Good news for the Prodromou family in Montreal: we've been doing house-hunting in Montreal for the last 6 weeks, and yesterday we made an offer on a cottage in the Plateau Mont-Royal, near Metro Mont-Royal. We found out last night that the offer had been accepted! The house has 3 bedrooms on the ground floor and a big open-plan living area on the second floor. It's really spacious and nice, with a couple of balconies and a small yard in the back. The street is very quiet, and the house is about block from the south Laurier Metro entrance, and block from a playground on rue Bienville. All in all, we're crazy about the neighborhood and we really like the house itself. Note that the house has two front doors; it's because it's a converted duplex, combined into one house now. I think it'll be very convenient when we have guests come over for parties and brunches; two doors, no waiting. This has been the culmination of a long build-up. When we got married in 2004, a lot of people gave us checks instead of gifts, and we put that money into a fund for the down payment. We're pretty grateful for the help of friends and family in buying this house. Now we go into the weird and complicated process of actually making the transaction. I'm kind of amazed how many steps there are, but I'm also amazed that Quebec hasn't added on 12 more complicated and unnecessary steps on top of the normal ones. tags: house montreal home me maj

Drive time We're waiting for our realtor to come by so we can sign some (more) papers, then we're heading off to New York City for LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. I'm going to be on an "Ask the Experts" panel talking about Web APIs and the programmable Web. It should be pretty fun. The drive's going to take a while, though, and it's going to be pretty cold. On the positive side, we'll see our friends Jen and Massoud in Queens, who we haven't seen for a year. tags: new york city drive travel trip

I have not been blogging for some time now, due to several things:

• My server’s hda is dying: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 DriveReady SeekComplete Error . Yeah, I hate hardware.
• I spend more time IRL than on IRC. Some time ago I left some (most of the) channels I used to hang in, and decided to spend more time with beers arounds than in front of the computer.
• All kinds of things happening in my life have led to a situation that I want to dedicate more time to play music and DJ (i already got word of a real gig some time soon), meet friends and go out clubbing than writing blong entries and doing Debian packages (still, I manage to update most of my beloved ones, except abcde, that needs a last upload but I dont know if it will make it for etch, eventhough the package has been ready for months).

On unrelated news, if you can stand a bit of disgusting scenes and a bit of perversions of the original book, you HAVE to go see Perfume. WOW.

Our despicable prime minister said "I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory".

That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq already. Claiming that removing US troops at this stage will do any further harm is unproven (and except for the Kurdish area extremely unlikely). Trying to link a presidential candidate with a terrorist organisation is the worst type of dirty politics.

Texas Republican senator John Cornyn requested that the Australian government stay out of US politics. It sounds like a reasonable request. But I wonder whether John Cornyn got involved when the US ambassador spoke out against the leader of the Labor party at the last Australian Federal election...

Senator Obama suggested that if John Howard wants to criticise his policies in Iraq then he should first send another 20,000 Australian troops (there are currently 140,000 US troops compared to 1,400 Australians). According to the CIA World Fact Book Australia has a population of 20.3M while the US has a population of 298.4M. If the ratio of serving soldiers was to match the populations then Australia would have 9,500 troops in Iraq. If Australia was to be a full military partner of the US (but scaled down due to the smaller population) and therefore had troops in South Korea, Japan, and Germany then the number of Australian troops committed might be closer to the 20,000 number cited.

But this is no criticism of Senator Obama. For a number that was made up to demonstrate his point that Australia is not pulling it's weight in Iraq it's a quite reasonable estimate.

The US Democrat Senator Ron Wyden correctly described Howard's comment as "bizarre". This may become a catch-phrase for the Howard regime (as the Bush regime is described as a "miserable failure").

Johnny seems to think that it's in his best interests to send Australians to fight a war that has no benefit for Australia (or the US for that matter), but he doesn't have the guts to do it properly. Fortunately for him the Bush regime understands his position and allows him to send a token force to demonstrate support without the risk of any significant number of casualties or having to conscript soldiers.

This mutual meddling in elections is a demonstration of the way Bush and Howard conspire against the interests of the Australian and US citizens. Both countries need governments that look after the interests of their citizens at home and let the UN take a larger role in world issues.

In MIT-land, IAP is over, and classes have been running again for a week. This term I’m doing things such as learning Scheme in the intro CS class 6.001, “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” — otherwise known as SICP. No DrScheme jokes. Ari, this means you. IAP was great fun — it’s kind of a like a mini-summer in between terms. I played in a LARP, participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt on the same team as Mako, and made a robot. But now it’s back to the grindstone. But I’m looking forward to this term more than I was last term. (Famous last words.)

News flash: gamers and Tron fans everywhere can rejoice; Armagetron Advanced will soon be up-to-date once more in Debian! The last time a new upstream version (0.2.7.0) was uploaded was almost two years ago now, and while the Debian package has languished in neglect, upstream has chugged on, fixing bugs and adding new awesomeness to the game. Just recently, the old maintainer orphaned the package, and since I use it anyway I’ve adopted it and given it some much-needed love. The new version is 0.2.8.2.1, what an, er, long version number. The new packages have been renamed from armagetron[-foo] to armagetronad[-foo] to reflect upstream’s name change. They include upstream improvements such as the addition of maps and improved graphics code, as well as packaging improvements like a new initscript for the server and rewritten, up-to-date manpages. While the new packages have been uploaded to experimental, they’re stuck in NEW due to the binary name changes. So, grab the x86 or x86-kfreebsd packages from here and test, test, test! (Yes, I run a kfreebsd machine. I wanted something eclectic for a non-essential, moderately old dual-core x86 box. Also, I’ll probably compile amd64 packages soon, but the amd64-machine I can use to build them on is currently in a half-installed state, which I need to fix before that. You can always build from source.) I’ve cleared with the security team that it won’t get in the way of anything and will probably be uploading to unstable as soon as there’s been some more testing to look for major problems. And since the newest version contains fixes for the security bugs affecting the old version, I’m going to snoop around and judge the [in]sanity level of porting back the security fixes for etch, since the new version will at most be unofficially backported to etch. Go, er, take a break in between fixing RC bugs. And test, test, test!

Now the proud owner of a Meade 200mm SCT, with accessories. Pics, and the story behind it, here. Unfortunately, the accessories didn't include a mount. So now, I'm in the market for a mount, looking for a Celestron ADM or equivalent at the moment. Any recommendations or reviews, anyone? Of course, cloudy skies are forecast for Galway for the foreseeable future. Update: Celestron ADM mount on order from Telescope-Service, Germany. Expect clear skies for the next few days until it arrives.

There aren’t many features I grew fond of with CVS that I haven’t yet found a satisfactory solution for in Darcs. One of them was, until today, sending commit mails to mailing lists. There are a number of more or less ugly hacks floating around the net, but I never found them very satisfactory, so I wrote my own. Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous “push” emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

I had the most wonderful dentist appointment this morning. bbollenbach was so excited over this dentist http://www.smilemontreal.com/ - but it seemed mostly because they use lasers to do any fillings or whatnot.

I started off by going to their website to get the phone number, and found a web form there. I filled in information asking for an appointment. I got an email back on a Sunday night from the dentist saying that someone would contact me during the week. They were nice enough to call during the evening (which was funny, since I'd given them my work number assuming they'd call during the day, but I was here anyway that day) and booking the appointment was easy.

I got an email saying that they'd booked the appointment and a link I could click to get an iCal appointment. This didn't work in the Google Apps for Your Domain setup, but might if I were using local mail.

A day before hand I got an email asking me to confirm that I would make the appointment by clicking a link.

The place is a little further away from M tro Vend me than I'd thought - it's beside the Westmount Public Library. I walked in to find a nice spacious waiting room. The office manager / receptionist was very friendly, and this continued through to dealing with the hygienist and the dentist himself. I usually *hate* hygienists - most of the ones I'd met before hand had been dentists from overseas whose accreditation's hadn't been accepted here. So understandably bitter and annoyed. My only other good hygienist had been at the clinic in Toronto, but that was also the dentist who tried to convince me that there were no risks with using mercury fillings, and that she was exposed to it much more anyway, so why was I so insistent on white fillings anyway? (Worth noting that my plan *covered* white fillings, so it wasn't an issue of price or anything.)

The dentist was also a really calming presence, and answered my questions with a smile. I need to go back, so I'll know more about what he's like then. But so far I suspect I've found a keeper.

So far, DBus has two types of busses: the session and the system bus. The session bus is used by most of your desktop applications. The system bus is used e.g. by Hal signalling that new hardware was added, or by NetworkManager for network connectivity changes. The system bus is protected via a security policy. Problems arise now when you need to locate your session DBus from a different session. For example, from a cron job. There is a DBus application called "notification daemon" which can display popup baloons. This is useful for signaling yourself e.g. the completion of a long-running computation or just about anything you want. But it's using the session bus, so you can't reach it from outside of your current session. A year ago, I wrote a hack for this, which will locate your current Gnome session, read the environment variable to find the session bus and then send a message to the sessions notification-daemon. This is an ugly hack, however yesterday and today people asked on #dbus precisely how to do this. It seems to be a common question. Maybe DBus should be extended by a "user" DBus, and applications such as music players or the notification daemon should actually listen on that bus (as well). Maybe it could also be made possible to (securely) locate your session DBus via the system bus, I don't know how detailed the security policies of the system DBus are.

French is going the wrong direction as I already explained, but it's interesting to see that Czech continues to progress. This means that maintainers are quietly fixing translations for their packages, which is still good. Few activity today, mostly because of an hectic schedule, being away from home. I essentially completed the translation of atokx, broken by its maintainer, and dealt with several answers from maintainers after I proposed some NMUs. It seems that I'm now reaching packages which are really maintained..:-) Yesterday also saw the beginning of a big update for apt-listchanges. Translations are coming in in a rush and I hope that Pierre will like this. Some translators even volunteered to use the (still experimental, and for a while) Debian i18n server, hosted here, in Extremadura.

After using BitlBee as Jabber client during the last years, I recently switched to Gajim, a Jabber client written in pygtk2. It supports some important Jabber features which I really miss in BitlBee, for example group chat, gpg encrypted messages and priority adjusting according to the current status. After some tweaking of my ion3 setup (floating winprop for Gajim windows, getting trayer started in the dock to catch the Gajim trayicon, some additional keybindings for gajim-remote (which unfortunately requires dbus)), it's perfectly usable in my environment.

After being told by a few people that it rarely snows on this coast, here's my view at 9am today (2007-02-08): Naturally, this means travel chaos, school closures, horsemen of the apocalypse and so on. Got to love England's reaction to snow. It's all melted now (noon), of course.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

A few interesting interviews with speakers at the upcoming FOSDEM 2007 have been published. I especially recommend reading the interview with Ronald G. Minnich, the founder of the LinuxBIOS project. Here are the questions he was asked:

• What's your goal for your talk at FOSDEM?
• We saw the mention on the LinuxBIOS website about one million devices shipped with LinuxBIOS. Could you tell us more about these devices?
• What kind of support have you received from chipset and motherboard manufacturers so far?
• Could LinuxBIOS theoretically replace all BIOSes, of are there certain limitations to be taken into account?
• Could you tell us a bit more about the BIOS side of the OLPC laptop?
• What exactly is the difference between "easy" hardware to write a BIOS for, and the "tough" hardware?
• What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)?

Answers here ;-)

The family of Benjamin Seidenberg released this statement today: The family will not be granting interviews at this time, but does want to issue the following statement in response to numerous media requests. We are naturally saddened and extremely concerned about the serious allegations being made against Benjamin. We love it very much, and right now, our primary focus is on its health and well-being. Benjamin is a very intelligent, accomplished individual. As an honorary pamp-commando of the International Bacalao Organization (IBO) and dubbed the Lauren Jarrett of the Cornell Orthodox Union Dining Society, it has resisted the evil temptation of search engines for over 18 years with a mildly-blemished record. Benjamin attained the rank of Golancipel, and sailed as a Hackergotchi Specialist aboard the Good Ship Lollipop in August 2003. Personally, Benjamin is an extremely caring and dedicated sibling and loinfruit to its brother and parents, respectively, although we amended our life insurance policies to remove him as a beneficiary last week. Considering both its personal and academic life, these alleged events are completely out of character and have come as a tremendous shock to our family. We are anxious to allow the facts to develop so that we can better understand what happened, and why. We hope that the public will keep an open mind about what the facts will eventually show and that the legal system will be allowed to run its course. Finally, we are very grateful for the expressions of love and support that we have received from family and friends, and we ask for your continued thoughts and prayers for our family.

As already mentioned (Camsync is shaping up), I've been working on a script to automate part of the workflow of digital photography (the part where pictures go from the camera to the computer and get registered into the photo management program). This script was PTP-only so far, since my other, older, USB mass storage digital camera was broken. I eventually found the time and willpower to tackle it with the usual method:

• unscrew every screw in sight until you can reach the part you believe is at fault (rather easy when the camera tells you "Zoom error" on boot);
• poke around, trying to see what sticks;
• push the thingy;
• push the thingy harder;
• hit the thingy;
• push the thingy (gently) in the appropriate direction;
• reassemble;
• find a spring on your desk;
• disassemble again, put the spring back where it belongs, reassemble;
• yay, it works!

So I converted my Contax U4R back from an expensive SD-card reader into a working camera (even if the autofocus seems to be less accurate than it used to be). Anyway. My point is: I've updated my camsync script (and the related Synchronisation scripts for digital cameras page) so it can now handle USB mass storage cameras, as long as they can be accessed through an automounter. I haven't tried it on a memory card reader, but it may just work. As usual, feel free to use, hack, send patches, and report your experiences.

Last Monday (5 Feb), I observed a meeting of Kewstoke Parish Council I mentioned the forthcoming North Somerset Cycle Forum but most of the public contributions were about the Cygnet Hospital. The hospital was accused of breaking promises given last year to the village and the police, namely:

• letting patients roam the village without supervision;
• chopping down screening trees they said would be left to grow and leaving dead wood on obstructive trees they said they'd cut; and
• now seeking to take drug rehab patients.

They also have some faulty light timers, floodlighting neighbouring houses from 1am to 6am every day. That's both antisocial and wasteful. A terrible way for Cygnet to keep their neighbours awake. Is it any wonder that there's an outcry? Regardless of what I think about the above promises, Cygnet should do what they said and not behave antisocially, or be punished. Fine them a century per night per house for the lights and they'd soon fix them, I'm sure! There was also some comeback on the Kewstoke toll road farce. The district council's panel has asked the officers to reexamine the options, after they noticed the creative accounting of including road maintenance (which must be done whether or not the road has a toll) in the toll cost. There was a reporter from the Mercury present, so maybe this will appear in their edition later this week.

Flickrpc 0.2 is released. This has several improvements:

• Re-license to LGPL
• Don't use an intermediate deferred, instead chain them (thanks Andrew Bennetts)
• Clean up errback handlers (thanks Andrew Bennetts)
• Try to import xml.etree for Python 2.5

Basically no new features but it now works on Python 2.5 without an external ElementTree, the code is cleaner, and it's LGPL instead of GPL. Grab a tarball here or the bzr tree here. NP: The Good, The Bad, And The Queen