Yesterday morning I decided to wear my summer bike leathers, rather than my waterproofs, in defiance of the weather forecast's prediction of rain. About twenty minutes later, that decision paid off big time when my motorcycle was helpfully reconfigured into this new shape by an inattentive car driver:

[not a great photo, I'm afraid, but I was in mild shock, and failed to notice that my phone was still in only medium photo-size mode, but you'll note that the dangly bits used to be the headlamps, and that the handlebars are in the full-lock-to-the-left position, despite the wheel pointing slightly to the right of middle.] Despite the fact that the bike is almost certainly a write-off, the main thing that's wrong with me is a slightly bruised ankle, and general soreness of all major muscles similar to that which would result from overdoing exercise a bit. The driver of the car seemed more shocked than I was. He was a nice chap, and a practicing Muslim (or so I surmised given his comments about having done his prayers in the morning, and wondering what he'd done wrong to cause this to happen). I think he was expecting to see my mangled corpse in the road, as depicted in a recent government safety campaign. While it's nice to see that people are affected to some extent by such campaigns, I think I'd prefer it if they instead promped people to look where they were going.

Yesterday was my turn as "primary care giver" (PCG) with Amita June, so I took the opportunity to do some shopping. I was on Autoroute 40 on my way out to the Ikea on rue Cavendish around 1PM when they had a breaking bulletin on the CBC. Yes, the Dawson C gep shooting -- they were sending a reporter to the scene. For those of you outside Montreal, yes, I and my family are fine, and we don't have any friends who were affected by the shooting. It's been strange in town, but we're physically safe and sound. Thanks to everyone who's asked. tags: montreal dawson shooting

Piknic Electronik On a more cheery note, this upcoming Sunday is the last Piknic Electronik for 2006. The last picnik is always quite sweet, and as usual Ninja Tune will be closing out the season. Smart, fun Kid Koala and, my personal fave, Ghostbeard, are on the lineup. Should be a great time, and it's supposed to be sunny on Sunday, so a nice day to be in Parc Jean Drapeau. tags: piknic electronik ninjatune montreal music

Ignition 2006 Burning Man just finished up last week, and here in Montreal the local Burning Man community is having a campout and bonfire to celebrate. The so-called "regional burn", called Ignition, is going to happen 22-24 September in the wt:Eastern Townships; more info on the Br leurs wiki. Maj and I are the regional coordinators for Burning Man activities, and we've been busy the last few weeks lining up the basics (tickets, toilets, insurance... check, check, check). Now we're looking forward to seeing what folks will be doing this time around. Our local Burning Man community is fabuloso -- the people are extra cool. tags: burning man montreal regional burn bruleurs ignition

Whew. Ichthux has released, and now I can breathe again! When I joined the Ichthux development team, they had produced their “proof of concept” release as yet-another-Knoppix-remaster. At that time, I encouraged them to move away from tacking their work on as a derivate of a derivative and instead become a CDD. I argued that as a CDD Ichthux would last, while as a Knoppix-remaster, it would just be another marginal custom livecd that went nowhere. They got the message. So you may well be surprised to hear our first release is based on Kubuntu, and not Debian.

So, what’s the story here? Have you defected?

Nope. It just happens that most of the team ended up being actively involved in Ubuntu development. Also, when we first started casting about for the best way to package a livecd/install disk, it seemed to us that Ubuntu already had a head start on this.

What about being a CDD? It looks to me like that idea has fallen by the wayside.

Nope again. We’re a joint team now, and though we’ve started out with Ubuntu, we’ll be pushing changes back into Debian. The goals of a CDD are well understood by the whole team: to best meet the needs of our users, we design the system to mesh well with the parent distributions, not forking and making a derivative, but working inside those distributions to improve them for our particular subgroup of users.

Hold on now, aren’t you contradicting yourself? A CDD’s development is all within Debian, but Ubuntu itself is a derivative, and what’s worse, Kubuntu is a derivative of a derivative! Aren’t you right back where you started?

Well, on the last count, you’d be wrong. Kubuntu is not a fork. And as for Ubuntu being a derivative, well, sure it is. But the Ubuntu/Debian relationship is different from other derivatives, and although there is friction, I’m enough of a crazy idealist to believe a joint Debian/Ubuntu CDD is quite doable, benefits both projects more, and serves our users better than if we were to split up and each go work on our own.

A lot of people outside Germany, including here in Ghana, can't pronounce my name right (whereas right is what I'm used to...). So I looked through the German wikipedia and tried to figure out how to write my name in the IPA. The result is:If you don't have unicode available, this will probably look strange to you. All these sounds have strange names, here they are:

• j: palatal approximant / Stimmhafter palataler Approximant
• : open-mid back rounded vowel / Gerundeter halboffener Hinterzungenvokal
• a: open front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter offener Vorderzungenvokal
• : voiceless uvular fricative / Stimmloser uvularer Frikativ
• : near-close near-front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter zentralisierter fast geschlossener Vorderzungenvokal
• m: bilabial nasal / Stimmhafter bilabialer Nasal

And yes, it is the same letter as in Te , but not the same pronounciation, which is t x. Update: I had to convert my serendipity blog to UTF8 to make this entry right. Did so by mysqladmin dump'ing the whole database and running it through iconv, and then re-inputting it. Sorry to any planets that had a broken entry for a while. Maybe this update paragraph makes these planets update the entry :-)Update 2: As I'm already showing of with unicode characters: The name Joachim is derived from Jehoiakim (Jojakim in German), which is Hebrew and looks like this:

If you are using "loose" when you mean the opposite of win, please stop. Use "lose". Loose is the opposite of tight. Similarly, "noone" is (almost always) wrong. You mean "no one". Noone is an obsolete form of "noon" (mid-day).

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

Today on Slashdot, there is a story and interesting discussion about an article entitled Consumer electronics ate my child's imagination.

The main point of the article is that children today are spending a lot of time in front of the TV and playing videogames. As a result, they are less able to reason about the world, and even have a higher rate of depression. Apparently children today average about 2-3 years behind children from just 15 years ago on cognitive tests.

The Slashdot discussion was (surprise!) interesting as well. One point raised was that the entire notion of childhood is fairly modern concept since most children had to work as soon as they were able up until modern times.

This is something that Terah and I have been thinking about already. Terah was shopping for high chairs one day, and was reading reviews online at Amazon. We were both shocked that some chairs were being panned in the reviews because children "got uncomfortable after more than 2 or 3 hours in the chair". Huh?? After reading some more reviews, it seems that people are using high chairs as a place to just plonk down kids for a few hours while the parents are trying to get work done around the house. I can't imagine any high chair being a good place to put a kid for hours. Some parents also complained that the kids could get out of the chair if left unattended for awhile (which brings up a whole LOT of questions).

Then of course, there are plenty of parents that use the TV (or PlayStation or handheld videogames) as a cheap babysitter.

Terah and I have talked about this already, and though we don't have any sort of detailed parenting plan, we certainly do NOT want to be that kind of parents. Some people react by saying, "oh sure, you may say that now, but once you have the kids, you'll change your tune." Yes, that's right, some parents don't even try, and what's more, believe that it's impossible to treat children any other way.

We know plenty of parents that are successfully raising children without buying them hundreds of beeping electronic toys, using the TV (or high chair) as a babysitter, etc. We know it's possible and that's what we're going to aim for, too.

Next to upgrading my journal software I have also replaced the software powering my normal homepage. I used to use Hobix for that, but I have replaced it with Webgen. Don’t get me wrong, both are good pieces of software, but Hobix is just nicer for writing a journal and Webgen for generating webpages from simple formatted content. But in the end, both produce nice static HTML pages! :-) Note that my normal homepage is emptier than it used to be, but given the low threshold to add something I am sure more will come soon. I also updated my style a bit to synchronize the look of the pages produced by both frameworks, but it was quite trivial in the end.

Joachim described a setup where the computer refuses to boot if there is a linux-created partition table. One possible way out could be to use non-intel partition tables, if the computer assumes in that case that there is no partition table. Another possible solution would be to write a partition table with windows that has the required sizes, and not fix the IDs at all - it might be a bit tricky to get debian-installer into installing in "wrong" partitions, but might work also well in the end.

Faro points out that the map of Spain in my previous post is obsolete. A more uptodate version can be found here. From that link I also discovered that calling Extremadura a province is wrong. It is an "Autonomous Community" which consists of two provinces: Badajoz and Cáceres. The latter is where the place we were staying, Casar de Cáceres, is located.

I'm psyched that the 2007 Wikimania bids are in, and that wt:Alexandria is one of the cities that's got an official bid. I had a great time at Wikimania 2006, the 2nd Annual Wikimedia Conference, in wt:Cambridge (Massachusetts) this year, and I think it'll be great to go somewhere new next year. I actually proposed the Alexandria bid based on some discussions on the #wikimania freenode channel. People were talking about Jimmy Wales's announcement of a renewed commitment on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation for providing reference and learning materials in Africa and Asia. It was suggested that maybe having Wikimania 2007 in Africa, we could further highlight this commitment. In thinking of sites in Africa that might be appropriate, I remembered Brewster Kahle's talk about universal access to knowledge. He talked quite a bit about the Biblioteca Alexandrina, the "new Library of Alexandria", created to be a 21st-century center of knowledge for the entire world. What better place to have a Wikimedia conference? A multilingual, user-driven Internet of the 21st century is going to depend heavily on participation from formerly marginal groups. Reaching out to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Asia is going to be crucial for the success of the Internet, of Open Content, and of Wikimedia for the coming decade. Taking the Open Source and Open Content story outside the traditional box of Internet culture -- North America, Western Europe, East Asia, Australia -- is a big step, but I think it needs to be taken. A Wikimania 2007 in Alexandria would literally shift the centre of gravity for Wikimedia. I put together a sketchy bid on the Wikimedia meta wiki site, and then I solicited some input from Egyptian Wikipedians. The result was spectacular; people have been coming out of the woodwork to add information, contact local authorities, and negotiate with the Bib. Alex. conference centre. Now that the BA has offered to host the event gratis, I think that the Wikimania 2007 bid for Alexandria is one of the strongest of the Wikimania 2007 bids. The shortlist comes out in a few days; I hope that Alex is on it. tags: alexandria wikimania wiki conference

Esperanto Wikitravel Under pressure from Chuck SMITH, the founder of Esperanto Wikipedia, I've tried to revive the wt:Wikitravel:Esperanto Wikitravel Expedition. It's been fun; I haven't done a lot of Esperanto in a while, since my new love in the conlang world is Sona. But the chances of having a Sona Wikitravel version any time soon are slim. tags: esperanto wikitravel chuck smith sona

The nice thing about keep track of when you watched a video (DVD) last is that you can fight of boredome by doing top twenty lists. Here's the twenty movies I've watched the most times.

1. 2005-12, 8 times, Thin Blue Line
2. 2006-03, 7 times, An Ideal Husband
3. 2006-09, 6 times, Love actually
4. 2006-03, 6 times, Roxanne
5. 2006-02, 5 times, 'Allo 'Allo (1-2)
6. 2005-08, 5 times, Tomb Raider
7. 2005-08, 5 times, Groundhog Day
8. 2005-08, 5 times, Charlie's Angels
9. 2006-05, 4 times, The New Guy
10. 2006-04, 4 times, Harvey
11. 2006-01, 4 times, Wild Wild West
12. 2006-01, 4 times, El Dorado
13. 2006-01, 4 times, Dead men don't wear plaid
14. 2005-11, 4 times, Ten things I hate about you
15. 2005-09, 4 times, Lethal Weapon 3
16. 2005-09, 4 times, Freaky Friday
17. 2005-08, 4 times, You've Got Mail
18. 2005-08, 4 times, When Harry Met Sally
19. 2005-08, 4 times, A Knight's Tale
20. 2005-07, 4 times, Shrek

Based on this, I conclude that Debian hackers born in the 1960s mostly watch romantic comedies (7/20), action comedies (4/20), plain comedies (4/20), or British TV series (2/20). Accordingly, we should try to get Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis to come to Debconf7 to give a BOF.

While evaluating Gallery, I noticed that my test web server generates wrong links inside the web application. After getting some help on the Gallery Forum, I was told that this was because my setup was miscreating REQUEST_URI to contain the entire URI, consisting of scheme, host name and path, while Gallery expects that variable to be only the path portion of the URI. Since REQUEST_URI is fine when I ask the web server running the application directly from the host in question, while accessing it from my local machine through an ssh tunnel (since the application web server is not going to be publicly visible on the Internet) yields the full URI in REQUEST_URI Unfortunately, neither is the PHP Documentation especially verbose (it just says that REQUEST_URI is “The URI which was given in order to access this page; for instance, ‘/index.html’.”) nor is the apache documentation formally defining REQUEST_URI (the closest to a definition being the documentation for mod_setenvif, which says that REQUEST_URI is “generally the portion of the URL following the scheme and host portion without the query string”). Did I miss a more formal documentation of apache/PHP’s behavior? Pointers appreciated. While I was writing this blog entry, which was a lot more angry in its first version, the Gallery guys finally acknowledged that apache and PHP are not sufficiently specifying REQUEST_URI and that I have delivered a valid example where there is a host part in REQUEST_URI. They’re going to work around this. Good news, thanks!

---

The promised fix is in gallery2 svn, I have applied the patch to my local version, and the application is fine now. Thanks!

Decorators in Python are just fantastic. Here are a few I've used in Postr. Update: the wonderful James Hensbridge expanded the decorators, so I've updated this post.

def threaded(f):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        t = threading.Thread(target=f, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
        t.setDaemon(True)
        t.start()
    wrapper.__name__ = f.__name__
    return wrapper

This decorator (stolen from O'Reilly) calls the method in a new thread, so execution returns straight away. I use this for long-running tasks that cannot be handled in an asynchronous manner (such as the photo uploading in Postr, which currently uses urllib). The main thread returns straight away so the interface doesn't block, and the uploads continue in the background. Of course this new thread cannot just call GTK+ methods, as GTK+ itself isn't threadsafe. So, I have another decorator that causes a method to be always executed in the main loop by scheduling an idle handler that calls it.

def as_idle(f):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        event = threading.Event()
        ret = []
        def task():
            ret.append(f(*args, **kwargs))
            event.set()
            return False
        gobject.idle_add(task)
        event.wait()
        return ret[0]
    wrapper.__name__ = f.__name__
    return wrapper

Erich Schubert requested return values, so James added those too. The calling function will block until the idle handler has called the decorated function. I've split the decorators out into a separate file in Postr, so you can view the latest version online. Magic stuff!

Development Environment Conference(Japanese) was held in Akihabara, 8 Sep. The event was focused for that the famous geeks use what kind of tools, software configuration, or environment. Many people were using zsh, GNU screen, and vim or Emacs. In the event, I really surprised a man who use GNU screen with default prefix key!

So, I just tested now VMWare Server in a Microsoft environment. I installed the server on a more or less powerful machine in the cave. First i connected to this server via RDP and tried to build a new image, it worked well with one big problem: During the initialization of the “virtual harddisk”, Windows Server 2003 seems to give the VMWare program a lower nice value, and I mean VERY LOW, so low that the RDP service do not get enough resources and times out. After 10 minutes I connected again to the machine and the image was ready. It works but I really don’t like it. Then in my second attempt I installed a VMWare Server Console on a local Windows XP Pro machine and connected with it to the Server in the cave. When i create this harddisk image in the console I get a nice statusbar and everything seems to work without problems, but when I try to start an RDP session during harddisk initialization it also fails. My question now is: Is this a bug of Microsoft because the priorisation doesn’t work correctly or is it a problem with VMWare? Note: Tomorrow I will also try to get this VMWare Server run on Debian Sarge and Etch.

Over the weekend there was the Edinburgh debconf meetup, which went pretty well. Due to unfortunate timing I wasn’t around as much as I should have been, so I’ll not actually mention anything which was discussed; mostly because I don’t want to hear that I was wrong and that dicussions moved ahead to contrary decisions after I left! I had to leave early on Friday evening due to my girlfriend coming back from a camping trip and falling asleep on the sofa of the pub. (Shes been away for three months, with only a week visit in the middle; so it was a long absense.) I also left early on the Saturday because we had booked a meal at a posh restaurant a month or two previously - to celebrate an anniversary - and that couldn’t be avoided. Still it was lovely to see the people who came, and I’m looking forward to meeting them and others again in the future. If you’re ever Leith Fishers Restaurant is beautifully located and full of amazing food. Ironically it is a fish restaurant and because I don’t eat that at all I ordered the only two non-fish based dishes, but both were utterly divine.

I managed to get myself to stand in front of the mixing table and got an old radio program playlist redone. Now it sounds great, well mixed and flowing, instead of cracky and jumppy as it did when i first aired it. The name for this mix? “Good stuff (quite good actually)” thanks to Paul Mundt from SuperH fame. Enjoy!

One of our neighbours, Carol (the one who adopted Cleo, the mother of the litter of kittens we temporarily fostered a while ago), is a mad keen volunteer for the Republican Party (at the state level). I think Sarah mentioned I was interested in having a political discussion with her some time, so she invited us to come to a rally in Saratoga today and gave us free tickets (normally you'd have to pay at least $25 per person to do what we did). So we went along to check it out. It started about 45 minutes late, and we'd arrived 30 minutes early. It was in a high-school auditorium that held about 400 people by our guestimations. While we were waiting, it was interesting to do a bit of people-watching. The vast majority were Caucasian, and either young or elderly, not a lot in between. Those that were had children there as well. A few conversation snippets I overheard were people seeming to justify their opinions with themselves and each other, which was interesting. First up was some sort of attempt at crowd warming for a couple of minutes, then I think it was the state leader of the Republican Party who had a few words, then Arnold himself came on. He gave a pretty good spiel about how he'd unfucked the state since he took office, and how he needed to be returned for another 4 years, and rattled off a list of his accomplishments and what more he wanted to do. It was good to hear him talk about the environment, although in the next breath he went on to talk about "rebuilding California" and how there'd be cranes and concrete everywhere, with new roads and tunnels and whatnot, so you've got to wonder a little bit... In the same vein, he went on about not raising taxes or increasing spending, yet had this whole "rebuilding California" thing going on. His speech was generally fairly light-on details and more of a rousing the party faithful, than a "vote for me", I think. He wrapped up with an "I'll be back" and proceeded to throw some campaign swag into the audience, then came down off the stage to kiss hands and shake babies. I got to shake his hand, so that was the highlight of the whole outing. I certainly walked away from the rally thinking fairly highly of him as a candidate, even if he is a Republican. I'd be inclined to vote for him if I was entitled to. For the sake of hearing both sides, I'd like to go and hear what Phil Angelides has to say for himself as well. Some photos from the rally are here and a little bit of video is here.