Well, I’m not yet thirty. But it started a bit more than a year ago, when I was turning 27, with a hellishly vivid feeling of mortality. (No, not morbid thoughts, exactly. Feelings of mortality. I’m told that’s normal when one is approaching thirties.) Today, I’ve been crying a lot, you could say regretting past mistakes, but more regretting my current inability to move past them. Professionally, I don’t have that much complaints. It could be better, but it could be a lot worse too. My demons have always laid on my personal side. In the past 14 years, I’ve made choices. They haven’t always been informed choices, they have sometimes, quite often in fact, been reactions against my own perceptions of my own past actions. I suppose the gist is that I am terribly lonely. I have a couple of people I call friends. My relationship with my parents is in order. But… When I was younger, I had eyes for women. I was friends with many women. I’m not positive, but there were several, along the years, who probably were even interested. But it never clicked. Perhaps I was just then making eyes at someone much further away and I didn’t see the one sitting beside me. Perhaps, had I, or she, not moved out of town, things might have been different. There was one that I probably almost stalked. I’m not proud of that, and in fact, the shame of that memory is probably one of the things that is holding me back now. In some cases, clearly one-sided ones, my inability to reign emotions properly caused quite a few awkward situations. I remember them, too, with shame. So I’ve learned to grow a thick shell around myself. It helps in dealing with professionals in the proper manner, regardless of their plumbing. It is ia useful skill. But I notice that the thick shell repels those who clearly would like to know me better (there have been a few; I’m not saying it would’ve ever gone beyond friendship, but even that is out of the question when I’m unable to relate). And when I finally figure out how to get out of that damned shell, they’re long gone. In some cases, well enough gone that I don’t even know their names. In others, it’s just the window of opportunity that has gone. But it’s enough. And it doesn’t help that I have this huge barrel around me which I don’t seem to be able to rid myself of.
And so, I come back to this day. I read Weber & Ringo’s We Few (note that it’s book 4 in a series). Maybe I’m just a sucker for martial romances, I don’t know, but they often affect me. But none has affected me this much before. I’ve been hurting like hell after I finished that book. The ending is so beautiful that it seems to have opened some old wounds, and I’ve been crying. And I curse my shell, the one that is so useful at the office, the one I took several years to build around me just so that I could do my job properly. I don’t know. Writing this has helped a little. But I’m afraid I’m going to regret posting this in the morning. (And I wonder how this keeping awake is going to wreck havoc with my teaching tomorrow afternoon.)

Perl Testing

Writing test cases for Perl code with Test::More is fun! It is slightly less fun when you have to come up with creative solutions to the problem of your code requiring root privileges - which means that your script + tests will fail when run by a mere mortal user. I was thinking I could run my test cases at the time that the Debian package is built, (and do so), but I realise now that the buildd system doesn’t run with root privileges either - it uses sudo to install packages for example. Ho hum.

Working on free software has made me fairly revision control system-agnostic; I can't afford to get too wedded to any one system because as soon as I do somebody will invent something new and I'll have to convert again, so I just work with whatever other people on the same project are using. Even CVS doesn't make a lot of difference to the way I work as long as I'm working online and have cvsps handy. And of course I usually don't bother with revision control if I'm just tweaking somebody else's Debian source package a bit (in which case I just use debdiff for paranoia). Using bzr at work, though, I think I just found my killer app in Michael Ellerman's shelve plugin. My working style generally involves alternating between doing lots and lots of stuff in the one working copy and (after testing) going through and committing it in logical chunks. This is fine if everything's in separate files (most revision control systems let you commit just some files), but if several of the chunks are in the one file then I'm reduced to saving diffs and manually editing out the bits I don't want to commit yet, which is obviously pretty tedious and error-prone. bzr shelve presents each diff hunk in your working copy to you in turn and asks you whether you want to keep it. If you say no, that hunk gets unapplied and goes into a "shelf", where bzr unshelve can later reapply it. In the meantime commits act as though the shelved hunks didn't exist. This doesn't help if you want to defer only one of two immediately adjacent changes that end up in the same hunk, of course, but it vastly reduces the scale of the problem. I suppose it would be easy enough to write a shelve-a-like for any other system; it's just that I haven't seen it for any other system yet. If working with systems that lack it really starts to annoy me, I may have to rip out the guts of shelve and figure out how to make it generic.

There has been a lot of news about the two cent U.S. postage increase that goes into effect today, but little explanation of why the increase is required. Some reports mention that the increase is needed for a $3 billion “escrow fund,” but do not explain what the escrow fund is for. In case anyone is wondering, Congress required the Postal Service to create the escrow fund to prepay retiree health benefits and fund the military portion of retirement benefits for postal workers who had served in the military. (At least according to postalwatch.org. Who knew there was a postalwatch.org?). I realize this is fairly off topic for my blog, but I was wondering about the explanation, so maybe one or two of my readers were as well. If you’re looking for a more topical connection, perhaps we can blame the postal increase on the War in Iraq.

As previously mentioned, Sarah is doing some volunteer work at a local animal shelter. Somehow a baby rabbit arrived at the shelter. Rumour has it that it was the offspring of a stray, but that still doesn't explain how it ended up there. Anyway, apparently there was a sign up in the tea room or something, asking if anyone could take it for a few weeks until it got big enough to be re-homed. So we have a rabbit for a few weeks. I don't mind rabbits, but give me a cat any day. We babysat our Canberra neighbours' pet dwarf lop on a number of occasions. Three weeks will probably be long enough for the novelty value to wear off having this one, though. Rabbits just aren't interactive enough. They don't vocalise. Being prey, they're genetically flighty at the best of times. They also tend to chew cables, so you have to supervise them when they're out of their cage. Anyway, we've named her Maybelline, because she has panda eyes, as if she's had eyeliner on and it's run. She's very small and cute. She's rapidly becoming more used to us, and tolerating being patted and handled.

Sarah has created a blog for showcasing cats that are available for adoption at Palo Alto Animal Services, an animal shelter she is volunteering at until her work permit is approved.

2005 is the first year I've blogged from start to finish, so it is interesting to go through and reflect on what has happened. It's certainly been an eventful year. Executive summary: got engaged, got married, got a job with Google, moved to the US. Did a whole lot of other mainly geeky things in between.

January

• Moved from living in an old rundown share house in Ainslie to a townhouse in Watson, without the flat mate
• Started getting my teeth into work at my new job
• Took Sarah to the ER with chest pains, after having had them on and off over Christmas

February

• Proposed to Sarah
• My blog got syndicated on Planet Linux Australia
• Wrote my blog post about mitigating SSH brute force attacks using Netfilter's recent module. Still get a lot of search traffic from that today
• Went camping at Jervis Bay, managed to hit a kangaroo on the way, had a rather traumatic time trying to euthanize it
• Decided to continue studying at Uni part-time in conjunction with full-time work (masochistic, huh?)

March

• Made changelogs.debian.net a whole lot spankier
• Had a moderately unsuccessful time turning an old laptop with a dead hard drive into a diskless server with an NFS root filesystem. (I really must get around to trying again doing ATA over Ethernet)
• Bought a QFE card, after much vying on EBay, which is still sitting in a drawer unused
• Discovered how to make my laptop suspend
• Completed a Saint John Ambulance Senior First Aid course

April

• linux.conf.au happened, and I helped make it happen
• Interesting side-effect of the above was that I got asked to apply for a job at Google
• I had fun with a cylinder of surplus helium
• Sarah is advised to discontinue triathlons because of a possible heart condition

May

• My oldest friends separate, and it looks like they're going to get divorced
• Sarah had her car broken into in the driveway and her purse was stolen
• I get into a panic about passing Uni and really knuckle down
• I discover a little too late that I've missed marking my ten thousandth day since birth
• I organised a dinner meeting of Canberra Perl Mongers, which is a largely dormant group
• We got a new cat
• I hit two years as a Debian developer
• I joined the Linux Australia sysadmin team

June

• We decide to bring forward our wedding from April 2006 to July 2005, "just in case" the Google thing comes off
• caesar, the box I use as my gateway blew up and got replaced with something gruntier
• I got into discussions with University House about doing a wireless LAN setup for them for their guests
• Started work on a box for Linux Australia that would host a few User Mode Linux instances for various things

July

• My old Rover crew turned 20
• We discovered the Tea Centre, and the wonders of different varieties of leaf tea
• I scraped through first semester at Uni
• I decided to upgrade daedalus and ordered a new box
• Michael and I went to the US for face to face interviews with Google
• Started semester 2 at Uni
• Started migrating services to the new daedalus
• Sarah and I were married

August

• Google makes me a job offer
• I ordered myself a new laptop
• My car tyres got slashed while I was at Uni
• Uni all got a bit much, and I decided to drop out
• I got a 1 gig USB key
• I had some fun with LVM snapshotting

September

• Video card in my desktop blew up
• I return to working in the office, and have a crack at catching the bus because of heinous petrol prices
• I built Linux Australia's content mirroring box
• The cat vomits one time too many and gets a new diet
• We went and saw the Warehouse Circus' most excellent BAM! production

October

• I ascended Mount Tennant with Rick
• Sarah and I went and checked out the Tumut 3 power station
• Sarah got her wisdom teeth out
• I had some more fun with LVM and data migration
• I had even more fun with LVM snapshots
• We finally got our visas for the US
• I quit my job
• We bought a new dining table
• We bought an iPaq and a bluetooth GPS and some navigation software
• We bought a new digital camera
• Canberra Perl Mongers had another dinner meeting

November

• I finished up at Cybertrust
• I went to the US
• Sarah went to Singapore for a holiday with some of her relatives
• I started at Google

December

• Sarah arrived in the US from Singapore
• We found somewhere more permanent to live
• We bought new mountain bikes
• All our stuff arrived from Australia

I had another cleat-related incident on the way home tonight. I thought I'd unclicked my left foot when I came to cross the road, but apparently hadn't, and I'd already rocked towards the left and was well and truly leaning that way before it became evident that my leg was still anchored to the pedal. I fell pretty heavily on my left wrist, and it made a nasty crunching sound. Doesn't appear to be broken though, just sprained I guess. On inspection of my left shoe when I made it home, it would seem that one of the bolts that holds the cleat to the shoe has come loose and disappeared. So when I turned my foot sideways, the cleat rotated on the other bolt, and didn't release properly, whereas I thought it had released by virtue of the fact that my foot moved sideways. Just as well it's forecast to rain tomorrow. Don't feel much like riding at the moment.

I've been relying on just Planet for reading blogs. I mainly read just Planet Debian and Linux Linux Australia, with a shortlist of other friends' blogs that used to be read via my own Planet instance, which is currently in a shipping container somewhere. This of course sucks in two ways: if you don't keep up, articles fall off the bottom and are gone forever, and you have to mentally keep track of what you've already read. So the next choice is a feed-reader like Liferea, but this then sucks in different ways: it's tied to the computer you run it on, and posts that have been previously read often seem to come back as new. I get this every time I refresh Planet Linux Australia. Drives me mad. So what I really want is a way of being able to centrally store what I've read, regardless of where I am, and what computer I'm using. Enter Google Reader. It has a nice clean interface, it's Ajaxed up the wazoo, and Just Works^tm. My only (minor) beefs are that it doesn't seem to allow you to mark posts as read or unread, and that it always wants to have the current article second from the top in the list. Other than that, the UI is very clean and simple (and even uses vi keys). Added bonus is that if any other user is already subscribed to the feed, you get all the historical articles for free, which in the case of the Planets, goes back a lot further than the feed currently provides. Ideally I'd like something like this, that I can run on my own server, because I like keeping everything in the family. In the meantime, this is a suitable alternative. Getting all the back-articles is a bonus well worth it. Full disclosure: I work for Google, but that's what's making me look for a more efficient method to read blogs.

Rob Thomson writes that he's going to give ortho-k a shot. I used it for a number of years, and recommend it to anyone who wants to try it as an alternative to laser surgery. My experience of it was that there was a bit of trial-and-error getting the parameters for the contact lenses right, but after that, it was all good. The feeling of independence was enormous. I took up outdoor rock climbing. The ophthalmologist said that for some people they could get away with sleeping in them for one night in three, but I found I needed to sleep with them in every night to get good results. Towards the end, I started to become dissatisfied with my vision quality, and I'd moved to Canberra, and so was seeing a different optometrist to the one in Brisbane (who incidentally seemed to be a bit of a pioneer in the field). I couldn't decide whether to get a new set of lenses made with the same parameters as the old ones, or go through the expense and trial-and-error nature of getting refitted again. Then one of my lenses broke at the 2004 linux.conf.au so I went back to wearing spectacles for a while. I was going through my phase of wanting to get into the Queensland Police, so I decided to get laser surgery, discovering later that day that they won't accept candidates until 12 months afterwards in case their eyeballs spontaneously vaporise or something. In summary, I can recommend ortho-k as a non-invasive alternative to laser surgery, but its downsides are pretty much those of wearing contact lenses. Camping was one thing that was a bit trickier and more inconvenient. Having really goopy eyes in the morning was another.

I've still been extremely busy. Unlike my last fairly incoherent brain dump, this time I've been keeping notes on the things I wanted to write about, so hopefully I won't forget things. Here we go...

Squirrels

Squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They're very fast and very cute. They're kind of like possums, except diurnal. They run up trees with ease, and leap from tree to tree. It's quite cool to watch them. The damn things don't stand still long enough to be photographed (properly), and they don't let you get too close without scampering up a tree or running off. I'm told they're the number one carrier of rabies, so I shouldn't be trying to get too close anyway.

Sales tax

Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of consumer life is the fact that prices quoted are not inclusive of sales tax. This means you always need to part with more cash than you expect. Furthermore, there are some places (some fast-food outlets) that do quote the prices inclusive of tax, so it's really hard to know what you're in for.

Speed limits

I find speed limit signs to be either infrequent or harder to notice, or a combination of both. They're just a black text on white background sign. I'm used to them having the red circle. That said, no one seems to drive at the speed limit anyway.

Ethnicity

Canberra's a very white town compared to say Sydney, but I reckon at least the San Jose area of California blows the socks off what I've seen of Sydney for multiculturalism. You really notice it over here. I've been at the mall in Milpitas, and you can play "spot the white European" (a variation of "spot the Caucasian").

Different responses to thankyou

I think the fairly standard response to saying thanks that I'm used to is "You're welcome". Over here, you get "mm hmm" a lot, which is just strange.

Fractions vs decimal

They love their fractions. Petrol gets quoted at 221⁹/₁₀, which took me a while to realise was 221.9 cents per gallon

Alcoholic beverage labelling

Australia has the concept of a "standard drink". I remember as a kid the advertising campaign "rethink your third drink" (or for women, "rethink your second drink"). The idea being that men could drink two standard drinks in the first hour, and then one standard drink every hour after that, and be at 0.05% blood alcohol, which is the legal limit for Australia. And every bottled alcoholic drink is labelled with how many standard drinks it is. An average beer is about 1.2 standard drinks for example. No such labelling over here. You get the percentage of alcohol per volume, and that is it, which makes self-regulating very difficult. The limit is apparently 0.08%, but I don't think I want to be driving around on the wrong side of the road at that level (or any level really).

Christmas vs "Holidays"

Everyone and every piece of advertising goes on about the "Holidays". Retail people are always wishing us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I think this is because there's a large chunk of people who don't necessarily celebrate Christmas.

Tipping

I haven't really come across tipping in everyday life as much as I'd expected, but when I think about it a bit, I'm at work most of the time, so that's probably why. The general rule seems to be to tip "double the tax", so for a bill at a restaurant, or where you get personal service, such as a haircut, you tip. But you don't tip at McDonald's, nor Subway (where I would have expected you would).

That's about all my current observations on living over here. Tomorrow we get our townhouse in Central Park. Our air-freight was finally delivered today. (What was supposed to take about 8 days took 4 weeks). Not sure when we can expect our sea freight at this stage. We bought a couple of mountain bikes last weekend, and if the weather is okay tomorrow, we'll pick them up and ride them home. We've found a really nice off road (as in not shared with cars) bike path, which runs close to home all the way to work. I'm really keen to roller blade to work if it's feasible, and also to cycle in. I'm a bit disappointed to discover after we've been accepted for the place that we're right on top of a toxic waste dump (or something like that). If I grow a second head, you'll know why. The other piece of exciting news is that the bank sent me a debit card, when they'd previously told me they wouldn't until I had a Social Security number (still no sign if that yet). This thing (the debit card) is freaking weird. It's Mastercard branded, and in some places you use it like you'd use a debit card for EFTPOS back home. You swipe, enter your PIN and that's it. In other cases, you swipe and sign a bit of paper like a credit card transaction. In either case, money is sucked out of our checking account. The scary thing is that no one seems to check signatures in this country, and a lot of places will accept credit card payments electronically (like petrol stations where you just swipe the card at the bowser and enter the ZIP code of your billing address and that's it). Oh, and I can use this thing like a credit card for Internet purchases. What bothers me is that the level of authentication is so low, but it's sucking actual money out of our checking account, so with all the credit card fraud around, it's relatively trivial to draw actual money out of a bank account, as opposed to using someone's credit. That said, I just got the card today, and since then, it's made shopping so much easier. It's amazing how many places won't accept a foreign credit card, and I was a big user of EFTPOS back home, and this ability to use a debit card like a credit card means I can essentially continue in that habit. I wasn't looking forward to carrying lots of cash or having to use cheques.

Where do I start? It's been an eventful couple of days... The flight to LA was uneventful. Qantas is certainly orders of magnitude more pleasant to fly with than United, even though we were seated in a bulkhead area. I had a 13-month old baby seated next to me (no, Mikal was on the other side), and he was about as well behaved as you could possibly ask a 13-month old baby to behave. Mikal also behaved himself. I had the intention of trying to get something approximating 8 hours sleep, as we arrived at LAX at 7am local time, but I only managed about 4 hours. I did spend about 8 hours with a mask on and my brain in idle, so I arrived at LAX being mostly coherent. Entering the US via LAX was a much less traumatic experience than I was expecting. The E-3 visa was accepted fine, and I now have an I-94 stapled into my passport. Quarantine involved getting looked up and down by a guy in a booth, who waved me through. We had 3 hours to spare (or about 2 by the time we cleared all the immigration/customs queues) and then hopped on a 50 minute American Airlines flight to San Francisco, hired a car and drove to Santa Clara. The accommodation we're staying in for a month is very spiffy indeed. It's a largish gated community of units. Mine's got a ground floor entry, but everything else (except the garage) is upstairs. When Sarah gets here, we'll put up some photos. The weather is lovely as well. Our first outing was to the Social Security office to attempt to get social security numbers. This wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, as we were too freshly in the country to show up on their systems, so we left with letters saying we'd get one within four weeks, when our details had been verified. Yesterday evening, we went for a general recce of the surrounding area, and checked out a supermarket. That was less disconcerting than I expected, although I don't think it was a terribly huge supermarket. Having a GPS certainly raises one's confidence when navigating significantly. Last night I discovered that all the keys in my apartment were not created equal, and that the two loose in the lock box on the front door were the only two that opened the unit, and the two sets on key rings on the coffee table only opened the amenities and my mailbox. So I got to spend a bit of time sitting on my front doorstep until the nice man from Synergy Relocations came out to let me in (except his key didn't work either, so he got to make conversation with a legal alien while we waited for someone else to come out with a key). Today, we drove around to see a shopping mall, and the first set of shops we found happened to be around the corner from an enormous (by my standards) apartment complex, which had some signage implying that it had vacancies, so we decided to get the low down on how renting worked before we did our rental tours. Casey drove us around in a golf buggy and gave a tour of what two different floor plans looked liked. It seems that in this part, it's standard for an apartment to include the refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, washing machine and clothes dryer, which is good to know. Let me just say that if this is what living in an apartment complex is like, it's more like living in a resort. The place had pools everywhere, tennis courts, two gyms, a community centre, it was just unreal. It was also cheaper than I was expecting. We then went to a massive shopping mall to do some window shopping. Discovered Wetzel's Pretzels. Hope they're not too fattening... Tomorrow, I'm going to avail myself to the complex's gym, and generally get ready for the week ahead. Future posts will be in a new category, which I won't be feeding to Planet Debian as not to bore people. I will inflict Planet Linux Australia readers with them until someone asks me to stop. If you'd like a custom feed that excludes my American adventures, please let me know. I wonder if adjusting Blosxom's idea of timezone buggers up existing posts and aggregators like Planet in general?

I received a bugreport 342156, and I went for a search on why this program seems to be working without a problem.For the case of delete[] of void*, void* actually has a destructor defined, _ZdlPv in libstdc++.A desctructor of a void* will call free, after checking if the pointer is non-NULL, as in plain C: if(a) free(a); .g++ will warn you if you use this construct, but it will function, in practice.However, this topic apparently is a popular onecovered in a few articles, such as this one which tells you it's a sin to mix malloc/free new/delete.Unless you are bored enough to be able to follow compiler intrinsics to the minor details, it's better to keep away from such practice.

This blog has been semi-offline for at least a few hours. Sorry about that. Through an interesting (at least to me) series of events, I discovered that my custom “popularity” hack/plugin was out of control. It started earlier today when one of the the RAID discs on this server gave a SMART error. I’ve never been able to really judge whether SMART errors are “for real” or not—sometimes I’ve had a disc with a serious SMART error that, after another test, will run fine for another year or two without incident. In any case, I wasn’t so worried, since this system is running RAID-5, so a single disc failing, even catastrophically, doesn’t result in any data loss or downtime. I decided to take the disc out of the RAID and run some SMART tests on it. I marked it with mdadm as FAILed (mdadm —fail) and then removed it. Strangely, the disc first passed a short test with no problems, but then ceased to be recognized as having SMART capabilities at all. I’ve had that problem before and never figured it out—the SMART capabilities seem to come back eventually. Not knowing what best to do, I just put the drive back into the RAID to see what would happen. Since the disc had already been marked as FAILed, the reconstruction started from scratch. Although I’ve got a pretty good (2Ghz) CPU and plenty (2G) of RAM, kblockd and md0_raid5 are using up most CPU cycles and everything has slowed down significantly. Reconstruction seems to be proceeding fine, just slowly—it will take 24-36 hours at the current rate. Presumably it would be much faster in single user mode, but I can’t take this server offline. In the meantime, I noticed that my blog had stopped responding entirely, while other blosxom blogs served from this same server were fine (maybe a little more latency than usual). So I started parsing through the differences in my blosxom installation and everyone else’s to see what could possibly be slowing things down so much as to time out the blog. Eventually I identified the culprit: my custom-made “popularity” plugin, which reports the most popular entries on this blog and the number of hits they have received. I hacked it together several years ago. I think at the time I just wanted to see if it would work, with the plan to come back later and fix it. I guess I forgot the “fix it” part. My popularity plugin creates a log file that it reads in each time the blog is accessed, and then appends to that file. Over the years, that file has grown to 17 megabytes. Although this is a huge waste of system resources, I didn’t notice it when the system was running at full speed. With the reduced performance from the RAID reconstruction, however, this meant that my blog never finished loading at all. If you made it this far, you certainly deserve some sort of geek admin award. Congratulations. I deserve some sort of stupid admin award, myself. P.S. Apparently I must have forgotten to check my horoscope today. The laundry machine flooded the basement when I didn’t check the sink into which the laundry machines empties. I should probably avoid sharp objects for the rest of the day.

People that claim things in blog posts because they *think* they are right, when even the *SIMPLEST* visit to the softwares website tells you otherwise... As an example to this... Sionide says that XMMS is a port of WinAmp, you can *clearly* see from the XMMS Website that this is *not* the case, the about page clearly states """It was modeled after winamp from the Windows operating system. XMMS is not a port of Winamp but was written from scratch by Mikael and Peter Alm.""" /me slaps Sionide about the face a bit. PLEASE DO AT LEAST A TINY BIT OF RESEARCH, DAMMIT. *sigh*

On my laptop's hard disk, I have this small secondary partition that I use to fool around with. It's had installations of all sorts of things, including Debian woody (back when that was still stable), MacOS X (which came with the thing), ubuntu, and (currently) Gentoo. The motto being that you can't love your own system (in my case, Debian Unstable) unless you know what other systems look like. Since I'd gotten tired of Gentoo by now, I wanted to try something else. As $SUBJECT probably tells you, that something else was FreeBSD for PowerPC this time. Only after booting I found out that my keyboard doesn't work. As it apparently is documented. Well, that's it, then. No FreeBSD for me. Let's see what NetBSD looks like.

A couple of people have commented to me on the lack of explicit reference to web services or e-business technologies in the XTech call for participation. It's worth explaining why this is so. On web services: I consider the low-level specs here (SOAP, REST, WSDL) now to fall under "core technologies" track, and the higher level stuff (WS-*) to be often vacuous spec-mongering. Also, over the years, the quality of web service proposals submitted to the conference has been notably poor compared to all the other topics. A lot of this was to do with the hype web services received. On e-business, some useful submissions have been forthcoming, but never more than a few. My suspicion is that the OASIS stream of events is more interesting for most people in this space--I'd love to hear otherwise. I do view e-business presentations as on-topic, but I would like to find those that genuinely present something worthwhile. While many people often say they'd like to see more case studies, turnout for these is always low at the conference itself, so I've shied away from them somewhat. The thing with case studies is that they're necessarily related to a domain, and it's easy to for attendees to assume there's not transferable experience to be heard. I guess I don't believe either that all the problems in the e-business space are unique to that area. Identity, federated service location, transactions are all topics that deserve a broad audience. However, I acknowledge that I do not work daily in the e-business sphere and I would dearly love to hear somebody who does do a presentation on why there's really some solid things going on there now. Exchange of best practices is more necessary than ever. More reason not to hive off e-business from the other matters in the conference. For a similar reason I've mixed semantic web topics throughout the tracks as well. If anyone working in e-business didn't get useful knowledge out of XTech, I'd be astounded. Likewise, those working in e-business have plenty useful to say to the rest of the conference.

• only 4 days left to submit a proposal for XTech 2006 (Amsterdam, May 16-19) -- do it now

Unfortunately, this quick note will most likely not reach the people it needs to, but it needs to be said in any case: When contacting myself or other people who produce free software, please use the mailing list for the project in question unless you have a really good reason to keep the conversation private. The reasons:

• Other people can benefit from, and contribute to the conversation. They might also be more interested than I am in the problem at hand, or at least want to hear about how it's resolved.
• It gets archived, and therefore people can find it via search engines in the future. This is critical when you want to be able to point people at archives that led to decisions that affect the project.
• It creates more sense of 'community'. Most successful open source projects are not the fruit of only one person's labor. Perhaps they are initially, but at a certain point, everyone is better off if a community grows up around the project, and keeping conversations public helps that process along.

Please pass this along - hopefully people will start to get the idea.