I missed a bus to Boston by about 5 minutes on thursday (I seem to be doing that a lot lately), so I went up to 8th Ave to find some internet access. The coffee shop I entered was packed, so I sat down at an already occupied table. The guy sitting across from me was in a wheelchair, reading the newspaper. After a few minutes of me typing away at my computer, and him reading his newspaper, he started up a conversation with me. “So, I was just reading that they’re going to have a feature in DVRs that has a video camera that watches over your home.” I have no idea why he thought I might know what a DVR is, or why he chose that topic. Maybe I just exude geek pheromones or something. “Oh?” “Yeah, they want to be able to have you be able to see watch it over your cell phone. How’s that for security? Being able to monitor your home through your cell phone?” “Ok, I guess…” “I’d want that, it seems like an excellent idea.” “Sure, but who else might be able to look into your home?” “What do you mean?” He seemed genuinely confused by my remark. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me; I tend to mumble. “Who else might have access to see your home?” “Oh, I see. So if someone else gets access to your cell phone, they can watch?” At this point he went off about cell phone IDs and PIN numbers. I cut in, “Well, yea, there’s that. But what about people with direct access to the video feed? People who work for the DVR company, and people who work for the cell phone companies. They’ll be able to watch the video. Not to mention people who manage to access the networks of these companies. If it’s in a DVR, is there a way to turn it off, or is it a video of your living room, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?” He pondered that for a minute, and responded with, “Yeah, I guess it’s a double edged-sword..” He made a few more comments about the DVR and how he had never thought about it that way, but I had already started tuning him out. My work there was done; another happy citizen infected with my special brand of distrust and cynicism. Big Brother is unnecessary in a world where all the high-tech consumer garbage you buy comes equipped with built-in security flaws. I’m hoping the next time I go there, I see him wearing a tin foil hat.

Where do I start? It's been an eventful couple of days... The flight to LA was uneventful. Qantas is certainly orders of magnitude more pleasant to fly with than United, even though we were seated in a bulkhead area. I had a 13-month old baby seated next to me (no, Mikal was on the other side), and he was about as well behaved as you could possibly ask a 13-month old baby to behave. Mikal also behaved himself. I had the intention of trying to get something approximating 8 hours sleep, as we arrived at LAX at 7am local time, but I only managed about 4 hours. I did spend about 8 hours with a mask on and my brain in idle, so I arrived at LAX being mostly coherent. Entering the US via LAX was a much less traumatic experience than I was expecting. The E-3 visa was accepted fine, and I now have an I-94 stapled into my passport. Quarantine involved getting looked up and down by a guy in a booth, who waved me through. We had 3 hours to spare (or about 2 by the time we cleared all the immigration/customs queues) and then hopped on a 50 minute American Airlines flight to San Francisco, hired a car and drove to Santa Clara. The accommodation we're staying in for a month is very spiffy indeed. It's a largish gated community of units. Mine's got a ground floor entry, but everything else (except the garage) is upstairs. When Sarah gets here, we'll put up some photos. The weather is lovely as well. Our first outing was to the Social Security office to attempt to get social security numbers. This wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, as we were too freshly in the country to show up on their systems, so we left with letters saying we'd get one within four weeks, when our details had been verified. Yesterday evening, we went for a general recce of the surrounding area, and checked out a supermarket. That was less disconcerting than I expected, although I don't think it was a terribly huge supermarket. Having a GPS certainly raises one's confidence when navigating significantly. Last night I discovered that all the keys in my apartment were not created equal, and that the two loose in the lock box on the front door were the only two that opened the unit, and the two sets on key rings on the coffee table only opened the amenities and my mailbox. So I got to spend a bit of time sitting on my front doorstep until the nice man from Synergy Relocations came out to let me in (except his key didn't work either, so he got to make conversation with a legal alien while we waited for someone else to come out with a key). Today, we drove around to see a shopping mall, and the first set of shops we found happened to be around the corner from an enormous (by my standards) apartment complex, which had some signage implying that it had vacancies, so we decided to get the low down on how renting worked before we did our rental tours. Casey drove us around in a golf buggy and gave a tour of what two different floor plans looked liked. It seems that in this part, it's standard for an apartment to include the refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, washing machine and clothes dryer, which is good to know. Let me just say that if this is what living in an apartment complex is like, it's more like living in a resort. The place had pools everywhere, tennis courts, two gyms, a community centre, it was just unreal. It was also cheaper than I was expecting. We then went to a massive shopping mall to do some window shopping. Discovered Wetzel's Pretzels. Hope they're not too fattening... Tomorrow, I'm going to avail myself to the complex's gym, and generally get ready for the week ahead. Future posts will be in a new category, which I won't be feeding to Planet Debian as not to bore people. I will inflict Planet Linux Australia readers with them until someone asks me to stop. If you'd like a custom feed that excludes my American adventures, please let me know. I wonder if adjusting Blosxom's idea of timezone buggers up existing posts and aggregators like Planet in general?

First off, Dan Zukowski has some very informative articles about Amtrak. It's particularly funny listening to Mineta say that the Bush administration wants to support Amtrak. After they proposed $0 for it in their most recent budget proposal, saying that bankrupting Amtrak would be a good thing. Hmm. Doublespeek seems to be in vogue these days. I've watched about half of this week's 4-hour hearing about Amtrak governance. One very interesting thing about it is that the Amtrak board, which fired David Gunn, may not have had a quorom for months, or even years, including the meeting where they fired Gunn. Secretary of Transportation Mineta, who holds a seat on the Amtrak Board, appears to have never actually attended an Amtrak Board meeting. I wonder what will come out next about all this...

Despite whatever connotations the above might hold, I do in fact like both winter and snow.

I saw Ruby the Rival via an article on Lambda the Ultimate, and of course it tickled my interest in the diffusion, rise, and decline of programming languages. The guys they picked to interview have pretty good commentary - I found it thoughtful and insightful. Robert Cooper's comments to the effect that you should do the easy things first and make the complex stuff available are spot on. Simple stuff has got to be simple in order for the language and its libraries and applications to scale down, and without scaling down, you leave yourself vulnerable to someone who is willing and able to get people started with something easier than what you're offering. Bill Venners points out that the Rails folks have done a very good job of marketing what they've done. Agreed. It's been hard to see the opposite effect in the Tcl community, which has some really good technology that has been sold very poorly. Speaking of which, James Duncan Davidson says Ruby doesn't have a "compelling" gui toolkit. It has Tk though, and if they do their homework, will soon have Tile. And that's not bad... maybe it's not the glitziest thing out there, so I could see why it might not appeal to a Mac guy, but on the other hand, there are countless very compelling desktop apps waiting to be written that are interesting to people for what they do, not just because they are slick looking. And frankly, it's not like Java is that hot in the gui space in any case... Mini-Language Only tangentially related to the above, I found this while looking at ofbiz, which looks to be a pretty good system for what it does. However, the "scripting language" doesn't really make sense to my way of doing things. Look at the example towards the end: http://www.ofbiz.org/docs/minilang.html That seems like an awful lot of verbosity for something that doesn't absolutely need to be edited by a computer.

Do not read further. If you couldn't control yourself, do not go here. If you did, run sudo apt-get remove frotz. Immediately. If by any chance you didn't, under no circumstances should you open a terminal and type frotz bookvol.z5. You did? Oh dear. Try not to ... spend ... the rest ... of your ... week ... aarrrggghhh .. too late... See you sometime later. Much later.

I managed to do a minor release of Monsterz that fixes compatibility issues with recent versions of Pygame and NumPy. Unfortunately, despite my recent ITP, Monsterz cannot yet enter Debian due to license issues. I really tried my best to create and use completely free content, releasing the game and the graphics under the WTFPL and using a public domain module for the background music, but I still have problems with the sound samples. Two samples are under the CC-by 2.0 (which according to us is non-free, although very close to being free, which gives me good expectations for the next versions) and 8 other samples are free and royalty free for commercial and non-commercial use , which sadly does not explicitly allow modification. I already asked for clarification last year when I started gathering media for Monsterz, but got no answer. And I did not just google for free mp3s , I really spent whole evenings hunting for the most freely licensed samples I could use. This shows exactly how difficult it is to find DFSG-free music and sound effects (as well as 2D and 3D graphics, but to a lesser extent from my personal experience). Though one possible reason may be that it is extremely easy to embed precise licensing terms within a program file, it makes me feel like coders are years ahead in terms of sharing their digital work for everyone to use and improve. Of course, not being a professional sound engineer or creator, I am most certainly missing huge parts of the whole business equation, and I may underestimate the artistic bond they share with their work (and thus their reluctancy to give it away for minor to no retribution). But I do not believe that sound samples of a grunting alien or a bouncing ball may have a high artistic or pecuniary value. And though many people outside Debian will consider our license analyses mere nitpicking, a game designer would probably never use a sound sample that cannot be modified. But instead of just ranting and waiting for new versions of licences that never come in time (GFDL anyone?), I will just try to create my own replacement sound samples and give them away for free when done.

Last night, I figure we had every major type of precipitation: hail, rain, freezing rain, sleet, and snow, in that order, plus 50MPH winds. All in the space of a few hours. The wind continued. Terah told me, "you know you live in Kansas when the forecast says 'winds at only 20MPH tomorrow', and you're relieved!" Yup. Never dull here.

About books:

• The book I think I’ve liked most, ever, is Los dominios del lobo, by Javier Mar as. I don’t think I’ve read any other novel twice.

• Between 1998 and 2003, I read a lot, but then I severely slowed down.

• 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, is a little wonder that everybody should read.

• Most of what I read is fiction, but none of it sci-fi.

• I find it amusing that I loved Co os, by Juan Manuel de Prada.

• On perspective, what it seemed like a lot of books, are truly very few.

• Steve Langasek may or may not dislike Carlota Fainberg, by Antonio Mu oz Molina.

• After the current Planet Debian meme/whatever (one abd zero, btw), I’ve resolved to take on reading again, but will most likely fail.

• I wish I would have been able to finish Las ideas puras, by Pablo d’Ors, and Un mundo exasperado, by J.A. Gonz lez Sainz.

• Strangely (?), I have a very strong preference for Spanish literature. The way e.g. Juan Manuel de Prada (El silencio del patinador, La tempestad) and Francisco Umbral (Las ninfas) make use of my mother tongue is obscenely close to perfection.

• Let’s mention one non-Spanish writer: Thomas Mann.

• Like with films, but unlike with music, I don’t like to make my list of read books publicly available.

I have read 13 of the books on the list that Clint mentioned. I had begun to write about all the ones which I expected to be there but weren't and then realized I might as well make my own list. So here it is in alphabetical order not in any particular rank. Some entries are actually series.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke (But the sequels get progressively worse.)

• Alice In Wonderland/Alice Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

• Baroque Cycle: Neal Stephenson

• Behold The Man: Michael Moorcock

• Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

• Dictionary Of The Khazars, Milorad Pavic

• Earthsea Trilogy: Ursula Le Guin

• Gloriana or The Unfullfill'd Queen, Michael Moorcock

• Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake

• Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

• Lord Of The Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

• Ringworld, Larry Niven

• The Computer Connection, Alfred Bester

• The Dune Encyclopedia, Willis E. McNelly (The real backstory to Dune. Brian Herbert should be fed to Shai-Hulud.)

• The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem

• The Island Of The Day Before: Umberto Eco

• The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein

• Ulysses, James Joyce

All pretty damn geeky I think if not stereotypically so.

Dear SpamCop, Please die in a large chemical fire. Don't fucking expect me, as postmaster of a secondary MX, to read every single bounce that comes from it rather than just sending a bounce message. And try educating your lusers (and truely, some of them are lusers) about how to unsubscribe from lists rather than deciding to report them as spam. And while I'm not keen on marketing email, some of it is legitimate and has working opt out systems. Just because you missed the opt out box doesn't make it spam and doesn't mean the way to deal with it is to report it as such. Gah. I like to think that SpamCop's heart in the right place, but it doesn't avoid the fact that I spend more time dealing with fuckwitted reports from them than I do with spam (because I do actually take the reports seriously as sometimes there's truth in them). Outblaze's FBL is the only other thing that comes close in terms of the sheer stupidity of the reporters. SpamCop; Just Say No.

John Carroll:

[T]echnology across software domains should be consistent. There should be a standard, however de facto, that works everywhere. Skills should be portable across those markets, so that someone with experience in desktop software development has a decent chance of developing for handhelds. Everything should just work together, and development across all devices should be relatively straightforward to someone with experience in any one of them. Microsoft has been very good at this. […] I wonder whether the open source world can match that consistency. Granted, there are movements to make things consistent, such as the LAMP set of technologies for Linux, or the Linux Standard Base project. However, the structure of development for open source products militates against the establishment of any consistent standard. Open source development relies mostly on voluntary contributions. People don’t tend to contribute to ALL open source products (that would be impossible). Rather, they concentrate mostly on the products that interest them. This results in a developer version of tunnel vision. Since all that matters is the creation of the handful of products to which the volunteer contributes, what matters is the interests of contributors to a single project, not the interests of technology which should span ALL products.

Great points, though I clearly disagree that the open source community is fundamentally unable to match Microsoft on providing a consistent environment. It’s going to take some work on our part though. One of the reasons Microsoft has historically been so successful is its unique ability to integrate disparate technologies into cohesive wholes, as well as to leave the mechanisms they use to do this just open enough that others can integrate with them to a degree but never so open that they can do so better than Microsoft can. Of course, Microsoft can do this because they develop, own, and control each of the pieces and the interfaces between them. Other platforms (Linux, Java, UNIX, even the Web to a certain extent) are comparative mishmashes for the exact reasons John describes, namely that every project is developed independently, and that there’s comparatively little thought put into how the pieces interact. The only parties that do think about these issues, the Linux distributors, tend to do so after the fact, and, of course, they have no direct control over the projects that produce the pieces to push any integration improvements they might make upstream (in the general case anyway). Furthermore, once multiple solutions in a given problem domain emerge, it’s not always possible to generalize the interfaces when the projects behind them don’t agree with each other on the “right solution”. In other words, because it’s an after-the-fact thing, “not invented here” and general inertia come into play. So, while the technical aspect of the problem is important, namely the interfaces between components (APIs at the source level and ABIs at the binary level), there’s a social aspect here too. We need to encourage the kind of competition at the implementation level that results in technical excellence while fostering a sense of cooperation at the interface level to ensure that, collectively, the various implementations fit seamlessly into a larger, consistent environment. In other words, we don’t want to get in the way of open source project and Linux distro innovation, but we do want to encourage open source projects and Linux distros to innovate in a collaborative fashion so the technology that ultimately wins in the marketplace can be standardized with as few legacy issues as possible (or, in the case where multiple best practices emerge, for legacy reasons or otherwise, we want to collaboratively define a uniform interface, i.e., cooperate on interface, compete on implementation, etc.). That’s the only way we’re going to get there.

Who can resist a good rhyme? Or a bad one? So this round of dak hacking turned out to make the AJ Market scheme another notch more confusing – hence the delay in blogging, and the teaser in my last post. The issue leading to the confusion is that the major item on the list to start hacking on was SCC, which unlike the projects I’ve undertaken so far, is more than a day’s hacking. In fact, due to the need to give mirrors a chance to adapt to the new system between it being implemented and actually used, it’s actually more of a multi-week task. And doing it as a one-day-a-week project would extend that into a multi-month task afaics. I guess that’s still better than never, but obviously it’s worth looking into alternatives. Naturally, then, the first phase of a longer project like this is threefold. We’ll call it “the three P’s”. Planning My theory at this point was to come up with a plan for what to do, try figuring out how much work it’d take, and then see what sort of financial arrangements might be plausible – not involving me cutting a few weeks out of my life for spare change, but without making the whole thing an unleapable chasm from what the AJ Market’s currently managing either. I figured writing it up as a semi-formal proposal makes most sense:

Summary Implementation of the outstanding mirror split proposal for the Debian archive to allow new architectures, particularly amd64, to be included in the archive. Benefit In spite (or perhaps because) of its simplicity, this project has been languishing for over two years, and is not currently being worked on; so at present it’s not even possible to estimate when it would otherwise be completed. It is most notably preventing amd64 from being integrated into the normal Debian development environment, causing derived distributions to maintain amd64 specific patches themselves. In the longer term, reducing the constraints imposed on the archive size may allow the introduction of additional suites, such as backports or volatile, as well as additional architectures; though significant further discussion on this would be needed. Background Since at least mid-2003 the Debian archive has been closed to new architectures due to the already large amount of space and bandwidth required to become a Debian mirror. At present, the archive uses some 158GiB of disk, and about 1GiB per day; additional architectures are expected to require approximately an additional 10GiB each, and there are likely around half a dozen architectures that will be considered for addition once the moratorium on new architectures is rescinded (incl amd64, armeb, sh variants, kfreebsd and possibly partial architectures for arch variants such as s390x and ppc64). The primary work needed to fix this involves:

• ensuring the mirror network operates correctly when a majority of mirrors are partial; this reduces the impact on bandwidth and storage capacity
• optimising portions of the archive maintenance software, particularly apt-ftparchive; this reduces the load on the archive server
• providing appropriate guidelines on the qualification criteria new architectures need to meet in order to be added to the archive; this provides a limit on future increases, allowing growth to be appropriately controlled

Actual work I expect there will be six phases to the project:

1. cleanup of the archive as it stands, and establishing a clear categorisation of its contents to define what a partial mirror by architecture or suite should officially contain
2. providing appropriate scripts to ensure mirror sites can easily comply with the previously defined expectations for partial mirroring
3. devise an appropriate structure for the new mirror network, that can easily incorporate existing mirrors, and coexist with the existing structure
4. provide information on the new structure to both mirror admins and users; assist with the transition, and resolve any problems found
5. ensure the archive management software is appropriately optimised, and that archive inclusion criteria have been debated and established
6. add new ports that have passed the qualification requirements to the archive

In theory, a couple of days for each of those sound plausible, so making that twelve days actual work (with a couple of week’s delay in between for mirrors to have some time to adapt to the new network). On the downside, twelve days at a day a week is over three months of real time, not counting the possibility of doing other things with the one day a week, or Christmas, or the aforementioned delay for mirrors. Yick. So much for planning. Preparation So the next “p” is preparation. In this case that’s finally getting around to fix dak CVS, which has been slightly broken since May. The extent of the actual breakage was just the loss of the ChangeLog history, aiui (or at least, that was the unrecovered breakage), but the result of that was months of uncommitted changes on both ftp-master and security (and reportedly from Ubuntu’s dak installation too). The changelog for the first set of commits (not counting buildd changes from ftp-master, security changes or Ubuntu changes that haven’t made it to ftp-master) looks like:

        * tiffani: new script to do patches to Packages, Sources and Contents
        files for quicker downloads.
        * ziyi: update to authenticate tiffani generated files
        * dak: new script to provide a single binary with less arbitrary names
        for access to dak functionality.
        * cindy: script implemented
        * saffron: cope with suites that don't have a Priority specified
        * heidi: use get_suite_id()
        * denise: don't hardcode stable and unstable, or limit udebs to unstable
        * denise: remove override munging for testing (now done by cindy)
        * helena: expanded help, added new, sort and age options, and fancy headers
        * jennifer: require description, add a reject for missing dsc file
        * jennifer: change lock file
        * kelly: propogation support
        * lisa: honour accepted lock, use mtime not ctime, add override type_id
        * madison: don't say "dep-retry"
        * melanie: bug fix in output (missing %)
        * natalie: cope with maintainer_override == None; add type_id for overrides
        * nina: use mtime, not ctime
        * katie.py: propogation bug fixes
        * logging.py: add debugging support, use   as the logfile separator
        * katie.conf: updated signing key (4F368D5D)
        * katie.conf: changed lockfile to dinstall.lock
        * katie.conf: added Lisa::AcceptedLockFile, Dir::Lock
        * katie.conf: added tiffani, cindy support
        * katie.conf: updated to match 3.0r6 release
        * katie.conf: updated to match sarge's release
        * apt.conf: update for sarge's release
        * apt.conf.stable: update for sarge's release
        * apt.conf: bump daily max Contents change to 25MB from 12MB
        * cron.daily: add accepted lock and invoke cindy  
        * cron.daily: add daily.lock
        * cron.daily: invoke tiffani
        * cron.daily: rebuild accepted buildd stuff
        * cron.daily: save rene-daily output on the web site
        * cron.daily: disable billie
        * cron.daily: add stats pr0n
        * cron.hourly: invoke helena
        * pseudo-packages.maintainers,.descriptions: miscellaneous updates
        * vars: add lockdir, add etch to copyoverrides
        * Makefile: add -Ipostgresql/server to CXXFLAGS
        * docs/: added README.quotes
        * docs/: added manpages for alicia, catherine, charisma, cindy, heidi,
        julia, katie, kelly, lisa, madison, melanie, natalie, rhona.
        * TODO: correct spelling of "conflicts"

Ugh. Still, that’s enough to start work. And the final “P”? Come on, be honest with yourself, you know what it’s going to be. Procrastination Okay, that’s not entirely fair; the irrelevant bit of work was actually on to TODO list before SCC (mostly because it was something that I could get done reasonably quickly) and in fact was this line of the above changelog:

        * dak: new script to provide a single binary with less arbitrary names
        for access to dak functionality.

All the various model/actress names have been getting more than a little confusing recently, with almost forty in the dak suite, and another two dozen or so in use elsewhere – and then there’s the fact that the whole hot babes thing is both a bit offensive, and getting a bit old. OTOH, you need something to rename them to. We ended up deciding on the “version control solution” and introducing a “dak” command that’d launch all the different little bits of functionality depending on arguments, in the same way cvs, svn, tla, bzr, darcs etc do. The implementation’s kinda neat: we have a list of commands (like “ls”) and their description (“Show which suites packages are in”), along with the python module and function they’re in (“madison”, “main()”). That let’s us not actually have to change any of the other scripts immediately, and lets “dak ls foo” work the same as “madison foo”. It also means that down the track we don’t need to have separate modules for each subcommand, and that we can rename modules and functions without affecting the user interface. Of course it also means that all the internal scripts haven’t changed to use the new names yet, leaving the new interface a bit underused, but hey, “dak ls” at least manages to be one character shorter than “madison”, so that’s a win! To be continued…

Ick.
So I caught some sort of cold/flu thing, which inverted my sleep schedule (especially since it happened as daylight hours began ending around 5PM). In the process of rotating it back I got sick again, probably due to lack of sleep. Last night I didn’t sleep at all, so hopefully I can pass out around 10PM tonight without a problem. Quod Libet 0.15
Released (and uploaded to Debian), featuring all the aforementioned speedups (SVN actually has even more yet, and some significant memory reductions). We are polishing everything up (and working on the audio feed browser (feedparser is seriously hot)) for 1.0. It’s all very cool. Well, except the times GStreamer segfaults; that’s not so cool. Geeky Jokes
In a lecture on quantifier semantics, my NLP professor made the comment “In America, a b F(a, b). In my country, b a F(a, b).” Much of the class laughed. Speaking of NLP, my final project for that class is likely to segue into the next thing gesten and I tackle, assuming I have any free time at all next semester. Books
I haven’t spent money on books in almost two months (aside from textbooks). This means the amount of books I own and haven’t read is actually for the first time in about a decade. Soon maybe I’ll even be able to go back and reread the books I read when I was 12 but don’t remember very well (ruining precious childhood memories in the process). Python Optimizations
Just because all my posts have had one of these lately, two recent things that surprised me: if s[:1] == c: is slightly faster than if s and s[0] == c:. And if v: is slightly faster than if v is not None: if v could be 0, “”, or (), the false immutables (this one surprised me less after some thought, but it’s still easy to forget when is is otherwise faster).

So, today has been a day of hardware. Some good, some bad. First, the good. Take one Via EPIA-M motherboard, add a helping of LinuxBIOS and Etherboot and let simmer for a few hours on a low heat. Then add a sprinkling of Phil Hands' d-i preseeding for the final garnish. Tweak to suit your tastes and lo and behold. A neat little motherboard that does proper serial console, boots d-i over the network via tftp and does a completely automated Debian install. Of course, it's not quite that easy. LinuxBIOS requires a few out of tree patches that are still under discussion. The latest version of Etherboot (5.4.1) doesn't seem to work (lots of rubbish on the serial console and no boot), but the version that does (5.2.6) requires a backport of the latest via-rhine driver to avoid leaving the network card in a state that Linux isn't happy with. And Phil's documentation could do with some updating (which I should really email him about). Oh, and add to that the fact that numerous things seem to assume that there is a PC BIOS and that it will support standard interrupts. Yeah, like that's going to happen. Still, I seem to have almost got there and it's quite funky to watch it all happen automatically. Kudos to the d-i team for the ease with which you can preseed. Flush with success I moved on to the next challenge; scanning some forms before posting them off. Nice and easy, normally. If it weren't for the fact that the machine with the SCSI card for the scanner just happens to be the one I stole for the above, and that the new case it's in doesn't allow any PCI cards. Bah. So, find a spare machine, get it into a state where I can actually drive the scanner, scan away. Took far too long. I really need to get it hooked up to my main machine, but there isn't enough desk space to have it close enough for the cables I've got. Perhaps I should crack and buy a USB scanner. I don't really need high quality, just something as an alternative to photocopying. After that trial I've moved on to upgrading my PVR box; I got a new 320GB HD today to replace the 40GB that I'd been using - it was getting to annoying to have to either watch or syphon off various series that I'm recording. While I had the box open I decided to upgrade the motherboard to something that might support wake-on-lan, so this turned into a bigger job than it should have been. :( I'm currently waiting for the data to copy across before trying to stick it back together. Bah. Don't suppose anyone has an S370 P-III better than 667MHz and no better than 1GHz they want to part with cheaply? I'm currently running a Celeron 800MHz (which I think is a slight step up from the previous PIII-667), but a little more oompfh would help with streaming over the network. I'd just upgrade to something modern, but I suspect the extra cost of silent cooling would be a killer.

Strange things are going on in the LinuxTag association. Yesterday, a press release was published announcing that LinuxTag e.V. will celebrate a booth party at the LinuxWorldExpo in Frankfurt today. Needless to say that the core mailing list was informed about the press release nearly one hour after the release and not prior to it. It is very interesting to learn that LinuxTag supports and enhances its only competitor with a party that also claims to be the largest such event with the most companies and visitors ("facts" most visitors can't backup, but nevertheless). The party is attributed to the community, which is quite abundant at this event apparently. Unfortunately, this also demonstrates that even after the big bang as a result of the press release covering the move of LinuxTag to Wiesbaden, nothing has changed within those who lead. They still don't seem to be interested to work together with the others in a "team". In response to the Wiesbaden press release in October two more people have left the association due to this constant skipping of team members and missing information distribution prior to their release in the press. More and more former team members who have committed large amounts of time and energy to the event in the past are leaving the group. To those who have wondered whether I left the boat or not: I have left the association in April already after the CeBIT disaster, together with three others including the founding member Klaus Knopper. However, in order to support the community and projects I decided to continue the work I've already started and supported them during the show. However, things have only gone worse since then. Currently, there's only about a 20% chance left that I'll be part of the next organisation team. Having a functioning team and team work is a precondition to this. Being paid, since others are being paid as well and I need to live from something is also a precondition. Until now, I haven't been paid for my work at LinuxTag, not even my expenses from this year have been reimbursed. It was said that the party was mentioned in a protocol from the 10th already. Also the press release was accidently released before the mail and should be release at the next morning. However, 18h until 10h next day is not that much when the text has to be modified.