Tuxpaint could be a poster child for l10n. It has translations now for 68 different locales. The large number of locales poses somewhat of a problem for testing¹. Tuxpaint 0.9.16 just released. During the release preparation, the manual testing of all of these locales drove me nearly insane. So to help out next time, I created the following bash script using xautomation², imagemagick and xprop (from xbase-clients):

#!/bin/bash
testname="tuxpaint" 
root_geometry= xprop -root _NET_DESKTOP_GEOMETRY  cut -d= -f2 
root_x= echo $root_geometry  cut -d, -f1 
root_y= echo $root_geometry  cut -d, -f2 
xc=$((root_x/2-1))
yc=$((root_y/2-1))
capture_tuxpaint ()  
   tuxpaint --startblank --nolockfile --lang $1 --640x480 --windowed --nosound &
   sleep 1
   xte "mousemove $xc $yc" 
   xte "mouseclick 1" 
   sleep 1
   xte "key Escape" 
   sleep 2
   import -silent -window "Tux Paint" $testname-$1.png
   xte "mousermove -120 -40" 
   xte "mouseclick 1" 
 
for lang in  tuxpaint --lang help  awk '$1~/^[[:lower:]]/  print $1 ' ; do
   capture_tuxpaint $lang
done

I’m not entirely happy with it, but it’s at least a starting point. Ideally, I’d make .pat files to use with visgrep to find coordinates for the button images instead of hardwiring the approximate button positions. Also, the script needs a companion script to configure the system for testing (i.e. perform the locales configuration and install all fonts). Here are the resulting screenshots which show up a few problems with the translations. It looks like the quit dialog strings have been updated since they were first translated, so now we need retranslation for several languages. Also, there are some languages, like Swahili and Klingon, for which there are no locales in glibc in Debian. I’ll have to talk to the glibc maintainers about that. And for that matter, I don’t even know if a DFSG-free Klingon font exists. In any event, I’m delighted with the results, and look forward to using xautomation more for GUI testing.

¹ For one thing, several languages require special fonts. For another, there is no way to get tuxpaint to tell you what locales it supports. Granted, there is --lang help, but this is a crude approximation, as the mapping between language and locale is arbitrarily hardwired (which hmh on #debian-devel irc pointed out to me is just plain wrong). It doesn’t help me at all in the arduous task of configuring glibc locales so I can test them. For that, I need to look at i18n.c.

² I tried using xmacro at first, but xmacrorec just made my pointer jiggle back and forth. It seemed like it was updating the position for a short distance, and then X was resetting it back to the former position of the pointer. Some strange interaction with my window manager, perhaps? But ultimately I am happier with the xautomation approach anyway.

I&aposve been dawdling and delaying writing about our trip to wt:Halifax (Nova Scotia) two weeks ago for some reason, but I&aposm bound and determined to get some info down on, uh, electrons about it right now.

Hella facts about Halifax We flew out of Trudeau airport eeeeearly on a Friday morning; I&aposd shopped a bit on the Air Canada site and got $99 each-way tickets from Montreal on their wp:Air Canada Tango program, but they required that we be on the 7:50AM flight. Air Canada used to be one of my favorite airlines, but they have been getting continuously disproportionately high prices and conversely worse amenities (pillows and blankets now cost extra, thank you very much). Discount flights in Canada are pretty sparse these days, with the collapse of Jetsgo in 2005 and the recent repositioning of CanJet for charters only. So, you just have to take what you can get. The flight to Halifax was quick and painless; Amita June slept most of the way there. The airport there is pretty small (yay small airports), so we buzzed through baggage claim. Cabs into town were a pricey flat-fee of $52, which got our hackles up, so instead we waited half an hour and took the Airporter shuttle ($16/person) into Halifax proper. We got to see a lot of the Nova Scotia countryside from the shuttle -- lots of leaves turning and conifer forests. We had reservations at the pretty and historic Lord Nelson Hotel, well away from the waterfront, but still in the downtown area, near Dalhousie University. The Lord Nelson is in the "Splurge" section of Halifax hotels on Wikitravel, but since this trip was for my birthday and our 2nd wedding anniversary I thought it&aposd be nice to stay there for one of the 4 nights we were in town. But when I called to make a reservation, I was able to get a very competitive rate, mostly due to a healthy 40% CAA discount, and I booked us for all 4 nights. I&aposd asked for early check-in, but our room wasn&apost ready at noon, so we tried the Lord Nelson Pub for lunch and a beer. The food was tasty and the atmosphere was, uh, pubby. We pawed through the stack of tourist-info documentation that we&aposd picked up at the info desk at the airport, then went up to our big and well-lit room for a mid-afternoon nap. Yes, all three of us. When we woke up, Maj and Amita June went for a walk across the street to the pretty wp:Halifax Public Gardens. It&aposs a very nice Victorian-era public park with disturbingly large geese roaming about. When they got back, the three of us headed down to the waterfront for an early dinner. Halifax&aposs streets are very steep -- they virtually plummet into the water. But we walked straight down to Water Street then meandered along looking at the sights. Our intention was to eat at the Privateer&aposs Warehouse, a building with a bar and two restaurants stacked on top of each other. It&aposs part of the Historic Properties on Upper Water Street, a collection of restored buildings with shopping and food. But the Warehouse turned out to be too rambunctious for us on a Friday night, so we instead went around the corner to Salty&aposs for a slightly more sedate meal on the water. We had good food; Maj had some very nice crab cakes and I took on a large seafood salad. Amita June chomped on really tasty fish and chips. The walk back up the hill was a bit tough, so we stopped in the Rogue&aposs Roost brewpub on the way home for a little strengthener. Unfortunately, as it was after 8:30PM, the baby wasn&apost allowed into the pub. So, we had to leave her tied to a parking meter while we had a... just kidding. We retired to bed after a long day, all three. tags: halifax travel amitajune nova scotia

California Dreamin&apos All the leaves are brown, red, orange, chartreuse and saffron here in Montreal, yet we&aposre off to wt:San Francisco tomorrow morning (early) to visit friends and family. I love going to see my parents and brothers and sister-in-law and nieces, but I also like going back to see the wt:Bay Area (California). It hasn&apost always been like this. It used to be that when I went back, it felt like I&aposd never left, and that the life that we&aposve made here in Quebec was just a story I told myself. San Francisco seemed real; Montreal seemed distant. San Francisco was where I was supposed to be; Montreal was where I stubbornly and irrationally insisted on staying. (The fact that I stayed in a room in my parents&apos house didn&apost help with the stepping-backwards feeling.) But it&aposs been a few years, and Maj and I have been married here, had a baby, and made a business for ourselves. Even though we don&apost own a house (yet), we&aposre putting down roots. Now when I return to California, it feels like a visit -- like traveling to just another destination. And you know what? California is a fabulous place to visit. Northern California even more so. San Francisco is a spectacular place on the edge of the ocean with music, art, redwood trees, organic food, and a sense of humor about itself that no other town quite has. It will be good to get back to SF for a while. It will be nice to take the baby around to see people and things that she hasn&apost ever seen before. We&aposll be in wt:Palo Alto to stay with my folks, visit my brothers in wt:San Francisco, up to wt:Petaluma and wt:Oakland to visit friends, and maybe even down to wt:Big Sur for a campout next weekend. I&aposve got the Web 2.0 Conference that I&aposm covering for LinuxWorld. And I&aposm sure there&aposll be more in there; we need ot dip the baby&aposs toes in the Pacific sometime soon. tags: california montreal home

This just in this morning:

Dear Dirk Eddelbuettel,

This is to notify you that your entry into the 111th Boston Marathon on Monday, April 16, 2007 has been accepted, provided that the information you submitted is accurate.

[...]

Yay! This was using the time from Sunburst in June but given Sunday's time I even get to run in 2008 too.

Ideal mobile text editing device redux As I read the responses¹ to my search for the ideal mobile text editing device, reality began to set in. The heating season is now upon us, and even used technology meeting my criteria would likely exceed my stated budget. Furthermore, I’d risk replacing my current issues with a whole new set of issues and end up with a less-than-ideal mobile text editing device. So I have rethought the problem and have decided it would be best to work on with what I have now while I wait for this ideal device to arrive on the market. Keyboard While I can’t change the keyboard of the ZR-5000, with a practiced lighter touch on the keys I can, in fact, touch-type passably well. It has served me well enough to draft several blog articles so far. Software Although not up to the high standard set by Vim, for quick note-taking, I don’t really need a fancy editor. My thoughts flow directly through my fingers into the device with only light editing. Cut-and-paste, motion keys and delete are the bare essentials. Anything more is a frill. Synchronization I do have an ACTiSYS IR-200L infrared dongle for my PC. The trouble is, although this is supported in Linux using IrDA, the ZR-5000 insists on speaking ASK-IR which is not supported. There is a Windows-only program, ZRLink, which might work. I’ll try it either on an XP system at work, (... mixed reviews out there as to whether it will work on recent Windows,) or under Wine. I can get the dialogs to display properly on Wine, but I have my doubts about whether serial emulation works. My initial tests at home under Wine indicate it doesn’t. (Could #277618 have something to do with this?) There is a 15-pin serial connector on the device, but I have no cable for it. And there’s a PCMCIA slot, but compatible devices are likely limited to older, harder-to-find components: either a 2M CF card or a modem card. While I have the latter, it exceeds the power available from batteries and I have no DC adaptor for the unit. Perhaps I overrate synchronization anyway. My best articles are rewritten from scratch more than once. Summary Living in an embarrassingly technology-rich country, it is too easy for a geek like me to convince himself that his gadget cravings are needs whereas, in fact, there is still plenty of life left in the devices he already has. After all, my venerable ZR-5000 was given to me by a fellow who figured if any one of his friends would still be able to use it for something, it would be me. Well, I won’t let him down. I’ll stick with it and make it work. There is one virtue of this device I doubt if any modern device of the same form factor can match. After a week of daily use, I still haven’t had to change the 2 ordinary AA NiMH batteries. Top that.

¹ Thanks, everyone, for your responses. Although there were the inevitable few that mentioned modern devices way over my budget, and I’ve decided now to stick with the ZR-5000, your suggestions did help me bring the real issues into focus.

Thanks to Don Armstrong's improvements to the performance of version-tracking in the BTS and Anthony Towns's tweaks to dak, as of the middle of last week, all NMUs uploaded to Debian unstable will cause the bugs mentioned in their changelogs to be marked as closed in that version, instead of just being marked as fixed. This is a great benefit to the release process, since previously, bugfixes in NMUs were still falling off the radar as soon as they were uploaded, with no automatable way to check whether a given update stuck in unstable fixed release-critical bugs that we needed to have in testing for the release. So these guys get a big thank you from me for helping to ensure etch only ships with the bugs we want it to ship with. ;) The new setup also has the advantage that bug submitters finally get the same, real email for bugs closed in NMU as they do for bugs closed in MU, instead of being left in the dark as they were before. But that only takes care of bugs closed in NMUs that happen between now and the release -- it does nothing for the roughly 1200 RC bugs that were already fixed in prior NMUs that haven't been acknowledged by the maintainer. Who knows if any (or how many) of those are still open in etch right now? Rather hard to tell when we don't know what version closed them, isn't it? So with a lot of help from Adam Barratt this weekend, we've marked about 800 (egads) of these RC bugs as closed in the corresponding NMU versions, with a brief note to the submitters. In the next couple of days, we should find our way to the end of the list, at which point we can think about ignoring the 'fixed' tag over on turmzimmer.net. Also fixed now is bug #388431, so people should be able to stop worrying now about their users chewing up the CPU with real-time scheduling. Nothing like a maintainer upload of a base package one year in the making, being uploaded after it's been frozen. So make that... 801 bugs closed?

In the English language, it is so trivial to create new words. In no domain is this quite so evident as the world of computers. Thus, informally amongst Debian users, you’ll often hear “apt-get it” or simply “apt it” which has the virtue of being equally apt a term for using aptitude. Now, I have no problem with people using these verbs. They’re precise, if a bit geeky. But really, shouldn’t there be a more general verb to cover this activity? Back when apt was new, and nobody else was installing packages this way, the lack of a general term made sense. But these days, in certain user communities, you might hear “yum it” instead. How many variants does the English language need? One per apt-like installer? Compare this with the evolution of instant messaging. Back when ICQ dominated the field, “ICQ” was synonymous with instant messaging. These days, although you might occasionally still hear people say “ICQ me” or “Jabber me” (where the protocol is important, because both participants must have access to that specific service) we can more generally say “message me,” encompassing in one fell swoop all possible protocols. Or if you prefer, the awkwardly geeky but more precise term, “IM me” (though arguably slightly less useful than “message me” because it seems to exclude irc, the king of all chat systems). So, what’s the equivalent verb that means “conveniently installing software from one or more software repositories by merely asking for the package by name”? My mind draws a blank.

Even people with good intentions can get things wrong. This article talks about the importance of typography and information design in web design, but I can't read it without making my browser window larger... I don't wish to rant specifically on the above page. Actually, I think it's author has a properly positioned heart. It is, however, a poignant reminder of a common problem I have. My laptop has a 10.6 inch screen. It's very small (and cute!), and it's never a problem, except for one thing: web pages that think they know better than I do how wide they should be, how big the font should be, and just blindly assume that I'm fine with either resizing the window or getting a bigger screen. Of course, this was a problem with the 14 inch screen of my previous laptop, too. And it was often a problem with the 20 inch screen I had when I used a desktop, unless I allocated an entire virtual desktop for a maximized browser. So perhaps it's not dependent on the screen size, after all. (I'd be happy to do experiments, if anyone wants to send me a couple of 30 inch TFT screens, though.)

Sometimes the things you want don't happen until you stop trying so hard. For as long as we've had Intel-compatible computers here at home, my parents have been running Windows. At first I didn't care—this was before I had even heard about Linux, let alone install it—but as I became more and more involved in Linux, I wanted more and more for them to make the change, too. Especially given how I'm still supposed to be responsible for making sure their machine keeps running; if I wasn't, I wouldn't care as much. These are the approaches I've taken to try to convert them, and why they failed:

• At first, I tried convincing them that Windows sucks and that they should use "something else, something better". This approach utterly failed, simply because Windows did not suck as much as I claimed it was. I was advocating something I believed in, but my arguments weren't fully on target. Whether or not this was intentional isn't something I remember fully (it's been somewhere about nine years), but I do remember it did fail because of that.
• Next, I made Linux boot up as default. They still could boot up Windows if they so chose, but they had to make a decision at exactly the right time. This approach utterly failed because it caused them to associate Linux with annoyances. Bad idea.
• The next step was to get annoyed at having to fix Windows every few months because of viruses and spyware and whatnot, and just not doing it. This was not a conscious decision; but having to reinstall a system from scratch is no fun, and eventually I got so fed up with it that I kept postponing it. At some point this turned into a strategy to subvert them into running Linux, by giving them "temporary" replacements for things that broke down. This would start with installing Free Software on Windows; using Thunderbird for e-mail, or OpenOffice.org as their office suite. Some of these replacements (such as Thunderbird, after I explained the security issues in Outlook Express) would be accepted with ease; others (such as OpenOffice.org, where my dad was much more used to Microsoft Office) would face initial resistance. They have eventually come to accept all of them, however.
  The approach failed because I was never up-front about my intentions (even if initially there were none, they did eventually surface). As such, they kept seeing some things as "temporary" replacements and never invested any time into trying to learn the system, whereas I was postponing reinstallation as long as I could. Eventually, this led to an argument which resulted in the next strategy.
• The next attempt was a direct result of the failure of the previous one; I asked them to give the system a chance, and they agreed to seriously try Debian for a few months. After those few months, we would sit together and decide what would be done; I promised to reinstall Windows if they decided that Linux wasn't good enough. Contrary to what I expected, the approach failed. Their main argument was that it was too slow. This was not totally unexpected, since their system at the time was a 133Mhz Pentium I running Windows 98 (I believe); installing Sarge with Gnome on that was a bad idea. I had tried a few things to speed up matters about halfway through the experiment; but unfortunately that didn't cut it. I now realise that the reason the attempt failed was that I was insufficiently prepared, and that I had to cobble together a workable environment for them in just a few days. Had I had a bit more time, I could've looked around for a useful yet not resource-hungry interface that would've made the system useable for them, and they might have accepted it. Oh well.
  Or I could've just bought them a new system and have them use that. Hah.
• After the failed attempt, I just plain gave up. I didn't remove the Linux partition from their machine, but I did not expect them to boot it anymore, either. A few months passed. I received an SMP box from Osamu, and replaced their aging box with my 650Mhz Pentium III. Eventually, my dad asked me about creating some poster for the theater group where he was directing a piece. What he wanted to do (having an utter mish-mash of letters of all sizes and forms as a backdrop) required a DTP application, or at least a decent graphical application; while I am aware of such applications for the Windows platform, I do not actually have them. So I said "I can help you with that, but it'll have to be under Linux". I rebooted the box, installed scribus (which, through the miracles of synaptic, looked to him like I was just fine-tuning a few things), showed him how it worked, and let him do it.
  A while later, he wanted to print out a picture. Similarly, I know of Windows applications to do this, but I helped him use The Gimp—under Linux.
  Another while later (now a month ago), they wanted to keep better track of their income and their expenses. Again, I know of Windows applications to do this, but gave them gnucash, because I know that best. This actually is the first application in the list that they now use on an almost daily basis. These days, when I get up and take a peek at their system, more often than not it runs Linux. And since I configured it (at their request) to run 'shutdown -h now' by cron at 1:30 AM (to force them to go to bed), this means that they actually choose to run Linux in the morning now, rather than just not bothering to reboot or shut down the machine when they want to. I expect they've finally chosen to use Linux instead of Windows for the things they want to use a computer for, even though they don't know it themselves yet. I can only be happy about that.

All in all, my message is this: if you want to convert people like my parents—who couldn't care less about all this freedom stuff and whatnot, shit just has to work for them—to Linux, then you should make sure that they have a reason to use it. They didn't use it when I tried to push them behind the curtains. They didn't use it when I tried to push them openly. They only decided to use it when, eventually, they had a solid reason to use Linux: there were applications there that weren't available on Windows. Of course, there's nothing in gnucash, the gimp, or scribus that prevents me from installing it on Windows. But installing software on Windows is such a pain—and, well, I did have a hidden agenda.

Tony tagged 2.6.18-omap1 yesterday. This has nearly got to the point where all the "easy" devices on the E3 are supported out of the box. I need to clean up the modem bits for inclusion - currently it's done with early_serial_setup which I'm sure is wrong but my attempts to do it with a platform_device haven't met with much success. I'm sure half an hour with a hammer will do the trick. That basically leaves the more intrusive or non fully functional drivers; Matt Callow's mailboard and camera work and Mark Underwood's sound driver (unfortunately still not complete :( ). All of these are currently against 2.6.16. I tried to get the sound working under 2.6.17 but didn't get anywhere with it. If I can manage to find some time I'll try again with 2.6.18. Not that I have a lot of time at present it seems. Spent last week in Northern Ireland, Cambridge, London and Reading and this week I've got LinuxWorld (I'll be on the Debian stand, of course). I've had a bunch of things to try in terms of getting SA1110 UDC working for the Balloon which should probably take priority over the E3 sound. Meh. Can I have more hours in the day? Or a teleport would probably be better.

As a little side project I got interested in adding a MicroID extension for MediaWiki. MicroID is a teensy little format for asserting that the owner of a particular Web user account is also the owner of another account (like an email account or an OpenID). Adding support to MediaWiki means that Wikitravel users can verify their accounts with claimID or other similar services. Fun stuff, relatively easy, and useful for everyone -- the best kind of hacks. tags: microid mediawiki wikitravel identity openid

Confidential to Mako So, one thing that makes a Web site WebSoftwareFriendly is making sure (as best as possible) that each page has one and only one URL. It makes it easier when doing summaries and statistics and such for Web software to know that one page has One True Identity. Otherwise, it divides that page&aposs count of hits, incoming links, citations, etc. etc. between the two (or more) different URLs. The Web software then has an incorrect view of the world and is less useful for human beings. Planet Debian is a site like that. You can get to the same front page either through http://planet.debian.org/ or http://planet.debian.net/ . It may be a good idea to use a 301 redirect (moved permanently) to tell browsers and other Web software that one or the other URL is the definitive one. (I&aposm partial to the .net one, but not for any good reason). The following code somewhere in the Apache configuration for Planet Debian should do the trick:

RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^planet\.debian\.net [NC]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://planet.debian.net/$1 [L,R=301]

It just says, "If the client requests an URL that doesn&apost use our preferred hostname, redirect them with a 301 HTTP code to the same URL at the right hostname." Web software like blog aggregators, Firefox (or Iceweasel) extensions, or any other software that does HTTP stuff at a low level will benefit. tags: mako planet debian websoftwarefriendly nosey

Geograph Quick link here: the Geograph British Isles project is totally cool. Creative Commons-licensed photos for every map square in the wt:United Kingdom and wt:Ireland. Their coverage is already quite good. tags: geo geograph photos cc

First day of Brumaire -- the foggy month -- today, and the Montreal weather seems bound and determined to fulfill the promise of that gray name. The day of pomme (apple), which reminds me that we&aposve wanted to go apple-picking in the Autumn since we arrived in Quebec a few years ago. But something seems to push us inside on October and November days. Locals say that the best way to confront Winter is face-first, getting outside and being active in the snow. I&aposm not sure; it&aposs never worked out that way for me. We had snowfall a couple of days ago; in the middle of a rainstorm big wet clumps of snow started falling from the sky. I was working out at the gym around the corner from our house, and people in the weight room went to the windows to watch the snow fall. Halloween is the traditional day for the first snow for Montrealers; more than a week early was kind of fantastical, like a long-odds horse winning a race. tags: montreal weather brumaire quebec

Mo&apos blogging I can&apost say why, but my production has dropped off precipitously on this blog in the last week or so. Partly it&aposs had to do with an increased workload; also, being out of town for two long weekends in wt:Hudson (New York) and wt:Halifax (Nova Scotia) threw me off my pace. And I&aposve felt some pressure to cover these trips and other things going on in my life, which has kept me from writing short sharp posts. But mostly I think it&aposs a case of keeping up a feedback loop for myself. When I&aposve made a blog post, I watch for responses on Technorati or Planet Debian. I add one more thing or one more post. I get in the habit of blogging and then it comes more naturally in short bits and movements. I guess it all comes down to the typical but hard-to-remember suggestion: if you want to do something, you have to do it. tags: blogs

BarCampMontreal Montreal&aposs BarCamp event turned out to be even better than I anticipated. I got up late on Saturday morning and I wasn&apost at the downtown location till quarter to 10. It was held in Fred Ngo&aposs swing dance studio, Cat&aposs Corner, on the power-centre block of 400 Ste.-Catherine. The studio had tables and chairs and a reception area set up, and it turned out to be a great venue -- lots of room and a big feeling because of the mirrors on the walls. I got there just in time to catch Chris Hand of Zeke&aposs Gallery give an excellent talk about collecting art and participating in art culture in Montreal. Not only was it extremely informative, but it charged me up to be more involved in Montreal&aposs art scene. It also set a great tone for the rest of the day -- talks at the event ranged from alternative voting systems to art and research projects to technology surveys to demos of new products and Web sites. It kept the entire thing really fun and refreshing -- different parts of your mind used at different times. I was glad to see that Heather Kelley and Damien had come; I&aposd made a point of inviting them, so it was good to see their faces. They did one of the first presentations, about their upcoming games-and-art event, GAMMA, at SAT on 9 November 2006, straddling the gap between the industry-oriented Montreal International Games Summit and the gamer convention Festival Arcadia, not to be confused with Montreal&aposs other top export, The Arcade Fire. Man, games are hard. Anyways, they demo&aposd a game they&aposre developing for GAMMA in which the gameplay action responds to arbitrary musical input; they&aposve got several teams of developers who are putting together games to fit this criterion. Interesting concept, fun and cool. There were a ton of great discussion, but I think my favorites for the day have to include Hugh McGuire&aposs talk about the excellent Librivox project; Anne Goldenberg&aposs presentation on Wikigraphe, which I&aposd seen before but which continues to boggle; Austin Hill&aposs discussion about raising money and building Zero Knowledge; and Sylvain Carle&aposs talk about successful consulting. The best part of the talks was that I came away feeling smarter and with new projects I wanted to work on. S bastien Pierre&aposs demo of data-mining del.icio.us tags in revealicious made me think hard about wp:data clustering algorithms (something I&aposve wanted to work on for a while). Patrick Tanguay gave a great talk about co-working setups in other cities, with the aim of starting one here in Montreal. As a near-independent worker who&aposs getting tired of his home office, this was a pretty fascinating idea, and I&aposm hoping to follow-up. And Simon Law&aposs talk about Web 2.0&aposs negative influence on Open Source software gave me a lot to chew on for my visit to the Web 2.0 Conference coverage I&aposm doing for Linux World. All in all, I thought the event was the best that BarCamp has to offer. Montreal has such a rich technology and Internet culture, and some of the smartest people in town were at the event. All our major tech sectors were covered, and people interested in hacking, yakking, and entrepreneurship were in a nice balanced attendance. We were all in one room together, which kept up a good atmosphere, and we had only 15 minutes per talk, which kept things well-varied and interesting. If I had any criticisms, it would be merely that I can think of so many people I wish had been there. There are a lot of women involved in Montreal technology and Internet culture who weren&apost in attendance, and Montreal&aposs majority francophone community was underrepresented. But I think those are outreach problems that need to be handled for the next time around. Fred Ngo is already talking about BarCampMontreal2, which may or may not be coordinated with RecentChangesCamp. Yesterday&aposs Montreal Gazette had an article called Geekfest comes to town which featured a photo of Heather and Damien in the print edition. Simon Law got an excellent BarCampMontreal photoset on Flickr, and also invited me out to take photos together (fun). There&aposs a BarCampMontreal post-mortem for those interested in a follow-up discussion. tags: montreal barcamp barcampmontreal

N Dollars... American! One of the funny things about Canadians is that when they talk about a large amount of money, they suffix the dollar amount with the word American to let you know that it&aposs really a large amount of money. Like, "I just ordered this t-shirt online and it cost me thirty-five dollars... American!" or "He moved to New York and now he&aposs making 85 thousand dollars a year... American!" It&aposs less of a punchline than it used to be -- American dollars used to trade at about 1:1.5 or 1:1.6 to the loonie, but now it&aposs hard to find 1:1.2. Still, Canadians talk about American dollars like D&D players talk about platinum pieces. They&aposre just a qualitatively different currency. I note this because I joked about in previewing Austin Hill&aposs talk at BarCampMontreal, and he did note that they raised $80 million American for Zer0 Knowledge. I had to stifle a laugh during the talk. Austin writes - Hi Evan. Yeah that&aposs funny. I may have mispoke - we raised $55 million american which at the time was important to distinguish because that was $80 million canadian. Just wanted to be clear. Loved your presentation BTW tags: dollars canada american

Project Blackbox Everybody&aposs all abuzz about Sun&aposs innovative design in their new Project Blackbox. It&aposs a datacentre that&aposs built into a big shipping container; whenever you need a datacentre you can just ship one of these blackboxes to wherever you need it. I have to admit that it&aposs an amazing piece of in-your-face metaphor. I mean, when a company is shipping tech jobs overseas, they can make it all the more poignant by actually taking the jobs and putting them in this big shipping container and stenciling "JOBS" on the side and packing it on a cargo ship and sending it off into the sunset. And you don&apost really use these big containers unless you&aposre shipping something faaar away. If your job is in that box, man, you can just kiss it good-bye, because baby it&aposs gone. Maybe the best way to ship out one of these jobs containers would be to have a big bulldozer that comes through the middle of town, crushing the community infrastructure under its treads, and then picks up the big shipping container full of tech jobs and carries it off to a big ship in the harbour (rolling over some more schools and houses and small businesses) and then sends it off to somewhere crazy and foreign where they keep monkeys as pets as a matter of course. In any case: good job, Sun. I hope this works out great for you. tags: jobs sun blackbox shipping container project blackbox

One thing I've wondered about for some time: does having a job in a computer related field help or hinder working on Debian (if you leave out those of us who are lucky enough to get paid for working on Debian)? I've noticed that on many evenings, when I get home, I don't want to sit in front of a tube for the rest of the day, but sleeping is impossible because I still have a head full of ideas.

Just a few weeks ago, the world heard the news of the tragic school shooting at an Amish school in rural Pennsylvania. A deranged man entered the schoolhouse, bound and gagged female hostages, brought along torture equipment, and shot 10 of them. 5 died, and the remaining 5 are believed to still be hospitalized.

Back in 1990, a deranged man committed a series of murders near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. The story mentions 5 people that were killed.

Both were tragic situations. Both men killed people that had their whole lives in front of them. Both shook an entire community.

But look at how the communities responded. The Amish responded like this:

CNN reported a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: "We must not think evil of this man."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts," he told CNN.

The Amish have reached out to Roberts' family. Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

An article in a Canadian newspaper the National Post stated that the Amish have set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. (Wikipedia)

In addition, the Amish invited the Roberts family to attend the funerals for the Amish girls he killed.

Gainesville reacted this way:

Dianna Hoyt, Christa Hoyt's stepmother, said Rolling's execution has been eagerly awaited by the victims' families. Some will be inside the prison to witness it. . .

Sadie Darnell, who was the police department's media spokeswoman at the time and developed enduring friendships with the victims' families, said Rolling's execution still matters, even if it also provides him more of the notoriety he sought.

"Retribution . . . is important because it represents that our society is holding that person accountable," said Darnell, now a candidate for Alachua County sheriff. (CNN)

We've all heard of murders that have taken place lately. Usually they are accompanied by calls by politicians, victim's family, and sometimes even clergy to kill the perpetrator. In the days after 9/11, there were reports of anybody that looked Middle Eastern being attacked in several different places around the country.

I have never understood this great desire for revenge. How does that help anyone?

What the Amish did was right religiously and morally. They truly followed the New Testament call to love your enemies and forgive. It is not easy to follow all of Jesus' teachings, and nobody said it would be. But they are doing it, and they have already begun healing. Reports are that the Roberts family has become friends with several of the Amish in the area, and they are working to help each other out after this horrible tragedy.

Even putting religion aside for a moment, the Amish actions are quite simply the right thing to do. By spreading love instead of hate, and friendship instead of revenge, they have succeeded in making sure that no cycle of violence starts there.

In contrast, 16 years later, the families of the victims in Florida still aren't healing. They are still angry and bitter. They are still seeking revenge. They hope that their lives will get back to normal after the murderer is killed. But after 16 years of stewing about it, will they really? And what about the family of the murderer, whose lives certainly must have been a mess for the past 16 years? They will now lose a family member. Does anyone care about them, or will they now turn angry at society and possibly spread the pain more?

Imagine what would happen if so many more people around the world took the Amish perspective -- to forgive those that wronged us. How long must it be before we can forgive? How far back do we spread our hate? Do we still hate those that were involved in 9/11, or can we forgive them? Do we still hate the Germans for what their ancestors did in World War II, or can we forgive them? Do we hate politicians with whom we strongly disagree, or think are liars? Do we still hate all those that have wronged us personally -- someone that stole something from us or the sadistic boss?

Knives, electric chairs, and bombs do not buy reconciliation. They can not "win over" the hearts of others. They do not make our lives easier. Hate brings more hate, and more resentment.

Forgiveness is not easy. We all hope that we will never be involved in such a tragedies as these. But let us follow the example the Amish have shown -- forgive for all things, big or small, important or not, painful or not.

Only then will we be at peace with ourselves, and only then will we have the chance to be at peace with our neighbors.

This weekend, I started modifying the way I use disk space on rock, my home desktop and server. rock used to be a PentiumIII running at 650Mhz, until I received an SMP box from Osamu Aoki when he moved back to Japan and couldn't take it with him. So rock is now a dual Celeron 433Mhz, and the machine that originally served as my desktop went on to replace pop, my parent's box. A little while later, rock's hard disk died, and I was left with a single 13G hard disk (or so I thought). At that point, I used the sarge installer to install rock on an LVM system, so that I could easily enlarge the volumes in the installation later on, without having to start copying files for no good reason. When I later on bought a second-hand 80G hard disk to add to the LVM system, I found that there were in fact two more hard disks inside rock, which simply hadn't been connected to the IDE controllers; one was 20G large, the other 40G. So I added them all, and enlarged all the volumes that could use some extra space. A while later, I started worrying. What if one of the disks would die? Reading the documentation, I found that I would lose all the LVM volumes that were on the dead disk, even if only partially. Obviously there's also an option to get LVM to mount partial volumes to get at the data that's still available, but it didn't sound too hopeful. In short, I became convinced that what I was doing wasn't all that sure for my data. Obviously I have backups of the important stuff, but avoiding failure is always preferable over having to use recovery procedures, even if they're good recovery procedures. So I decided that I would migrate to a setup that would use at least some redundancy; that way, I could stop worrying as much. And since I had four disks, there should've been a way to do that. I started partitioning, and found that I had overlooked a second 40G hard disk that rock was using; so rather than creating a RAID5 array on top of two 33G partitions (on the 40G and 80G disks) and one RAID0 array or something similar (combining the 13G and 20G disks), I decided to create a 40G RAID5 array composed of two 40G disks and one 40G partition on an 80G disk. All other disk space (the other 40G on the 80G disk, and the 20G and 13G disks) would be combined into an LVM volume group for less important data (such as the squid cache and other large parts of /var, swap space, and a bunch of digitized CD's of which I still have the originals). Also, the RAID5 array wouldn't just be one large volume or so; instead, I created another LVM volume group in the RAID array. Theoretically I could of course combine everything in one volume group and use pvmove and/or the right options on lvcreate to force important volumes on the RAID array, but then having separate volume groups for RAID/no RAID would force me to think carefully before managing volumes, which is never a bad idea. So on Friday I started moving data. This would involve running pvmove on a particular physical volume until all data would be removed from it; then run vgreduce -a <vgname> to remove the physical volume from it; use the just-freed drive to create new partitions on it to hold the live data; copy the live data over; and start doing pvmove again. Rinse, repeat, until all data is copied over and/or you've freed enough disks to create the RAID array. Luckily one can create a RAID array in degraded mode, or the procedure would've involved updating my backups, verifying them, wiping the hard disks, and reinstalling. As it is, I could get away with creating partitions that were just large enough to hold all data, and hoping people wouldn't try creating more data. I started working on this on Friday, and am just now, over 48 hours later, finishing up. It should've been possible to do all this in far less time; but rather than explaining what went wrong, let me just say, for the record, that I hate hardware. And that I should plan better. Anyway. The last stumbling block was the fact that the system simply wouldn't boot from the new root device. The reason was fairly obvious; the initrd was generated when mdadm was not installed yet, so had to be regenerated. But after calling yaird with the right options, it still wouldn't work. It took me a while to figure it out; but eventually, I found that yaird will read your /etc/fstab to find out about your root device; that it will see how it can get at that root device (where it's smart enough to know about md devices and LVM devices etc); and that it will then add the right software to the initrd based on that. Sure enough, my temporary root device that I had put outside of any LVM thing on /dev/hdb3 did have /dev/hdb3 as its root partition. So yaird didn't think mdadm was necessary. Heh. Quick edit fixed that. So now I have my important data on an LVM system on RAID5, and my less important data still on LVM. Me happy.

On Friday, a branch for GCC 4.2 finally got created, which means that we will hopefully see a release in a few months. The branch should have been created ages ago but the number of regressions just wouldn't go under 100 until recently. During that time, basically since I completed my tests with GCC 4.1, I've been busy testing snapshots of 4.2. I've mainly been testing on em64t (amd64), powerpc and ia64, but I also did some runs on alpha, mips, mipsel, s390 and sparc. Recently, I started testing it on ARM. Being an embedded architecture, ARM isn't terribly fast compared to some other architectures. However, Intel's IOP line is quite interesting and is used in a number of NAS devices. They typically include SATA and often have expandable memory. The device some ARM people are currently working with is the Thecus N2100. A port of debian-installer is underway but more on that later. Since my N2100 is not permanently connected to the Internet, Riku Voipio kindly gave me access to his to do some GCC tests. I started several weeks ago using gcc-snapshot 20060922-1 and it has been compiling happily since. I sort packages by their age, starting with old packages, so while there has been quite a bit of progress since I started, lately it has been going quite slowly. With about 2000 packages compiled in 3.5 weeks, I reckon that GCC 4.2 will be released before I've compiled the full archive. I've therefore been thinking of using distcc to speed the process up. The idea is to run the build process natively on the ARM box but use distcc to perform the actual compilation on another box, namely on a fast machine that has an ARM cross compiler. Unfortunately, I don't have access to such a setup right now. However, I strongly believe that this is a good alternative to test GCC on slower systems and in fact Bill Allombert is currently testing whether it could be used for the m68k port. Finally, Intel's new IOP 34x CPUs are also interesting for this kind of work given that they feature a cache and go up to 1.2 GHz with two cores. P.S. If someone is interested in fixing bugs, I have tagged package bugs related to GCC 4.2.

One of my longstanding frustrations living in Boston is the lack of artisanale espresso sources. Starbucks is, of course, ubiquitous (I think there are four within a block of where I work), and at least espresso drinks there aren’t bad, but there is little-to-no artistry involved. They aren’t aiming for perfection, they’re aiming for absolute consistency, mass appeal, and caffeine. Ever since Starbucks started opening in strip malls and grocery stores like Safeway, I’ve doubted whether they even care about maintaining an image of serving an elite population. This article presents some good background on the art of espresso, but apparently the only place it’s happening in Greater Boston is on the other side of the Charles River, which might as well be Prince Edward Island. (See also this article about Murky Coffee, my and Steve’s favorite coffee place in DC). I’d love to support Emack and Bolio’s, my neighborhood coffee shop, but the coffee and espresso there are inconsistent at best. I don’t get the feeling that the baristas there get a lot of training. Or that they even consider themselves to be baristas (according to Wikipedia: “one who has acquired some level of expertise in the preparation of espresso-based coffee drinks,” or “a professional who is highly skilled in coffee preparation, with a comprehensive understanding of coffee, coffee blends, espresso, quality, coffee varieties, roast degree, espresso equipment, maintenance, latte art, etc.”). Hey, while I’m talking about Starbucks, I should mention that Google Maps is wrong. There is no Starbucks at 1510 Centre Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. It’s nearly a mile away from the real Starbucks at 1810 Centre Street, that has the same phone number. Wouldn’t you think Google could have figured that out? Can someone tell them? Anyway, I recently discovered the Channel Cafe (deserving a PageRank boost), just a brisk 8 minute walk from my office down Summer Street across the Fort Point Channel, actually has quite respectable espresso and espresso drinks. I first went there for lunch several months ago and the place was mostly empty — more recently, there seems to be a line up the steps every day. (The cafe is in the basement of art gallery space and is owned by one of the Fort Point artists.) Aside from excellent espresso, they have a great menu, especially for vegetarians, with entrees such as baked tofu with pan steamed vegetables, peanut dipping sauce, jasmine rice, mandarin and oranges, and basil and ricotta ravioli with fresh tomatoes, zucchini, sweat pea and mint coulis, and parmesan cheese. All for under $10, which is a bargain in the greater financial district. I’m afraid the line up the stairs may soon be out the door… It’s a good sign for the burgeoning Seaport District, though.
(…more espresso art…)

This morning I got back to an article that has been on and off my work-plate for a year now, one that I have to turn in to a discussant for my 4S panel as well for an edited collection of articles on the intersection between art, activism, and biopoltics. Part of my efforts meant attacking a virtual “stack” of articles and one of them was one of best journalistic articles I have read in a long time. Exceedingly clear prose is combined with good references, hard numbers and just the right amount of passionate verve to make reading actually fun and not just another nameless, faceless cog in the academic research wheel. The article mentioned a couple of interesting studies that while sadly not linked from the article (but I am going to take that was an editorial and not authorial decision), they were pretty much cake to find by doing a little poking and prodding on the Internet. So for example, one of them was published on PLoS Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature and stands pretty strongly on its own right. But what is even better are the long list of citations (many with links) that would otherwise be frankly, a *total* time consuming bitch to find like the correspondence between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies: # Food and Drug Administration Division of Drug Marketing Advertising and Communications (1997) Effexor warning letter. Rockville (Maryland): Food and Drug Administration. Available: http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/june97/effexor.pdf. Accessed 14 October 2005. Total gems given to you right there on a silver plate. That is what I love about Internet based research… On the other hand, this extreme access is not always so peachy. The amount of data now available can be experienced as a totally mind-numbing, frightening, chaotic infolanche (as one of my old adivsors liked to call it), which translates into a lot of academic hunting and gathering not to mention all the sorting, sifting, cataloging, and then of course trying to remember what the heck you have just amassed in the first place, even with the aid of tags and all I am not sure if things have gotten easier or harder because this is all I personally know but what I do know is that there are times when I just love the hunt, losing myself for hours, following links, gathering articles, enlivened, exicted about research and there are others when the woolly mammoth of infomartion gets the better of me.

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk about Extremadura i18n meeting at Tokyo Debian monthly meeting. This meeting was organized by Junichi Uekawa and wonderfully 20 or more people came and filled the meeting room (awesome!), thanks! My paper is included in this PDF [in Japanese]. I picked up and spoke some themes from what we discussed at Extremadura; i18n task force, Pootle system, and language-pack/tdeb. PO-based translation has an advantage and a disadvantage. The tools support PO are mature and PO is very useful for the short messages. But using it for documents, such as manuals or Web pages is not so useful. Especially translating to Japanese sometimes add/delete/reform sentences. Some attendees suggested that we would always use the original XML (or something) format for translating/reviewing and have PO format in the central database. Masayuki Hatta pointed the license of translation. For example, Japanese is completely different from English, both words aren't always correspond 1 on 1... Translators use their creativity power. He said translators would have a copyright for their translation instead of original author. When I talked with Warren Togami was Fedora US leader last month at Tokyo, he said his project asked to agree "translation license agreement" to all translators. If we Debian or Debian-JP apply a central translation system like Pootle and use its translation memories, it's time to consider making similar license. Although current idea of Tdeb is still under the development, most attendees loved that idea rather than language-pack. For me, the goal of this meeting was not only speaking my experience report but recruiting more people for i18n/l10n working also. I'd like to recommend Nabetaro-san for next i18n meeting attendee instead of me, and Noritada Kobayashi for next of next. I strongly suggested attending next Debconf to them also. They are hardly working for Debian i18n/l10n in Japan. I hope attending such meetings expands their personal connections and motivations. There were two other sessions at the meeting. Matsuyama-san demonstrated creating Flash on Debian by using ming, and Junichi talked about profiling apt-get by oprofile tool. Both topics were interesting for me.

This seems to be a happy day for Debian. It certainly gave me the warm fuzzies when I read people's reactions to the Slashdot item, the steering committee, Madduck's and Joeyh's reflections on how things can work and some comments on IRC. It pleased me enough to get some new bloging infrastructure going in order to be able to chipe in.

There definitely is hope for Debian and change for the better is possible (and actually happens), as seen in the improved climate on IRC.

As with every change for the better, there is need of "positive crisis awareness" in order to reflect on possible changes, build momentum to overcome the status quo and implement changes in order to improve the situation step by step.

Crisis awareness is the awareness that there is a problem that needs solving. In contrast to negative crisis awareness, where one is paralyzed and unable to act on the danger and basically rolls over and dies, positive crisis awareness motivates to initiate change in order to avoid the crash and burn point and turn it into an opportunity of improvement, perhaps.

And exactly this is what I see emerge more and more: People who are no longer satisfied with the current situation and formulate thoughts on how to achieve improvement. A year ago we saw this with the hostile climate on mailing lists and IRC, now people realize that Debian has a lack of leadership, and that this is actually a problem.

We are still not the welcoming and friendly project we ought to be, but we are less hostile already and people know in what direction they want to move in the future (the more friendly one, thankfully). People have realized that hostility and pissing contests are evil and not a sign of l33tness, as some might have thought some time ago. But a culture change is happening, and if we stay on top of the issue we have a very good chance to not only omit the negative, hostile things we used to do but also come up with actively inviting and friendly things we can do.

The same is happening now (on a lesser scale so far) with the leadership area. The great thing is that if Debian takes up its issues and continuously improves there is hardly a limit to its potential. Not the first and strongest, but be the most persistent and patient will win in the end. And if we have incentive and urge to change we might just manage to keep up a continuous improvement process.

I think *that* incentive is the greatest thing we have to thank Ubuntu for.