Bob Sutor: “Standards can allow innovation by providing a strong underlying foundation on which to build the new ideas. Do standards themselves need to be innovative? No, but they can lead to innovation downstream. Can waiting too long to create open standards hinder innovation? Absolutely, if de facto standards force or convince people not to try to innovate in certain areas. So please don’t simply say ’standards might hinder innovation.’ That’s overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account how things evolve over time.”

Matt: Please don't forget you are talking about the language with the "there should be only one way to do it" motto, where you have to "program the way Guido indented it". I also feel much more at home where I can play with the way my program works and looks like. I like whitespace to be irrelevant - Yes, Python is a nice beast alltogether, but you cannot expect much space for personal preferences once you understand how it was designed. And yes, as a Perl guy I often hate the style some of the modules I maintain are written in, but then again... It's the most comfortable style for the main upstream author, the person who will do most work with the beast!
...But anyway... Emacs knows best. I just press tab and it works magically, either becoming a set of spaces or becoming a proper tab. And as long as other people understand what I wrote (which can become messy if some lines have supposedly eight-spaces-tabs and some are made up just of eight spaces), and specially the compiler doesn't barf at me, I'm OK with it.
Using a decent editor helps you a lot when writing Python, YAML or such things..

Happy new year One of my Christmas presents was a brand spanking new USB key. For quite a while I’d been planning to put my SSH / GPG keys off onto something like this for some extra security. I’ll write up the exact steps of how I achieved my setup in the sometime next week, but it was all fairly easy. As part of the transition I followed Adrian von Bidder’s guide to multiple subkeys such that I have now a signing key (0×4054AB08) which I keep separately from the private key material of my primary key. My new key fingerprint is below

pub 1024D/59B2D9A0 2005-02-03
Key fingerprint = 6583 A11F 1428 FCDD 65FC C7B5 E0CD 3CDC 59B2 D9A0
uid Matthew G L Brown (Default Key)
uid Matt Brown (Debian Packages)
uid Matt Brown (WLUG Key)
uid Matt Brown (CRCnet Key)
uid [jpeg image of size 4390]
uid Matt Brown (MediaLab Key)
sub 1024g/DF8A0504 2005-02-03
sub 1024D/4054AB08 2006-01-04 [expires: 2008-01-04]

I’ve uploaded the new key to the keyservers, or you can grab it from my key information page. All in all I’m quite liking the new setup, plug usb key in, password dialog pops up for SSH key, enter password, password dialog pops up for GPG signing key, enter password. I then have both keys stored in the relevant agents easily accessible for signing email / logging into machines. Meanwhile my GPG private key is sitting securely somewhere else. I plan to sign all outgoing email from now on. Next step is to investigate libpam-ssh for local authentication so that I don’t have to type 3 passwords whenever I login. Moving House
We’re moving house tommorrow, this means that my DSL connection will be down for a few days while Telecom and my ISP get everything sorted out. Hopefully it will go smoothly and I’ll be back online sometime mid next week.

About a week or two ago, my sister called me that her computer didn't boot anymore. After looking at it for a short while and asking her how it had stopped working, there was only one conclusion that I could come to: the processor fan had broken down, which meant that she'd had a processor meltdown (she had a Pentium I-class system; back then, builtin thermometers weren't as common as they are now). She needed a replacement. Now I do have a bunch of spare hardware, but I didn't have anything that could compare to her 200-something Mhz system, and she was already complaining that the thing was rather slow; so I helped her find a 233Mhz Pentium mainboard (with processor) on eBay. That arrived on monday at her place, and she brought it to me to install it. That's done now, but not before I had to tell the thing it was the worst mainboard design that I have ever seen. No, really. And I've seen quite some mainboards already, since I used to work for a place where they sold hardware, a while back. The power connector, IDE connectors, serial ports, parallel port, and floppy drive connector are all positioned in the top left corner of the mainboard, above the PCI slots and right below where the power block is supposed to be. As a result, it's nearly impossible to reach them. When you do reach them, they're all placed so fucking close to eachother that it's nearly impossible to fit them all and to do so correctly. The one exception to that rule is the parallel port, which is fairly close to the rest, but still in the same area. It gets in fairly easily—unfortunately, it also gets out fairly easily if you touch them cables, which you have to do to put the topmost PCI card in its slot. Grmbl. Can't they put those cables in the center right, where they belong?!? After fighting with them cables, it was time for the RAM. That mainboard contains two DIMM slots and four 72-pin SIMM thingies. I have one RAM module for the DIMM slots, but unfortunately it didn't work with that module; I'm not sure whether it's the RAM that's broken, or whether the mainboard simply doesn't want to accept it. Fortunately, I have some 72pin RAM modules left. Unfortunately, I found that the 72pin slots were placed so close to the top of the mainboard that I had to get it out again in its entirety to be able to fit the topmost module. Grmbl. One centimeter of space is too much to ask? After that, it turned out that the machine still didn't boot. At first I thought this was one of those braindead BIOSes that doesn't boot unless you hook up a keyboard, but in the end that didn't seem to be the case. After one by one disconnecting everything, it turned out that the system would boot when I didn't connect the CD writer, but it would not boot at all when I did connect it. And when I say "not boot", I really mean it that way; it didn't even start the POST. Replacing the IDE data cable didn't help. I even tried using the one of the hard disk (which worked, because I had already done a boot from disk), or to connect the writer to as slave to the primary connector, but no luck; it simply wouldn't boot with that writer connected. Well, I'm tired of it now. Maybe I'll go to the shop with that writer again (it was a christmas present, so should still be under warranty) and ask them to have a look at it, but otherwise sis won't have a writer.

Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]

2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net (somewhere there..) for eternity :)

my pictures from debconf.es 2 in December 2005 and debconf5 in July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy hackergotchi out of them!

debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.

In the end of december I went to 22C3 and had lots of fun and insights there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference (no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)

The CCC's conference management system, pentabarf, has been rewritten from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..

The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have "some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome to help!

Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa! That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its peoples situation.

Early musings, but I wonder if it's possible to sign up with Engin, and score a local Australian phone number, which pops out in the US, terminated on an Asterisk box? It's all technically feasible. The big question is, will Engin allow me to sign up? Initially googling implies that Engin will support Asterisk, which is cool in and of itself. Watch this space. I suppose I need to get Asterisk working now.

(Working Title: "Light up the crack pipe boys, thinkin' time's over!") A tab is a wonderful thing. It makes everything line up nicely. So what does YAML ("indentation is so critical to proper interpretation of YAML" -- from the YAML FAQ) do with them? It bans them. Apparently Guido (van Python) thinks the same way -- using the key meant for indenting to indent things is a crime against humanity. And why is it such a heinous crime to use tabs, you ask? Because "they are treated differently by different editors and tools" . Where's the prohibition on using line endings, then? They're treated differently by editors and tools, too. Broken tools exist, that's true, but we don't pander to them -- we either fix them, or insult the people using them until they switch to something that doesn't suck. If tabs are criminal, why do we even bother to *have* a tab key, then? Just pry it off your keyboard and throw it out. It's obviously not useful for anything. Let us bang on our spacebars, and have endless flamewars about how many spaces a particular project should indent all it's code, instead of just using tabs consistently, and then setting your personal preference of tab stop width in your editor like the good lord intended. I am so amazingly and deeply pissed off right now. Bloody religious zealots -- "I don't like something, so neither will you".

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping Looking back at 2005:

• January :

• I started this blog (on the 22nd)
• Submitted my UPOU application

February :

• I got into using planner-el
• Tried my hand at managing GtkLP for Debian in Subversion
• Got to know more about BitTorrent as well
• Got a Gmail account
• Successfully set up Linux-2.6 on St. John’s Debian Woody box malinao
• Got to know Clair via this very blog

March :

• I met Ubuntu Warty, Clair, and Mario too after my UPOU admission exam
• Moved to Emacs 22
• Delved into Lisp while coding an MP3 playback script on Warty
• more PlannerWiki goodness

April :

• More Lisp programming
• Video card replacement
• Attending my first PLUG Technical Seminar

May :

• The usual summer routine: teach swimming and maths

June :

• Back to school
• Tried blogging under Emacs PlannerMode, in which I have inadvertently spammed Planet Debian and Pinoy Tech Scene, earning the ire of Mako
• Attended the first meeting for Software Freedom Day with Sacha, Clair, and Rick. Also met Jerome for the first time

July :

• Sacha (left for Toronto on the 15th)
• Went back to WordPress

August :

• ITA on ecb
• Preparing the LinuxWorld conference
• Trying out Arch
• Released a new GtkLP for Debian

September :

• New ecb package (which to this day hasn’t been uploaded yet, looking for sponsors

• Software Freedom Day on the 10th!!! Met Donnie too
• LinuxWorld at Dusit!!!
• MidTerms!!!
• Started contributing to Ubuntu

October :

• Finals!!! (yeah, just after midterms
• NatSci finals in Naga City, looking for Linux users too
• Became a Ubuntu Member

November :

• Became a MOTU

December :

• Glimmer of hope
• Another GtkLP release
• Lost cellphone
• Meeting Ealden for the first time at the Ubuntu-PH EyeBall
• Thankful for $DEITY letting me live another year

Things to I want to do this 2006:

• More Debian and Ubuntu work
• Learn some more programming languages
• Try other VCSs/RCSs
• Really finish school
• Catch up with my RL

Things to look out for:

• Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour/Philippines
• PLUG’s very own hacker conference/camp
• Bicol Open Source Forum (and perhaps Bicol’s very own LUG

Rock on, 2006!

Currently, Nautilus is hardcoded to draw the desktop icon’s captions in white with a black background. This works well for Latin scripts, but for CJK scripts where each character is pretty complex, the captions quickly become a jumble of black and white pixels. Hence the following patch against Nautilus 2.12. It adds a GConf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow, which when set to False prevents the shadows from being drawn. A nice side benefit is that Nautilus then checks the background colour, and draws captions in black if the background is light. Nice. Screenshots later; gotta run now.

--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c.old 2005-11-19 10:58:42.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c 2005-11-19 11:00:32.000000000 +0800
@@ -404,6 +404,10 @@
      PREFERENCE_STRING,
      NULL, default_font_callback, g_free
     ,
+          NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW,
+          PREFERENCE_BOOLEAN,
+          GINT_TO_POINTER (TRUE)
+         ,
    /* Icon View Default Preferences */
      NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_ICON_VIEW_DEFAULT_SORT_ORDER,
--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h.old 2005-11-19 10:58:47.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h 2005-11-19 10:59:35.000000000 +0800
@@ -54,6 +54,7 @@
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_DESKTOP          "preferences/show_desktop"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_IS_HOME_DIR                "preferences/desktop_is_home_dir"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_FONT          "preferences/desktop_font"
+#define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW               "preferences/desktop_label_shadow"
 /* Display  */
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_HIDDEN_FILES         "/desktop/gnome/file_views/show_hidden_files"
--- ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in.old  2005-11-19 11:04:30.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in  2005-11-19 11:06:17.000000000 +0800
@@ -321,6 +321,20 @@
     <schema>
+      <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</key>
+      <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</applyto>
+      <owner>nautilus</owner>
+      <type>bool</type>
+      <default>true</default>
+      <locale name="C">
+         <short>Desktop label shadow</short>
+    <long>
+     If set to true, then Nautilus will draw shadows for the desktop icon's captions.
+         </long>
+      </locale>
+    </schema>
+
+    <schema>
       <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</key>
       <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</applyto>
       <owner>nautilus</owner>
--- ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c.old   2005-11-19 10:53:43.000000000 +0800
+++ ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c   2005-11-19 10:58:01.000000000 +0800
@@ -532,7 +532,7 @@
    fm_icon_view_filter_by_screen (FM_ICON_VIEW (desktop_icon_view), TRUE);
    icon_container = get_icon_container (desktop_icon_view);
-   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, TRUE);
+   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, eel_preferences_get_boolean (NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW));
    fm_icon_container_set_sort_desktop (FM_ICON_CONTAINER (icon_container), TRUE);
    /* Set up details */</schema>

Rumours about possible consolidation in the Chinese Linux market are spreading fast. Most concentrate on the business side. While there are some truths there, as with most rumours there are nothing substantiative in any of the news articles… other than quotes from a disillusold guy. Also, there are more politics involved than others imagine. One is hated by the government, another not doing well financially, while one appears to be facing their own China-Japan relationship problems…

First of all, thank you DebConf5 organizers! You guys did a fantastic job in providing the opportunity for both DDs and non-DDs alike to meet face-to-face with each other. Debian definitely is alive and kicking! So it is with great disappointment to see articles like this (”No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software”) when I came back to Hong Kong. It’s an op-ed piece in a local newspaper by Charles Peter Mok, and begins by attacking last week’s Evans Data report for lacking objective data, therefore the conclusion reached (OSS adoption is speeding up) is too far-fetched. This is followed by (translation to English mine):

In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.

Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):

… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.

Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?

I’m still arranging things, but it’s looking very likely that I will be at Debconf5…

Just went back from today’s roundtable discussion on “IPR Issues and Open Source” hosted by the National 863 Project. It was well attended, with major software companies as well as experts from MII, MOST and the academia. In particular I found the talk by Peking University’s Dr. Zhang most enlightening — they have done extensive research on almost all open source licenses (including CDDL), as well as the impact of software patents on open source. Unfortunately I’ve learned today that China has already granted software patents. Even more sadly is the fact that most participants viewed software patents as ‘inevitable’, as a thing that Chinese companies need to deal with as they join the global community. I told them about the various software patent backlashes around the world, especially in Europe; and also asked them to ponder the question of whether software patents, as currently implemented by the US, is a sensible and logical thing for China to move towards. Hopefully this will get them thinking…

1. What is Preventa?

Preventa is a port of the Debian and GNU userland to the Minix 3 kernel and libc. Hence an alternate name is Debian GNU/Minix (but I won't use that unless it becomes an official Debian port. See below.) 2a. Why is it called Preventa?

It's a riff on the last attempt at porting Debian to a non-Linux kernel which was called Nexenta. 2b. Why is it called Preventa?

Because if it becomes an official Debian port, it is probable that the sheer number of release critical bugs caused will prevent Debian from ever releasing again. 3. Is this an official Debian port?

Currently Preventa has no official connection to the Debian project. In the future? Perhaps if there is some interest. I'm not persuing that angle right now. 4. Does Preventa suffer from licensing problems like Nexenta?

No, the Minix kernel and libc are BSD licensed. 5. So why are you doing this?

Like many people, I used Minix when I studied operating systems in college. I am interested in trying the new version but I am more comfortable with a GNUish environment rather than the BSDish one that Minix provides. This led me to wonder how hard it would be to port Debian and in general, how much work goes into a new Debian port. Maybe I might be able to write some articles about the experience. Other than that there is no practical reason really. 6. How can I help?

At the moment I am just doing this for my own edification so I'm not looking for help. This will undoubtedly change if I get stuck. 7. What does the port entail?

I will attempt to port dpkg, apt, and the Debian base system plus a few other odds and ends I feel I need. I will use the Minix kernel and libc (unless GNU libc turn out to be easy to port which I suspect it won't.) Basically Preventa will have the same kind of features as the official Minix3 distribution. If I have to patch anything I will offer it back to the Minix and/or Debian maintainers if they want it. 8. Where can I keep abreast of your progress?

I will blog about it. As soon as it is somewhat usable, I will release the results (including source of course) to the public for people to use as they wish. 9. what does ast and the Minix community think about this?

I haven't told them yet. I should do that soonish. 10a. Hi, I'm from OSNews and I don't like Preventas' green on black theme. And the file manager is totally unintuitive.
Uh, that's the command line. Minix doesn't support the X window system yet. 10b. Then I dub thee "not ready for the desktop."

Aieeee!

Aggregation the G way.
I've been using the magic of RSS (and Atom) to keep up with Planet Debian, blogs of my friends, tech news and posts to an anime fan forum for the past several months, however one little problem bothered me - the forum has a lot of posts (sometimes more then 5 per minute) and an RSS feed of only last five items. That means that I had to have my RSS aggregator (Liferea) open at all times, so that I do not miss any posts. However keeping my laptop on and online at all times is quite bothersome, so I started looking for solutions.
I tried Google Reader however I didn't like it much - I like to see more of my feed. There is too much screen space wasted for all the wrong reasons, one can only see 5 items at the time (which is quite a hassle if you have 500+ of them), a lot of info I would like to see is not there (which blog did this come from???), some strange html conversions, ...
Now I have found my solution. It is a combination of rss2email and GMail. I have a computer that I always keep on and online (it could be a server, but in my case it is a simple workstation). I installed rss2email there, added all my feeds to the database there (hint: export feedlist from Liferea and do a bit of grep/sed magic), moded config so that all mails come from a single address, all have a custom identifiable header and all are HTML mails without any transformations. After that I configured cron to launch "r2e run" every half an hour and "r2e run 22" every minute (where '22' is the id of the feed of that anime forum). At Gmail side I simply filtered all mails from rss2email into a separate label and archived them (so that they do not clutter my inbox).
Now when I want to reed my feeds, I go to the last message of the RSS label in my Gmail, open it, read it, star it if I need to look at it later and then press "k" to get to the newer message. After I am done reading I usually go and remove RSS label from read messages, so that they do not appear in this labels "folder" and are only saved in Archive. If I start running out of space, I will simply search and delete old RSS items then.
Most of the screen space now is devoted to the message, I can see all the fields I want to see (source, author, topic, content, pictures, URLs) and I can manage messages by hundreds. Also being able to search both your mail and your rss feeds at the same time is neat.
Yesterday I did a little improvement to this scheme. The forum that I read has the title of every message made of "author: topic", so every message is a separate conversation in Gmail. I decided to try to use the conversation feature of Gmail and did a little modification to rss2email so that if the message is from this forum, then everything up to the first semicolon is cut from the title and inserted as a part of the name of the sender. In the end the subject of every message contains only the topic of the corresponding thread in the forum and thus all messages from one thread are neatly grouped together as a single conversation. At the same time every messages From: looks like "$forum_name $author " so that I can still see who wrote what in the forum.

2005 is the first year I've blogged from start to finish, so it is interesting to go through and reflect on what has happened. It's certainly been an eventful year. Executive summary: got engaged, got married, got a job with Google, moved to the US. Did a whole lot of other mainly geeky things in between.

January

• Moved from living in an old rundown share house in Ainslie to a townhouse in Watson, without the flat mate
• Started getting my teeth into work at my new job
• Took Sarah to the ER with chest pains, after having had them on and off over Christmas

February

• Proposed to Sarah
• My blog got syndicated on Planet Linux Australia
• Wrote my blog post about mitigating SSH brute force attacks using Netfilter's recent module. Still get a lot of search traffic from that today
• Went camping at Jervis Bay, managed to hit a kangaroo on the way, had a rather traumatic time trying to euthanize it
• Decided to continue studying at Uni part-time in conjunction with full-time work (masochistic, huh?)

March

• Made changelogs.debian.net a whole lot spankier
• Had a moderately unsuccessful time turning an old laptop with a dead hard drive into a diskless server with an NFS root filesystem. (I really must get around to trying again doing ATA over Ethernet)
• Bought a QFE card, after much vying on EBay, which is still sitting in a drawer unused
• Discovered how to make my laptop suspend
• Completed a Saint John Ambulance Senior First Aid course

April

• linux.conf.au happened, and I helped make it happen
• Interesting side-effect of the above was that I got asked to apply for a job at Google
• I had fun with a cylinder of surplus helium
• Sarah is advised to discontinue triathlons because of a possible heart condition

May

• My oldest friends separate, and it looks like they're going to get divorced
• Sarah had her car broken into in the driveway and her purse was stolen
• I get into a panic about passing Uni and really knuckle down
• I discover a little too late that I've missed marking my ten thousandth day since birth
• I organised a dinner meeting of Canberra Perl Mongers, which is a largely dormant group
• We got a new cat
• I hit two years as a Debian developer
• I joined the Linux Australia sysadmin team

June

• We decide to bring forward our wedding from April 2006 to July 2005, "just in case" the Google thing comes off
• caesar, the box I use as my gateway blew up and got replaced with something gruntier
• I got into discussions with University House about doing a wireless LAN setup for them for their guests
• Started work on a box for Linux Australia that would host a few User Mode Linux instances for various things

July

• My old Rover crew turned 20
• We discovered the Tea Centre, and the wonders of different varieties of leaf tea
• I scraped through first semester at Uni
• I decided to upgrade daedalus and ordered a new box
• Michael and I went to the US for face to face interviews with Google
• Started semester 2 at Uni
• Started migrating services to the new daedalus
• Sarah and I were married

August

• Google makes me a job offer
• I ordered myself a new laptop
• My car tyres got slashed while I was at Uni
• Uni all got a bit much, and I decided to drop out
• I got a 1 gig USB key
• I had some fun with LVM snapshotting

September

• Video card in my desktop blew up
• I return to working in the office, and have a crack at catching the bus because of heinous petrol prices
• I built Linux Australia's content mirroring box
• The cat vomits one time too many and gets a new diet
• We went and saw the Warehouse Circus' most excellent BAM! production

October

• I ascended Mount Tennant with Rick
• Sarah and I went and checked out the Tumut 3 power station
• Sarah got her wisdom teeth out
• I had some more fun with LVM and data migration
• I had even more fun with LVM snapshots
• We finally got our visas for the US
• I quit my job
• We bought a new dining table
• We bought an iPaq and a bluetooth GPS and some navigation software
• We bought a new digital camera
• Canberra Perl Mongers had another dinner meeting

November

• I finished up at Cybertrust
• I went to the US
• Sarah went to Singapore for a holiday with some of her relatives
• I started at Google

December

• Sarah arrived in the US from Singapore
• We found somewhere more permanent to live
• We bought new mountain bikes
• All our stuff arrived from Australia