Fascinating New Yorker interview with Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to Bush 41. I wonder how the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, gets this degree of access: he’s apparently emailing back and forth with Bush 41, having coffee with Colin Powell, and engaging in frank discussion with Scowcroft for a significant period of time. This sort of reporting is the antithesis of what you see in most newspapers, where the reporter probably spends no more than a few hours piecing together information that is widely available. This is also consistent with everything I’ve seen in the New Yorker for the past few months I’ve been subscribing—high quality writing and primary source information that you won’t pick up just from reading blogs. In any case, it’s interesting to see all these conservative ideologues from the Reagan-Bush era turn on the neoconservatives. If Brent Scowcroft thinks the war in Iraq is misguided, does the current administration have any hope at all?

Being almost friday and having a little bit of time and all i decided to create a new blog. Since my debian account was created recently i though 'why not' and added it to Planet Debian, among the best of the best.

Reading today the slashdot article about Nokia and opensource i remember about a project i did this summer. Following a question i posted about handling private keys on debian-security sometime in june someone emailed with this reply, which i found very interesting. And i actually wrote that, even though it's pretty rudimentary (authentication using mobile devices and assymetric keys).

Basically when you enter a username at the login prompt, the PAM modules looks up information about that user from a configuration file which contains the hwaddress of his assigned device and a path to a public key (either GPG or SSL). The PAM module then generates a temporary password, encrypts it with the users public key and sends it via bluetooth to the mobile device.

The Symbian part was a little tricky, and my first encounter with java. I implemented only SSL decryption capabilities because it's a faster decryption time (~4 sec on my 6630) , and because BouncyCastle's cryptography support for pgp is impossible to port to j2me with my java knowledge. Anyway i haven't seen assymetric key cryptography (oss) on mobile devices until this. Being in java it doesn't really use anything fancy, and it _should_ work on any mobile device supporting FileConnection API (jsr-75).

If you feel adventurous, you can find the source code here.

So I am on the Tabor Mennonite Church centennial committee (coming right up in 2008!). We've been going through the church archives, and I've been scanning in interesting photos. Here's one, taken about 1950. This is a photo of the original 1908 Tabor Church building, as remodeled in the 1930s. You'll notice the front door, the many windows. And the two well-worn paths out back. They are leading to the two outhouses. If I understand correctly, they continued to be used up until the mid-1960s when the "new" (present) church building was constructed. The building in the middle housed a Delco Light Plant (generator), which was used until rural electrification provided power to the church. So yes, this church had its own on-site generator, decades before it got indoor plumbing. There's a joke in there somewhere but it's late and somehow I can't come up with a good one. Feel free to post your own ;-)

This is by far the most stressful long period I can remember in my life. I was quite in control of things approximately until around June. Since then, things have been falling over me in a quick and heavy sucession - First of all, being co-organizer at Debconf was quite hard. I had run conferences before, but nothing ever like this - And, I should add, I never had a German boss running the show. [friend="Stockholm"], as a project leader, you really rule... But whoever works with you should be warned: It is not easy.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: It's easier to be the coordinator (remember I was officially the Tyrant for three years at CONSOL? :) ) than to be in the immediately subordinate team.
Back home, I expected the regular post-vacation rush, so having a hard August -trying to make everything on time- was expectable and OK. I don't remember exactly what projects was I in during August/September (I remember some minor stuff, but I think adding it all together was the mistake). There is one thing I did, though: Accepting way too many invitations as a speaker, at least one every two weeks. And, as many of you know, you cannot just travel somewhere and keep working - When I am at a conference, I want to get to talk with the people there, I want to know what are they interested in (why they invited me in the first place), and make friends with them. But this time it was (as it happens every year - Why are most conferences stuck together September-November?) just way too much.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: Be careful on what you accept. It's easy saying "yes" to a conference. It's hard keeping sanity afterwards.
Ok... I have been going places. For example, two weeks ago I was to San Luis Potos . Instead of staying there for two days, I left my office at 7PM, took the metro to the bus station, got the bus at 9PM, arrived at 2AM, went to my hotel, woke up at 7:30AM, had breakfast, coded for ~1hr, went to the conference theater, delivered my talk at 11AM, went for a quick lunch (which became a takeaway order) at 1:15PM, got on my bus at 2PM, arrived back in Mexico City at 7PM, got to a (fucking long) meeting at 8PM, left the meeting at 12AM, and finally got back home at 1AM. Fun, huh?
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 3: Yes, it's fun to travel. It is much more fun to travel when you actually get to know the place!
...And pressure has not given way. As soon as I finish with one project, there is another one demanding my attention right away. October has been more than hectic. I had to cancel two invitations (on which I was to go to two cities each time) I was quite looking forward to, in Peru - I am very sorry, friends at Lima, Moquegua, Tacna and Arequipa... But I won't make it there this year. I am specially frustrated by not being able to make it to Concladeb in Arequipa - I really want to see DebianPeru/DebianArequipa's good work! And I am specially sorry on canceling today my trip to Moquegua, after they had already booked (and paid) for the tickets... It seems the money will not be lost after all, but I was such a pain in the ass for them, it is not fair I am cancelling... But anyway.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 4: Remember to learn from past experiences - It feels incredibly as a deja-vu from last year.
I hope I am not spoiling any surprises: Today, instead of blogging, I am supposed to be setting up the Comas server for Debconf6. Even with all of my worries, yes, I am still determined to be the man behind the show for Debconf. It will be in Oaxtepec, don't worry, and it will be a huge success. So let me finish this post quick, and it will be sooner you can register for it ;-) There are still too many points to work on Comas, though. I am setting up a tweaked version, against my will, but with the commitment to fix it transparently and soon. Oh... Yes, and I still have to coordinate with the locals here, as it's taking forever for us to open the fscking bank account so we can start receiving funds and paying money. Did I mention Debconf would be in Mexico? Ok, I will do my best not to make lateness the norm.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 5: Try not to bore your audience with too many details. Remember you have to work, and somebody might complain you lose too much time blogging!
But before I leave you alone: You might ask why do I mention the addiction in my post title... Well, because I have started treating my main addiction. It is really not easy, and I don't ever want to know what is it like to have a chemical addiction, like people who abuse drugs. If you have seen me face to face, it should be obvious: I have a very strong addiction to food. For one month already, I have been as conscious as I can every time I open my mouth - And, yes, it was not just three times a day. I have made some advances (sorry, I cannot really measure it, as home scales make it only to 120kg). Today is a big day for me: I was admitted in a pilot obesity control follow-up treatment at my University's sports health direction. I am very happy about this, as I do need mentoring and hand-holding. This is a seriously difficult process to follow, and I really hope to carry it thoroughly. Fortunately, my health has been perfect until now - But I cannot abuse myself forever.

Yesterday I returned from Dresden where I attended the Linux-Info-Tag. All in all it was a really great weekend. The event was very well organised and I had a lot of fun. We shared a booth with debianforum.de and had a lot of visitors, ranging from people who had just started to consider switching to Linux to advanced users with detailed technical questions. As usual I also learned quite a lot of stuff myself, this time (among other things) that my digital camera (an IXUS II) works very nicely with gphoto2 and that there's also a lot of other graphical digital camera software that works with it.

We had two copies of Frank Ronneburg's Debian Anwenderhandbuch and I thought it would be a nice idea to give them away in a little contest. Alexander "Tolimar" Schmehl owns a little etch that I asked him to bring along. The idea was, that, in order to promote the name of the next release, people should draw us a picture on the little etch and the best one would win a copy of the book. I'd actually expected to see people fail miserably and in the end crown the funniest try. But I was confuted. Totally!! In fact we had two entries that were so good that we decided to split the first place and give both of them a copy of the book.
Here are (as promised) all contestants:


This entry was taken out of the rating. It was our first entry and was made by Carsten, who was one of the Debian booth people. Of course we know that he could have done much better and only produced this in order to not discourage other contestants.


The third place, personally I don't really agree with the motive but it won a lanyard anyway.


The second place, a rather obvious motive, but well done and a worthy second place. Another lanyard for this gentleman.


The two first place entries: We absolutely couldn't decide between the perfect curves of "Tux" and "A house with garden"'s 1000 little Details. So the first place was splitted and we gave a away both copies of the book.

Congratulations again to all contestants! Well done!

After deciding on the prices I had to hurry to give my talk on user friendly system administration. I had a nice number of people and I think the talk was well received. The (German) slides are now also available online. Please inform me of any usage.
One nice incident was, when after the talk a former system administrator of the Technical University of Dresden approached me and told me that he really liked the talk. He said that he was now retired and really missed talking to the users and helping them when they had trouble with the system. After hearing so many sysads talking about their users like complete idiots, that all seem on a personal quest to annoy their sysads as much as possible, this was a nice change. I sometimes think that the "BOFH-Syndrome" is also a generation problem. But that's a different story ...

After the talks there was a barbecue outside the building, I talked to a lot of people and had quite some fun. Afterwards there was a presentation and movies, a really nice ending for an almost perfect event. (The only problem was, that there had been no Internet access until around noon, but from what I heard it was one of the University's switches that had given up. Apart from that everything worked out perfectly.)

On Sunday we went on a guided tour through Dresden and afterwards to a museum. The museum actually is on Human Biology but there were two special exhibitions, one on evolution and one on games. As expected most of us went for the game exhibition that featured several rooms dedicated to the history of games as well as the different kinds of games that exist (imitation, strategy, gambling, ...). All rooms had games to try yourself and all of us had a lot of fun. (We're such a bunch of kids ;)) After leaving the museum we went for a Pizza (Very tasty! I think, I am developing a weakness for Pizza with Parma and rocket.), which concluded that day.

One last nice incident happened when I was riding home on the train with Tolimar. We asked the guy who'd checked our tickets for a later train connection. His answer: "Oh, did it get too late at the Linuxtag at the Technical University?". Unnecessary to mention that we were most thrilled! Often when talking to "normal people" I get the "what is this all for" feeling, since, how much ever you evangelise, there's such a mass of people who never even heard about the existence of FOSS/Linux. It's these little incidents that are really rewarding!!

Final conclusions:

• Great weekend
• Very good event (Thanks LIT people, you guys rock!! Also a big thank you to our host, Frank, who provided three of us with a place to sleep, really tasty breakfast and also drove us around.)
• Lots of fun
• Lots of interesting people to talk to
• An IXUS II does not work as a USB storage device
• You can do amazing things with an etch a sketch
• Knowing that my talk is being recorded gives me an awkward feeling (I tend to use a lot of "spicy language")
• The rebuilt Frauenkirche looks impressing
• Pizza with Parma and rocket is great!

Tomorrow (1 November), there's a protest against the Norwich Northern Distributor Road (N25) taking place in... Ely... which seems to be where the powers that be decided is a good place for the public examination of the east of England plan. It would make too much sense to hold it in any of the main cities, wouldn't it? On the plus side, Ely is a main railway junction, so maybe people will turn out despite the terrible roads to it.

"* poof... Clippie appears * It looks like you're trying to type a job advertisement. Shall I ..."

-- darsh, replying on-list to the day's third spam

"H5N1 BIRD FLU BELIEVED TO BE FIRST VIRUS UNABLE TO SPREAD THROUGH MICROSOFT OUTLOOK Researchers Shocked to Finally Find Virus That Email App Doesn't Like"

-- Mock news release forwarded to ALUG by Tony

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

Advogato

Randomly clicking around Advogato today I accidently tried to login. Rather than seeing “Person not Found” which is all I’ve seen since my account(s) were removed I now get “incorrect password”. It looks like my primary, and replacement accounts at Advogato are back. At the time those accounts were removed I setup this blog so that I could still remain syndicated upon Planet Debian. It would be nice to have the Advogato account(s) back, but I could live without them. (Indeed mailing Raph at his acm.org address bounced so I may will have to)

Syndication

For my own notes. This blog appears at:

• Planet Debian.
• Planet Hants Lug
  • The Hampshire Linux User Group - ironically i live in Edinburgh and should be more affiliated with Edlug…
• Planet Former Advogato
  • A planet syndicating people who “moved on” from Advogato.

Stalker-tastic. Of course my daily life goes entirely elsewhere - but that contains rudeness, angst, & etc. As you would expect from LiveJournal

This week's installment of Cringely's column has a slightly different take on the recurring theme of implication of the retirement of the Baby Boomers cohort:

In the U.S. the Baby Boom generation includes anyone born from 1946-64, which means everyone 41-59 years old. Those ages generally cover the top technical management positions in most companies and universities and they are starting to retire. But as anyone who reads magazines knows, this generation of upcoming retirees acts younger and healthier than the generations that preceded it and they plan to have very active older years. At the urging of reader Joel Franusic, I've been thinking of what implications this has for Open Source software. The implications are huge. Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that's what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.

Andrew, if you're doing a lazyweb call of help, at least make sure you include some sort of form of contact. Your blog doesn't have comments enabled and I can't find your email address anywhere on your website (even on your resume link on the main site, which leads to a 404).

Not that I use Mac OS X anyway, but enable comments if you want feedback! I'm sure someone will eventually answer on planet, but it's not like IRC.

(Don't take this as a rant; it's more of a pet peeve.)

Systems 2005 Another year, another Systems. This year, however, sadly the first time without Jens, so organization was harder than usual. C&L again provided an Open Source area where we had a booth along with GNOME, KDE, the several BSDs, PostgreSQL and some smaller Open Source projects. As we were not able to build up the booth on Sunday already, there was only a pretty bad location left on Monday, facing towards the wall. Roland Stigge provided a huge 1,5 by 1,5 metre Debian swirl banner, which we mounted in the vicinity of the (too small for that) booth. Michael Ablassmeier brought a Shuttle PC and a TFT display so we could show visitors around the Debian desktop and point them towards further information on the internet. Credativ again kindly shipped posters and flyers. We sold the former and distributed the latter to passing visitors. Unfortunately, Credativ did not receive any LinuxTag DVDs this year, and we were unable to obtain some from other people (apparently they are spared for LinuxWorldExpo in Frankfurt next month, though most visitors there should know Debian already I guess), so we only had about 30 DVDs, which were left from the pack I took back from LinuxTag myself. We sold those for 2 EUR, and later distributed some shiny new Breezy CDs the GNOME booth acquired on Thursday and had some Sarge CDs pressed at a nearby CD production booth which we sold for 2 EUR as well. After some initial doubts on whether we would be able to properly man the booth, it turned out that the local Debian community was enough to guarantee presence except for Friday morning. Michael Ablassmeier, Erich Schubert, Simon Richter, Roland Stigge and Rene Engelhard manned the booth besides me. So we were in the fortunate position that we had two people at the booth most of the time while shuffling around personnel, while most other booths were operated by the same one or two people throughout the week. This year, almost all people I asked (I usually offered a flyer and asked "Do you know Debian already?" to all passing visitors, unless they quickly tried to run through our territory) knew about Debian at least somewhat, and surprisingly many people said they had Debian installed and were happy with it. Thanks to the Sarge release and the almost-official amd64 archive (the respective lack of which were by far the most prominent questions last year), we had almost no recurring questions to answer; probably the most frequent question was about Ubuntu and our relationship with it, but those were pretty scarce and I expected much more of that. Likewise, only very few people were unhappy about Debian (far outweighed by the happy bunch), and most of that seemed to be due to specific technical issues rather than any general reservations about the Debian development or community processes. Most of the remaining questions were pretty specific, e.g. people having issues installing Debian on their hardware or trying to do some exotic stuff. To summarize, it was a nice having a booth again and getting in touch with visitors and users. I did not see much else of Systems this year due to being busy with university as well, but I do not think it would have been worth it anyway. Murray Cumming and Joerg Kress (who were managing the GNOME booth) helped me dismantle the booth and carry back the hardware and leftovers on Friday evening and we decided to have dinner together at a nice pub in Munich.

Google is expanding it's empire. In fact it's becoming a threat with this big of an influence on public opinion just by being able to effectively "censor" information if they would want to. We need more diversity, IMHO. With the latest rumors - Google Base - it seems that Google will be attacking new markets soon. Google Base could be a big threat to Craigslist and EBay, actually... (from what I've seen of Google Base, I find the phrase "Google wants to host your Databases" overstretches it a bit though...) So what is Google up to? When is Google starting to sell books? Google Talk isn't really big. It seems to be a nice product, but very few people are using it. I've never seen Google advertise it, so it's no wonder most people stick to their established IM/Voice services. But what's the point of it, when they don't adequately promote it? And whats behind that VPN service on their planned WiFi network in SF? Is it about beta testing, maybe? Google obviously wants to run company intranets. Company intranet search engines are a well-known product, and they for sure would like to expand that offer - offer email service, IM/voice, ... From what I've read about their WiFi service, they would be allowed to run e.g. deep packet inspection stuff on it. Combined with Google indexing tech they could test e.g. filtering out pr0n sites. Or test a virus filter. And then offer that product to companies. So is a google firewall coming? More obvious missing products in Googles portfolio are a document management and a customer relations management solution. Or a combination of both. Google base might actually be part of an upcoming document management product by Google, I guess. And, I mean, wouldn't it be obvious for Google to offer a document management (and storage) solution to companies? As for CRM - a google CRM solution combined with their document management and indexing applications would beat any other product: add a user to the CRM and have the related files appear automatically due to google indexing, have the email correspondence added from the company gmail accounts...

With all the hype that was around it, I got myself a GMail account some time ago, when they were rather "rare". While the UI is still very good for a webmail, it has also a lot of things I do not like. I don't use it heavily - not for personal emails, but only to recieve some mailing lists I don't want to clutter my regular mail (and there are no privacy issues there... Google will index them in the list archives anyway), and to recieve some off-site notifications by some servers (it's always better to get warning emails etc. off-site so you can still access them when the site is down... oh, and if you have an email relay, try to setup a direct transport for your email, so it works if there is something wrong with your email relay, too!) My top issues with gmail are:

• Functions moving their location in the menus. E.g. when I empty my spam folder I always try to pick "delete" from the dropdown. But while the "delete" function is there in every other, it's not there in the Trash and Spam folders (instead it's a big button where the "Archive" button usually is).
• "Delete" is hidden away. GMail assumes that you don't want to delete any mail. But I do. There are so many mails not worth keeping at all! Especially with the logcheck mails I get - sometimes one every hour - I really want to delete them permanently. It's just of no use to keep them, all I want to review is that they do not contain important information (e.g. suggesting a hack attack, software or hardware fault) and then get rid of them.
• There is no keyboard shortcut for "delete" either
• GMail diverts my browsers /-shortcut for in-page searching to in-mailbox searching

I used gmails feedback function before, but didn't get any reply.

All-Around Awesome You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 77% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored well above average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 82% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Nice one, Mike! I would have liked to end up being more humane, though ;-)



  
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
  

Much More Scientific        You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 47% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored about average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you're best at. Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable  Funny Test It rules.

  

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 7% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Very Well-Rounded You have: 62% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 30% on Scientific You scored higher than 36% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

For a few years I've hosted a Faq-o-Matic instance for FAI. I received an email today from someone saying that all of the content in the FAI Faq-o-Matic had been merged into the FAI wiki, so I've just reconfigured my web server to redirect visitors straight to the wiki. I'll give this a couple of weeks or so for the search engines to all get with the program, then I'll completely decommission the web server.

Yesterday evening, as I took the train home from work (during peak hours, for a change), someone (by the books he was carrying and the clothing he was wearing, obviously a student) came to sit next to me. I was hacking on NBD at that time, trying to add config file support (the first item in the roadmap for 2.9; more on that probably "soon"). As he moves to sit down, I notice the cover of one of his books. Which is that of the best computer-related book ever. No, really. I have the third edition of that book, really need to buy the fourth some day. Anyway. As I see that cover, I ask that guy whether it's the fourth, and make a remark about how truly good the book is. To which he answers with "yeah, and that's a truly good laptop, too". Turns out he actually meant the operating system, rather than the hardware (which I thought at first). Well, I didn't see that one coming :-)

On Wed, my apartment was broken into. Amongst the things stolen were a laptop and my only monitor. Do not expect timely replies on emails, and feel free to NMU packages. I probably won’t make UBZ because of this, as it doesn’t really make much sense to go without a laptop…