Sarah told me a while ago that she was planning an early birthday present for me, but it was going to be a surprise. Last night, I found out what it was: tickets to see Kylie Minogue in concert at the Fox Theatre in Oakland. I had no idea that Kylie hadn't done a US tour before. Last night's concert was her second one ever, and was only put on by popular demand (the night before was her first ever). I've never seen Kylie live before and it was a great show. There was a DJ on stage for about 45 minutes prior to her starting. There were awesome lasers and lights, a live band, and excellent choreography. My only complaint was that the music tended to drown out her vocals a bit, but other than that, an excellent and totally unexpected night out. We nearly saw her when we were in Prague last year and she happened to be performing at the same time we were there, but I think this was a much better deal: a smaller venue and cheaper tickets. The general admission area was all of the standing areas on three levels. We could have elbowed our way right to the edge of the stage if we'd wanted to. The San Francisco Chronicle has a good review of her opening night.

One of my awesome colleagues from Collabora, Danielle Madeley, has done various improvements to the clutter-gtk project started by the also awesome Alexander Larsson. Reading her blog I was so impressed with this post, that I decided to spend some free time to try out some crazy, experimental stuff using that. What I did was create a very simple GTK+ widget that derives from GtkClutterEmbed, and works as a somewhat replacement for GtkNotebook, called, proving how bad I am at naming things, GkOverview. Like I said, it s not really stable or well-done, it doesn t even free its resources (in fact, it doesn t even have implementations for finalize and dispose!), it s really just an experiment. What GkOverview does is provide a simple API for you to append widgets into it, and it is able to show you one of those widgets, or an overview of all of them. This is quite simple, and yet very powerful. With the help of my significant other, I have got a layout of the widgets in the overview that I really like. Of course I used WebKitGTK+ to try it out, what else? And since I had effectivelly, at least in my head, created a fairly convincible replacement for GtkNotebook functionality, I decided a second challenge I could take on myself was to make my preferred browser, Epiphany, use that instead of its EphyNotebook widget. Epiphany being quite well-designed, replacing EphyNotebook was quite a breeze, and here s the result! Before I go on, let me repeat it: this is all crappy, experimental, curiosity-induced work. It may be that in the future we can use stuff like this to make, say, improving the back/forward mechanism, history navigation, as other browsers do, replacing tabs with a better UI mechanism, and whatnot. A couple videos, for your pleasure (I was finally able to create a nice video, using Byzanz =)):

Then they stopped, and Thorin muttered something about supper, and where shall we get a dry patch to sleep on? Not until then did they notice Gandalf was missing. So far he had come all the way with them, never saying if he was in the adventure or merely keeping them company for a while. He had eaten most, talked most, and laughed most. But now he simply was not there at all! Just when a wizard would have been most useful, too, groaned Dori and Nori (who shared the hobbit s views about regular meals, plenty and often).

- J.R.R. Tokien, The Hobbit

I am very fond of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien; it would not surprise me to find that many of you recognize these words from the second chapter of The Hobbit titled Roast Mutton . It occurred to me recently that there are parallels between Gandalf s role in The Hobbit and that of an Agile coach. Now, before my fellow Tolkien enthusiasts leap on their keyboards, bear with me on this. Know that I am not saying an Agile coach is on par with a wizard (OK, with one of the Istari sent by the Valar, but let s table that so as not to scare off the normal folk, alright?); that should be enough to calm you down. In the excerpt from The Hobbit at the top of the page, Bilbo and the dwarves have run into their first predicament. Note that it s not a particularly difficult situation; they just need to find shelter and partake of some food. Fire would be nice, too, if it could be managed. (Mind you, it s the first day of their journey; they set off mere hours ago fully provisioned and riding on ponies.) It isn t very long before the fledgling group finds itself not only without shelter and food, but in the hands of three rather nasty trolls who are deciding how best to eat the entire group. Gandalf returns once things have gotten out of control, and with some subtle adjustments to the situation, the crisis is averted. Could Gandalf have come back sooner and spared them this entire experience? Perhaps, but in their struggle a few key things happened. First, the group had to work out how to assess tasks at hand and appropriately delegate. To their credit, that effort was partially successful. The most skilled firestarters were assigned to that task, one of the keen-eyed dwarves was assigned to be the lookout. Second, they gathered some field experience that led to the establishment of improved practices, i.e. don t leave the ponies laden with packs when you make camp, particularly if it s all your food. (They lost most of their food that night when the pony carrying it bolted and ran straight into a nearby river later that night.) Third, Bilbo Baggins was called upon to perform his first task as burglar, albeit a fool s errand that landed them in the troll predicament. While Bilbo was wildly under-equipped for his job, he managed to work through it. That experience began a developmental journey that would prepare him for the great things that would be expected of him later on. This was not Gandalf s first adventure, nor was it the first group of people he needed to equip and challenge in order to develop them to a point that they could accomplish their goal. At this point, he s been in Middle-Earth just shy of 2,000 years. He would have been more than capable of walking them through their entire journey, but to what end? Agile coaching is a discipline that aims to help teams develop their own use of methodologies like Scrum and cross-methodology practices like testing, user stories, etc. This means equipping teams with just enough information to strike out on their own for a bit, then letting them run with it rather than dazzle them with one s own mastery so as to appear like the indispensable demigod. Until people struggle with the terse maxims of Agile Software Development, they cannot internalize them. And when the wizard is always around, why bother struggling? One of my greatest frustrations as an Agile coach is how few companies are willing to take a coaching approach with their Agile adoption. They want you to come in and be the demigod as a full-time contractor. Sure, there are fiscal, political, and seemingly practical reasons that they will cite; I chalk most of them up to being excuses for a lack of willingness to embrace what it would take to face the hard task of nurturing what you have. It s seemingly easier to just throw more money at more bodies and hope that somehow things will all work out, and surely if you can stumble upon some superstar to wrangle the mess, you ll eventually be able to browbeat them into becoming a full-time employee. Don t get me wrong; in some ways, I benefit from this dysfunction. From a selfish business standpoint, having a single full-time client is certainly easier than juggling multiple concurrent clients and their schedules. As far as actually accomplishing the aim of my business, however, I think it hinders the mission. One of my aims in working with companies is to be a coach despite being brought in as a contractor. It s certainly possible, though it is more challenging. There s not that natural separation of the coach from the team that forces them to take up the mantle on their own. Few things in my work are more rewarding than having a developer come to me and say, I wasn t really sure this Agile stuff could work, but now, after going through all this, I wouldn t want to go back to the old way of doing things. Much later in the journey of the hobbit and his dwarf companions, Bilbo is again called upon for a challenging task. His response makes me think Gandalf s approach has worked:

Perhaps I have begun to trust my luck more than I used to in the old days he meant last spring before he left his own house, but it seemed centuries ago but anyway I think I will go and have a peep at once and get it over. Now who is coming with me?

- J.R.R. Tokien, The Hobbit

Here s hoping more people will be willing to embrace the challenging, messy, and altogether beneficial task of equipping teams and allowing them to struggle when necessary, even if it means the occasional scuffle with trolls.

Normally I, like most people, ignore cold calls but someone asking about opinions on software caught my interest - doesn't happen often. Turned out to be a study using contact data gleaned from a now dead Linux magazine which, in turn, had been gleaned from the attendance information submitted to a now all-but dead conference: LinuxExpo (the data itself was hidden in the data stream behind those fancy barcodes on the admission badges).

Simple questions about which languages I used, which development environments I used (questioner hadn't heard of either anjuta or geany but then as she also asked me to spell Debian that was probably to be expected) as well as questions about magazines and other sources of technical information. (She had heard of LinuxFormat and El Reg so that wasn't too bad.) More complex questions about why I chose a particular tool which I couldn't really answer in just a few words seeing as Martin has done an entire thesis on the answers to that question!

Got a more interesting response when asked for my opinion on various vendors - 1 to 5 where 1 is rubbish and 5 is superb. Adobe: 1 - got an oooh, why's that? (umm, no source code and better free software alternatives). RedHat: 4 got a slightly surprised tone but Microsoft: 1 got a "Really? why?" - to which the only answer had to be "release all the source code".

Interesting that RedHat was mentioned, along with Google and Sun/Oracle but neither Ubuntu nor Debian.

Gradually found that the inspiration for the (expensive) methodology came from companies trying to get me to use proprietary demos which then turned into subscription-model tools. No go area for me, all my tools will need to remain free software or I'll just find something else. (Got another "why?" to that - with the inevitable "I need the source code to fix the tools" answer.) Also asked "what are your hobbies?" - to which I could only say "You've spent the last 5 minutes asking about my hobby, my paid work is not in IT".

Despite the call ending not 5 minutes ago, I've no memory of who was doing the survey. Still, she seemed impressed that I've been subscribed to LinuxFormat since about issue 3.

I was gonna write this as a comment to Daniel Kahn Gillmor s post on sexism in the FOSS community, but it got a bit too big and I noticed I couldn t log in with OpenID to comment, so here it goes. Do you think that the significant under-representation of women is a problem? I don t think it s a problem in itself, but it is a symptom which can point to a series of problems, with different levels of importance, depending largely on the cultural background involved. That is to say: the reason for this gender disparity may have significantly different roots depending on the place, some of which need to be addressed in completely different ways, if at all. Off the top of my head I d name a few:

1. Cultural favoring of men as intellectually superior in any given field, filtering women out of participation in said field.
2. Cultural/religious taboo of women as professionals in general.
3. Cultural/religious taboo of learning for women.
4. Cultural favoring of women as superior in some fields, draining other fields of prospective women professionals.
5. Cultural characterization of certain fields as non-feminine, scaring women away on other grounds than technical capacity.
6. Cultural expectations regarding pregnancy and marriage, coupled with age expectations for entry level jobs, barring entry to certain fields.

And since I m speaking theoretically, we could also imagine a maternalist culture in which women aren t attracted to IT because it s beneath their level , preferring instead careers in politics or whatever is seen as a superior career in this imaginary culture.
This is obviously bogus, but I feel the need to make at least one Devil s Advocate argument pointing out that women don t necessarily need help achieving equality everywhere. With this in mind, I d say we can start addressing the problems where they exist and for what they are. Seems like a clearer starting point, IMHO. Disclaimer: I m not really active in this endeavor, partly because I ve never believed in any particular large-scale plan to change the scenario. I m more of a small-scale guy: changing the world one person at a time (which is ironically contradicted by the sheer existence of this post, but anyway ).

Since I returned from this year's debconf quite a lot things have changed in my life. One thing I knew way before debconf already, I switched jobs. I was working for a pretty long time (and also through great times) for Silver Server, for well over 6 years. Let's see what I can do in and for my new job. I'm still only pretty short there yet and I being to understand what's going on (and what could need improvements in some workflows) but it's too early to see that more precisely. On a small side-note, the job change also required me to switch my mobile phone number because the old one was a company's number. I now have a private one that I don't fear of losing anymore. If you subtract the number 3933309527644 from my old one you have my new one. On the other hand you can always ask me for it in case you had my old one and wonder. ;) Besides my mobile phone number other smaller things have changed over time too. Most of you noticed that I'm neither using my @ist.org nor my @debian.org address anymore because they did carry the wrong nick. And given that everyone was switching their gnupg keys I did so too. Like before I again created separate keys for private usage and for Debian usage. I'm not really following the procedure of sending out signing requests to people who have signed my old key(s), personally I don't follow them myself so I don't expect others to do. They are though cross-signed with the old ones just to be on the save side to keep the WoT not losing connections. Also I finally got around to set up my own ejabberd server and did create my a new jabber ID that I also plan to keep. It is the same as my private mailaddress as you can see linked above in the key for private usage. ;) One of the reasons for the server is by the way also a testbed for the packaging of ejabberd which will get moved into team maintenance with the next upload which will be the next upstream version, 2.1. But the biggest and most important change in my life is that I will have to rethink my spare time spending quite a lot because there will be something demanding a lot of time starting in about march next year. An extremely fortunate change and almost as happy one even though it means that I won't be able to attend next year's debconf in NY, but I hope the people whom I told that I will be there aren't too disappointed by this announcement. Sorry! :)

Oh well... in the last days my machine crashed during the nightly backup. When I restarted it the next morning I realized two problems: the LVM is not recognized anymore and my X crashes on startup.
With the help of Tino Keitel (scorpi) I fixed the first issue by installing an older version of the lvm2 package (namely: lvm2_2.02.39-7_i386.deb) and libdevmapper1.02.1 (namely: libdevmapper1.02.1_1.02.37-1_i386.deb). Tino reported this in Bug #546817.

But there's still the Xorg problem left. Xorg.0.log reports:



Maybe this is Bug #546586? I've already detached the second display, but it still crashes. Pointers and solutions appreciated!

UPDATE: thanks for the points! X is now working again!

At 14:45 CEST, today, 1 October 2009, I submitted my thesis to the print shop. Sarah has kindly agreed to pick it up tomorrow and drop it off at Brian s office, from where it will go to the three examiners. On 30 October at 9:30 IST, I will stand to publicly defend my work at the University of Limerick. I expect to receive a list of changes to be made from the examiners, hopefully minor, such that there won t be much in the way before I submit the final version to the University Board by 3 December. Once they give their green light, I will make it available on my research website, along with the data. I expect this to happen in January 2010. I have many many people to thank and will do so in due time. Right now I just want to thank Brian Fitzgerald and Kieran Conboy for their flexibility. I was supposed to have the thesis done by the end of August to given them a month to read it over, but by then, I only had the first six (of eight) chapters done. We hence spent all of September sending back and forth PDFs and paper comments, working iteratively so that today, I could put the finishing touch on the work and keep the schedule. The next thing on my agenda is the second edition of my book, which we are targetting for Debian squeeze . If you would like to be the first to receive more details, sign up to the announcement mailing list.

After seeing bubulle s post on the statistics per country in Debian I started wondering about how the statistics were made. They probably take into consideration the Country field in the LDAP, but this seems a bit off since there s a considerable number of DDs living abroad.
This hit me since I should probably count as BR, but live in DE. I m personally skewing the statistics! I know this is totally meaningless, but perhaps we could add a nationality field to the LDAP, just to make the competition a bit more precise! ;)

Since I last evaluated and complained about wikis last year, I ve been using moinmoin for two sites: a public one and a personal one. The personal site has notes on various projects, and my task lists. I ve been starting out with the Zen To Done (ebook, PDF, paper) idea. It sounds great, by the way; a nice improvement on the better-known GTD. My To Do Page Anyhow, in MoinMoin, I have a ToDos page. At the top are links to pages with different tasks: personal, work, yard, etc. Below that, are the three big rocks (as ZTD calls them) for the day: three main goals for the day. I edit that section every day. The Calendar And below that, I use MoinMoin s excellent MonthCalendar macro. I have three calendars in a row: this month, next month, and last month. Each day on the calendar is a link to a wiki page; for instance, ToDos/Calendar/2009-10-01. The day has a red background if the wiki page exists, and white otherwise. So when I need to do something on or by a specific day, I click on the link, click my TaskTemplate, and create a simple wiki page. When I complete all the tasks for that day, I delete that day s wiki page (and can note what I did as the log message if I like). Very slick. The Task Lists My task pages are similar. They look like this:
= Personal = <<NewPage(TaskTemplate,Create new task,@SELF)>> <<Navigation(children,1)>>
<<BR>>
So, my personal task page has a heading, then it has an input form with a text box and a button that says Create new task. Type something in and that becomes the name for a wiki page, and takes you do the editor to describe it. Below the button is a list of all the sub-pages under the Personal page, which represent the tasks. When a task is done, I delete the page and off the list it goes. I can move items from one list to another by renaming the page. It works very, very nicely. Collecting Part of both ZTD and GTD is that it must be very easy to get your thoughts down. The idea is that if you have to think, I ve got to remember this, then you ll be stressed and worried about the things you might be forgetting. I have a Collecting page, like the Personal or Work pages, that new items appear on when I m not editing my wiki. They get there by email. MoinMoin has a nice email system. I ve set up a secret email address. Mail sent there goes directly into MoinMoin. It does some checks on it, then looks at a combination of the From and Subject lines to decide what to do with it. If I name an existing page, it will append my message the the end. If it s a new page, it ll create it. I have it set up so that it takes the subject line as a page name to create/append to under ToDos/Collecting/$subject (by putting that as the name on the To line). So, on my computers, I have a newtodo script that invokes mail(1), asks for a subject, and optionally lets me supply a body. Quick and painless. Also, I ve added the address to my mobile phone s address book. That way I don t have to carry around pen and paper. Need to get down some thought ? No problem. Hit send email, pull the last address sent to, give it a subject and maybe a body. Very slick. Wiki Software As a way of updating my posts from last year: I ve been very happy with MoinMoin overall. It has some oddities, and the biggest one that concerns me is its attachment support. It doesn t let you specify a maximum upload size, and doesn t very well let you restrict attachment work to only certain people. But the biggest problem is that it doesn t track history on attachments. If a vandal deletes the attachment on a page, it s GONE. They expect to have that fixed in 2.0, coming out in approximately November, 2010. I also looked at Ikiwiki carefully over the past few days. Several things impressed me. First, everything can be in git. This makes for a very nice offline mode, better than Moin s offline sync. The comment module is nicer than anything in Moin, and the tagging system is as well. Ikiwiki truly could make a nice blog, and Moin just couldn t. It also puts backlinks at the bottom of each page automatically, a nice feature. And it s by Joey Hess, who writes very solid software. There are also some drawbacks. Chief on that list is that ikiwiki has no built-in history of a page feature. Click History and it expects to take you to gitweb or ViewVC or some such tool. That means that reverting a page requires either git access or cut and pasting. That s fine for me, but throwing newbies to gitweb suddenly might not be the most easy. Since ikiwiki is a (very smart) wiki compiler, its permission system is a lot less powerful than Moin s, and notably can t control read access to pages at all. If you need to do that, you d have to do it at the webserver level. It does have a calendar, but not one that works like Moin s does, though I could probably write one easily enough based on what s there. A few other minor nits: the email receiving feature is not as versatile as Moin s, you can t subscribe to get email notifications on certain pages (RSS feeds only, which would have to be manually tweaked later), and you can t easily modify the links at the top of each page or create personal bookmarks. Ikiwiki looks like an excellent tool, but just not quite the right fit for my needs right at the moment. I ve also started to look at DokuWiki a bit. I was initially scared off by all the plugins I d have to use, but it does look like a nice software. I also re-visited MediaWiki, and once again concluded that it is way too complicated for its own good. There are something like a dozen calendar plugins for it, some of which even are thought to work. The one that looked like the one I d use had a 7-step (2-page) installation process that involved manually running SQL commands and cutting and pasting some obscure HTML code with macros in it. No thanks.

Since I asked for suggestions on the Brownback town hall, I figured I ought to report what happened. He was scheduled to spend about 30 minutes in it; he probably spent a total of 40 or 45. He arrived a few minutes early, went around the room shaking hands and asking each person their name (including me). It was polite on the one hand, and a little odd on the other, as he was occasionally reaching over chairs to reach people far away. Anyhow, he stood up front and had a little speech to start with. He spent the first 5-10 minutes talking about local sports teams. It might have been a nice icebreaker if it was 30-60 seconds, but it just felt weird by the time it was over. Everybody knew he was here to talk about other things and had very limited time. He then launched into the economy, talking about keeping taxes down and making sure they re low in Kansas for the recovery. He touched on energy, supporting wind energy (which led to his most memorable comment of the morning: This state blows, and it s got lots of wind, too. ) He also came out in favor of coal, oil, and gas. Basically he s pro-energy. Can t go wrong with that, eh? He rode our prototype all-electric ZTR mower, and praised it quite a bit. He touched on health care briefly, saying that he favors incremental changes to bring down costs. He thought health savings accounts and high-deductible health plans (such as one option at my employer with a $2500 deductible) were good innovations. He then opened it up for questions. There was a brief awkward moment when nobody raised their hand, so I did. I started by saying where I agreed with him. I told him I agreed that health care is way too expensive, that I agree that we need liability reform, and said that we pay almost as much each month in health care as we do in all federal taxes combined. I was going to continue, but he interrupted, and said, Are you serious? Yes. 80% as much in fact. Do you have an illness in your family? My wife has asthma, a thyroid disorder, and we had a baby this year. That s it. Wow. So I continued. I told him I was concerned about the 46 million uninsured Americans, that they weren t getting the care they needed. I pointed out that many of them wouldn t be able to afford that $2500 deductible in the HDHP, let alone regular doctor visits. And I said that it is our moral and even religious duty to take care of the least of these when it comes to health care. He answered by first saying that nobody goes without care that s the law because anybody can get care in any emergency room in the country. Then he spent several minutes describing how he thinks the government can t manage anything, and thus a single-payer system wasn t right for us. After a few minutes of this, he asked if that answered my question. I said that I don t care how the 46 million people get care, whether it s a public option or subsidies for private companies, just that they get it. I also acknowledged that ERs must provide necessary stabilizing care , but pointed out that 20,000 Americans die each year due to inadequate health care and reminded him that ERs are not required to provide diagnostic or preventative services, or long-term treatment of things like cancer. For the first, but not the last, time of the day, at that, he got really quiet, sort of hung his head, and said something like, Yeah, I agree. It is hard on the least of these. I wish we could do more. And moved on to the next question. At this point, it got weird. The next question was a guy that stood up, saying how we ve got to put God back into the constitution. He said he s lived long enough to see the moral decline in this country, and it s going to hell faster than we know. We need to be God-fearing again, he said. Brownback, in reply, again did the quiet hang-his-head thing and said, I agree. Then moved on. We then had a question about state s rights, nullification , and the 10th amendment. Though it was obvious some issue was underneath it, I couldn t figure out just what it was. Brownback, predictably, thinks that the federal government has grown way too powerful. (Ironic for someone that supported the Patriot Act, but hey.) Then one other question, and as he was going to wrap it up, a yelled question from the back: What s good about Kansas? Brownback was caught a bit off-guard, but launched into talking about aerospace, and how he hopes to lure wealthy retirees from California to settle here. All in all, an interesting experience. More respectful than I feared, more scary than I imagined, and about as genuine as I expected a politician at that level gets.

I was thinking about how I often end up in a directory path where the names of one or more components repeat. It seemed there should be a name for when this happens.

/home/joey/src/ikiwiki/doc/ikiwiki/
/home/joey/src/pdmenu/src/
/home/joey/src/joeywiki/joey/
/lib/modules/2.6.26-2-686/kernel/lib/
/proc/1/task/1/

Then I realized there was a name already: Fractal. While directory structures are supposedly hierarchical, different levels in the hierarchy are self-similar, and so sometimes the same name is duplicated, with a subtly, or vastly different meaning, at different levels in the same directory path. I had wondered if we were doing something wrong, that this happens so often. It is occasionally confusing. But aside from using a deep, nominally hierarchical directory structure, and displaying a slice through it (as if talking about electron orbitals in a rock orbiting sol), I don't think we're doing anything wrong. Here is a oneliner that will find all such directories inside a specified start directory. You will probably find some amusing ones you've never noticed.

perl -MFile::Find -le 'find(sub   if (-d $_)   my %bits; foreach $bit (split "/", $File::Find::name)   if (++$bits lc($bit)  > 1)   print $File::Find::name; return         , shift   ".")'

As ajax quite elegantly summed up, due to a series of catastrophic power failures at PSU, where fd.o is hosted, we were down for a good chunk of yesterday. Despite the machines having redundant power supplies, being connected to separate power rails in the rack, which were hooked up to independent, UPS-backed, power supplies, we still (like a good chunk of Portland, and certainly everyone in the PSU machine room) lost our power.

As far as we can tell, when annarchy.fd.o (websites, people.fd.o, cgit, anongit, et al) came back up, power was again interrupted while the ext3 journal was being replayed. When it came up the n'th time, fsck dumped almost the entire filesystem in lost+found, then started saying increasingly unhappy things about the state of the filesystem on its second pass. In the end, we just went with mkfs, and now we have a brand new and shiny filesystem.

It's worth pointing out that even if this was another filesystem, such as /srv, which hosts all project data, we would've been fine, as they're all backed up. But, unfortunately for some, we made a decision a while ago to not back /home up, and didn't advertise that as widely as we should have. So, if you had stuff in annarchy:/home, it's now gone, and I hope you have backups.

Sorry about that. On the upside, I got to see PSU's new and really very nice machine room this morning, thanks to XDC being about 250m away from the PSU machine room, and fd.o is otherwise running fine. We've been talking this week about replacing our ageing hardware, which would also allow for more redundancy as well as better performance from those machines. But we still have no plans to back up /home, so if you put stuff there, please, please keep your own backups (or make sure the Wayback Machine knows about it).

This is my first attempt at homebrew. It's from a stout kit, purchased from the Elderberry Home Brew Centre, which you can find at 28 Station Road, Whitley Bay. The fellow there is very helpful and gave me lots of advice on starting out. I'd recommend anyone interested in beer or wine making in the Newcastle or North Tyneside area to make the journey. In honour of a period in modern British music I am really fond of, I've decided to call it "FAC-1". Thus, when the first stage is complete and I siphon off a sampler, I can call that "FAC-2".

There was a recent post by Martin Meredith asking about dotfile management. This inspired me to put together a simple hack which allows several operations to be carried out:

dotfile-manager update [directory]

Update the contents of the named directory to the most recent version, via "hg pull" or HTTP fetch. This could be trivially updated to allow git/subversion/CVS to be used instead. (directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.)

dotfile-manager link [directory]

For each file in the named directory link _foo to ~/.foo. (directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.) e.g. directory/_screenrc will be linked to from ~/.screenrc. But hostnames count too! So you can create directory/_screenrc.gold and that will be the target of ~/.screenrc on the host gold.my.flat

dotfile-manager tidy

This removes any dangling ~/.* symlinks.

dotfile-manager report

Report on any file ~/.* which isn't a symlink - those files might be added in the future.

Right now that lets me update my own dotfiles via:

dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles-private
dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles-private

It could be updated a little more, but it already supports profiles - if you assume "profile" means "input directory". To be honest it probably needs to be perlified, rather than being hoky shell script. But otherwise I can see it being useful - much more so than my existing solution which is ~/.dotfiles/fixup.sh inside my dotfiles repository. ObFilm: Forever Knight

Arrived at Manila yesterday. At least in the parts we passed through (Pasay, Makati, and Malate,) everything seems back to normal, with almost no sign of the previous storm's havoc. And nary a raindrop in sight. I'm staying at my cousin Deng's place, as usual with my Manila trips. We found it in a bit of chaos, as ondoy's flooding reached here, recalling the water being almost knee-deep. The water's gone now though, but a lot of things that were not brought up to the apartment's second floor are still wet. Hopefully they will be dry before the next storm comes in... A little history: the last time I lived in Manila was in September 2006, when Orange & Bronze got me for a 3-month contract work on a project. At the time, I was fresh off my GSoC work, and I was raring to whet my skills as a software developer. That job gave me that opportunity, as well as opportunities to meet new friends, participate in a bit of commercial software development, and get used to Manila life again. Then awhile later I got into the Morph Labs bandwagon to become its first Systems Administrator, working from Daet via telecommuting. It was here that I began the long road to unrecovery^H^H^H^H^H learning the ropes of being a sysadmin, building some cool stuff in the process as well as maintaining it. Now, I'm back here in Manila, to work for Orange & Bronze again, but this time in a more permanent position, as Systems Administrator Lead. I look forward to reconnecting with my old pals as well as meet new ones, use the valuable experience I've had over the years in my new job, and get back to the long road of unrecovery^H^H^H^H^H building more cool stuff. And I start doing that tomorrow. Good times ahead.

This post describes how to play with the UK postcode database that recently turned up on WikiLeaks using GeoDjango. You will need the following pieces of free software:

1. PostgreSQL (MySQL does not provide sufficient geospacial features) I will be using Postgres 8.4.1; please adjust your paths for your version and/or distributor.
2. PostGIS spacial database extensions I will be using version 1.4.0.
3. Django I will be using version 1.1. This version includes the GeoDjango framework.
4. GEOS geometry engine I will be using version 3.0.0 from the libgeos-c1 package in Debian unstable.

You will also need a copy of the leaked postcode data. Usage of this data is almost certainly a copyright violation.