This year was the first time I think I watched the debate live, and didn't just read the logs. We had some fun in the discussion channel, and one question of mine was actually posted to the candidates. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get my point across (the "size barrier" question, it wasn't about Debian not growing any more, but about wether we could need some structural changes - e.g. bugmasters, first-level supporters with some privileges, but not the full DD requirements - to use our resources (that is mostly the time of our developers, i.e. us) more effectively. E.g. by preventing flamewars somehow. I hadn't really made up my mind yet. But some trends are there:

• Krooger. He definitely lost my vote in the debate; I had the impression that all he cared about to bring across was that all those who say he misbehaved are evil. When it came to financing, he seemed very naive; he suggested Debian should pay someone to optimize Debian for the Desktop.
  However, we should have plenty of people interested in optimizing Debian for the Desktop already, so if we were able to spend the money as easily (and I don't want to see anyone fighting over money...) we certainly should spend it on something we don't have sufficient volunteers for. Maybe processing the NM queue, ftp-master or security work. But there is tons of stuff that can go wrong if we pay any developer, anyway.
  So krooger will be below NOTA.
• Bill seems to be a nice guy, but I don't think he's that deeply involved in the project yet; I think the DPL should have been more visible before and maybe more involved with the core tasks. So above NOTA, but not first.
• Andreas seems to know a lot on how stuff works. No wonder: he's been in the DPL team before. Having a wife and children is a plus, this gives Debian a more "mature" representation, good for a DPL IMHO.
  In the debate, he had a realistic approach to running things and also on the financing stuff. He was involved in organizing DebConfs IIRC, and I think I already ranked him high last year, can't remember hearing anything bad about him. I liked his response to the expulsions question best IIRC. He currently is my favourite.
• AJ: above NOTA, but I can't really imagine him as DPL.
• Steve: don't know yet. Above NOTA likely, but no idea where either.
• Ari: although he just fixed my gaim bug, I mostly remember him as being a clown on IRC; but I don't give too much on that. Sometimes you're pushed into a certain role, and this definitely feels like a "running gag" during the DPL elections. Above NOTA likely, but can't really rank him yet either.
• Jeroen: DPL-team is a bonus with me, this means a smoother handover, and also means he probably is used to distributing responsibility in the new DPL team. Probably around 1-3, so above NOTA, too. Can't tell you yet how I'd rank him compared to Andreas, Steven, AJ, Ari yet.

Today, at 12 noon EST, I was sitting at my computer staring at http://decisions.mit.edu/, adrenaline rushing, pondering whether to click the magic button. At 12:01, I closed my eyes and gave in.

Dear Christine, On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to the MIT Class of 2010. You were identified as one of the most talented and promising students in one of MIT’s most competitive applicant pools ever. Your commitment to personal excellence makes you stand out as someone who will thrive within our academic environment as well as contribute to our diverse community. At MIT, you join kindred spirits: scholars, builders, entrepreneurs, and humanitarians. We believe that you and MIT are very well matched for each other.

Tell me if that’s not the biggest adrenaline rush you can get from clicking a button. MIT, you will never be forgiven for that experience. Never. I spent the next half hour running around trying to find people to talk to. I could not type. I could not talk properly. I called people on the phone, I IM’d people, I tracked my Dad down and handed him a printout of the letter. I hugged him. He tracked my mother down at the door when she got home an hour later. Now that I’ve gotten over the initial rush, I’m actually sitting here laughing. Why? Because I was completely myself in my application. I think that’s all you can really do for these things. I talked about Shadows of Isildur in part of my admissions essay. I put Debian GNU/Linux work, roleplaying, and all my music stuff under my activities. I talked about my amazing real life friends when they asked what you do to unwind. I talked about the family building a giant kite from house wrap at my grandparents farm in the optional “tell us about something you have created” section. I can recall having a lot of fun writing up my responses. As for the rest, I have excellent grades, though only decent, far from perfect SATs (no 800s for me). My SAT IIs were better than my SAT I. My day has been made a thousand times over. There are so many people I need to track down and talk to, to say “thank you!” to. My alumnus interviewer. The two teachers who wrote my recommendations, and my guidance counselor. Various other people, some of whom I’ve already spoken to. I say again: thank you. Ironically, I was supposed to be in New York City this weekend, but the friend I was going with is very sick and the trip had to be cancelled. The very friend who has always told me “of course you’ll get in!” I love my friends. From all that I’ve seen so far, including posts like this and this which have some nice thoughts on the admissions process, I’m fairly sure that MIT is my #1 school choice. Apparently this year only 13% of all applicants were accepted, wow. I’m excited about hopefully attending their Campus Preview Weekend from April 6-9th to see what things are really like. Excitement.

As I've had to use Windows on a daily basis, I've found that I am no longer able to maintain my air of detached tolerance for the foibles of the system. In fact, I'm starting to get really infuriated with the utter boneheadedness of so many facets of it. Not so much things that are broken, as things that are done badly, and done so in the face of widespread examples of how to do it right.

Here are two simple examples that are emblematic of what Windows users have to suffer through.

(a) Mandatory file locks.

On Windows, every access to a file, by default, acquires a mandatory lock on it. Want to recompile the program you're working on? Sorry, you have to track down and kill all its running instances. Want to read that file on the network server? Sorry, you'll have to run around the office and ask all the people using it to close it.

Last week I got an email asking me to unlock a directory on our local fileserver so it could be renamed. It turned out that I was running an acroread process to view a PDF file...and that locked the directory from being renamed. Because, of course, the universe would implode if someone were to rename a file I had already loaded into memory. This is, however, better than how shared libraries are treated; trying to register a new version of a shared library with the system (the Windows version of ldconfig) will silently fail if programs have the old version mapped into memory. WTF? No, really, WTF?

Windows users get around this by having tools to find out which processes have a file open so they can terminate them with extreme prejudice. This is considered normal and acceptable behavior for a computer in the Windows universe. After all, in the real world two people can't use the same document at once, so why should they be able to do so on a computer?

(b) C# events.

They've been invented many times. Signals, events, hooks, whatever you want to call them, they're collections of function objects that are invoked when some particular condition occurs. It's a great way to make it easy to connect together objects that don't know about each other, they're simple enough that your average CS sophomore could implement them in a half hour, and the concept is so obvious (besides having dozens of examples of working and deployed implementations) that there's no way to screw it up, right?

Wrong.

Now, C# is generally a somewhat clunky language, but this is nothing to do with that (I am not, for instance, surprised that it's cumbersome to bind extra parameters to an event in a language that has little support for higher-order programming anyway). No, this is one of those utter idiocies that just make you scratch your head and go what the *@&# were they on when they did that? You see, when you call an event with no attached listeners, C# throws an exception. Just, you know, as a friendly way of letting you know that you didn't connect to that event.

But wait! It gets better! In order to test whether the event has any connected delegates (the Microsoft term for a function object), you ... compare it to the null pointer. Yes, that's right. Every time you call an event, you have to do this:

if(Event != null)
    Event();

...because, of course, an empty collection of events is clearly the same thing as a nonexistant object.

I really wish I could be a fly on the wall at the meeting where this was decided. My imagination supplies a scene along these lines:

Scene: A smoke-free office somewhere deep in the sterile labyrinth of the Microsoft campus

Programmer 1: "...and we call this bold new innovation 'events'! It's a way for you to perform method calls without knowing which method you're calling. We've found that it's amazingly useful when doing UI programming. I'm sure that introducing this new idea to the world will be yet another chapter in the Microsoft story of advancing technology!"

Programmer 2: "Have you checked the corner cases? What happens if there is no method available to call?"

Programmer 1: "Oh, of course! In that case, the list of methods is null, so we throw a NullPointerException. We thought about adding an IsEmpty property, but who would want to look up properties on the null pointer? Besides, hardly anyone will ever want to create an event that might not get connected to."

Programmer 2: "Uhhh, sure, that makes sense to me."

...!!!?!?!?!

This post is going to be a little handwavey, but here goes. I really want to know what other Debian developers (and users, too, they’re in the same boat) think about this. So here’s the situation. You’re at a party — a college party, if you’d like to be precise, where all the things you saw in ‘Old School‘ happen — and by chance you are wearing a Debian t-shirt. There is consideration that doing this was a bad idea in the first place, but nevertheless, you’re there, and then the people you’re talking with start going on… First question from the peanut gallery: What’s Debian?
Second question, for those are looking closely at the words on the t-shirt (indicating that they have not quite had enough to drink yet): What’s Linux? For me, at least, it feels a little odd talking about heady stuff like Linux at parties like this. Not only is it awkward, it makes me feel like I’m getting a large ‘NERD’ stamp on my head no matter how I try to dilute it and explain it. It’s true — I am a geek. But I think it’s a bit of a faux-pas to flaunt it at a party where you’re more likely to see lots of “Mass Communications” and Political Science majors who, seriously, don’t give a damn. I’ve often tried to tell it off with “it’s a long story, not worth telling,” but all drunks love a good story. Just that this story isn’t particularly interesting! “So uh, to make a long story short, a lot of computer nerds got together and put together a lot of free software together, and it got called a ‘distribution’! Debian’s one of those distributions.” At this point, the hippies will have totally bought into it, because free is good, and free is love, etc. But they’re usually downstairs smoking pot and singing songs of liberation or whatever the hell it is that hippies do these days, so you’re still talking to the Mass Comm majors. So the question I’m really asking is: Is there a graceful way to explain Debian to people who don’t really care about it, but want a plausible answer? Should I just lie through my teeth and say it’s something they can identify with, like a band or a fraternity or something? That just sounds wrong, but if I try to sort of explain what it is, it’s hard to figure out how deep to go with it. This doesn’t just happen at parties, but it’s a notable example. Are there others in my situation? Am I the only DD in college in the USA who also has social interaction on a regular basis and inevitably stumbles on this dilemma? Help me out, guys…

To make a long story short I obliterated the working directory of my current project with a bad invocation of rsync, but I have been able to recover most data with a few hours of work using the unrm and lazarus programs from The Coroner's Toolkit maintained by Wietse Venema and Dan Farmer. If you use ext3 and do not have an undelete command then this is the next best thing. (This current project is the major reason for why I have not been very active with my Debian packages in the last month.)

Right - so things that have come up this week... I appear to not understand the world - or it doesn't understand me - I'm not sure which but either way it doesn't really matter, the world doesn't really exist (just how can you get something from nothing?). Apparently, according to people, I have a version of other people stored in my head that is not what those people really are - and my version of people apparently differs from other peoples version of the same people - I don't understand this - I base everything on what people say - I try not to extrapolate other information, and I'm quite used to being entirely ignored. I tend to see patterns, and believe in the patterns more than what's actually said, though - maybe that's where I go wrong? Anyways - this weekend - work permitting - I might finally get round to answering the e-mails that have been sitting in my INBOX for an age that I've been meaning to get round to for, well, months - especially NM questions - they really need answering, and I should get to that - so tomorrow morning, that's the goal - assuming that nothing break horribly between now and then! Today I've mostly been looking at some nasty SQL, it did however finally make total sense to me, and I think that it should now (mostly) work. There's some extra ideas that might be worth looking at, but nothing too taxing. Quite tired at the moment - which is strange as it's still before 10pm. That's not usual for me. Maybe I need to take up caffeine again, I actually really miss the taste of good coffee - which I wasn't expecting... but I refuse to drink decaff coffee on the basis that it's not what coffee should be - it's kinda like diet, caffeine free coke. Pointless, tasteless, boring. Anything else? Hmmm. Not at the moment - but I can tell this is going to be a strange month.

Telephone technology is just so weird. Andrew recently wondered about store-and-forward SMS capabilities. I would not dare to say that I got an advanced mobile phone. Despite me having got it fairly recently, it's an older model but it was cheap to get in a discounter (Motorola V635). Anyway: This mobile seems to have the functionality you desired. But: I wrote a message yesterday with excellent coverage and it got postponed. I didn't even get the mobile to forward the SMS to the provider. I tried restarts and stuff, without any result. I left, however, the message in the outbox. Today I had severe problems with receiving messages over my German provider (T-Mobile). So I just switched to a French net because I live near the frontier (by the way: hello svenl, long time not seen). Now it just decided to push out the message. Weird things are going on... The messages are flowing in now... From Germany over France back to me. Did I already say that I hate T-Mobile? *cough*

This year, we're dealing with the worst DPL election I've known. Despite the high number of candidates, none of them makes me really feel like voting for him.

Summarizing the general tendencies of the candidates:

• Jonathan Walther is a populist who's saying anything that could bring him any vote, after having spread infamous political ideas on Debian lists two years ago.


• Andreas Schuldei is a pure teletubby, fed with rainbows and sunshine.


• Steve McIntyre talks like something that's between a teletubby and a commercial guy with ultra-bright shining smile.


• Ari Pollak likes cats and Samuel L. Jackson. There can be nothing wrong with such a guy.


• Anthony Towns has a very appealing platform, but his past behavior when occupying a key position makes me very reluctant to see him as the DPL.


• Jeroen van Wolffelaar wants to force developers to be nice to each other. Teletubbies can also have fascist tendencies.


• Bill is a very nice guy with good ideas. He's also the only candidate who hasn't voted for option 2 in the GFDL GR - read, the only one who seems to be interested in truly free software. Sadly, he's not very good with public relations.

That makes only 2 candidates I can decently put above "None of the above": Bill and Zeke the cat. I know many developers disagree with my analysis for the other ones, but when filling your ballot, you shouldn't forget that behind their words, there is what they will actually do if elected.

After my last experience, you'd think I'd have learned. But nope, when my girlfriend needed a new desktop system, I enthusiastically offered to build one for her. Hey, this time it's desktop hardware, and I know desktop hardware, right? I built my last machine myself, and I've replaced a couple motherboards and done various other work on computers since then.

Well, it seems there were a few changes since my last computer. First of all, there's the whole business of heatsinks. I don't remember spending any time on the heatsink last time around. I suppose this is because it was pre-attached to the chip or because the assembly process was "place the heatsink on top of the CPU", but I don't remember which. For the Athlon 64s, the heatsinks are so ginormous that you couldn't place the CPU into its slot if it was attached to the heatsink. So there's no option but for them to ship the two separately and have the user assemble them.

Problems? Well, consider the documentation. The store sold us a supposedly complete CPU box packaged by AMD which, when I opened it, contained a stern warning not to attach the heatsink without first applying a thermal material. Contradicting this, though, was the fact that there was something that looked suspiciously like thermal material already on the heatsink, and after quite a bit of research I decided that the warning was for people who want to overclock their systems or replace the stock thermal compound. Nowhere in the documentation does it say whether the heatsink comes pre-treated with thermal compound, though, and since I have no desire to let the magic smoke out, I wasted a lot of time checking up on this.

A second problem with the documentation is that it suffers from severe Lowest Common Denominator syndrome: the installation instructions are entirely word-free. For simple purposes this might suffice, but it took me a lot of squinting and several incorrect tries to figure out WTF the diagrams were telling me to do; in fact, I didn't really figure out what to do until I found an annotated version online with actual words. AMD, there's a reason we quit using cave paintings and invented written language. Please use the stuff, it'll make the rest of us much happier.

On to the practical problems: it's apparently necessary to attach the heatsink so tightly that you need a latching mechanism the size of Wyoming to hold it onto the motherboard, and actually activating it seems to take several metric tons of force. OK, I exaggerate, but just this step (attaching the heatsink assembly to the CPU) took me at least an hour of prying at the latch mechanism to lock it down. In fact, I didn't finish until I finally gave up using my fingers and used a screwdriver to apply a good portion of my weight. Predictably, of course, the screwdriver slipped as I secured the latch, bouncing off the motherboard. More on that in a moment.

The motherboard (an Abit K8N) had better documentation than the CPU, but not by much (this is apparently a pattern with computer components that most consumers never mess with). I had to make educated guesses about the orientation of several connectors, especially some of the case connectors, and it took me at least a dozen reads to understand what I was doing wrong with the power cable.

Once I got all my initial stupidity worked out, I flipped the switch and watched some of the fans turn on and the hard drive spin up...and that was it. Nothing. Nada. No beeps. No POST. Not even a blank video signal (although the video card's fan runs just fine).

So, my best guess is that I killed the motherboard dead with my screwdriver, which means I get to go buy a replacement and install it. And, of course, disassemble all the stuff I carefully assembled already. Including the CPU assembly. And the thermal material on that probably won't be good any more, so I'll have to replace it with what's left over from when I rebuilt my laptop. And there's always the possibility that it's actually the CPU that's dead (although I can't imagine why)...in which case I could waste a lot of time and effort replacing the motherboard needlessly. Blah.

I begin to think that it might be worthwhile to pay the store to install the critical components for me, or even just buy from a real PC vendor. At least then I'd avoid wasting my time and (presumably) get my money back if they screwed up.

This seems to be pretty old, but I only stumbled over it recently: Just in case you were considering buying a Kensington lock to secure your laptop while you're away... don't. Some lock picker from toool.nl (Barry Wels, it seems) has demonstrated how you can open such a lock within seconds, using only a roll of toilet paper and some duct tape. Watch the pretty impressive video (7.5 MB). Favorite quote from the video: ...so actually you're militarizing the roll of toilet paper. Well, leaving a laptop unattended in a "hostile" environment is always a stupid idea (with or without a lock, with or without a screen saver with password). One of the many reasons for that is that your box can be owned by an iPod within seconds if you have a Firewire port... (via Boing Boing)

Yesterday I announced version 0.8.5 of beancounter. My testing over the last few days must have been with a, ahem, preceding version as the daily cronjob today promptly aborted when some of the data came with incomplete fields. [ This is common for e.g. mutual funds which do not have high, low, or open values but just closes and previous close. ] This quick patch fixes the issue by inserting proper undef values which PostgreSQL groks much better. A revised beancounter version 0.8.6 should be forthcoming in a few days. My apologies for any inconveniences caused.

<don_armstrong> 30 minutes until the debate starts

Join us in #debian-dpl-debate on irc.freenode.net for the Debian presidential election^W^Wproject leader debates.

Branden, hear, hear. Shave it, kill it, get rid of it. Alternatively, grow a goatee.

A few days ago I joined Douglas Nerad as an editor of The Unofficial Blosxom User Group, an of course Blosxom running blog about Blosxom and full of quite up-to-date information (in comparision to the neglected official site). Today I posted my first article there which covers an FAQ coming up again recently on the mailing list.

I recently changed my spam filter from spamassassin to dspam and have spent the past couple days training it. It’s been working well until this morning, when I found that it had falsely tagged 3 mails as spam. I found this quite alarming, since false positives are a very bad thing. Even worse, the messages didn’t look spammy at all. When I looked closer, I realized that all 3 had been sent to the NM Front Desk, new-maintainer@debian.org. So I thought to myself, “Why would dspam think any mail sent to new-maintainer@.d.o is spam?” Well, like any other Debian role address, it’s basically a giant spam trap and receives a gazillion spams a day. Since up to that point, not a single mail sent to that address had been valid, so dspam must have decided that all email sent to new-maintainer@d.o was spam. It must have been sorely disappointed to learn that new-maintainer@d.o actually receives a valid mail every once in a great while.

<p>Came back from a nice walk on the seafront, including a 30 minute professional firework display from a boat 20 meters offshore and about 50 people watching, to find that someone had attempted to attack my blog comment to send spam. Fortunately according to my mail logs, nothing went out, but it did make me go through and read the comment plugin code. I did wonder if every suitable field had been cleaned and have now made sure that it is. Looks like it came from several IP addresses over a 5 minute period and got past my (admittedly very) simple turing test, so I don't think it was an automated script. For an example of the attacks, check out this <a href="http://www.davidpashley.com/cgi/pyblosxom.cgi/general/fists-of-fury.html">old posting</a>.</p>

Went to a step class at the new gym last night. As usual, I was the only boy in the class. The teacher refered to me as "young man" a couple times, since it was the easiest way to do so. =) I enjoy taking step classes and am surprised to not find other guys in there. It seems to me that if the women I see at the gym manage to look really good and have decent strength and endurance by doing hour-long cardio and pilates/yoga classes, that they are probably better to follow than the weight room full of generally out of shape guys who look like they're risking a hernia when they exercise.<br /><br />The interesting part was that the class was in French. While my French is quite good, it seems that my parsing is a bit slower than the teacher's ability to hand it out. It took me several times hearing pas de base , before I realised the teacher wasn't telling me *not* to do something, but was in fact asking us to do the basic step. Other things which I understood quickly enough simply made no sense like carr e .<br /><br />Afterwards I came home and had a snack of some Soya Nova Westcoast Smoked Tofu. It tastes quite good, and I've had several people who still eat cheese tell me that it tastes much like Gouda. When I was in Vancouver recently, I picked up several blocks of it. I phoned them today and spoke to the owner. It seems that the Metro stores here might carry it. If not, they're expecting them to in several months as part of a deal with Sunrise Tofu.<br /><br />I remember when we first moved to Toronto, that few of the stores carried the vegan treats that <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://auzure-skies.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://auzure-skies.livejournal.com/'><b>auzure_skies</b></a></span> and I are used to eating. Places slowly acquired them until there was a whole range of products that we were eating in Toronto that we hadn't seen when we were living in Vancouver. Despite the fact that there's a few large chains of health food stores here, we're still having trouble finding a number of them. Some companies like Toffuti Canada refuse to return phone calls. Many others, like Tofurki, don't get information on which chains carry their products, or beleive that their products are being sold in stores like Provigo even though they're not.<br /><br />Perhaps one of these days I'll have spare hours in the day to contribute to the Association V g tarien de Montr al / Montreal Vegetarian Assocation.