Search Results: "ron"

30 September 2006

Mike Hommey: Compiz & aiglx in unstable. Woohoo !

Thanks to David Nusinow, Thierry Reding, Kristian H gsberg and Michel D nzer to have made this possible. It’s really nice looking, but damn, this is soooooooooooooo slooooooooooow. I already tweaked my X configuration, so that GL applications would be fluid, and they are, but compiz is so much slower than all the rest of the GL applications that I really wonder what’s going on. Is it so much more difficult to display 3 windows than to display the full earth with plenty of textures ? As a bonus, for an unknown reason, it cuts the nautilus desktop window at a width of 1024 instead of 1280., which makes the right of the screen a warp zone… (For the record, I have a Radeon Mobility 9200 with the x.org drivers ; I should try with the proprietary ones) Update : The slowness might be related to this message:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b Update 2 : According to this comment from Michel D nzer, the above message is only cosmetic.
I solved my slowness problem ! I just needed to switch back to XAA instead of EXA as an acceleration method (Option “AccelMethod”). There still remains the geometry problem… even fullscreened windows are limited to a width of 1024, though the gnome panel is correctly at the right-most of the screen (I use a vertical panel on the right of the screen).
There is also a cosmetic problem when switching from “normal” use to GL use (like cube rotation, window moving with wobbly, etc.): the window contents are kind of blured, but there’s nothing we can do about that, except have the windows blured in the same way in the first place.
Ah, and scrolling in windows is more sluggish, now. Update 3 : After some tracing of compiz, and some reading of the source code, it appears that the width limit problem is indeed due, as suggested by Hez in the comments, to GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE being 1024 (you can display it with glxinfo -l grep GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE). I wonder if, as suggested by erich, there is really an environment variable to change that…

29 September 2006

Jos Parrella: Several stuff

WebGUI and DateTime::Cron::Simple If you use WebGUI and feel concerned about the removal of DateTime::Cron::Simple (due to license, or more precisely, non-license issues promptly noticed by Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich), you can use DateTime::Cron::Parser, which has a compatible API. Since more people were interested in rewriting the module, an official discussion at the DateTime mailing list is going on, and therefore this module does not aim to be an official replacement. Some people point out that DateTime::Event::Cron might do what’s needed here with a little tweaking and patching. Choose what you need. MiniDebConf in Venezuela If you are subscribed to debian-devel-announce, you might have read (eng) about the Venezuelan Minidebconf, taking place from October 14th. in Maturin. While this is not the first event we organize (we’ve celebrated the Debian Day two years in a row, nation-wide) we’re pretty excited about having international visitors participating with us in a joint effort to promote collaboration with Debian. If you’re interested in following the event, you can take a look at the Wikipage (eng). Every comment and collaboration is greatly appreciated.

Jeff Bailey: I'm an Internet Service Provider!

The Canadian Information Processing Society has a certification program known as the ISP program. It *actually* stands for Information Systems Professional, something which the person who picked the acronym clearly wasn't.

Anyhow, this is the first key step towards my application to the University of Athabasca's Masters of Science in Information Systems. My plan is to start this degree late next year as a part-time distance program.

Next step: Two letters of reference, and a CV.

Russell Coker: SAK, ctrl-alt-del, and Linux keyboard mapping

A common problem with Linux systems is when Windows users press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login prompt and reboot the machine.

To fix this some people change the ^ca line in /etc/inittab to just disable the reboot function. However this is not desirable because sometimes you want to reboot a machine with a simple keypress.

Another problem that has not been widely considered is the use of fake login prompts by attackers. This can be implemented in either text mode or graphics mode. All the fake login prompt has to do is display something that looks like a real login prompt, accept a user-name and password, verify the password (a localhost ssh connection is a good way of doing this) and then abort. In the case of a text-mode login the user will think that they entered the wrong password, in the case of a GUI login via an XDM program the user will think that the login program just crashed. Then the attacker has access to their account.

The solution to the fake-login problem is the use of the Secure Attention Keyboard (SAK) feature. When invoked this feature makes the kernel kill all processes that are on the virtual console in question. If you make CTRL-ALT-DEL the SAK combination then pressing those keys will cause the kernel to kill any processes that are attached to the current virtual console and preventing the ability of hostile programs to forge a login prompt (which is the same as it's purpose in Windows).

The next thing to do is to make another combination used for system boot. A reasonable combination seems to be CTRL-ALT-BREAK as those keys are widely separated and the combination is not used for anything else.

If you put the following in a file named sak.map (or whatever you want to call it) then the command loadkeys sak.map will apply the change. Note that when creating a keyboard map you should do it on a machine for which you don't mind being forced to perform a hardware reboot. It's easy to make a mistake and give yourself a keyboard mapping that is not usable. Another possibility is to do such testing on a machine that allows ssh logins, you can then login via ssh and run loadkeys -d to correct any errors you might make.

control alt keycode 119 = Boot
control alt keycode 83 = SAK
control alt keycode 111 = SAK
control altgr keycode 119 = Boot
control altgr keycode 83 = SAK
control altgr keycode 111 = SAK

Note that the above covers both ALT and ALT-Gr keys as well as the numeric keypad and regular versions of the delete key.

dumpkeys -l gives you a list of all possible keyboard combinations. showkey will display the number matching any key you press and will exit after 10 seconds of inactivity.

Martin-Éric Racine: Linutop: The Teaser Trailer

Linutop: Front and Back

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: What have I been doing?

On the server: 
$ history awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN  FS=" "   print $1 ' sort uniq -c sort -rn head -10
    234 really
     34 fg
     25 cd
     24 screen
     23 tail
     22 ls
     17 less
     16 spammer
     13 host
     11 man
Spammer is a simple shell function: 
spammer()  
        really iptables -I INPUT -s $1 -j REJECT
On the laptop: 
$ history awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN  FS=" "   print $1 ' sort uniq -c sort -rn head -10
    297 echo
     62 ./graph-reduction
     53 darcs
     30 gdb
     10 make
      6 ssh
      6 LC_ALL=fi_FI@euro
      6 cd
      4 valgrind
      3 top
./graph-reduction is a program I wrote during the week. I’ll blog about it separately. the LC_ALL lines are likely all LC_ALL=fi_FI@euro luit slrn so that slrn would send Latin and not UTF-8 (the latter is strongly discouraged in sfnet).

Andreas Schuldei

Future beach front property

Today I watched the "An Inconvenient Truth" film which was recommened to us at the foo camp preceeding Euro OSCon. Steve had already blogged about it shortly. While i enjoy the summer evenings at the end of september that I experienced this week, I think we are heading for very serious and even hard times. I would guess that we all will soon have to cut back on many areas of our compfortable lifes: less warm showers, more sweaters in winter, not keeping your computer on 24/7, no more car, no more flights. I have been thinking on where to move, given the delicate position that europe is in with its dependency on the gulf stream.

Incidently i also ran into this cool website today, which makes one consequence of global warming a little bit more realistic. If you are lucky your house in the middle of the city will be beach front property soon.

Yet another example of that positive crisis awareness is needed. Act today and we might just get a major global crisis. Don't act and we might get mass extinction.

28 September 2006

Biella Coleman: The Silence of Failure in Silicon Valley

After about 6 months of initial research in the Bay Area, I had to make a choice over the future direction of my more directed fieldwork. Would my project be on Silicon Valley, its religious fervor for the exuberant technology start-up, with the geek entrepreneur (probably with some affiliation with Standford) at its center stage, or would it be more broadly about free software and the culture of geekdom? I chose the later, for various reasons, but I think I wanted to write a dissertation that did not bleed with cynicism but instead flowed and flowered with a lot more joy than could have been possible if I had stayed within the grasp of the start-up and the venture capitalist. That said, I learned a lot about SV, took a lot of notes, and read most anything I could get my hands on whether the work of San Jose Anthropologist,Jan English-Lueck or published in magazines like Mother Jones, Harpers, and even the National Geographic. One of the luminaries that writes about SV from a cultural perspective is Paulina Borsook. And she is fine writer who admittedly has ticked me of on occasion (to be precise because she collapsed too much of geek culture into that of the specific SV world in Cyberselfish, which at the time I found almost personally offensive, probably more than it should have). Today I just came across a short, older but very illuminating piece of hers The Disappeared of Silicon Valley (or why I couldn’t write that piece) which is as much about the limits of historical representation in general as it specifically about the failings of start-ups in SV at the end of the recent boom and bust cycle. So her goal was simple enough: To find people involved in starting new high-tech whose companies had died.. and to find them to get a more visceral and cultural window into this experience. But it was a near to impossible task. Despite her impeccable record with confidentiality and a far flung social network, she could not get anyone talk about these ostensible failures. There has been a good amount of writing on the limits of historical representation because the archive or what comes to be the archive is a function of power and it is usually the powerless who are left out, as the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so eloquently shown. But while it is true that some CEO of a dethroned corporation may be powerless in some sense of the word, it is not what we associate with the word. But in fact, the power of stigma of failure in a region that magnifies an already well-develiped cultural fetish of success (especially, I imagine, among male graduates, of places like Stanford Buisiness School), is enormous, so much so, that it seems one can only write about the experience, as Barsook has done so well, through the reality of a lack, through silence.

Axel Beckert: wApua 0.06 released

I today released version 0.06 of my WAP browser wApua (Release announcement at Freshmeat). The one big new thing is user friendly documentation: wApua and wbmp2xbm (which has been renamed from wbmp2xbm.pl) now have POD documentation and therefore also man pages. Besides that a lot of minor bugfixes and enhancements complete the new version. The other big new thing is that there now is a Debian package of wApua. The package should work fine on Debian Woody (3.0), Sarge (3.1) and Etch (upcoming 4.0) and probably also works on other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu. Thanks to sponsoring by Christoph “Myon” Berg the Debian package is also in the Debian New Queue and hopefully will be included in Debian Etch.

27 September 2006

Gunnar Wolf: How to change a large bill

Last Monday, I went out to meet lvaro and the LIDSOL gang. At 18:00, I had surely missed his Cherokee talk, which I have seen already a couple of times... Anyway :)
...So I had to take the metro. Two stops only, but I didn't feel like walking - and they would probably leave if I took ~30 minutes to arrive. Problem: I didn't have any metro tickets, and I had only a MX$500 bill on me. Very previsive, I stopped by the ATM just by the station's entrance, and got MX$100. One metro ticket costs MX$2. The $100 bill was quite worn out, though, even glued together by some adhesive tape, so it was not _that_ surprising when the clerk didn't want to take it.
Clerk: (quickly taking the $50 bill and several coins she had put in the window opening for me to pick up) Sorry, I cannot take that bill.
Gunnar: Ok, well, I understand... I'm sorry, then, I must pay you with this $500 bill...
C: Sorry, I don't have change for that. (looking over me, unsympathetically, to the next in queue) How many?
G: (blocking her view to the next guy) Well, so what alternatives can you offer me? I need to take this trip.
C: Go change your bill somewhere else.
G: As you might have well noticed, it's worn out. And I'm not buying $450 of tacos.
C: I don't have change.
G: I see you have quite a bunch of $10 coins, in towers of ten...
C: You _really_ want that?
G: Looks I have no choice...
(Visibly pissed off, the clerk just shoves 4 full stacks and one stack minus a coin in the window opening. No, no bills were offered, not even the $50 one she had lying in front of her)
(Gunnar, patiently, takes one by one the 49 large coins and puts them in his pocket)
G: (smiling, as if I had put the third consecutive 7 in Mao) Thank you very very much for your kindness!
Of course, after that, I left with ~1kg in my left pocket. Enough to kill many people.

Alexis Sukrieh: More and more alioth://, less and less localhost://

That’s pretty cool to have such a useful environment like alioth for handling collaborative maintenance. I joined the Debian Perl Group recently in order to put my Perl packages into the hand of the team, and that reminded me how alioth is a powerful tool when you’re about handling a debian package with others. As I receive quite often some po/po-debconf updates for the package backup-manager, I decided to exhume the pkg-backup-mngr project, in order to handle the source with subversion, and to let the translators commit their changes. I now use enormously svn-buildpackage and I feel pretty happy about that. I even think about opening an alioth project for every single package I maintain (and of course, which cannot be handled by an already existing team). Update I apprently forgot the last paragraph of that post in my mind, and the mail Philipp Kern sent me made me aware of that (pointing to Rapha l Hertzog announcement about collab-maint). Indeed, Philipp, I wanted to conclude my post with something about collab-maint, I guess it’s done now. Thanks!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Announcing 'littler'

Earlier today, Jeff announced our new toy r (aka 'littler') with this post on the r-help list. What is 'littler'? We summarized it briefly in the post and on our respective or pages:
GNU R, a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, provides a wonderful system for 'programming with data' as well as interactive exploratory analysis, often involving graphs. Sometimes, however, simple scripts are desired. While R can be used in batch mode, and while so-called 'here' documents can be crafted, a long-standing need for a scripting front-end has often been expressed by the R Community. littler (pronounced 'little R' and written 'r') aims to fill this need. It can be used directly on the command-line just like, say, bc(1): 
	$ echo 'cat(pi^2,"\n")'   r
	9.869604
http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html Equivalently, commands that are to be evaluated can be given on the command-line 
	$ r -e 'cat(pi^2, "\n")'
	9.869604
But unlike bc(1), GNU R has a vast number of statistical functions. For example, we can quickly compute a summary() and show a stem-and-leaf plot for file sizes in a given directory via 
	$ ls -l /boot   awk '!/^total/  print $5 '   \
		 r -e 'fsizes - as.integer(readLines());
			print(summary(fsizes)); stem(fsizes)'
	   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
	     13     512  110100  486900  768400 4735000
	Loading required package: grDevices
	  The decimal point is 6 digit(s) to the right of the  
	  0   00000000000000000011112223
	  0   5557778899
	  1   112233
	  1   5
	  2  
	  2  
	  3  
	  3  
	  4  
	  4   7
And, last but not least, this (somewhat unwieldy) expression can be stored in a helper script: 
	$ cat examples/fsizes.r
	#!/usr/bin/env r
	fsizes - as.integer(readLines())
	print(summary(fsizes))
	stem(fsizes)
(where calling /usr/bin/env is a trick from Python which allows one to forget whether r is installed in /usr/bin/r, /usr/local/bin/r, ~/bin/r, ...) A few examples are provided in the source directories examples/ and tests/.
At least one shortcoming already became apparent: by calling it r to not trample on the real R binary, we obviously overlooked that there are certain operating systems on which case is ignored -- ouch. So Mac users may have to install it as a littler binary. Other comments, as seen in the mailing list thread, are mostly supportive. littler can either be downloaded from either the Vanderbilt BioStat Wiki or my local archive. Also available is SVN access via 
	svn  http://littler.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ littler
Debian users shall get it via apt-get install littler as soon as it leaves Debian's NEW queue. In the meantime, the configure && make && make install three-step works for us under any of Debian testing, Ubuntu Dapper, OS X, and with both R 2.3.1 and the pre-releases of R 2.4.0.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Who Gets to Define Freedom?

Recently, I had an opportunity to publicly discuss my projects around definitions of freedom for creative work with Lawrence Lessig at a workshop at Wizards of OS. In particular, we talked about my article Toward a Standard of Freedom in which I advance a call for a list of essential freedoms, a definition of free culture or content, and a goal around which a social movement for free creative works can be based. At WOS, Lessig and I agreed that its likely that, eventually, some standard (or standards) of freedom will take hold. Like me, Lessig seems to think that this is a good thing. We both agree that there will be, and should be, competing definitions of freedom, competing social movements, and a long conversation about what essential freedom really to creative works is before we get there. Our most fundamental differences seem to stem from a disagreement about who gets to define freedom or, perhaps more precisely, who the communities of producers should listen to in order to find out what essential freedoms in the domain of different types of creative works are. Lessig is extremely reticent to make any claims about what essential freedoms might be: he does not want to speak for creative communities that he does not intimately understand. While he seems to be suspect of any project making normative claims in this regard, he disagrees most strongly with projects like mine that offer definitions of free content and expressions that are intended to be applied broadly and outside of the explicit domain of the definition's initiators recognized experience (in our case, online encyclopedias and software). Lessig explained that he trusts musicians -- and in particular, Gilberto Gil, the progenitor of the CC Sampling license -- when it comes to defining essential freedoms for music. Similarly, he trusts programmers -- and in particular, Richard Stallman -- when it comes to defining essential freedom for software. Since Richard and I are less accomplished, less well known, and less experienced musicians, Lessig feels most comfortable erring in favor of Gil where there's a disagreement between us about the scope of essential freedom for music. While his is a convincing argument, I disagree with Lessig's position for a series of reasons I'll try to discuss here. First, it is important to remember that Gilberto Gil does not represent all musicians. There are many artists and musicians who support my definition. There are many (and probably more if the CC license usage statistics are any indication) who support Gil's lower base-line. It's worth remembering that, even though we disagree, both Gil and I are offering controversial and extreme positions. Today, most creators think that giving away their work at no cost, even non-commercially and barring derivatives, is crazy. To illustrate why this is not a problem, we can look again to free software. In the free software community, we see that Richard Stallman does not speak for the programming community at large when it comes to defining essential freedoms to code. In the mid-eighties, Stallman spoke for himself and a tiny handful of like-minded others. Today he speaks for many more but it's still a tiny fraction of all programmers. It's hard to remember when you're down in the trenches but the idea that software should be free remains a marginal and kooky idea to this day. Due to the hard work of the free software movement, many people have adopted Stallman's definition of essential freedom for software and many more will. But it is not mainstream and it didn't get here by being so. Setting an ethical standard and a goal for a social movement should not be about being popular. It should be about describing an ideal. It should be about standing up to injustice. It should be about answering the question, "what sort of world do I want to live in?" Not only is this process not a popularity contest, it will, in all likelihood, stand to make one very unpopular. Being respected or seen as an expert within a field will help with the adoption of one's ideal. Programmers trusted Richards Stallman because he'd written large parts of the very popular programming tools like GNU Emacs and GCC. However, it wasn't from his experience in programming that this insight into the importance of software freedom stemmed. It was from his desire to be a good, ethical, neighbor and member of a technical community. To this day, most great programmers continue to disagree with Richard. Second, I'm interested not only in talking about the ability of authors to choose how their works are used but in the rights of readers. You don't need to have a platinum album under your belt to have an informed and important opinion about how music should be heard, experienced and distributed. Lessig's current push for a "Read-Write Culture" is very fixated on creators and re-mixers. That's only one important piece of the community that frames and deals with this problem. Third, while I agree with Lessig that discussions around definitions of free culture must happen separately in each separate artist community, I see several compelling reasons why a single definition of freedom may be a very good idea both tactically and philosophically. For example, it provides a common rallying cry around which different creative groups can collaborate and it mirrors the common treatment of different types of works in current IP systems. More importantly, there are fundamental similarities between information goods and the way they are created, distributed, and consumed on computers and in digital networks. I've highlighted this before in quoting Eben Moglen on the ethics of creating artificial scarcity in goods with zero marginal cost. As a final note, it's worth stating that one doesn't need to feel that all works should be free to support a definition of freedom. Richard Stallman provides a great example of this. Stallman doesn't think that works of opinion or works that are designed primarily to entertain need to be free. However, he does believe that the term "free" should refer to a fixed set of freedoms so that he can take such a position. Without a definition of "free," a position on what should or should not be "free" is impossible. I believe that freedom to distribute and produce information goods like art and content and software are embedded in a set of freedoms and rights for both the producers and consumers. I think that to some degree (and quite probably a less extensive degree), Lessig agrees with this. Unlike Lessig, I don't believe that one needs extensive expertise in the creation of a particular type of creative good to make true statements about what is ethical or unethical in the production, distribution, and control of it. To use admittedly extreme analogies, you don't need to be a slave owner (or slave for that matter) to say that slavery is wrong. You don't need to be a farmer to make arguments against or in favor of vegetarianism or in favor of free range animals. I don't believe you have to be a technologist to claim that certain freedoms to technology are essential. I don't believe that you need to be an musician (successful or not) to make claims about essential rights to music. I welcomed the conversations and challenges that Lessig offered and it was encouraging to see agreement on the process of discussion and debate going forward. After the workshop, Lessig suggested that we continue the conversation. I look forward to doing just this in other venues and in other ways.

26 September 2006

Clint Adams: Remember when Hugh Laurie used to be British?

Sam, French people don't understand irony, so I know you didn't write this on purpose.

Biella Coleman: The Long Fire Of Political Action

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
-Rainer Maria Rilke I have made it back from NYC after a pretty intense few days spent at the Open Minds Conference and Icarus-hosted workshops, Get Your Freak On. Both were incredibly interesting and I felt the ambivalent rush of excitement and fear that follows the prospect of working on a new project. While I have spent some time researching critiques of psychiatry, I have not spent all that much time with the people involved, academically and personally, in the various movements. And there is nothing like seeing in the flesh and blood some very passionate political work to get the intellectual excitement brewing. The first time I went to a survivor conference and protest I was living in San Francisco, deeply involved in my hacker research. I learned about the movement from a civil libertarian John Gilmore, who drew inspiration from psychiatric survivors to develop his free speech arguments for drug legalization. I had never heard of them and was intrigued so I naturally poked around the web. And I was fortunate to find out that their conference was being held the following weekend less than 10 blocks from where I was living at the time. I made time to go and unsurprisingly, it was a powerful event, perhaps the most stunning conference I had ever been to. There was something awfully inspiring about a political movement in which the members had experienced heavy doses of trauma, often through heavy doses of “treatment” and yet found the energy, will, and life to engage in political action, and in a society that does most everything to dampen the fire of politics. This weekend was no less inspirational. Even at the academic conference, the personal stories of trauma, survival, and the complex ethical decisions of choice in a landscape dominated by one medical model, erupted frequently. These were important eruptions that sometimes probably for some felt out of place in an academic setting where such outpourings are discouraged, buried deep away never to disturb the calm and rationality of talks. But without them, the conference would have felt dry, staid, and sterile, which would precisely have been the most disappointing atmosphere to have created for this environment. All the talks were engaging and illuminating and it was great to see and hear many folks working on these topics and especially working to carve out a different political and somatic reality. For me, the talks by David Oaks and Jackie Orr were the most electric and hopefully I will soon get the videos of them as well as most others (as I (tried) to tape most of the conference) up for those who are interested. In the meantime, David Oaks has already
released his talk, which is worth checking out. One of the more interesting parts of the conference was that it gave a clear indication of one of the great successes and strengths of the mad movement, which is its staying power, its ability to survive (even if not necessarily known to wider publics) generation after generation, which is more surprising given that the vitality of so many of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, vanished or languished. This continuity was marked by David Oaks keynote speech entitled “Unite for a Nonviolent Revolution in the Mental Health System: What 30 Years in the Mad Movement Have Taught Me” and just by the fact that he and Celia Brown were there, both who have been involved for decades. Beyond that, it was also the new faces, the new groups, that include Icarus, and the
Freedom Center, that attest to the ability for this Mad Movement to thus far escape the cruel ravages of time and its intervention, often causing rifts within and across generations. Sasha Dubrul who gave a talk during the activist panel and founded Icarus four years ago talked about the deep alienation he felt when he first had encountered the rhetoric of psychiatric survivors and, even despite his deeply critical stance against psychiatry. He wanted to create an organization and a message and a place that resonates with our actual experiences of mental illness rather than trying to fit out lives into a conventional framework. It is a message that swoops into many territories that includes a stiff, unrelenting critique of psychiatry and the pharma industry all the while admitting that not everyone can survive without pharmaceutical drugs (and being deeply grateful for this), all the while also providing pathways to alternatives. It is not easy territories to navigate, due to the and cracks and crevices between positions but then again, most of life is filled with these bumpy textures and not a smooth plane free contradictions. If Icarus was born in part because existing organizations did not adequately address existing needs and desires, it did not grow and move away from existing organization but moved closer to them and is now is in alliance with
MindFreedom. And this is key. Difference in a political movement adds vitality, depth, opportunity but this can only be brought into healthy fruition with alliances. Otherwise, deep fragmentation follows, which given the already deeply fragmented nature of our lives, and of the political landscape, can end in political stasis. But so far, the Mad Movement has over years taken “mad anger” to fight a mad system, and given the last 30 years, I am sure will provide many more decadesof mad pride.

Amaya Rodrigo: When it doesn't really make any sense, but yet it does...

I was reading a disambiguation page in Wikipedia today. I quote:
SAD is a three letter acronym.

25 September 2006

Simon Richter: I'm #1, again

Recently, planet appears to bump edited posts to the front. Which is bad since I tend to blog from the train categorise (and reflow) later when I get home. Some posts (the "wacky ideas" ones for example) even got out of order. Since my perl foo does not exist at all (I suck at languages with weak type systems) I cannot even look into what happened. I'd be grateful for hints.

Jordi Mallach: Visited the opthalmologist

Today I went to the hospital to visit the opthalmologist. The good news: as expected, what happened the other day was just a case of optical migraine, which needs no treatment and I shouldn't worry about. Thanks to everyone who mailed me or commented in the blog giving advice or wishing me luck! The doctor examined my retina, and found nothing wrong with them that would cause lights or total blindness. He did find what he described as the start of retinal folding , which might be congenite, but I should keep an eye on in case it becomes a real problem. Apparently I should be vigilant to objects appearing with deformed shapes, etc. So I came back earlier that expected to office, but I really can't do anything here due to the pupil dilation. Everything is blurry, light is extremely annoying, and I'm writing this using a ridiculously big terminal font. The get decent sleep plan continues, and I've been sleeping the expected amount of hours since last Tuesday.

Russell Coker: quotes

At http://www.infodrom.org/Infodrom/fortunes/download/infodrom-linux there are a heap of quotes from Debian people, and more than a few from me. It's strange reading my own writing in someone else's quote file. Some things seem so removed from context that there is little point to them. For some things I couldn't even remember writing them and had to ask google. There were some things which seemed wrong, but google showed list aschives proving the quote file to be correct.

Also when googling my quotes I found that I had written an amusing and apparently quotable flame to someone who was far from the top of the list of deserving recipients of flames.

For anyone who reads the quotes, the Double Woody refers to Balvenie Double-Wood Scotch whisky. When Debian Woody was first released I would regularly bring a bottle of the Double Wood to Debian meetings.

Evan Prodromou: 2 Vend miaire CCXV

Happy new year, everyone! I was away over the weekend, working hard on Ignition 2006, and I missed the big day here in front of the computer. Instead I was out under the stars with Montreal Burners, having Burning Man fun out in the wt:Eastern Townships. I'm not sure if it happened this year, but I think next year it would be great to have a Debian:BSP in wt:Black Rock City. OK, sure, it'd be super-nerdy, and the connectivity is pretty spotty, but there are some long, hot afternoons out there and I know that there are at least two DDs that are on the Playa pretty regularly (me and Don Armstrong). I wonder if there are more? I wonder if we had a BSP, if lots more would show up? tags:

Usability So, my current computer usability problem has to do with the rockin' secure shell program OpenSSH. Here's what happens: I'm on a box and I have a new login goin' on. And I have to ssh to another box, and I get the message: 
Enter passphrase for /home/evan/.ssh/id_rsa:
This happens because I haven't run ssh-add when I logged in, to store the passphrase for the key with the current ssh-agent. So now I have two options:
  1. enter my password and then possibly forget to run ssh-add before running ssh again
  2. kill the current ssh instance, run ssh-add, then run ssh again
Both options suck. What would be nice is if I could enter my passphrase, and have that count as if I had run ssh-add. Like, after I enter it, the ssh client could say: 
Add this key to your current ssh-agent session [Y/n]?
...and then ssh would add the key, like ssh-add does, and continue with the login. Wouldn't that be great? I think this is the biggest usability problem I run up against in my daily work life. Which, y'know, is pretty good. [You might want to look into libpam-ssh] [See also http://advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary.html?start=90 ] tags:

Wikimania 2007 in Taipei I have to say that I'm a little wistful that wt:Alexandria wasn't chosen for Wikimania 2007. We had a really good bid to hold the event in Alexandria at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the "new" Library of Alexandria. I was getting pretty excited about going to the Mediterranean next year. But I think that Taipei is going to be a fantastic place to hold Wikimania, too. Holding the event in wt:East Asia will make it much easier for people there , in wt:Southeast Asia, and in wt:Australia or wt:New Zealand to come to the event. A Wikimania in East Asia will focus attention on the non-English-language and non-European efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation. Taiwan also has a really strong local Wikimedian group, with Wikimedia Taiwan soon on its way. Finally, a Wikimania in wt:Taiwan will re-emphasize the wp:Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China. Jimmy Wales has said on the record that Wikimedia will not censor its Chinese-language projects to comply with the PRC's firewall (the so-called wp:Great Firewall of China), and I'm sure an official event in the ROC will further highlight that point. Personally, I'm looking forward to a trip to Taipei, which will be a good excuse for some more exploration of Taiwan. And I want to congratulate the Taipei bid team. I was impressed by the amount of work that went into the Alexandria bid, and I'm sure they did a lot of work for Taipei, too. I know the Alexandria crew is optimistic for next year: starting the steps for making a Wikimedia local chapter in Egypt, and continuing to develop relationships with the local technology companies as sponsors. Should be interesting... it might be worth a trip after all! tags:

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