrew the locking site - and that would allow me to close it. (Albeit leaving it unlocked). Its half-open/half-closed state is just the worse way for it to be stuck.

Jordi Mallach: XFS nightmares

Following up to madduck's and gwolf's recent horror stories on XFS, last Thursday, my desktop greeted me after the fantastic week around Asturies with a series of I/O errors whenever I tried to execute something. I rebooted, and then the kernel wasn't happy. 
I/O error in filesystem ("hda1") meta-data dev hda1 block 0x4a9778  ("xlog_iodone") error 5 buf count 1024
/dev/hda1 is my / partition, and the machine would not boot at all. To make things more interesting, the box refused to boot from any of my old CD and DVD drives. Yesterday, with my mail piling up already at Sindominio's mailserver, I managed to find a spare CD writer, which would not open its tray, and a DVD reader which managed to boot a Breezy Live CD I had around. The good guys at #xfs were helpful as always and helped me in the process of not fucking up my valuable root filesystem while trying to fix it. The filesystem ended up having quite some corruption here and there, but after xfs_repair, nubol was able to boot again. Only it was missing libldap.so.2, libX11.so.6, debconf programs and other minor details like those. Some reinstall rounds later, GNOME was able to startup without errors and now the box is up and running. Does anyone know of some script that compares dpkg's contents database with that the filesystem has, so I can easily find the rest of damaged packages to reinstall them?

21 August 2006

Gustavo Franco: GNOME 2.14 and more

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

Gustavo Franco: Theo did it again

"<span style="">I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already." -- Theo de Raadt</span>. Well, the fact is that he doesn't need to inform Sun about a hole, but the whole community and i think he does, no?<br /><br />By the way, for the second time (to say the least) i think that Theo is right and raised some good points but close <a href="http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/20/2050223&amp;from=rss">his last interview</a> with a weird phrase. Well, let me comment about what i think is Debian related in that interview:<br /><span style=""></span><span style=""><br /></span><span style="">"We often run into vendors who have signed NDA agreements with Linux developers, who will then happily write a Linux driver filled with magic numbers, which only one developer in the world understands. Having signed the NDA ensured that Linux got a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It cannot be fixed by anyone else, because it is full of secrets. It is a source code version of a blob."</span><br /><span style=""><br /></span><span style="">It push us into the blob business again. I think we should team up with OpenBSD folks, and tell them that some Linux people care about free software as a whole. If upstream (read Linus) doesn't care about unmaintanable drivers that are written by one person under a NDA we should. Does anyone have or wants to prepare a list of these drivers ? If some of them are already in a cleaner form into the OpenBSD kernel we should prepare a new list and a linux kernel hacker with free time could redo the drivers in a cleaner way, no ?<br /><br />It's need to point out that Theo said many Asian vendors are more documentation friendly than the Americans. Are you surprised?</span><br /><br />Closing, if you feel lost in this post probably you will understand me when you buy your next laptop cointaining a cool, new wireless chipset made by a american company.

Gustavo Franco: epiphany 2.14 in Debian

<a onblur="try parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully(); catch(e) " href="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 89px; height: 31px;" src="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png" alt="" border="0" /></a>If you're using GNOME as your desktop environment, it's possible that you're using the wrong browser or just using one that isn't doing everything you want as i was, right ? Well, when Firefox came into the scene with one of its previous names i was using Galeon. Galeon worked for me, but it lacked some features that the new browser was offering. I would like to tell you that the same thing is happening again, and it's now time to give <a href="http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/">epiphany</a> a try. If you did it before, do it again with the latest epiphany (2.14.0) in Debian sid, my reasons are below:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gecko<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span>Yes, it uses Gecko 1.8 as backend and not gtkhtml so don't worry about page rendering. For those 'in the loop', it's already linked against <a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner">xulrunner</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></span></span>library. Firefox (in Debian sid) isn't yet.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>Bookmarks</span><br />You can attach tags (epiphany calls them 'topics') to the bookmarks and it will organize everything in a tree for you. The bookmark manager looks good for me too, i'm not too much into the bookmark thing but together with deskbar-applet and epiphany topics i can find what i want.<br /><br />The most interesting feature is that epiphany can look up to bookmarks published using avahi (mdns/dns-sd daemon) and show them as "local sites". In other words, you can setup a centralized bookmark server and all the epiphany users in your network will be able to see them. I've a mt-daapd server, and epiphany recognize that there's a admin website around, just like rhythmbox does.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Extensions<br /></span>Yes, it has extensions and is able to do ad-block and all that. Unfortunately the latest <a href="http://packages.debian.org/epiphany-extensions">epiphany-extensions</a> package still needs to be built for i386, but it's already ok for amd64 arm hppa powerpc s390.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">RSS<br /></span>I had some rss apps around, but wasn't really using them because what i needed was subscribe from the browser, organize the feeds in the app using topics/tags or folders and see some interesting integration between that app and the browser. It's now done, try epiphany and liferea. =)<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Memory<br /></span>After eight hours using epiphany it won't eat all your memory to 'optimize page loading' and even with this "bug" i don't see epiphany (and the rest of my desktop) too slow to open a new page after all this time.<br /><br />I think that a lot of users and developers will just look to epiphany as a serious Firefox alternative, after a big "user oriented" distribution pick it as the default browser. Thanks to the epiphany developers anyway, keep the good work.

Gustavo Franco: 7th International Free Software Forum

I'll be in Porto Alegre, Brazil <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en">for the event</a> (FISL, in portuguese) from 19 may until 22, the last day. There will be some interesting Debian related activities there:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian stand<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>We will have a stand in the event, and there we plan to coordinate a Key Signing Party (KSP) and a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). Since we will have many DDs and NMs there, it sounds promising. If you want to join us in the BSP, keep an eye at debian-qa mailing list and irc.freenode.net - #debian-bugs.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Sacix<br /></span>I will talk about a CDD called <a href="http://www.sacix.org/">Sacix</a>, that aims to be the default choice for telecentres and counts with more than 15000 end-users in Brazil right now. The project wasn't a CDD until i jumped in and released with a team the 5.11 (November, last year). The next release is scheduled to May and will be Sarge based again, but with a interesting telecentre management system developed in PHP, some "in house made" backports and stuff from backports.org. Stay tuned or just go there and watch my talk.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian-BR-CDD<br /></span>Unlike Sacix, <a href="http://cdd.debian-br.org/">Debian-BR-CDD</a> has no clear goal in terms of audience and in its first release ships the most user-friendly GNU/Linux desktop for Portuguese speakers until now. The 1.0 announcement was made, but the release party and Otavio Salvador (DD and Debian-BR-CDD starter) talk will happen during the event.<br /><br />I'm sure that i will have some time to keep uploading <a href="http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org">python-modules</a> and meet with Otavio to talk about some new stuff for LTSP package and discuss it with <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ltsp">pkg-ltsp</a> members. Hopefully i'll be more involved in GNOME too, due to the evil <a href="http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=guilherme.pastore@terra.com.br">Guilherme</a> influence, that just received his account. Isn't it cool when you see a 15yr old hacker joining the project ? That's the real "fresh blood" we need.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>

Gunnar Wolf: Caps Lock becomes useful again! / Is this a farewell, my dear Window Maker?

I have always hated and despised the Caps Lock key. Not only it is useless to anybody who works writing code, sysadmining, or plainly writing real text, but its mere existence has degraded the work quality of millions of people's work. Suddenly, IT GETS NORMAL TO WRITE LIKE THIS - It's just a magic spell that allows you to get rid of those old-fashioned rules about the language, about where to write in which case. Even worse, in Spanish some people tend to think that uppercase letters do not carry accents, so they produce text that is, um... Lets say it is readable, but that's often an overstatement.
[switch context]
I have been a happy and loyal user of Window Maker since 1997, when Juan Pablo Romero pointed me to it (BTW, I found Juan Pablo's homepage after searching for some links to post here and finding his, very old and probably unmaintained, WindowMaker page), back in the time where one of my favorite webpages was Window managers for X - clear sign that I didn't really like anything I had been using. And with WMaker, I was happy for (WOW) almost ten years. I still am. But after last week's ugly XFS corruption episode, I decided to follow the trend among some Debian people, and installed ion3.
My impression so far, with two and a half days of usage? I LOVE IT. It is the only WM I've met that really comes from a different point of view, stating that what most so-called modern WMs offer is just counter-productive. It just stays out of your way, not providing any visual distractions, and limiting to providing screens and frames to organize your windows. It acknowledges that its target audience (in my life I'd never set up ion3 for my mother ;-) ) usually hates using the mouse if unneeded, and that there is little point in wasting screen real estate with docks and desktops with functionality. It just sits there waiting for you to command its working via the keyboard - of course, the mouse is also an option, but not the natural one.
Anyway, I won't discuss the beauty of ion3 here - mostly because I have only scratched the surface so far. I have loved it, let me tell you. A little more on this in a couple of lines... Just for my Spanish-prefering friends, I found this piece of text explaining what ion3 is about: Ion3: Rompiendo con los entornos gr ficos convencionales
[merge contexts]
My only grudge is that in its default configuration, ion3 becomes the 0wn3r of Meta. What is Meta? What some people call "the Alt key". That key that is not Ctrl, but has become a controlling key. And I'm a heavy Meta user - Remember that my favorite way of interacting with the computer is Emacs. Yup, the nice OS without a decent editor, nicknamed after "Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift". Rob me of my Meta, and the gained productivity might as well go down the drain.
Here comes the link to my first paragraph: Ion3 is very configurable. No, it's not configurable - it's programmable. The configuration files are pieces of Lua, a full programming language. Of course, this means you can do mostly anything with it... But you have to do it in the end. Editing ion3's behaviour is not just clicking on selectors - You can take a dive to get the feeling. It looks quite easy, but I yet have to get around it and start poking the configuration.
After mourning my lack of Meta, I came across a very useful post in Gregor Hermann's blog. Gregor, I owe you a beer or three - You not only gave me back my productivity, you also gave use to the most despised key in my keyboard. Two lines into XModmap, one line into a couple of Ion3 files (I have yet to be sure it is needed in all of them), and I now have a perfectly useful CapsLock key, which is the key I will manage my WM with. It just rocks! It stands in nobody's way, and I am sure I'll very soon grow used to it.

20 August 2006

Lars Wirzenius: Debian Inquirer: List silence causes concern about evil Cabal plot

The Debian developers may have been pacified! This is the startling conclusion of our resident traffic analyst, Lars W. The main Debian discussion forums have been almost completely silent for several days already. The debian-devel mailing list has only had a handful of posts the past few days. The #debian-devel IRC channel is either silent, or has people asking if the list server is down. Speculation for the uncharacteristic silence runs rampant. The current most likely theory is about a secret experiment by The Cabal to treat all Debian contributors Clockwork Orange style and are now unable to express their true feelings. When asked to comment, the Debian Project Leader had this to say: "I have no comment to muck raking guttersnipes like yourself, show some respect for people trying to improve the world!" The other main theory is that almost all contributors have finally gotten a life and are on vacation. Experts agree that this is not a likely scenario.

Andree Leidenfrost: Aurelien Jarno is my hero! (New mindi-busybox package)

There was this long-standing problem with Mondo Rescue that during restore runs the virtual consoles wouldn't work on amd64. I managed to finally track this down to a rather bizarre bug in glibc.
.

The problem is actually fixed in glibc 2.4. When I found out that 2.4 is not going to make it into etch, I asked whether the fix could be backported to 2.3. To my total delight, this is exactly what Aurelien did! Thank you a lot, indeed! :-)

Without further ado I thus bring you mindi-busybox-1.2.1 with working virtual consoles. (The only other noteworthy change is that there is a link now from /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts in the restore system to keep the new upstream busybox happy.)

Testing was done on:
  • sid, i386, stock Debian kernel 2.6.17-2-k7 (2.6.17-6) to NFS
  • sid, amd64, stock Debian kernel 2.6.16-2-k8-smp (2.6.16-17), LVM & RAID to NFS

19 August 2006

Clint Adams: Whaling in Memphis

I was sitting in the airport, watching all the teenage Marines hitting on each woman they saw, and watching them get consistently rejected, when I may have had an auditory hallucination. By means of the public address system, some sort of airline employee had summoned a list of passengers to the gate, and none of those passengers were named Horselover Fat. Nevertheless, I sashayed up to the desk and inquired of the manchimp standing there, Did someone call my name? He looked at me, grinning smugly, and asserted his intellectual superiority by pointing out that he couldn't answer that question without knowing my name. Rather than explaining to him that he could have assimilated that little bit of knowledge by reading the boarding pass that I was holding in front of me, I told him that my name was Jarom Hennessey, for that was the name in the passport I was using. (Hi, Alana. Hi, Ophira. Die, Aliza.) Nope, he said, and as I began climbing over a pile of Marines, he continued, Oh, wait. She called your name and I didn't hear. So I climbed back, and waited for him to ask my name. Alas, he did not; he only said, You don't have any objection to sitting in Business class, do you? No, I lied, and so he printed me a new boarding pass. It turns out that this was the good sort of Business class not the foul sort you might get on British Midlands, where your seat is exactly 14 millimetres wider than those in Economy, and they still stab you with sharpened Yorkshire pudding and plead with you to do your part in lightening the load of the airplane, even though you are several thousand feet in the air and don't even want to be going to the UK in the first place, but the kind where the enormous seat reclines all the way back, has electronic adjustable lumbar support and all kinds of other gadgets, the food is pretty good, and you can even get snakes if you ask for them. First class on that flight looked even better, especially because there was a 55-year-old 4'7"-tall man giving people laypdances and begging them not to keep calling him a stewardess , because apparently he is some sort of flight attendant . Anyway, I sat next to some fratboy douchebag who eventually learned to mind his own goddamn business, and passed on the free Bellinis since it was only 6am. I did avail myself of other free stuff, and when the stewardess (not the guy from First class) took my breakfast order, she asked if I wanted a DVD player. In mimicry of Fratboy Douchebag, I grunted, Sure. She brought me a portable DVD player, which claimed to have a battery, but didn't work unless it was plugged in, and also claimed that it would not play any DVDs not provided by the airline. I did not have the opportunity to test this, since I had opted to not bring any DVDs with me. Instead, I perused the selection provided me. These DVDs were all labeled to indicate that they could be played only in the airline-provided DVD player. I have a funny story about that. I'm not going to tell it. I don the noise-cancelling headphones, and jack them into the DVD player, into which I have put Transamerica. For a little while, I think that the lack of speech is the movie being artsy. Then I begin to suspect that something is horribly wrong, so I start over, with subtitles on. It becomes clear that all the speech has been elided, as well as some of the sound effects. A bad burn? I swap the DVD out for Firewall, and experience similar problems. Summoning one of the stewardesses, I complain that there seems to be something wrong with something. I trade everything in for a new set. This time I don't get Transamerica, so I put in Firewall; having seen the first two minutes, I have to watch it to completion now. There's no sound at all. I discover that if I press down on the headphone plug, shifting the jack sideways, I can hear the audio portion of the presentation. What a pain in the ass. Here would be another good place to not tell the funny story. I switched to a better movie after that. In retrospect, I should have taken more advantage of the in-flight service, since my next leg was abysmal. This airline was one of my favorites a little over half a decade ago, and now I am plotting ways to never fly it again. I'll note that the seat was smaller than Greg Pomerantz's former toilet, that the radio controls were from the wrong century, and instead of having hot food included, the flight staff sold sandwiches and snack boxes . Matthew Garrett might say that this sort of flight gives one more freedom than the sort where you get a choice between two different meals or nothing at all, but I think that it is a travesty. There should be giant warning indications for such flights, so that one has ample time to purchase crappy, overpriced airport food to drag on board, as that is a better alternative. The third leg was rather unremarkable, except for the elderly Jewish man who kept fondling a stewardess and gesticulating some sort of claim that he had no command of English. Just prior to the descent, she gave him a loud scolding, repeating at the end, Yes, you understand me. I imagine that she could make quite a bit of money as a prostitute for the Chasidim; they like their hookers blonde. Now the fourth leg was pleasant for numerous reasons, most of which are boring. The guy across the aisle from me bore some disturbing similarities to Mr. Foxworthy, but was not nearly entertaining enough to hold either my interest or the interest of a blonde chick, who sat on the other side of him and probably wouldn't be all that popular with the Chasidim. One of the stewardesses was Latina, but spoke like a limp Swiss man. Her partner in comedy was not Latina, and did not speak like a limp Swiss man. I didn't catch their names, so I'll call the first one Marta and the second one Gladys. Marta and Gladys were having a work-related discussion about a complimentary beverage prior to it having been served to some fool behind me. There was a bit of a communication mixup, so Gladys leaned over to me and gestured a few allegations about Marta, concluding with So if you have to talk to her, just use sign language or somethin'. Hearing this, Marta shoved Gladys out of the way, leaned over to me, and said, You just wait. Later on, I'll tell you something really bad about her. Then I wrecked some guy's priceless painting. Oops. Isn't paint a liquid- or gel-like substance? If you ask me, all instances of art are terraist weapons. Oh, Gladys sighed happily, I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here. Later, at the deplaning, Gladys cried out, My friend! , and Marta nudged me and said, She's single!

Amaya Rodrigo: Exactly on year ago...

Exactly on year ago... I followed the white rabbit into a pirate ship.

It has been a year of Sauna, Sushi, Salmiakki, Jolly Rogers and Tequila. (I must admit there was no sauna, very little salmiakki, maybe even less tequila, and exactly three Jollies, but the cheese, the happiness and the sushi... Oh the sushi!) We have since indulged many in rolled cigarettes, a blond pirate dog, ma ana, Fortuna, loving and hating airports, kissing, three wonderful cats, sleeping in weird places, some more cheese, minding our steps, respect, bug squashing, and freedom. Paraphrasing Paravoid, yes, us people are strange! And so Free and Happy! I didn t want a boyfriend, and I never got one. Te quiero, Holger!

17 August 2006

Joachim Breitner: Free Software Club in Tema, Ghana

A while ago, I blogged about going to Ghana, to spread Free Software. By now, I'm here in Tema, at the coast near Accra, and school has started. My actual work has still to get going, but I know I will hold a Club where I hope to assemble all the possible future Hacker here at the school, to introduce them to the world of Free Software, of wikis and collobarative work and to the Blogosphere. Or something like that, depends on what they want. I have put up signs to advertise the club, if you want, you can have a look at the slogans.For the school infrastructure itself, I have created a list of possible applications of Free Software Comments are welcome!PS: The "Obroni" in "Obroni Computer Club" is what the kids in the street call me. It actually just means "White Man"...

16 August 2006

Junichi Uekawa: 'Twas a good Debian birthday.

Jingu-Gaien Hanabi Taikai last night celebrated the summer ina Japanese style with loads of fireworks.Instead of celebrating the summer, I personally celebrated Debian.This month's Tokyo area debian meeting is held this weekend.I'm looking forward to it.

MJ Ray: Blog Moves: Multilingualism

How do you blog in more than one language? Variations on the same question arise at conversationblog and problogger. Anyone got any good suggestions or further links?

Daniel Baumann: Happy Birthday Debian

Debian turns 13 today, congratulations to the whole Debian universum and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this longterm success story. Birthdays are always some sort of breakpoints in life, where people making a pause, looking back what they have done in the last year and what they are planning to do in the next year, similar as on New Years' Days. In the past years, I have not done much for Debian except some simple package maintenance. Here are some statistics as of today. debian.org backports.org And now to the future... I don't think that I will change the way how I give a little bit back to Debian in compensation for how much I am taking from it. There is always need for people doing higher level tasks, such as various teams in Debian already do. However, people doing the grunt work of simple packaging are also needed, and that is where I'm happy with (remember: never change a running system :). I have still some packages to introduce on my todo list... Nevertheless, I'm interrested in doing QA work (such as with piuparts), and maybe, if I have the time to further advance my Esperanto, I'm even able to help out with translations. But both things will, as far as I think at the moment, be of less priority to me. For my work at Debian Live and Debian Unofficial, there will be a dedicated report soon.

Daniel Baumann: Happy Birthday Debian

Debian turns 13 today, congratulations to the whole Debian universum and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this longterm success story. Birthdays are always some sort of breakpoints in life, where people making a pause, looking back what they have done in the last year and what they are planning to do in the next year, similar as on New Years' Days. In the past years, I have not done much for Debian except some simple package maintenance. Here are some statistics as of today. debian.org backports.org And now to the future... I don't think that I will change my way how I give a little bit back to Debian in compensation for how much I am taking from it. There is always need for people doing higher level tasks, such as various teams in Debian already do. However, people doing the grunt work of simple packaging are also needed, and that is where I'm happy with (remember: never change a running system :). I have still some packages to introduce on my todo list... Nevertheless, I'm interrested in doing QA work (such as with piuparts), and maybe, if I have the time to further advance my Esperanto, I'm even able to help out with translations. But both things will, as far as I think at the moment, be of less priority to me. For my work at Debian Live and Debian Unofficial, there will be a dedicated report soon.

Lars Wirzenius: Debian Inquirer: Etch release delayed by one year

The release of Etch, the next full release of Debian, will be delayed by a year. Sources close to the release managers revealed the change in the release plan to the D-Inq. before it is announced publically. The source, who calls himself (or is it herself? we're not telling) with the covert nickname "twin", told the D-Inq: "I'm, like, close to the are ems, y'know. I, like, live in Europe and listen to ABBA. Andreas calls himself ABBA on IRC, see." The reason for the delay: the co-incidental occurence of two mystical omens. First, this year is Debian's thirteenth year, and thirteen is always a bad omen. Says twin: "It's, like, bad luck and all." Second, the number of release critical bugs is now 666. "That's, like, the number of yeast, or something", reveals our source. Apparantely the release managers could have dealt with either omen alone, but not with both of them at the same time. Once again, D-Inq. has the scoop! And we verify the reliablity of our sources!

Evan Prodromou: 28 Thermidor CCXIV

I spent most of the day today putting polishing touches on the OpenID MediaWiki extension I took to Wikimania a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to work on, but spending a lot of time with Jonathan Daugherty of Janrain Inc., David Recordon of Verisign and David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios let me know that there was still a lot of work to do. Needless to say, helping kate of Wikia and Travis of wikiHow step through the installation and testing also was a humbling experience. "No... don't do that... Ouch... No, I didn't think of that... Uh, I'll definitely get to that later..." Probably the most painful moment was having about 4 people all at once exclaim in horror that I was storing searchable data inside a blob in the database. "Uh, see, it was just easier that way..." Harsh stares for Evan, you can believe. So today I've been sanding a few of the rough edges and doing some optimization (indexed columns -- what a concept!) and otherwise fudging with the code to make it work better. Jonathan had done some quick hacks at the conference, and I've been adding in his patches as well. tags:

Tha Grill Maj, Amita June and I went out to dinner at the Tha Grill on rue Laurier and St. Laurent this evening. We had some anniversaries to celebrate, so it seemed like a good day to go out for dinner at a new restaurant. The Grill is at the portal between Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal hipster neighborhood and foodier-but-also-hipster Mile End. It's got huge, open windows on St. Laurent and we got to sit right off the sidewalk, perfect people-watching spot. The room is big and airy with pleasant wood details and lots of Thai statuary -- all in natural wood tones. It's a very nice room. The food was great, too. We got crab claws in curry sauce, and a green curry, with papaya salad and fried squid as appetizers. It was all done very nicely. Most pleasant was the proprietor coming to our table with small, heart-shaped slices of melon d'eau (watermelon) for Amita June. Les enfants sont sacr s en Tha land, he gave as explanation: that is, children are sacred in Thailand. Ah, if that were only the case everywhere. It's hard to see summer slipping away in Montreal -- especially since we're off to Wikisym this weekend, and by the time we come back it will be a few days into September. Such a good place to be when the sun is warm, really. tags:

15 August 2006

Joey Hess: ikiwiki milestone

First significant software project to use ikiwiki for its web page (aside from my own code): ion (announcement) Well, so it turned out not to be the Hurd after all. I'm very happy to be of service to a window manager that has been of such great utility to me. Tuomo had some pretty sharp insights about ways ikiwiki could be improved, although it took me a while to get around to doing some of them.

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