One of the most typical religious traditions in Spain, within the Xmas celebrations, is the Kings’ day (”D a de Reyes”), which is celebrated every year on the 6th of January remembering the arrival of the three Kings to bring their presents to baby Jesus. It is quite typical to have presents that day, and one of the things I got this year was an external 2.5′’ HD case with multimedia playing capacity. I also got a 120 Gb 2.5′’ HD for it. The strongest point I had for it was that my brother already has one and it seems to support many file formats and codecs without problem. In my very short experience with it, just a few days for the moment, it has been able to reproduce all the films I have tried. The main drawback is that it only supports VFAT/FAT32 and NTFS partitions, and only 2 different partitions, no more. Thus, I had to cope with NTFS if I wanted to use the whole HD. I created one VFAT partition as big as supported by that filesystem (32 Gb, with a file limit of 4 Gb) just in case I need it when I go to some friends’ house, and another NTFS partition for the rest of the disk. The next point was to be able to read and write to it from my Debian-powered computer. Reading NTFS is no problem at all, as it seems to be built-in in the kernel by default, but for being able to write on it, I had to use ntfs-3g. It seems to work perfect for me, on an Intel-compatible 32bit computer.

The race had 3 finalists:
- HP nx6235 (in Romanian) - incredible low price, fully works (with some patches and except the fingerprint reader) (thanks Marc)
- Dell Inspiron 6400 (aka E1505)
- ASUS F3T-AP008

I have decided against the 64bits AMDs and in favour of long life batteries and Centrino Core 2 Duo architecture.

HP nx6235 failed to meet my criteria of design, reliability (I have heard that local HP service has problems with HP products; waranty is 1 year). The shared video memory was a concern regarding overall system performance.

Dell, well... Dell 32 bit arch... I would have been nice to jump into the 64bit wagon, but I guess that will have to wait for now. Design is nice, the hard disk is bigger by 20GB (we all know disk storage is never enough ;-), Centrino tehnology (Intel seems to be OS friendly and drivers seem to exist for all the components), battery time (I can wait to test the real battery time), has some video memory of its own (HyperMemory - some kind of video cache)

ASUS - the selling points over the Dell were the AMD Turion 64 x2 processor(s), the design (looks nicer than Dell, IMHO), the nVidia video card (which was also a concern due to the proprietary driver and its security holes - sorry, no link), and the not yet working built-in webcam. There was also an bonus: a bag and a mouse, but that almost never works for me. And I had to wait for at least a week for it.

The winner is the Dell Inspirion, they also have it on stock, I already placed the order and I will pick it up after I finnish this entry ;-) .

I can't wait to fire up Debian Installer on this baby.

Update: when I said I'll skip he 64 bit wagon I was thinking (for some reason) that the amd64 bit port does not perform well on the Intel Core 2 Duo processors and I would be forced to use the i386 arch. Thanks for correcting me.
Update: it seems eMag was using false information in their advertising regarding Dell, the system is NOT using Centrino technology since it has a Broadcom wireless lan.

Our brunch yesterday went super-well. We had about 15 people over, which was far too many for our supposedly mellow evening. But it was great -- we got to catch up with a lot of folks I've been missing over the holidays and haven't gotten to see. I hadn't seen Lucinda Catchlove much for a few months, and Heather Kelley and Damian DiFede made an appearance, too. We got to see John Usher, who's off to do weird things to people's ears at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Niko came with friend Johanie, who made some great black-bean brownies; DJ Ghostbeard was still feeling ill from NYE; and Meg showed off her deep purple hockey bruises. It was also nice to have some new friends come, too. I've been wanting to hang out with MC Turgeon, one of the most experienced bloggers in Quebec, founder of me dia and toiles-du-Web, since we met last year at South by Southwest. She and her partner Chris came over with a nice bottle of wine and got to know everyone there. Actually, she knew a lot of the people already -- she and Anne-Marie had met at Mutek, for example. When Patti came in, she said, "Oh, yeah, I know M-C. We do a lot of panels together." Ah, the panel circuit. Altogether a really good time. Probably the only downside is that our oven was really dirty, and while I was making quiches and roasted potatoes I smoked up the entire house. But it cleared pretty quickly, and with the nice weather we're having, I could even have the kitchen door open to clear the smoke. Unheard of! tags: bruncher mcturgeon montreal cooking

Making a point Speaking of unseasonably warm weather, the Green Party of Canada held a picnic and ice cream social on Mount Royal last Saturday, which would have a couple of feet of snow on it in a regular year. The subject of discussion? Climate change, of course. I dunno -- clever move, but do they have to rub it in? tags: green party picnic climate change

Shameless plugs My friend Allegra has started a great new blog, Sucking-stones. She's got a really good voice and it's now in circulation as one of the blogs I read each morning. Also, my friend Anne-Marie Bergeron has her first travel TV show on 33mag tomorrow. She's got a four-part series on her trip to Iceland which they're going to show. It's in French, but her husband Jeff only cusses in English, so that's probably what you'll hear when they're climbing glaciers and lava floes. Did that get everyone? I hope so. You know what they say: You can plug your friends, and you can plug your ears, but you can't plug your friends' ears. Or something. tags: allegra sucking-stones annemarie jeff 33mag

Chix I was just reading Angela Beesley's end-of-year blog post and realized that I'd missed the establishment of WikiChix. It's a new organization for female wiki participants, in the great tradition *Chix tradition of Linux Chix or Debian Women. All the more galling is that two other blogs I regularly read also covered the new group. Joseph Reagle made a note about gendered spaces and the role they play in any movement (like Open Content and wikis). Biella blogged about his bloggage and put some social-science twist that was a little hard for me to follow. In any event, good luck to WikiChix. I find clubs extremely fun and useful and by nature exclusionary, and nothing to get worked up about. Of course, as one of the two founding members of the Maldekstrulaj Vegeteranaj Esperantistaj Linuxamantoj (Left-handed Vegetarian Esperantist Linux-users Club), I'd probably be pretty hypocritical calling anyone else exclusionary. tags: wikichix wiki angela beesley joseph reagle biella coleman clubs

I'm quite upset with the POSIX APIs. I'm trying to write some kind of simple piece of software, to be included in a mail chain, doing a lot of DNS queries, mostly to RBLs. I've met two kind of problems:

1. the POSIX API is synchronous, and absolutely no usual API for non blocking requests exists, there is of course:
   • adns, but it's very bloated, does not work with ipv6,
   • c-ares, but it's quite bloated, does not work with ipv6, and need select (cannot be used with epoll e.g.),
   • libdnsresolv (hahahaha, that's an horrible patch over the BSD resolving API, it's horrible, yuck),
   • udns, that's the best of the four, but still, the code do not feels very well, solid (do not check recvfrom/sendto errors e.g.).
2. there is no way to escape the system resolver, which is good for usual applications, but very bad when it come to RBLs.

The second point is in fact the worse. On mail queues I administrate, there is also very often a bind that is used as a caching DNS resolver. Very well, except that it complectely sucks with RBLs. RBL generate a lot of queries that resolve and that you will almost never ask again before its TTL expires, and the other kind of queries you do get NOT FOUND answers, that are usually not cached. Too bad, the most useful answers are the NOT FOUND ones, and the cached answers are just here to make our local cache use huge amounts of memory for nothing. So RBLs just end up poisonning your system efficiency. That's quite ridiculous. I'd really love to have a decent async resolver API, and a way to tell my DNS cache (here BIND) that the domains serves a RBL, and that I (for at the same time the sake of the RBL and from my system) want specific caching features for it. I fear that it wont be possible, and that I will end up writing some API specifically designed to craft DNS queries to the RBL servers (once again there is absolutely no reason to use forwarders for that, as it will end up by screwing your forwarder cache for almost no gain, and won't save you from a lot of useless queries with no answers at all). The good point is that the kind of queries you need to do to RBL servers is indeed completely trivial:

• only A and maybe one day AAAA queries ;
• a query will never be greater than 512 octets, so only UDP is needed ;
• you only have to ask the NS that serve your RBL (and here we use the local resolver API, to benefit from the caches), and query that RBL, no recursion is needed.

Then implementing on top of that some efficient caching (RBL-aware) will be rocking fast, and way more efficient than bind caching, without the poisonning effects. A big gain I hope. What suprises me the most, is that I've not found anybody speaking about those side effects of RBLs on nameservers, almost no discussion at all. Very surprising for a protocol that is so vital for the internet as a general rule.

Via the Trademark Blog, My Cage — digitally generated silence for cellphone:

My Cage (Silence for Cellphone) dispenses with performer, piano and auditorium, instead utilizing a continuous stream of silence produced on a computer, and compressed to ringtone format. While noting that Mr. Keats doesn’t have a cellphone of his own, and may be less-than-qualified to make global pronouncements about them, the CEO of the company that distributes the ringtone believes that “My Cage” may be a platinum hit. “People want a respite,” he says, “and not everybody has the time or money to go to a spa. The virtues of silence are unsung.” Nevertheless, Mr. Keats is careful not to take credit for silence in general, and hopes that people will bootleg his creation, just as he was inspired by John Cage. Mr. Cage, who died in 1992, could not be reached for comment.

I hope the IP professors in the crowd are preparing a hypothetical for the next round of exams.

As part of my work on Xen I've been playing with Xephyr (a replacement for Xnest). My plan is to use Xen instances for running different versions of desktop environments. You can't just ssh -X to a Xen image and run things. One problem is that some programs such as Firefox do strange things to try and ensure that you only have one instance running. Another problem is with security, the X11 security extensions don't seem to do much good. A quick test indicates that a ssh -X session can't copy the window contents of a ssh -Y session, but can copy the contents of all windows run in the KDE environment. So this extension to X (and the matching ssh support) seem to do little good.

One thing I want to do is to have a Xen image for running Firefox with risky extenstions such as Flash and keep it separate from my main desktop for security and managability.

Xephyr :1 -auth ~/.Xauth-Xephyr -reset -terminate -screen 1280x1024

My plan is to use a command such as the above to run the virtual screen. That means to have a screen resolution of 1280x1024, to terminate the X server when the last client exits (both the -reset and the -terminate options are required for this), to be display :1 and listen with TCP (the default), and to use an authority file named ~/.Xauth-Xephyr.

xauth generate :1 .

The first problem is how to generate the auth file, the xauth utility is documented as doing it via the above command. But this really connects to a running X server and copies the auth data from it.

The solution (as pointed out to me by Dr. Brian May) is to be found in the startx script which solves this problem. The way to do it is to use the add :1 . $COOKIE command in xauth to create the auth file used by the X server, and to generate the cookie with the mcookie program.

In ~/.ssh/config:
Host server
SendEnv DISPLAY

In /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
AcceptEnv DISPLAY

The next requirement is to tell the remote machine (which incidentally doesn't need to be a Xen virtual machine, it can be any untrusted host that contains X applications you want to run) which display to use. The first thing to do is to ssh to the machine in question and run the xauth program to add the same cookie as is used for the X server. Then the DISPLAY environment variable can be sent across the link by setting the ~/.ssh/config file at the client end to have the above settings (where server is the name of the host we will connect to via SSH) and in the sshd_config file on the server have the line AcceptEnv DISPLAY to accept the DISPLAY environment variable. It would have been a little easier to configure if I had added the auth entry to the main ~/.Xauthority file and used the command DISPLAY=:1 ssh -X server, this would be the desired configuration when operating over an untrusted network. But when talking to a local Xen instance it gives better performance to not encrypt the X data.

The following script will generate an xauth entry, run a 1280x1024 resolution Xephyr session, and connect to the root account on machine server and run the twm window manager. Xephyr will exit when all X applications end. Note that you probably want to use passwordless authentication on the server as typing a password twice to start the session would be a drag.

#!/bin/sh

COOKIE= mcookie
FILE=~/.Xauth-Xephyr
rm -f $FILE
#echo "add 10.1.0.1:1 . $COOKIE" xauth
ssh root@server "echo \"add 10.1.0.1:1 . $COOKIE\" xauth"
echo "add :1 . $COOKIE" xauth -f $FILE
Xephyr :1 -auth $FILE -reset -terminate -screen 1280x1024 $* &
DISPLAY=10.1.0.1:1 ssh root@server twm
wait

I'm finally releasing version 0.1 of my Flickr library, flickrpc. The name is actually misleading, and I should change it for 1.0, as the class name is flickrest and the transport protocol is HTTP/REST, not XML-RPC (as was the original plan, thus the name). This library is written in Python and uses Twisted.

Why another Flickr library?

Because Postr required it. All of the existing libraries that I know of are blocking (I used to use Beej's flickrapi, which was based upon Michele Campeotto's flickrclient), which makes using them in GUI applications painful. Early versions of Postr used threads so that uploading could be done in the background without blocking the UI, but as Postr makes more calls to Flickr whilst being used interactively these threads will become a maintaince nightmare. By using Twisted all of the network operations are handled in the main loop, and I can write callback-based network code just like I write callback-based UI code.

Why Twisted?

Because it works, and is popular. If someone has a HTTP client library that integrated into the GLib mainloop and will expose callbacks when operations complete, please tell me. I love what Twisted gives me, but at the end of the day if there is a simplier solution, I'll consider it.

Sounds excellent! Where can I get it?

There is a tarball of 0.1 available here: flickrpc-0.1.tar.gz. If you want to track the latest development, or contribute patches, there is also a Bazaar archive.

While the next debian release is being prepared it is not a good idea to upload new packages, so I'm trying to use the holiday to 'look across the fence'. For starters I've gotten me an iMac and so far I like Mac OS X. It is an immense improvement over Windows and a pretty good alternative to KDE from my point of view. I'm still a bit lost with accelerators and in-program window movement but it is nice to have another environment to play with.

And on that machine I'll try to play with sbcl, openmcl and f-script. But so far I'm been busy using iMovie to convert our DV tapes into DVD's.

(continuing with clearing the blogging backlog) Four days after returning home to the US from the trip to Australia, I was at it again, flying the other way around the world. In hindsight, this was totally insane, but I'd expressed interest in going much earlier in the year, I think before we'd organised to visit Australia. I flew to Madrid, via Philadelphia. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, Philadelphia International is a very nice airport. It's the first time I've flown across the United States, and it really is a long way. Just like Brisbane to Perth, it's a long time on a plane for staying in the same country. Arriving in Madrid, entering the country was extremely straightforward, as I've also said previously, the immigration guy barely looked at my passport long enough to open it and find a page to stamp. It was my first time in a country that didn't speak English and wasn't terribly bilingual. Fortunately the airport was signed in English as well as Spanish, and the information/assistance people all seemed to be able to speak English. I arrived in Terminal 1, and the European contingent were mostly arriving at Terminal 4, which is essentially a completely separate airport, a short shuttle bus ride away. My flight arrived in the morning, and I had about 4 or 5 hours to kill before the first of the European contingent rocked up. It was tempting to get a train or taxi into Madrid and have a bit of an explore, but I really didn't want to risk not getting back in time, so I just loitered around Terminal 4 for the time. The highlight of the waiting was I bumped into Doug Foster, who I used to work with a SecureNet in Canberra, disembarking a flight from London (where he's now working). It really is a small world. After everyone turned up, we got on a bus and headed for Badajoz, a mere 5 hour bus ride away. We didn't get away until about 7pm, so by the time we hit the road, it was dark, so there wasn't a lot to see. We arrived at Badajoz around midnight, and made a short walk to the hotel and had a late dinner and hit the sack. Unfortunately with all my travelling in the three weeks, I'd managed to come down with a cold, which started manifesting itself pretty much from the moment I got to Badajoz, so I started to feel increasingly suboptimal as the week wore on. Badajoz itself is an incredible little city. It's just like what I envisaged an old European city to be: narrow winding streets. It had a funny effect on me. I'd alternate between finding it really quaint, and incredibly claustrophobic (and I'm not usually the claustrophobic type). After doing a bit of self-analysis, I think the problem was the lack of sky. With so many buildings crammed in together and the narrow streets, the amount of sky you got to see was minimal. Definitely no horizon. I felt more comfortable at night, in fact the place looked really awesome at night. Everything was lit up, I think especially so for Christmas, and everyone came out and walked around and did shopping. The other thing that, well, I noticed about the city was that it was wall to wall concrete (or bricks, or bitumen). The buildings all connected up, there were no gaps between them, and the sidewalk basically ran from the front edge of the building, to the kerb, then there was the road, and then the reverse, so it was a real concrete jungle. That said, it was pretty clean. the sidewalks were all swept, there was no rubbish in the gutters. By about the second day, my cold had driven me crazy (my nose was running incessantly) and I just wanted some pseudoephedrine to dry it up. I didn't have a clue how pharmacies operated, but fortunately I was able to get Miriam to tag along with me, who spoke English as well as Spanish. She'd never heard of pseudoephedrine before, but as soon as she said it to the pharmacist, he knew what it was and came back with some form of Nurofen (ibuprofen) that also had pseudoephedrine in it. I didn't really want or need the ibuprofen, but when sick in Spain, beggars can't be choosers, so I took it. I didn't feel that it did a great deal for me anyway. Getting home again was fun. Due to various peoples' flights, the bus was leaving at 6:30am, and that wouldn't get me back to Madrid the ideal 3 hours before departure, so I took a taxi with a few people who needed to be there earlier. It left Badajoz at midnight, and arrived at Madrid at about 4am, where I had to wait for about 5 hours before I could check in for my flight. I had a bit of fun leaving, which I've already written about, and was happy to get home late on Sunday night. My cold had gone to my chest by this stage and I had bronchitis, so I was just glad to get home and see a doctor on Monday. So now I can say I've been to Europe. It was a shame I didn't get to see Madrid itself. Next time. Update Photos from the trip are here

I have been asked for advice about long-term storage of documents. I decided to blog about it because my thoughts may be useful to others, and because if I get something wrong then surely people will correct me. ;)

Many organizations are looking at using computers for storing all documents. This gives savings on the costs of storing paper - the promise of the paperless office is being fulfilled. There are some potential issues about whether a signature in a PDF file that's scanned from paper is valid - but I guess it's the same as a signature on a FAX and everyone seems to accept FAXed contracts.

The technical problem is how to reliably store data long-term. The problem is that all modern methods of storing data will degrade over time. Anything less than engraving a message in stone, gold, or platinum and burying it will have some data loss eventually.

If the documents that need to be archived have no special requirements and if you have a good backup system in place (testing backup media, off-site storage in case of disaster, multiple sets of hardware that can read the backup media in case of hardware failure, etc) then you might be able to just store the documents on a server and include them in the backup plan. The regular backups should cater for replacing media over the long term. If however there is a significant amount of data or the data has confidentiality requirements that preclude having it all online all the time then you need a separate infrastructure for such storage.

Regular backup systems have to deal with files being deleted from storage and files that have their contents changed. For a document archiving system no file will ever be changed once it has been created and no file will be deleted. This allows some simplifications to the backup strategy. For example if you have multiple terabytes of documents backed up by tape and stored off-site you could use CD-ROMs or other media for storing recent changes. It would be very easy for an employee to grab a couple of CDs before rushing out of a burning building, but grabbing a set of tapes (or the correct tape from a large set) may not be possible.

It would be possible to use a tape library system as the primary storage for documents. If a large organization was going to implement this a few years ago that might be a good option. Nowadays storage is getting increasingly large and cheap. Terabytes are available in desktop PCs and hundreds of terabytes are available for server storage. So having the primary document store on a server with a decent amount of space and then making tape backups for storage in secure locations seems viable.

One thing to note about such document storage is that having everything on a server allows a much larger amount of data to be accessed and copied more easily than on paper. Sorting through a billion paper documents and copying the thousand most useful ones would be a difficult task for someone who was involved in industrial espionage. Finding the most useful files when they are indexed on a server should be quite easy and copying a few thousand is also easy (one thousand scanned documents of medium size should fit on a USB memory stick - much smaller than a few reams of copied documents).

Finally documents have to be archived in publicly documented file formats that can be easily read in the future. The PDF specification is well known and there are multiple programs that can display data in such files, another good option for scanned documents is JPEG. Proprietary formats such as MS-Word should never be used, you never know whether you will be able to read them in four years, let alone the seven years for which many documents must be retained or the 20-30 years that some documents must be retained.

Yes Mark, your rant expresses well what I think. And also what I have said before but apparently not many people do care. I still think that we need a strong DPL or a special delegate with powers of orphaning packages by force, since sometimes getting a new maintainer is a step ahead no matter how much experience the new maintainer needs to have. Skills can be learned. But skills in the hands of an inactive maintainer is simply dead potential. Doing something somehow is sometimes better than not doing anything. A such hypothetical delegate would need to have the right nose to detect such cases and orphan such packages. No matter how important this package is - bugs are bugs are bugs and they need to be fixed in a timely manner, ie. without unacceptable/long delays, no matter which RL problems of the particular maintainer do hinder him/her.

We got back to Montreal yesterday morning just after midnight. Maj got us upgrades on United to business class, which was really a life-saver. There's a direct flight from San Francisco to Montreal, but it's 5 hours one way and 6 hours on another. This time traveling to California, we decided to split up the flight, stopping in Chicago about halfway between. Returning was a good flight. We were comfortable, there was room, Amita had enough space to play on the ground and sleep comfortably on our laps. Maj: "Business class isn't anything fancy; it's just enough space, good service and quality food that you feel like a human rather than like livestock." The only downside was that Chicago O'Hare is a half-ass airport. For one of the most (the most?) visited and transited airports in the world, it's really skimpy on services inside the security area. There aren't any big restaurants or nice bars or stores inside the B and C concourse; just stand-up kiosks. We walked halfway across the airport to find a pub to eat at. Probably the best thing about the airport is the giant brachiosaurus skeleton in B concourse. Amita June couldn't stop looking at it; she ran from foot to foot banging it with her hand. Good for her; it's a pretty neat thing to see in a boring airport. tags: airport travel ohare brachiosaurus amitajune maj

Ebjo Another Maj quote: "It's just a coincidence that we use the term blog as a cutesy contraction for 'Web log'. It could have easily have been a 'Web journal' people were contracting, and then we'd call it an ebjo." tags: ebjo blog maj

Goethe One of the things that I've found as a participant in Open Source software and Open Content is that there are a lot of different people involved. And today, in 2007, Germany and France have become important loci of new developments in Free Culture. I've been working on my French for a while, and I think I'm getting pretty good, but I've never learned any German. At all. But German Wikitravel is one of the largest and most popular versions of the project. And I want to be more of a participant -- or, at least, have some better relationships with our German users. So, today I signed up for German lessons at the Montreal Goethe Institute. The Goethe Institute promotes German language and culture world-wide, including high-quality lessons in German. Montreal's is in a beautiful old building right at the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Denis. It's got a nice office and a friendly warm bookstore, "Das Buch". I'm going to take the intensive beginner's course -- mornings Tuesday and Thursday for 6 weeks. I hope at the end of that time I'll be better able to meet German-speaking Free Software advocates, Open Content participants, and most of all Wikitravellers a little more towards halfway. tags: goethe institute german wikitravel classes montreal

La ka I went to La ka this afternoon again to meet a couple of people. It was my first two-meeting day at La ka, which I think is a bad sign I'm turning into a serious maven. But like they say, it's really where the hipsters are doing business on this le lately. The nice thing was that I got to introduce two Montrealers that I like a lot. Hugh Macguire of, among other things, the Librivox public-domain audiobook project, is really interesting and passionate about communities and free content. Nicolas Ritoux is one of the most clued-in tech journalists I've met. It was nice to introduce them, and it was good that they seemed to get along. Depressing, on the other hand, was walking around the Plateau in January with 12C weather. This has gotten beyond funny into scary -- we just haven't had any serious snow in Montreal this winter. I'm worried that it's going to get worse, too, and I don't know what that will mean for Quebec's culture. Mon pays, c'est l'hiver, goes the song, and I'm not sure I get what a city without winter would mean here. tags: winter laika hugh macguire nicolas ritoux librivox montreal snow

House Maj and I have been watching House on DVD. It's really good, although a little formulaic. Everybody's always running around and bleeding and vomiting, and people get an average of 3.8 different rare diseases per episode. There's also a lot of cheating and sneakiness. It's great. tags: house tv

Mantini One nice thing about New Year's Eve this year was that Baron Earl served a refreshing -- nay, energizing -- spocktail called a mantini. I was especially pleased to find out that the first ingredient was not, in fact, a praying mantis. With the Baron, you never know. tags: mantini spocktail baron earl

Hah! Targetted memes have hit again - Arareko decided I should talk about myself. I will do this, but I won't point the finger at five others - Lets see just who bites ;-) Besides, having left this post rot as a draft for over a week already, it got a bit more interesting: The meme bit from two sides. Arareko (as well as Ion) was bitten by Cicloid, from the mx.planetalinux.org-derived side of reality, and then Hanna bit Wouter on Planet Debian. Ok, time to get this message out from the freezer...
So... Five not very well known things about me? Ok, here I go.

1. Many people inquire me routinely about my name, specially when reading it off an official document where it appears with both names and both family names (Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich). As many Jewish families, mine comes from all over Europe: My mother-side grandparents were both born in Poland (hence the Iszajewicz, morphed into the slightly more writable Iszaevich). My father-side grandmother was born in Vienna, Austria (I still have some family in Graz), and my father-side grandfather was a proud child of the Austro-Hungarian empire - His family probably was originally Austriac (Wolf is a German name), but became Hungarian and Hungarian was their home language. He was born in Felszoviso, Transilvania (the part of Hungary that later became Northern Romania). And, yes, I mentioned my family is Jewish, so having the Hebrew name Eyal (my second given name) is no surprise. Now, about Gunnar? Well, I still don't know :) It's a Scandinavian name. My family has no (upwards) relation to Scandinavia, but both of my parents (although merely by coincidence, and with over 30 years between periods) lived in Western Sweden - My father, 1970-1972, and my mother, 2003-2006. Oh, and people usually expect them to carry strange foreign names as well - No, they are Bernardo and Ofelia.
2. I like to think started my journey into Free Software very early in my life. No, I didn't use Linux until 1994 (and only installed it in 1996), I'm not talking about such a modern piece of free software. I first touched computers around 1983-1984, when my father used to take me on Friday nights to his institute, to play with the computer. This computer was a Foonly F2, administered by La Mancha. What did I use to play on such a beast? Why, of course, I used Emacs to write TeX! Rumors say that this Foonly had the first TeX installation outside of Stanford (I guess this fact derives from Donald Knuth's visit to UNAM in 1977 - But of course I don't remember that!)
3. My family is bitterly split in two camps: Those who love eggplant and those who hate it. At least my parents, my aunt and I are known to love it. At least my wife (Nadezhda), my brother and two of my cousins are known to hate it. The feelings towards this noble plant are really strong, but out of respect for the other party of the family, we practically never cook with it.
4. Now that we mention food-related strangeness, I was a vegetarian for almost my first 20 years of life. My father is still a vegetarian (for over 35 years already). Nadezhda became a vegetarian almost a year ago. I still think I have saved enough karma during those 20 years to endure some more meat eating, but who knows... I might switch back just to be on the safe side ;-)
5. Often, memes can absorb too much energy from me. Even having left this entry not responded for over a week, I've been thinking (and forgetting) on and off what to write in it. So, Mauricio, thanks for making me waste my time this way! ;-) I hope this fact counts as a legal fifth thing.

Kewstoke is connected to the town of Weston-super-Mare by the mile-or-so of Kewstoke Toll Road but since 2005, there has been no toll collector. Unsurprisingly, the number of the least desirable vehicle types (Chelsea tractors/SUVs and light goods) using this coast road has doubled while the toll has been missing. Now the council is looking at putting up the season ticket rates from 5.50 to somewhere between 22.00 and 35.00 if they bring the toll back. A seven-fold increase? The alternative is to abolish to toll: which do you think is more likely? The latest report lists

"Unrestricted access and egress between Kewstoke and Weston-super-Mare"

as a benefit of abolition. Becoming a rat-run between the town centre and M5 is a benefit for who exactly? Certainly no benefit to the residents of Kewstoke or the top end of WsM who get the extra traffic wriggling along small roads with junctions not designed for that flow. Probably no benefit to drivers if they start to rely upon a hazardous road along the cliff-tops, which can be totally closed by just one break-down. It also goes against the Joint Local Transport Plan which says the council will

"direct traffic and particularly freight onto the most appropriate roads. Manage safe travel taking into account the current and desired uses of the network. Improve quality of life for local people."

Are press releases like Toll Road Accidents Reduced trying to convince us that driving along the cliff-tops is safe? More reports can be found among the items of the Strategic Planning and Economic Development Policy and Scrutiny Panel

I’m trying to learn ruby, but having no inspiration of what to write with it. My girl suggested I post “Will code for films” and see what people would pay to have written .. I expect very little. Still who knows? I’m suffering connectivity issues again, which are making me actual freetime difficult to spend. Grr. To follow the meme: Five random facts:

• I believe that garlic can be used to enhance all food. Even ice-cream.
• My first scar was given to me by my sister, when I was approximately six weeks old. Families, eh?
• I have lived in the same flat for 2.5 years, and in all that time have never opened the bedroom curtains/blinds.
• I have twelve bottles of Single Malt in front of me. Current favourite? A balvenie.
• I rarely dress before noon.

And for bonus points: “My girl” refers either to my sister, or my girlfriend. Context usually makes this obvious if it matters…

There seems to be a bit of a fuss around Vista's Content "protection" mechanism going around the 'Net these days; someone made some review of it in terms of the effects this will have on the hardware industry, which was mentioned by a few people on Planet Debian, and also on Bruce Schneier's blog. The argument, basically, goes like this:

• To view "Premium Content" on Vista, you must have a computer that consists of drivers and hardware that are vetted by Microsoft as being "ok".
• For this hardware and these drivers to be "ok", you need to have created your hardware to implement cpu-to-device encryption, and have done a number of other things that require huge gobs of money to properly develop.
• Hardware manufacturers will do this, but that will require them to ask more money from consumers.
• As a result, everone will pay, even those who don't run Vista (such as Linux and MacOS users)

Personally, I don't buy that argument. "Premium Content" (really, Crippled Content) will only be available to those users who actually have hardware and software which is capable of viewing Crippled Content. While it might be a problem for home users not to be able to view Crippled Content, I can't think of any reason why you would want to be able to view Crippled Content on your enterprise desktops. As a result, Enterprise users will continue to buy the cheapest hardware available that still accomodates their needs, much as they do now (I have yet to see the first enterprise desktop with one of those extreme 3D-capable cards...). And if just one manufacturer decides that the Enterprise market is enough of a market for them not to support Crippled Content with (a subset of) their hardware, then I can't imagine there being a problem in finding affordable hardware anymore. Eventually, people will understand that Crippled Content is much more of a trouble than it is worth—a DVD player is just as cheap, and doesn't require you to have a humming, noisy PC in the living room—and Vista's Crippled Content will go the way of the dinosaur. Where it belongs.

Following a bug report earlier today, Jeff committed a quick fix to our svn archive. A few minutes ago, I wrapped it up as version 0.0.9 of r (pronounced littler), put it into the local directory and page here and sent it to Debian's incoming queue. It should also hit Jeff's littler page at Vanderbilt in due course. The principal change is an added initialization to prevent the reported segfault, as well as a small improvement to the update.r script (which makes it easy to keep your CRAN packages up-to-date). I use littler all-day-long at work, and have found it rather reliable and easy, including during upgrades of the underlying R version.