A new littler release (now at 0.1.3) just went out of the door this evening. littler provides r (pronounced littler), a shebang / scripting / quick eval / pipelining front-end to the the R language and system. This version adds a few minor behind-the-scenes improvements:

• interactive() now evaluates to false as you'd expect in a non-interactive scripting front-end. To restore the previous behaviour, new switches -i or --interactive have been added.
• Some of the 'cleanup' functionality described in Section 8.1.2 on 'Setting R callbacks' from the R Extension manual have been adopted.
• Example scripts install.r and update.r received an update based on lessons learned from the R 2.10.0 roll-out and package rebuilding.
• A few build issues were improved, a minor manual page formatting bug was fixed.

As usual, our code is available via our svn archive or from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue and will hit mirrors shortly.

Had you been on our yard tonight, you would have seen a strange sight. Me, dressed warmly (but not quite warmly enough), jumping on the icy and snowy hood of my pickup. Some maniacal fit? An obscure part of my 3-day-long taking out the trash routine? Not exactly. Before I tell you why I was doing such a strange thing and almost in the dark I feel compelled to take a detour through ancient Greek poetry. You heard right. I ve been reading ancient Greek poetry lately. Those Greeks were forever running around receiving signs and portents from the gods. If ever a bird flew by carrying a live snake, and you saw the snake bite the bird while looking over your left shoulder, you knew Zeus was telling you not to attack the enemy that day. Or something. And if you, fool that you are, attacked the enemy that day anyway, you should be not in the least surprised to find a spear through your shoulder in just a few pages time. If ever someone received a sign from Zeus in modern times, surely it was I, tonight. I say that because, as I was trying to close the hood on my pickup after charging its battery, the hood nearly snapped in two. The hood is supported by some spring-loaded brackets in the back, so to close it, you have to push down on the front. I did so, and was surprised that it was going down so easily. Then I realized, apparently in the nick of time, that only the front was going down. The back was staying put, aiming up in the air as ever. So I tried to straighten the hood back out. I then tried to get it down by pulling at it halfway back, but just couldn t get enough leverage to make it budge. So what next? Why, jump on it of course. I got it most of the way closed that way, then jumped/slid down, latched it in front, then crawled back up there to push down the sort of rusty mountaintop that had formed halfway down the hood where it was buckling. OK, sorted. So to recap By this point, I ve had the battery charging for 24 hours, inflated the tire, removed the bungee cord around the brake pedal, removed the battery charger, coerced the hood shut. Time to start it. I hop in, pump the accelerator a few times, and turned the key to start. I heard the sickening aaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRRRuuuuumphhh . of a weak battery. So it wasn t charged enough to crank fast enough to have any hope of starting in winter. So I go get the car, pull it up close, being careful to leave myself enough room to maneuver between it and the electric fence. I get out the jumper cables. Then it occurs to me: I have to open the hood again. DOH! I open it just a bit, and hook up the jumper cables. It turns over a bit faster. For just a bit. I get a small sputtering of life from it, but it fades faster than an enemy of Hector at the battle for Troy. So I have Terah come out and put her foot on the accelerator of the car while I try to start the pickup. This too proves futile. So I disconnect the jumper cables, close the pickup s hood with significantly less care than a 31-year-old rusty and nearly-broken hood deserves, roll the window back up, and go for plan B: 4 trips to the road with stuff in my car trunk, and leave the giant cardboard boxes that are covered with snow in the pickup bed for next month. Obviously I have displeased the gods. Forgotten to offer up a sacrifice to Penzoil, feared goddess of internal combustion, perhaps? Or perhaps it was just a sign that I need a new pickup? I m so convinced of the latter that I didn t even bother to replace the bungee cord. Postscript Terah walked in, and said, Ah, I thought I heard you writing a blog post. Yep. It s about pickups and the Greek gods. <very slight pause> Oh, of course it is.

For a long time it has been obvious that in all cases anti-piracy technologies discourage purchases and in many cases encourage piracy. I first discovered the significance of this in about 1991 when I attended a public lecture by a senior employee of Borland and a member of the audience claimed that the Borland product he bought didn t function correctly due to anti-piracy measures. The Borland employee firmly stated that Borland did not use anti-copying technology on any of it s products, didn t have any plans to do so, and the problem in question must have been caused by something else. Of all the hostile questions that were asked, this was the only one that caused the speaker to appear agitated so it was obviously an issue that was considered to be important within Borland. In the late 80 s anti-piracy measures were mostly based around creating floppy disks that couldn t be easily copied (violations of various aspects of the disk formatting standards). This meant that you couldn t make a backup copy of the data, so it wasn t uncommon for people to seek pirate copies of their commercial software for daily use to avoid wearing out their valuable original floppy disks. Then the dongle was invented and people who bought software sometimes sought pirate copies so that they could use their printer and their commercial software without having to change plugs on their PC. But in those cases the benefits to uncrippled software to the users were small. Now a large part of the battle on copy protection concerns DVDs. If you had a DVD of a recent movie and an MP4 which would you rather watch? Would you prefer to be forced to watch some anti-piracy rubbish for a couple of minutes at the start of the movie (with fast-forward disabled) or would you prefer to just start watching it? Would you prefer to be able to pre-program the sections of the movie that you watch (as some parents desire to skip the sex and/or violence in movies for their teenagers) or would you prefer to be forced to watch the movie straight-through with only a manual fast-forward to skip sections? Would you prefer to have a DVD that can t be played properly on many (most?) computers because of the CSS encoding or an MP4 that plays on everything from PCs to mobile phones without an issue? Would you rather have 100 movies in the spare space on your laptop hard drive when you travel and 1000 movies on your desktop system or the much smaller number of boxed DVDs that you can store? I think that in most cases a pirate MP4 will give a better experience than a DVD. So the question is, why pay for a DVD when in most cases you get a lesser experience than you will get from a MP4 file downloaded by bittorrent? One reason for buying the DVD is to support the film industry. But I doubt that such a profitable industry will get much sympathy in today s economy. Another reason is the morality, some people consider piracy to be theft (it isn t by definition theft requires that for at least a moment the property be completely in the possession of the thief) and therefore avoid it. One technical reason for buying a DVD is the fact that it may have multiple languages supported, it will have subtitles, it may have an audio track with the creators giving a commentary, and it may have extra scenes that were cut from the main release. I believe that work on adding subtitles to the video file formats is a work in progress, so it s only a matter of time before the DVD rips include all this extra data. Really the content creators should focus on making a product that meets the needs of users and that they want to pay for. Pirating books is technically possible, but almost no-one does it. Some successful authors such as Charles Stross freely publish significant parts of their work and Cory Doctorow freely publishes all his work in electronic form. Books just work well, they meet the needs of users and people want to buy them. Sure they can sell them second hand, lend them to other people, and it s technically possible to pirate them, but they remain profitable. On my documents blog I have a page of links to free short stories that I liked [1] and a page of links to free books [2]. It seems to me that creators of other copyright content should consider how they can be of service to their customers. We are all familiar with corporations and misguided individuals who get whiny about the supposed losses due to piracy. Bruce Everiss has unfortunately joined this trend and demanded the disconnection of Internet users based on unproven accusations of game piracy [3]. I don t know whether the game buying experience sucks as badly as the DVD buying experience, but based on the reports of locked-down consoles that have to be cracked before they run Linux I expect that the modern game industry is doing at least as badly as the movie industry. They need to provide things that users want! One thing to note is that a Windows or console game player who uses pirate games will probably buy some games at some future time, while someone like me who uses free software both by principle and because it gives a better user experience will probably never pay for a game (I haven t got time to play all the free games so I probably wouldn t even buy a Linux game).

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-books/
• [3] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/05/304149300-stolen-from-activision/

Well that is the end of my time off, tomorrow it is back to work. However my break started with snow and it seems its finishing that way.


Unfortunately despite my previous enthusiasm this weather is becoming a little tedious. Schools have been closed today so I had to child mind instead of getting anything done.

Speaking of getting things done...I have completely failed to do anything productive whatsoever for the last couple of weeks. I have played some computer games, watched some TV read some books and listened to music and you know what? Aside from a tiny guilty feeling, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I suppose I should apologize for not contributing to all those open source projects that could have used my help, but that would imply remorse which I seem to be lacking. Oh well

Mentioning music, I have acquired a selection of new music over the holiday which I ought to talk about. In no particular order:

• Iron and Wine - "Our Endless, Numbered Days"
• Paramore - "All We Know Is Falling", "RIOT" and "Brand new eyes"
  
• Phoenix - "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix"
• Lady Gaga - "The Fame Monster"
• The xx - "XX"
• Muse - "The Resistance"
• Cymbals Eat Guitars - "Why There Are Mountains"
• St. Vincent - "Actor"
• Carter Burwell - "Twilight-The Score"
• The Darkness - "Permission to Land"
• Oasis - "Stop the Clocks"
• Chameleon Circuit - "Chameleon Circuit"
• Hank_Green - "I'm So Bad at This" and "So Jokes"

Unfortunately none of it was outstanding which sometimes happens when I take a punt on a large pile of new music. On the upside none of it was particularly bad either, so a kind of "no win" deal. Though on re-listening the "XX" album is starting to grow on me and the albums from the DFTBA label are so inexpensive they are more than worth it.

Once a month, I take our recycling to the road. This is something far more annoying than most city-dwellers may suspect. For one thing, the road is about 1/4 mile away. Over a month, we fill up at least three large plastic trash cans full of recycling. If I walked each of those there to be picked up, then walked them back to the house after, I d have walked 3 miles. So, I use our $75 pickup to get the trash to the road. The process is a long one, and it starts two days before the recycling is due to be picked up. Monday, 5:30PM: Find an outdoor extension cord in the basement. Put on snow-suitable shoes. Go outside, plug the extension cord in at the elevator. Grab the battery charger, hook it up to the pickup. Unfurl and untangle the extension cord, plug it in. Blog about it if desired. Tuesday, 5:30PM: Go outside. Disconnect the battery charger, coil up the extension cord. Plug in the air compressor and get it going. Run the hose to the tire that keeps going flat and hope it reaches. Fill up the tire. Return the air compressor hose to the elevator, turn off the air compressor. Go to pickup and actually get in. Remove the bungee cord from the brake pedal that is holding it up, preventing the brake lights from being on 100% of the time and draining the battery even faster. Start pumping the accelerator. It s not a fuel-injected engine, after all. Crank the engine. Stop cranking, pump some more, trying to avoid the hole in the floor under the accelerator. Eventually get it started, hopefully. Roll down the windows to prevent the exhaust fumes from getting too strong. Drive the stuff to the road. Unload the three cans, plus all the extra cardboard from Christmas that didn t fit in them and is now soggy and snow-covered. Drive the pickup back to the yard. Park it. Replace the bungee cord on the brake pedal so it ll start again tomorrow. Wednesday, 5:30PM: Dress warmly yet again. Go to the pickup, hoping the tire is still inflated and the battery is still charged. I m going to be optimistic and assume they are. Hope that the pickup starts after only a few minutes of pumping. Go back to the road, only to find that the Kansas wind has scattered the trash cans and their lid all over the county. With luck, I ll be able to find them on foot. Sometimes, I have had to get in the pickup and drive down the road to find all my lids. Stash all of this in the pickup, drive it back to the yard, park, replace the bungee cord, and close it up for another month. I m promising myself that when I upgrade to a better pickup, it ll be one worth at least $200.

The Lenny version of the spamassassin package contains a regular expressions that considers as coming from the future mails dated in 2010. Starting from a couple of days ago, that has increased the possibility of false positives.
More information about that can be found in some blog posts such as this one and in the Debian BTS, bug #563245.

If you are running spamassassin on a Debian machine, you should probably upgrade it to avoid false positives. That can be easily achieved using the volatile version of spamassassin 3.2.5-2+lenny1.1~volatile1. More information about this update and instructions of how to update in this announcement from the debian-volatile-announce mailing list.

Generally, it is a good idea to have a volatile line in your sources.list. Read more about the debian-volatile project in their website.

Unstable users only need to make sure they update to the latest version available in the archive 3.2.5-7.

Contributed by: Stefano Zacchiroli

If you ever tried to determine what patches other distributions apply to some package you are interested in, you might have come to the same conclusion as I: It is quite an impudence how those are presented. If you don't give up, you end up with programs or scripts to extract many propietary source package formats, more VCS systems installed than you think there should exist. Thats when you start to love the concept that every Debian mirror has next to each binary package the source in a format that you can extract the changes easily with only tools you find on every unixoid. And that's why I love the new (though in my eyes quite misnamed) "3.0 (quilt)" format, because that makes it even clearer and easier. Sadly one problem remained: How to generate and store those patches? While you can just use patches manually or use quilt to handle those patches and store the result in a vcs of your choice, the newfangled VCSes (especially git) became quite good at managing, moving and merging changes around, so it seems quite a waste to not be able to use this also to handle those patches easily. While one can either use git to handle a patchset, by storing it as a chain of commits and using the interactive rebase, or using git to store the history of your package, doing both at the same time is tricky and not resonably doable with git provided porcelain. Thus I wrote my own tool to faciliate git for both tasks at the same time. The idea is to have three branches: a branch storing the history of the your package, a branch storing your patches in a way suitable to submit them upstream or to create a debian/patches/ directory from, and an branch with the upstream contents. I've an implemenation which seems to already work, though I am sure there is still much to improve and many errors and pitfalls still to find. Thus if you also like to experiment with handling patches of a debian package in git, take a look at the manpage or the program at git://git.debian.org/~brlink/git-dpm.git
(WARNING: as stated above: alpha quality; also places are temporary and are likely to change in the future).

This is primarily a bug-fix release, cleaning up some issues introduced in 2.3.0. Specifically, it fixes collection of the contents of *.a files, fixes the severity of spelling errors in man pages, properly parses Depends starting with a newline for weak-library-dev-dependency, and fixes the spurious display of archive areas in some cases in the HTML reports. This release also includes Raphael Geissert's work to eliminate unpack level two (which means having a full unpacked copy of the package) in favor of a collection script that does this and a new type of collection that's automatically removed after processing. This is the first step towards eliminating the internal Lintian distinction between unpack and collection scripts and implementing both using the same mechanisms. As usual, there are a variety of other fixes and improvements, but there shouldn't be any major user-visible changes in this release. Note that, following advice from Joey Hess, Lintian now warns about missing $ misc:Depends dependencies for any package that uses debhelper, since any debhelper script may start adding dependencies there. This was already mostly in place in 2.3.0, but is the source of a large number of new warnings in the archive.

I've spent the past few days trying to get MMS to work on the N900.

EDIT: Seems frals has managed to beat me! read more

Yes, aptitude can list packages by priority, but what I wanted was a simple list of just package names. I've got two ways of getting a bare list:

Updated with many thanks to Phil Hands.

$ aptitude search '~prequired' sed -ne 's/^i [ A] \([^ ]*\).*$/\1/p' tr '\n' ' ' sort -u fold -s ; echo

#!/bin/sh
# Licence: GPL-3+
FILE= find /var/lib/apt/lists/ -name '*unstable*Packages'
LIST= grep-dctrl -n -s Priority '' $FILE sort -u

for P in $LIST; do
[ "optional" != "$P" -a "extra" != "$P" ] continue
echo "Priority: $P"
grep-dctrl -n -s Package,Priority "$P" $FILE sed -ne '/^'$P'$/!h;/^'$P'$/ g;p ' tr '\n' ' ' fold -s
echo
done

The advantage with the script is that is lists all packages in all priorities except optional and extra and can be restricted to individual Packages files and therefore to individual repositories and components. (Change the find expression if you have more than one repository specifying unstable or adapt the script to accept a path to the relevant Packages file on the command line.)

I really ought to have used perl because pattern matching in perl is a
lot more natural to me than using sed or awk. I do tend to chain a
couple of sed commands, just so that it's easier to work out which bit
is broken when it breaks.

The final version of this script will end up in emdebian-grip-server,
converted to perl with POD content, translated and reading the Packages
files using Debian::Packages::Compare.

$ ~/scripts/list-priority
Priority: important
adduser apt-utils apt aptitude bsdmainutils libbz2-1.0 cpio cron libcwidget3
debian-archive-keyring dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dmidecode ed libgdbm3 gnupg
gpgv groff-base ifupdown iproute iptables iputils-ping logrotate libept0
libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libtasn1-3 libusb-0.1-4 man-db manpages module-init-tools
nano libncursesw5 net-tools netbase netcat-traditional libnewt0.52 whiptail
libssl0.9.8 libpopt0 libreadline5 libreadline6 readline-common rsyslog
tasksel-data tasksel libwrap0 info install-info traceroute udev vim-common
vim-tiny wget libxapian15
Priority: required
libacl1 libattr1 base-files base-passwd bash coreutils debconf-i18n debconf
debianutils diffutils dpkg e2fslibs e2fsprogs libcomerr2 libss2 libc-bin libc6
findutils gcc-4.3-base gcc-4.4-base libgcc1 libstdc++6 grep gzip hostname
lsb-base libdevmapper1.02.1 lzma liblocale-gettext-perl libselinux1 libsepol1
libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl libunwind7 mawk
libncurses5 ncurses-base ncurses-bin libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g
perl-base procps sed sensible-utils login passwd libslang2 initscripts sysv-rc
sysvinit-utils sysvinit tar tzdata bsdutils libblkid1 libuuid1 mount util-linux
zlib1g
Priority: standard
apt-listchanges at bash-completion bc dc bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-50
libdns53 libisc50 liblwres50 bsd-mailx libsasl2-2 libdb4.8 libdb4.5 libdb4.6
libdb4.7 debian-faq doc-debian doc-linux-text libc6-i386 locales exim4-base
exim4-config exim4-daemon-light exim4 file libmagic1 gettext-base libgnutls26
libgpm2 libkeyutils1 libgssapi-krb5-2 libgssrpc4 libk5crypto3 libkadm5clnt6
libkadm5srv6 libkdb5-4 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 less lsof libcap2 libedit2
libevent-1.4-2 libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgpg-error0 libgssglue1 libidn11
liblockfile1 libnfsidmap2 librpcsecgss3 libunwind7-dev libxml2 m4 mime-support
mlocate mutt ncurses-term ftp telnet nfs-common libldap-2.4-2 openssh-client
patch libpci3 pciutils libpcre3 perl-modules perl portmap procmail
python-central python-minimal python python2.5-minimal python2.5
python-reportbug reportbug wamerican libsqlite3-0 tcpd texinfo time ucf w3m
whois

Hmm, next step is to check the "Priority: standard" set for Emdebian - it looks far too large for what would be standard on an embedded device. LDAP will be dropped for one - and what is a -dev package doing in there? libunwind7-dev isn't even installed on my amd64 Debian desktop!

Probably check the important and required listings too, then tweak what we need to change via the archive overrides for Emdebian Grip.

Come to think of it, I might need a PHP version of this to read live data from the repository, documenting the changes.

My first RC Bug-squashing Day (or rather night):

• bug #552791 acorn-fdisk Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 gidentd Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 dietlibc incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 autossh FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC

I picked all of them mostly randomly from the list Zack gave me, and except dietlibc they are packages I had not even heard of before. The first one begun easily (track down licencing information, pimp debian/copyright, but I ended up fixing compiler and lintian warnings and even wrote a manpage for it while there (but for this one, I didn t bump the Standards-Version). The second one was only the second one to complete because the others took longer; it s basically a change of a d mon to use two instead of one listening socket, to work with a doble stack OS instead of just a dual stack OS by not using v4-mapped IPv6 addresses (I considered if to use select(2) or poll(2), or to just fork and have two d mons running, but that seemed too ressource-consuming to me so I chose the less-complicated poll(2) method, looking at popa3d(8) s source code (inherited from OpenBSD) in the MirBSD tree since I could not find my network programming book. The third one was basically communicating with upstream; the bug can be blosed with no change to the package. The fourth one took me a while; luckily I have qemu 0.11.0 on MirBSD, and aurel32 s mipsel qemu images helped a great deal; however, cowbuilder --create failed for me, so I ended up waiting almost the entire night for a-g d-u to finish; in the end, it was simply a bug in upstream s configure.ac which is only exposed due to a toolchain bug on mips(el). To do: my AM Zack needs to upload the NMUs (after checking, of course); I need to communicate some of the fixes upstream (the gidentd upstream is NXDOMAIN ), produce a very small testcase for the mipsel toolchain bug, maybe fix some more mipsel FTBFSen as I have a working qemu instance now, but maybe I ll do that at the BSP when I can t find IPv6 bugs or so that I feel I can fix (I also want to do an mksh release which has to be prepared first RSN, and there s still the need to formally publish the MirBSD-current bi-arch snapshot and make another ISO out of it for BT and prepare the multi-BSD USB stick for allbsd.de ). Annoyances: a-g d-u could ask me things at the start before working for some four+ hours instead of in the middle, and the same questions several times (PAM restart). The sid kernel doesn t boot today but did yesterday, the lenny kernel produces this:
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdudevd[320]: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly
(I hate udev.) And, worst of all, these annoying fireworks (some sounded like originating from inside our staircase, I pity the neighbour s cats) when one wants to hack Finally, I *loathe* CDBS. Debhelper v5 rules! Oh, and I also was under the impression that Firstname LASTNAME was a French thing, and to a much lesser extent Asian. (@bubulle)

This has been a big decade for me. Ten years ago, I was living in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley; VA had just had its crazy IPO; my unvested options were worth over a million dollars on paper. I remember sitting in first class[1] on the way out of Atlanta after the holidays and wondering what one did with a million dollars. Avoid working too much? Have a lot of interesting computers? Build a distributed house[2]? Mostly I decided to not count my chickens, which turned out to be the right choice. Six months later, I started debian-installer, in many ways my biggest project to date. In spring of '01, VA was crashing; I was sick of the Valley; gloom was everywhere. I took the hint and quit, cashed in my options for five figures, not seven, bade forewell to the many people I'd come to know, and moved back east. By reading my old journal, I can tell that subconciously, I had long before decided what to do when it was time to leave the Bay Area. So without really thinking too much about why I was able to do this, about how not just my own family, but others were indirectly making it possible, I moved to a 150 acre wooded "farm", and mostly went off and did mostly my own thing for three years. This was such a huge life change. I lived in a building affectionatly called "the shack". It was renovated from a chicken coop in the 70's and leaked during heavy rain, but I preferred it to the main house (warmer). I went back to dialup for internet. I hauled groceries and most everything half a mile in by hand. There was an outhouse and washwater hauled from a creek. I cut barely enough firewood and readapted my body from California to cold. My main tech project during this time was mooix. In some ways my largest failed project, but it was neat to be able to go off and do such a thing. This was a blissful, reflective, peaceful, amazing time. Parts were a second childhood. Somewhere in there I properly confronted my mortality. And learned to use a chainsaw. And over the course of three years, I dug myself into a rut, a hole. I wasn't going anywhere. (Except for a month in Honduras, and my first DebConf in Oslo.) In '04, I found myself talking on the phone to a cosmonaut in a house that had been without power for days in a hard winter. I realized I was ready to leave the farm if I could figure out how to do it, and I almost took him up on the job working on his new Linux distro -- but at the last minute Oslo connections suggested I work for SkoleLinux instead, and so I did. Soon after moving into a rented house in town, I was jaunting off to Brazil for a month, a great time. Followed by a productive year where I got heavily back into debian-installer, started Debian's testing security tream, and generally worked a lot. The next summer I fooled around with an RV, and sort of fell into a job with ADS. But my time on the farm had changed me, I think. I ended up going back to the farm for a year and working part time from there. During this time I also started ikiwiki and other smaller projects. One day I came back from a camping trip and found the kitchen had been torn down in my absence. Reminded unsubtly that I was not the only one with a claim to the place, I got out, though I somehow suspect not for good. For the last four years, I've been more outwardly settled, buying a house in town, continuing to work at the same job, starting little projects like pristine-tar, mr, and etckeeper. About two years in I began to feel antsy sometimes (and had a minor medical scare), and set up the yurt as a relief valve so I can have crazy adventures in the cold woods again. Still, I sometimes feel that a big change is building up. From here, this decade feels like it contained endless changes, important decisions, interesting projects, strong experiences. The 90's, containing only little things like college and moving to California, pale in comparison. Maybe the naught's will be the decade I always remember.. or maybe not. Anything could be around the corner.

---

1. Bumped up due to an airline scheduling snafu, not because I was throwing money around.
2. Concept of mine perhaps not worth explaining here although it was oddly similar to how I ended up living at the farm. Good ol' subconcious..

I can hear the question now: What kind of guy puts The Iliad and War and Peace on a list of things to read for fun? Well, me. I think that reading things by authors I ve never read before, people that take positions I haven t heard of before or don t agree with, or works that are challenging, will teach me something. And learning is fun. My entire list for 2010 is at Goodreads. I ve highlighted a few below. I don t expect to read all 34 books on the Goodreads list necessarily, but there is the chance. The Iliad by Homer, 750BC, trans. by Alexander Pope, 704 pages. A recent NPR story kindled my interest in this work. I m looking forward to it. The Oxford History of the Classical World by Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, 1986, 882 pages. It covers ancient Greece and Rome up through the fall of the Roman empire. The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time #5) by Robert Jordan, 1994, 912 pages. I ve read books 1 through 4 already, and would like to continue on the series. War and Peace by Lev Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1869, 1392 pages. Been on my list for way too long. Time to get to it. Haven t read anything by Tolstoy before. The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, 1972, 2nd ed., 270 pages. Aims to dispel the notion of Jesus as apolitical. An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin, 1996, 496 pages. Picked this up at Powell s in Portland on a whim, and it s about time I get to it. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church by Gregory A. Boyd, 2007, 224 pages. An argument that the American evangelical church allowed itself to be co-opted by the political right (and some on the left) and argues this is harmful to the church. Also challenges the notion that America ever was a Christian nation. Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire, by Jerome Carcopino, 2003, 368 pages. I ve always been fascinated with how things were on the ground rather than at the perspective of generals and kings, and this promises to be interesting. Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Conrad Grebel Lectures) by Willard M. Swartley, 1983, 368 pages. Looking at how people have argued from different Biblical perspectives about various issues over the years. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927, 252 pages. I can t believe I ve never read Woolf before. Yet another one I m really looking forward to. Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922, 319 pages. Per Goodreads: This book of five confessional essays from the 1930s follows Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from the height of their celebrity as the darlings of the 1920s to years of rapid decline leading to the self-proclaimed Crack Up in 1936. Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (1961 unabridged version), 783 pages. The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox, 2009, 256 pages. Per Goodreads, Cox explains why Christian beliefs and dogma are giving way to new grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience. Heard about this one in an interview with Diane Rehm. Being There by Jerzy Kosi ski, 1970, 128 pages. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus Borg, 2006, 352 pages. Whether or not you agree with Borg, this has got to be a thought-provoking title. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, 1844, 640 pages. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, 1906, 154 pages. Per Goodreads: In 1906 in turn-of-the century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Nearly a century later, Kakuzo s The Book of Tea is still beloved the world over. Interwoven with a rich history of tea and its place in Japanese society is poignant commentary on Eastern culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more. More of my list is at Goodreads.

Amazon Kindle Un-selling Books was the most-viewed news item on my blog this year. Once again, a lock-out/bad-business story takes the top spot. I don t think that one got as much coverage in the mainstream media as they usually do, which probably contributed to the relatively high reader numbers. I feel like I get criticised often for commenting about business ethics, but it does seem to attract a fairly big audience. The repost of Tribute to Richard Rothwell came a fairly close second. Again, not something that the mainstream tech news covered. the world is a sadder and lonelier place without him, and the rest of the world has lost one of its brightest stars. Top-placed technical item was HOWTO Apache httpd 2.2 PAM Authentication Modules which was a distant third. It was posted in late 2008, but I suspect that will keep getting viewers until everyone s upgraded. It s currently the top recipient of search engine traffic for the site. Other technical stories in the top ten were Windows 7: Released with known critical bug in fifth, ssh security in sixth and Top 8 J2ME MIDP Applications in tenth place. The only completely non-technical topic was the Cooperatives-SW Board and Housing Enquiry in ninth place. Cross-over topics complete the ten with 2009 Software in the Public Interest Board Election in fourth place, New #ukgovOSS Action Plan in seventh and Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation in eighth. Finally, I think the strangest three search phrases ending at my site this year are spi bike week , request free t-shirt and will britannia building society demutualise . Happy New Year! Found any easter eggs in your web stats?

I ve spent the last week packaging VMware Workstation 7.0.0 at work. Looking around on the net, I ve been unable to find anything helpful about packaging this new version, so it seems nobody s got around to packaging it yet. I ve asked our customer for its approval for releasing our packaging scripts to the community and got it, so here are our packaging scripts for this version, courtesy of EDF. See the instructions in debian/README.source for what has to be done to turn it into a full source package. The packaging is based on our previous 6.5.2 packaging, which was itself based (partially, at least) upon the Gento 6.5.2 ebuild. It uses a tweaked vmware-installer to install the products to debian/tmp, then makes use of the vmware-installer database to populate the packages. I think this method should work with any VMware product using vmware-installer 1.1. Packages have been built and tested on Etch and Lenny. Hope it helps! Bugs, comments, questions to the email address listed as Maintainer in debian/control, please :-)

Shifting my life towards programming. 2009 was an year where I focused more on programming. My day job involved coding lots of code using C++ and python and SQL and other languages, and I started writing more code in general in my spare time as well.

On the train to my parents' house for Christmas I finished up a wild run through the book Coders at Work. The book isn't even mine, but I'd been borrowing it very often, sometimes to the chagrin of its owner, because I could barely put it down. The book is a collection of interviews with 15 great programmers of our time, starting with Jamie Zawinsky and ending with Donald Knuth. It's written in an interview style each interview starts with a brief introduction to the person being interviewed, summarizing what the person is known for and what he or she has accomplished and a few of the highlights of the interview, and then a transcript of the interview follows, with the author/editor, Peter Siebel, will saying something or asking a question, and the interviewee responding. I was skeptical about this format at first because I feel like it can be an easy way out of good editing and make the reader have to do the work of the editor, but on finishing I think that Siebel uses the format to his advantage in this case. For one, the speech format allows the reader to really form a picture of how the person being interviewed speaks and would act in a conversation. Jamie is somewhat bitter and pretty informal. Brad Fitzpatrick is flippant and energetic, his speech littered with profanity and colloquialisms. Others seem more stately and verbose Joe Armstrong's responses can go on for a page or more. In this way, not only do readers learn something about what these greats have learned about programming, but we also feel a bit more like we've met or know them, and can connect to them more as people. I always have this problem where I want to read computer books, but often computer books seem inextricably tied to the computer, so there's this dynamic of reading a bit and then wanting to get on a machine and try something out, write some code, play around especially with books focused on a specific language. Coders at Work retains some of this computer-book dynamic in that I constantly encountered things that I want to investigate or play around with more: Erlang, OCaml, various papers and essays, Knuth's literate programs, and books such as Higher Order Perl and others. Siebel makes a point to ask each person what her short-list of books and papers programmers should read are, so this book is a great source of pointers to other reading material. Unlike a more specific book, however, keeping a list in a notebook was enough to settle the mind to read away-from-a-computer for chapters at a time. It's obvious that despite the interview format, Siebel has done some serious editing. None of the prose is boring to read, and I can't imagine that the text is a straight transcript of how the interviews went. He also has arranged the interviews in an order such that different interviews play off each other. In Branden Eich's interview, for example, he disparages the book Design Patterns:

I never bought the Gamma book. Some people at Netscape did, some of Jamie Zawinski's and my nemeses from another acquisition, they waved it around like the Bible and they were kind of insufferable because they weren't the best programmers.

In the next chapter, Joshua Bloch names it as a book he thinks programmers should read:

Another one, which I have slightly mixed feelings about but I still think everyone should read, is Design Patterns. It gives us a common vocabulary. There are a lot of good ideas in there.

Similar plays, such as Ken Thompson and Fran Allen disagreeing on the badness of C, happen in later chapters, tieing together the different chapters and illustrating how even really good programmers disagree on the Right Thing all the time. Clearly the craft of programming is no settled thing. Besides the general structure of the book being well thought-out, the material is generally thought-provoking and interesting. One thing that stood out to me was Joshua Bloch describing what he called the "empathy gene", which is what a programmer has to have if he's going to be able to design good APIs and programming languages he has to be able to put himself in the shoes of the person who will be using the language or API. This is one thing that differentiates how different programmers can be good at different things. Another thing that stood out to me is that many of those interviewed stated that they don't use much in the way of modern tools and IDEs Joshua Bloch and Simon Peyton-Jones both touch on this, just to name a couple examples, even though some say that they think using these tools would make them more productive, especially when it comes to refactoring. This is a testament to the power of inertia sometimes there is just no chance to be unproductive now in order to be more productive later. Or perhaps just a sign that a programmable text-editor can stand on the same level as a heavier tool in terms of productivity in the right hands. I could go on with examples, but the conclusion here is that I thoroughly enjoyed Coders at Work, and I think it is a book that is well-worth the time spent reading the entire thing.