Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance. So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I've tried to come here with my most "just relax" mentality and it's working pretty well, I've also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I'm staying with Josep and Jes s in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it's a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There's a public bus service, but some days it's quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use. An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltr for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days. Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest. Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said "hey I have one of those!", which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montr al conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it's hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare. Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations. After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later. Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station. Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn't been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town. We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent's place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel "at home".

Don't dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebasti and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies. I took danilo and mako around the town's center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the gay streets . At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00. We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane. It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions! The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Pla a de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin's place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

So to make a long story short, last night at GUADEC featured a great Fluendo party at one of Vilanova's great beaches. At some point, people had drunk enough to finally consider getting a good swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. David Reveman, from the Novell crowd, was one of them. I learned from Anna that in the US it is illegal to show your nipples (ie, go top-less) or any reproductive organs in public. WTF!? The GNOME Hispano crowd did have no problems at all, and went in completely naked, reminding me of the great nights at Helsinki during Debconf 5. I thought it was a good opportunity to POP THE TRUNK, if only a little bit, so I swam to the buoy and came back, in complete darkness, and acs watching out for me from the distance. When we were back, most people were getting dressed already, and I managed to lose my micro suimming suit, which is a PITA as I need it to train.

The phone had more sand than silicon, I guess. Anyway, I wasn't the only one leaving stuff behind. David, if you mind your valuable wallet and mobile phone, find me around the conference. :) Other GUADEC stories will need to wait for another entry...

A press release from Telecom just landed in my inbox: TELECOM TO SEPARATE WHOLESALE AND RETAIL OPERATIONS. From what I can make out, Telecom is announcing that they’re going to ‘voluntarily’ do what the Government’s proposed legislation would force them to do anyway. That is, separate the accounting and business processes of their wholesale and retail departments. It’s not a full structural separation (which would involve different shareholders and upper management teams). It’s still a good thing, but the way the press release is worded makes me think Telecom is trying to confuse the public into thinking that a full structural separation has occured.

…or, “Bits from a Gforge maintainer", if you’d like. After being neglected for way too long, the Gforge packages have finally started moving again. Packages for the most recent upstream release (4.5.14) are available in experimental, with quite a few improvements over the version currently in unstable:

• lots of improvements upstream, of course;
• no more sourceforge transitional package;
• source control management systems are now integrated via plugins rather than core code; existing plugins are gforge-plugin-scmcvs for CVS and -scmsvn for Subversion (both are in experimental);
• should support recent versions of PostgreSQL;
• default authentication scheme for users created through Gforge is now no longer LDAP (although it’s still available for the masochistic); nss-pgsql is now preferred, with lots of benefits (not the least being that its configuration and setup are far less brittle);
• and lots more, thanks to Christian Bayle’s work while I was busy doing something else.

From a Debian maintainer’s point of view, my Gforge-related TODO list now mainly sports three items.

• First, rewrite some PHP code into Perl: the script in charge of bringing the database schema up-to-date, db-upgrade.pl, currently delegates some of its work to PHP scripts with system() calls. That’s justifiable by the fact that these PHP scripts can use the Gforge code, classes and methods, but it makes the whole upgrading process fragile: for some reason, the system() calls sometimes fail without db-upgrade.pl noticing, and the process then just goes on with a broken DB instead of stopping right there with an error. Also, this is doomed to fail sometime: the Gforge classes used are the ones currently installed, which may or may not correspond to the database schema (remember we’re in the middle of an upgrade, so the schema is moving). Since I want this db-upgrade.pl script to be unbreakable, I need to change that.
• In addition to that (or in parallel), I’d like to migrade the gforge packages to use the dbconfig-common infrastructure. It’s supposed to be able to take on the tasks of database (and database user) creation, while still giving me a hook to plug db-upgrade.pl into.
• When the dbconfig-common migration is done, I’ll probably spam^Wcontact the various translation teams, so the Debconf templates look good and consistent.

I suppose I could also try and migrate to the webapps-common framework, but I’ll keep that for later. Of course, any help is welcome. Remember: the sooner I get the Gforge packages into a reasonable shape, the sooner they’ll go to unstable, then testing, and the sooner I’ll be backporting them to sarge, which means Alioth can be upgraded. But since I’ve heard a few complaints about Alioth being too damn slow or broken or whatever, I expect I’ll get lots of patches (in bug reports, please) from disgruntled users eager to help.

Since Freenode has been compromised my nickserv password might be too. Unless they had the good sense to hash the passwords, which isn’t common. So after checking my 121 line long vim encrypted “accounts” file, I noticed that this particular weak password is used in 17 other systems. Woops. You know what be good? Web standards in regards to user accounts. Now I have to fiddle with umpteen annoyingly different systems to change my password. Pain and suffering. It would be far better is I could do this task with a CLI tool or some handy trusted Web application that would implement such a standard. Though would such a standard make it easier for “crackers” to script attacks to change your password and really screw you over? Actually after thinking about it, the best option would just be to reset the password via email. Though that process can be sniffed… If the cracker tried to change your email address too, the user management system should send you an email to the old address to confirm the change. If the user management system had any doubt, it should just send you email a link to proceed. Btw, I’ve made the move to the OFTC IRC network. I also found lilo’s “money badgering” a bit too annoying.

In the past months, I was getting more and more comment spam. Even though the configuration was set to moderate comments containing a link. It was a good filtering measure at the beginning, but became less and less handleable. When I decided to act, I was getting more than a hundred comment spams in my “Awaiting moderation” list. Per day. Maybe even more, I can’t remember. And about the same amount were actually able to go past the moderation filtering, by not putting links in the comment itself, but in the homepage field of the comment form. While wordpress’ comment moderation interface is pretty efficient at deleting a lot of spam, the comment management interface just sucks, even in the “massive editing” mode. So, after having spent quite some time in this sucky interface, I decided I didn’t want to resort to it any more. First I had to remove all these comment spams. I had to use use the SQL delete command myself, since Wordpress is useless. I basically deleted all comments posted after the last real one I saw. Sorry if someone posted one I didn’t see. The tricky part was that the comment count for articles is kept in a field of the wp_posts table. Which means there was a difference between the actual comment count and the count displayed. For those who’d want to do the same at home, here is the magical SQL query to refresh the comment count:
update wp_posts set comment_count = (select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_post_ID = id and comment_approved = '1'); Next step was to avoid getting more spam. I didn’t want to use captchas or any turing tests, because they basically all fail to be accessible in some way. So, I took a balanced decision. While I appreciate to get comments, I can’t stand any more the spam that get in posts as old as the blog. The best thing to do then, I think, was to allow comments on recent posts only. Sorry for those who’d like to comment on old stuff, but being able to comment on the newer posts is still better than nothing. I also kept the link moderation policy, which seemed to be helpful at the beginning. For the little story, again, Wordpress was not very helpful, so I had to resort to an SQL query to close comments on all the posts. It’s been 3 weeks or so, now, since I switched to this new policy. I got only 1 spam to moderate and none directly in the comments. Let’s hope it will last.

Last month I went to Mexico to attend Debconf6 and then I traveled with 4 geeks to Oaxaca. Here are a few photos from the trip, which was quite lovely, though I stalled writing anything about it here because I was thrown into a strom of sickness during my last week there and into my first week here. I have been to Mexico a few times before though usually in passing or in Baja, which is somewhat nice but desolate. This was the first time I had any sustained exposure to Mexico and it was quite nice. Some of my favorite things about the country and my visit are perhaps a little odd but they are what took me in and here are some of them… For example, during Debconf proper, I feel in love with the following reptile and very surprisingly, because, when it comes to animals, I usually like the soft and cuddly and not the scaly and spiny. But…. this lizard was…. special. Here is how I found him: We were eating at a restaurant after a visit to some ruins and there we found this little guy caged at the back of the restaurant. I was more than a little miffed that he was trapped (and by butting his head against the cage, he clearly was saying I WANT OUT) and so was about to pull a “PETA move” and just let him out. But I decided that was not such a good idea so instead I went over to the owners to ask why the little one was caged. In answer to my query, they promptly pulled him out and told me he first that he was a chameleon (which does not seem right to me) and was usually free to roam but when there are a lot of folks (as there were) they lock him up. He plopped the little one on my arm and alas, what I pleasantly found out was that a lizard can act an awful lot like a dog. He LOVED to be pet and basically had a look of all-out-pleasure when you stroked his back. And at times, with a particularily good stroke, he would even subtly smile and flutter his hind leg a little just like a doggie. Aside from a special dog-like reptile, there were many other things that I loved about Mexico. The food at the market was divine, divine, especially the corn smut a.k.a huitlacoche and all the salsas were better than you could imagine. It is tragic that every city does not have a local market with such divine food. The architecture of Oaxaca was especially stuning as was the whole city center. It reminded me of viejo San Juan in Puerto Rico but the buildings were a little lower (apparently because of earthquakes) and the environment was dryer and more expansive. Our hostel was courtyard style (as were many houses there) and I think the courtyard should be revived as the defacto style for housing as this is probably one of the most enticing and smart architectural styles ever (at least in warm places). While a home is suppsed to provide shelter to enclose, the courtyard brings some of the outside inside and some of the inside outside. While in Oaxaca we met some folks from espora, walked a lot in the city, met up with other Debian folks traveling about, and cleaned out Vagrant’s ear which was truly … well I won’t go into that. We also drove for a few hours up to the mountains for a few nice hikes. The town hoped we happy trip and I think we did. Mexico city, by a number of measures, is one of the largest in the world and I unfortunately only got to see the Zocalo area as well as the subway. The center was quite impressive and especially nice before a thunderous storm One night at the Zocalo we happened upon a free concert, the lineup including the Tijuana Nortec Collective. One of the most dynamite parts of Mexico City is its impressive and I mean impressive subway system. In a nutshell, the system is large, clean, efficient, cheap, and quiet (thanks to thick and black rubber tires). The trains come quickly, ferrying the millions of riders who pay 20 cents for a ride on a lovely bright orange train. Every time I rode it, without fail, a vendor entered the car, loaded with a backpack that doubled as a radio/stereo, who was selling pirated music. I appreciated the sample and bought one disc chock full of mp3s. Like most urban trains, the riders are silent and I have always wondered why this is so. When I go to PR, I ride the busses much more and there, as in the states on the busses, there seems to be more open flow of chatter. Perhaps it is because trains are quite comfortable and they lull already tired riders into a state of quite contemplation. Who knows. So these are some of the things that I liked about Mexico but perhaps the most exciting part about the country was the clear political heatwave passing through, just as it is with much of Latin America. In the zocalo of Mexico City there were various stands protesting the attacks in Atenco, as well as general protests against neoliberal policies. The city of Oaxca was also filled to the gills with protesting teachers, demanding a pay raise. Thousands of them were camped out all over the city center, which is apparently a year rite. Sadly, in the last week the police broke up the protest, violently…

I am offitially screwed. Last night I wanted to reinstall my laptop (which is also my only computer now), so I backuped the contents of my laptop’s hard drive to an external usb hard drive as a 13 Gb tar.gz file and happily went on with a format and reinstall. Of course, when I had completed the installation and went back to unpack files from the backup, I was greeted by a nice message from gunzip - “invalid compressed data–format violated”. Currently I am trying to follow gzip recovery guide that requires one to manually find the next undamaged compression block and make a new gzip file with standart header and then the undamaged compression blocks, but it is quite possible that data after that will also be damaged. Additionally I have no idea how tar will react to me giving it a middle of the archive, hopefully it will not get too confused. Unfortunately the damaged block is only 90 Mb into the 13 Gb file. Oh, and of course there is a huge heap of really important files that I have no backup for that are on that backup. Fun, fun, fun. Update: I have managed to recover two crucial OpenOffice.org documents from the formatted filesystem using Magic rescue and now I am proceeding with finding if I can recover anything from the .tar.gz backup file using Gzip recovery toolkit. It is buggy, but it is still better then doing it by hand. Unfortunately, I also found out about some kind of hardware problem with my external harddrive - if I transfer lots of data to it (think a direct copy of a 13 Gb file), then it just locks up and stops responding until I power cycle it. If I turn off the USB2 support, then it works reliably, but very very slowly. This slows down my recovery attempts even more.

I made it to Vilanova on Friday for GUADEC, managed to get settled in to our chalet (I’m glad we opted for one with air conditioning!). After we got them to fix the hot water, I now think it’s pretty decent accomodation for the price, complete with wifi, swimming pool and a well-stocked shop. The only downside I can see is the distance from town. On Friday night we missed the last bus and walked in, which took over an hour and I developed a bad headache by the time we reached the town (we didn’t find the right beach, but stopped in a bar instead). My enjoyment of the walk wasn’t helped by the small children who were out on the street launching fireworks, mortars and other incendiary devices at or near us most of the way. :) Yesterday we hired bicycles to get to the town center which was certainly more fun, but there’s quite a hill on the way back. Also, bus in and taxi back is pretty much cheaper than the cost of hiring bikes here anyway, so I’m not sure I can recommend it as a long-term strategy. We might do it again for the novelty, and it has the benefit of not needing to wait around for a taxi to get back. Even before I made it to the conference venue yesterday, I’ve already met loads of cool people who hack on all sorts of cool software which I use every day, and I’ve recognised lots more people who I’ve not managed to speak to yet. I’ve also realised that we need to do a lot more work to raise the profile of the Telepathy project which I’ve been working on for almost a year now (eek!). It’s a really cool way to get IM and VoIP stuff properly integrated into the GNOME desktop, and everyone should go and check out the website, play with our releases, chat with me and come to my talk on Tuesday. Oh, and if anyone wants a Telepathy or Collabora t-shirt, grab one off me or daf. :)

Its sunday morning and I'm trying to get back into life with some coffeine. I had a really nice time yesterday, the Froscon was excellent organized, even WLAN worked all the time. I had to talks yesterday, one about backports.org and one about spam. The first one had 5 persons or so, but most of them were developers and they were really interested so it really nice. In the spam talk were round about 30-40 persons and we had some very good discussions, so that I ran out of time at last. The feedback of both talks was very positive.
In the evening I managed the KSP, which went mostly well, even if I was too tired to organize it the way I normally prefer to do.
TODO: create some video/animation about how KSPs work. (any volunteers?)

I organized to get some pretzels that looked like debian swirls, Sven Guckes has some pictures of it.

Social Event was also pretty nice, much Wheat Bear and Food .


Thanks to all who made this happen and I really hope that it will happen next year too.
And now I'll get prepared for day II.

Small Comment:
Madduck asked me about taking the slides online, here

We've been having some interesting discussions on the Hecl mailing list about how to do concurrency: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=19566676 (although it seems SF has managed to lose a portion of the conversation!) When all things are said and done, we have a couple of options:

• Try and immitate Tcl's select-based event loop. Not really concurrency, but it does a good job of "faking it" for things like GUI's, if done correctly. For the right kind of code, it makes life very easy for the programmer, as you don't have to think too much about concurrency issues, and you don't have to deal with threads. The downside for J2ME is that we don't have the equivalent of select, so we'd have to do the system with threads, which would probably be costly in terms of the resources required to set it up.
• Tcl style threads, where each thread gets its own interpreter, and data is mostly shared by message passing between the threads. Conceptually, I think this is a cleaner way of doing threads, compared with 'sharing everything and using mutexes', and it's a little closer to how Erlang handles concurrency, which is very nice indeed. For J2ME, I'm a little bit worried that this might be too resource intensive, and potentially slow to launch new threads.
• A low-level interface to threads that just exposes the Java API. This would be nice, and lightweight, but potentially quite complex to program if we attempt to make the interpreter reentrant. There are a lot of issues with things like stack frames - for instance, say one subroutine (proc) adds a stack frame, then a second thread kicks in and exits a proc, tearing down the stack frame again. If you put a big lock around procs, that just leads to blockage if a proc is doing some sort of long running calculation, defeating the whole point of the exersize.
• Deal with concurrency on a case-by-case basis, building it into each command that needs it. Not very elegant, and probably requires just as much work, if not more, than other options.

At this point, I'm tending towards each thread having an interp, because option three seems very prone to extremely difficult bugs. Not sharing the interpreter has worked well for Tcl both from the implementation and end user perspectives. It is, however, not an easy subject and I'm still thinking about it. Note comments are broken, so email me with questions or comments.

Yesterday I cycled from Mountain View to Santa Cruz. 50 miles (80 kilometres). Why? Google had its annual Engineering off-site, and there were a bunch of people riding. One ride was a "no rider left behind" one, so I figured I'd give it a go. We left Mountain View at about 6:50am, and 5 and a half hours later we finally arrived at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Man it was tough. I now have a much greater appreciation for the ride to Kosciusko that Sarah did, that one time, at band camp. I was really grateful for the use of Sarah's 2 litre Camelbak, and even then I was amazed at how fast I ran out water. And steam. Did I mention it was a tough ride? One of the highlights of the ride was the fact that Alan Eustace came on it. Here you've got one of the Senior Vice Presidents of the company coming along with the mere mortals. Early on in the ride, one of the riders got a flat tyre, and he changed it for her. He changes a mean tyre. When we reached the summit of whatever mountain it was we were toiling to cross, we came upon a store, and had a breather. He shouted everyone whatever they needed from the store to keep going. That was really nice. I was also really grateful to Richard, who saw me struggling at one point, and gave me a Power Bar to help keep me going. I really appreciated that. Just goes to show that eating only a banana for breakfast before embarking on a ride like this isn't such a good idea. The other highlight was the downhill coast once we got over the mountain. That was pretty sweet. Made me glad I was taking the bus back again, and not having to cycle back up it. Other than a lack of water and a lack of breakfast, I pulled up pretty well. I think I sat around for about an hour after arriving at Santa Cruz feeling pretty stuffed, but I didn't get any cramps or anything, and I cycled to work as usual the next day. I've got some funky sunburn on the backs of my hands where there's a hole in my cycling gloves. Would I do it again next year? Dunno. Maybe if I've improved my fitness some more, and maybe if it's on a road bike rather than a mountain bike.

I've started looking at Trac recently, a nice web-based project management tool written in Python. It integrates with existing Subversion repositories; for example, you can browse the code in your repositories with Trac (it'll be displayed syntax-highlighted), view diffs between revisions etc. etc. Additionally, you get a wiki (e.g. for project documentation), as well as a built-in bug-tracker a la Bugzilla, all integrated nicely into a single piece of software... It's Free Software, of course (the license changed from GPL to revised BSD somewhat recently)... A few words on the installation:

• First, install Trac, e.g. via apt-get install trac.
• Then create a so-called Trac environment with trac-admin /path/to/environment/myproject initenv. You'll be asked where your svn repository resides, what's the name of the project etc.
• You can then edit /path/to/environment/myproject/conf/trac.ini, and change the header logo/URL, the default component/priority/issue-owner and more.
• For more administration, I recommend using the interactive Trac shell via trac-admin /path/to/environment/myproject. Type "help" for um... help.
• Read the docs for how to setup the web server in order to run Trac (you can use CGI, FastCGI, or mod_python).

So far I've set up ca. 7-8 Trac instances for various projects and I'm quite happy with it. While I was at it, I also created a tiny Trac article in the German Wikipedia. You can get tons of useful plugins and macros over at trac-hacks.org for additional functionality, e.g. DoxygenPlugin, GanttPlugin, DebianBtsMacro, and many more.

He left a (funny) colored shirt and a couple of jolly rogers.



Excuse the Clintyness of this post, specially after so much no-blog time.

Since the initial announce of the transition to the new Python policy, there has been some grumblings due to some unexpected last minute changes. I spent a copious amount of time discussing with all parties involved (Matthias Klose and Josselin Mouette mainly), rewrote dh_python 2 times to accomodate everybody’s needs (those who use the XS-Python-Version field, those who won’t) while still preserving backwards compatibility and went as far as NMUing debhelper to unblock the situation (Joey didn’t want to take an active role in the dh_python update). But this is now over and things have settled down. All the infrastructure is now in sid, the interfaces have been defined and won’t change anymore. It’s now really time to continue the transition. Update your python related packages by following the instructions here. Please help by providing patches and NMUing all the packages that have not yet been updated. Join #debian-python on OFTC if you have any questions. Thanks to everyone who gave a hand to update the infrastructure required for this new policy: Matthias, Josselin, Marc Dequ nes for the CDBS class, Joe Wreschnig for the update of the policy, Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth for their advice as release managers.

I'm willing to start a bounty for someone to fix/port/implement the required pieces of GStreamer so that Sound Juicer can rip a whole CD, fully tagged (all tags SJ writes must be correctly encoded), to MPEG4 AAC (as used natively by iTunes). A requirement is that a music player that support MPEG4 files can see the tags without any extra work: the primary test for this will be importing the ripped files into iTunes. I think there are many people out there who would like this to happen, so I want to arrange a group bounty. Bounty County looked promising but I have to specify how much the bounty is up front, I can't just let the fund grow as people donate what they can. The Bounties section on Launchpad has the same limitation. Does anyone know a reputable site for managing donations like this, or should I just get register a new email address on PayPal and get people to donate there? Also to gauge how much interest there is in this, can anyone who would consider donating leave a comment? NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada

Yesterday I managed to

• create the 1000th "node" (article) on my homepage/blog/podcast/photoblog at hermann-uwe.de (this includes blog posts, songs posted in the podcast, uploaded photos etc).
• create a load of >= 1000 on my laptop. I'm not kidding you and this is no typo! The load was higher than 1000, more explanations about how I "achieved" this, maybe even with photos, will follow (screenshots won't work — at a load of 1000 you aren't left with enough CPU time to create screenshots)...

Typeahead find in gvim’s GTK+ open dialog box is driving me bananas, but today I discovered a trick I hadn’t seen before that will help work around it with a bit of relearning. For those who aren’t familiar with the problem, John Goerzen describes how painful this feature is for large directories. Just imagine, then, having to regularly deal with large directories on particularly slow, remote filesystems. Argh. Unusable! The trick I came up with to work around the problem is to first enter the path incorrectly and then fix it afterwards. Type a blank first, then the whole filepath, then [Home] to return to the beginning of the line, and finally [Delete] to fix the path, and [Enter] to open the file. It still takes an awfully long time for gvim to read the file, but it’s a great improvement over either trying to type the filename blind, or waiting for each directory to be scanned. Ultimately, these files should be moved off the remote filesystem and into subversion, but there are cross-platform compatibility issues that prevent me from doing this at this time (OpenVMS + Linux + win32). I’m still looking for a real solution. In the comments to John’s post, someone suggested there is a gconf setting that controls this, but so far I haven’t been able to find it. So for now, I’ll have to live with this hack.