It's been a little while since I wrote about Asterisk. It's about time to update the story. I've been using Asterisk at home for awhile, but now we're going to use it at work. The need We have approximately 150 internal extensions here, and they are being supported by a Nortel PBX. This PBX is being end-of-lifed, and it would cost well over $100,000 to replace it, once the cost of the two required Windows servers (!) was factored in. Not only that, but it still isn't as flexible as Asterisk. Along with that, we have a need for internal wireless phones. We have a large manufacturing area, and we have people that would like to be able to use a wireless phone anywhere on the shop floor or office areas. No single cellphone company provides a signal that is strong enough to reach everywhere in the building -- not to mention that there would be big airtime fees. So we are planning to deploy 802.11b wireless phones for this purpose. Hardware The decision was made to go ahead with Asterisk. We will be replacing all office phones with Polycom IP501 units. This means running about 90 new runs of CAT5 to people's desks. For our Asterisk server, we got a HP DL385 2U server with dual dual-core Opteron 2GHz CPUs. We've really had good luck with Linux on these DL385s, and with HP's support. We got redundant power supplies, disks, fans, etc. on that machine. The CPU on here is probably more than we need, but telephones are very important to us and we wanted to make sure that we don't have any issues down the road. We purchased two A104d quad-T1 interface cards with hardware echo cancellation. Very nice cards. The drivers have been a little troublesome. But Sangoma's tech support is awesome. They logged onto our box and I was watching as they were hacking on the kernel module right there. Tech support like that is rare. I highly recommend Sangoma. We really need only one of those cards, but they're the only component of the Asterisk server that isn't completely standard. So the second is on hand as a spare. For our analog phones, we are using two Adtran TA 750 channel banks. Each has a T1 interface and a 50-pin telco ("Amphenol") connector for a punch block. So we can run 24 channels off each of those. Our consultants (see below) suggested getting them used from Colspar Communications. We found them fully loaded with FXS cards for $250 each. We bought three -- two for production use and one for a hot spare. These are very solid and nice units. The only problem we had is that the voicemail indicator lamps (MWI lights) on our old analog phones wouldn't light up. Turns out that Asterisk with a T1 channel bank uses digital FSK lamp, whereas our older analog phones expected a certain line voltage to indicate messages waiting. After some Googling, I found add-on FSK lamps from American Science & Surplus for $1.50 each. Nice. In our other building, we have a gigabit fiber-optic link, so we purchased an AudioCodes MP124 SIP-analog gateway. It's working well so far, except it's not working with voicemail indicator lamps at all. It seems to be a firmware issue that is incompatible with Asterisk in some way. We're investigating now. For wireless phones, we're using the Hitachi IP5000. We're not terribly pleased with the quality of wifi phones in general, but this one seems pretty solid. And it doesn't crash every few minutes like the Zyxel model we tried. The Telco Our current phone system has about 23 analog lines for interaction with the outside world. We wanted to get a voice T1 with PRI channel for the Asterisk system. Our local telephone company is Sprint, and this has been the annoying part. First they tried to quote us an Internet connection. Then it took a very long time for them to even get us a quote for the voice T1. And now we have signed the contracts but are still waiting for an install date. Consultants While I had used Asterisk before, it was in a home setting. Not exactly business-critical, and not dealing with hundreds of extensions, T1 lines, and all the rest. So it seemed reasonable to get someone experienced with that sort of thing to help us out and make sure we weren't making mistakes that would cost us down the road. I posted on the asterisk-biz mailing list describing what we would like to do. I got a bunch of supplies from consultants, and we wound up selecting Asteria Solutions Group. At the beginning, we wanted some advice about server sizing, phones that work well in business settings, etc. I think that most consultants are not used to working with people that have significant Linux experience, and a good deal of Asterisk experience, already. Asteria was a little surprised with our situation at first, I think, but has been very helpful. They've educated us on the ins and outs of T1 technology, pointed us to Colspar (which saved us a ton of money on analog gateways), and helped us with some obscure questions. They were also fine to have a much smaller involvement with our project than they would probably normally have. I highly recommend them. Surprises You'll never believe just how hard it is to buy phones from Polycom. They won't sell directly to people, nor will they even list authorized retailers on their website. You have to call them, leave a message, and in a few days they'll let you know where to go. Some online retailers such as atacomm sell Polycom phones, but they're not authorized to do so, so you don't get any warranty or have the right to get firmware from Polycom. What's more, Polycom usually expects people to need configuration assistance with their phones. But I think that when I told them we need 90 IP-501s, had already configured 5 on our network, and needed no assistance, they were happy to work with us. Reactions We've deployed desk phones all over by now. So office workers have two phones on their desk right now (one from the old system, one from the new). We've heard a lot of positive comments from people about the new phones. And all the features of Asterisk -- music on hold, flexible queues, etc -- will be really helpful here. Cost Even with the cost of all new phones, new CAT5 runs and labor for that, consulting time, etc., we still expect Asterisk to be far cheaper than the latest Nortel PBX. Also... I recently wrote an article about Asterisk for Free Software Magazine. I'll let you know when/if it gets published.

So you read the documentation for IO::File and see:

open( FILENAME [,MODE [,PERMS]] )
open( FILENAME, IOLAYERS )

so you write:

my $rules = new IO::File('debian/rules','w', 0755);

and wonder why it hasn't changed the permissions from 0666. Stracing confirms it is opened 0666:

open("./debian/rules", O_WRONLY O_CREAT O_TRUNC O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 4

A bit further reading of the documentation you discover:

If IO::File::open receives a Perl mode string (">", "+<", etc.) or an ANSI C fopen() mode string ("w", "r+", etc.), it uses the basic Perl open operator (but protects any special characters). If IO::File::open is given a numeric mode, it passes that mode and the optional permissions value to the Perl sysopen operator. The permissions default to 0666. If IO::File::open is given a mode that includes the : character, it passes all the three arguments to the three-argument open operator. For convenience, IO::File exports the O_XXX constants from the Fcntl module, if this module is available.

and the correct way to write this is

my $rules = new IO::File('debian/rules',O_WRONLY O_CREAT O_TRUNC O_LARGEFILE, 0755)

Thank you very much perl for ignoring the permission parameter when you feel like it. Update: Steinar, yes sorry, I did have 0755 rather than "0755" originally, but changed it just to check that didn't make a difference and copied the wrong version. I've changed the post to have the right thing.

% strace -eopen perl -MIO::File \
   -e 'my $rules = new IO::File("foo","w", 0755);' 2>&1   grep foo
open("./foo", O_WRONLY O_CREAT O_TRUNC O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 3
% strace -eopen perl -MIO::File \
   -e 'my $rules = new IO::File("foo","w", "0755");' 2>&1   grep foo
open("./foo", O_WRONLY O_CREAT O_TRUNC O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 3

Incidentally, 0755 and "0755" are different:

 perl -e 'printf("%d %d\n", 0755, "0755");'
493 755

Sadly arriving two days late for wearing to FOSDEM, my trial-run of Sound Juicer t-shirts arrived on Monday. They rock! The back reads freshly squeezed audio if you can't make it out. Go and get yours now! NP: Ben Folds Five, Ben Folds Five

Yes, the title of this post is yet another FTWCA. The question is, do YOU still care about the Debian Project ? I refused to take part to the recent flames, aka the FTWCA threads, but given the upcoming DPL election and the recent events, I feel it’s time to write something up about the current status of the Project. I’d like my readers to ask themselves: “Do I still care about the Debian Project, about its goals, about its spirit, about what it really is ?”. You may find that the answer to this question won’t be the one you expected, either way. Before reading further, you may want to quickly google for “Teletubbies” if you don’t know what this thing is. It may help you better understand the rest of this post. This post is a long one, thanks in advance to all of you who will read it until the end. I may refer to some people in this post. This is by no mean a personal attack, so please don’t take it as such. Recent events I mentionned “recent events” earlier, here are the events I am referring to: the FTWCA threads, DDs willing to expel Andrew Suffield because of his post to d-d-a, listmaster deciding to block Andrew from posting to d-d-a again, Rapha l Hertzog promoting his “social pressure” thing again, and some other bits that happened here and there. The problem: a bunch of Teletubbies
The Debian Project is a technical community, which some DDs are now trying to turn into a social community. Obviously, this can’t work. Why ? For a start, because the NM process has not been designed to select people based on social abilities (there’s a minimum, though, but other than that, that’s absolutely not the point of the NM process). New developers are selected on purely technical criterions, which is what you would expect from a technical community like ours. Adding social tests and whatnot isn’t going to help; the NM process is enough of a pain in the ass already for the applicants. We are a thousand Free Software hackers collaborating to the Project, dedicated to producing the best operating systems ever, and we want these operating systems to be Free Software, as defined by our guidelines on that matter, that is, to say, the DFSG. We all agree with the Foundation Documents of the Debian Project, we agree with the DMUP, and that’s pretty much all we all agree with. We never agreed to be nice to each other, we never agreed to group hugs at developer’s meetings or anything else. Our beloved Teletubbies are complaining about the “frequent” flamewars that happen on the Debian lists, and to be honest, one must acknowledge the fact that those flamewars have been a bit too frequent recently. What I find quite amusing, really, is that most of these flamewars have been started by one of the Teletubbies and mention Ubuntu. Now the same people want to come up with a mailing-lists code of conduct, similar to the one Ubuntu has. Ironic, isn’t it ? The same people are willing to expel Andrew for his post on d-d-a. Is it coherent ? The whole “social pressure” thing is nothing less than intimidation, and this is not acceptable. Similarly, the reactions to Andrew’s post on d-d-a aren’t acceptable either. Why ? Because this Project used to be open-minded. It looks like a bunch of people lost this, and I really feel sorry for them. Your reactions to Andrew’s post are really over-exagerated. You need to take a break and a reality check. If you aren’t open-minded enough to grok Andrew’s post, you’re not open-minded enough for this Project, or even for Free Software. Some of you also need to come back down to Earth. We are a volunteers organization producing Free OSes. We are doing it all for fun, so stop being so fucking serious and pull that tree out of your ass. You’ll feel better afterwards. It’s also quite amusing when the same people are announcing, on side channels (IRC, …), that J. Doe made it to their kill-file. I don’t use kill-files myself, because I believe that everybody has something interesting to say, because this is an open-minded Free Software Project, because the people I would kill-file might be maintaining something someday related to the packages I maintain and I’d need to work with them. No matter what I think of my fellow DDs, I never refused to work with anyone. People please, learn to put the Project’s interests before yours. Why ? Why now ? Why ? Because I joined a technical community of Free Software hackers, not a social community of Free Software integrists to spend my holidays with. Why now ? Because the vote on GR 2006_01 is currently running. Because the DPL election is on its way too, it’s that time of the year again. Because out of 7 candidates, 5 are, to diverse degrees, Teletubbies and 1 is the worst DPL candidate EVER (if you don’t know why and are a DD, log on to master and grep for his email address in the -private archives. Not his name, because his firstname at the time was Jonathan — something you must think about when you’ll vote). That leaves one sane candidate only; Bill, I hope your platform will be good. Solutions ? Realize that the Debian Project is the Debian Project and has nothing to do with Ubuntu, remember its goals, its spirit, remember why you joined (if you joined to get the @debian.org address, GO AWAY). This means:

• Debian is not Ubuntu, stop trying to copy everything Ubuntu does;
• Stop the social madness, we’re a technical community;
• People need to learn to put Debian’s interests before their owns.

Remember that there is only a limited number of people making a lot of noise. So if you belong to what I believe is a silent majority, please raise your voice. Help tell those people to FOAD and let’s get back to work. When you’ll vote for the DPL election, please, think twice. Be extra-careful, most of the candidates are really good politicians.

Tonight I met Eric House, who wanted to get his GPG key signed, as we was interested in becoming a Debian Developer. We had an interesting discussion about packaging and sponsorship and the general mechanics of how Debian works as a distribution. It's motivated me to get my act together and get back into things a bit more actively. I've been having a bit of a hiatus since moving to the US, generally because I've been far too busy with real life. I think I've only made a very few uploads in the last 3 months. It also made me think as I was madly brain dumping all my tips on how to package stuff, that I should write it all down, so for any future people, I can just refer them to the document, rather than again brain dumping at them, or trying to write it all down in a lengthy email. One of the biggest problems now is plain old spare time. In my old job, I had enough idle time because things went so slowly at work, that I could sneak in a bit of Debian stuff during the day. In my new job, I'm always busy on something, so I don't have the time or inclination to be doing anything that isn't work related while I'm at work. So that leaves my evenings or weekends for Debian. Evenings have seen me tinkering with Asterisk, and will probably see me tinkering with MythTV soon. Weekends have involved doing sightseeing and other touristy stuff. So I guess the sooner I can finish my other projects off, the sooner I can devote a bit more time to Debian again. I think in the meantime, to ramp up again, I'll try to get back into doing QA work and upload one orphaned package with the wrong maintainer field a night. The list has grown long again. I think I had it down to the single digits when I last stopped. It'd be cool to get it down to zero.

In an effort to put an end to the endless time sink of hardware problems on the small cooperative ISP I run, I’ve decided to outsource the responsibility of actually taking care of hardware and move most of the operations to a virtual private server. Part of our hosting is actually already on a VPS, but the service there has been lackluster: sometimes disk space is mysteriously unavailable; we don’t always get the promised amount of memory; throughput is slower than we’d like; customer support usually gives us cryptic responses about what was wrong and how they fixed it after a few hours; etc.. (Not to give them too bad a name, but the provider here was SPRY.) We decided to find a new provider. Lots of people had good things to say about RIMU Hosting, and after just a day it’s becoming clear to me that they are an excellent provider. Tech support (even before we signed up) was incredibly responsive; the packages of virtual servers or dedicated hardware seem like an excellent value; and my first impression is that there is none of the VPS flakiness that seemed to permeate our prior provider. It looks and feels like a real machine: top provides an accurate task list that reflects the memory we really have, dmesg gives realistic kernel-like output, etc. In such a short period of time, I can’t genuinely claim that RIMU Rules, but I will say that they rule so far. They also have a Debian developer discount, as well as a discount for hosting multiple machines with them.

So Microsoft has released a new AJAX toy, currently on preview.local.live.com. It's not particularly new, though. In one pane it's like Google Maps, overlaid with a car image, in the other pane it's like Amazons local search. I wonder if they actually licensed Amazons imagery for it. I'm impressed: it works with firefox. But it's rather slow (seems like they are not doing view image preloading, like with the map). The final version will probably be called Microsoft GTA: Reality, and if they manage to add gore after you've driven over pedestrians (who is this guy, anyway? Did he give the permission to be included in this toy? is there no privacy in the US?) when going down one-way-streets the wrong way, it can probably even become a big seller. More likely they'll give it away for free, not making any money with it.

Anthony: if that happened to me, I’d have left too. Normally I try to be a nice person, etc., etc., but I don’t like it when it’s imposed on me. If I’m in a channel where there’s such a charter, and some channel regulars make hostile comments towards me, I’d leave immediately as I can’t respond effectively, lest the Long Arm of the Charter descends upon me, as I know I can’t win. Moreover, when you remind somebody about the existence of the Charter, that’s a threat: “hey, remember there’s a Charter and there are consequences for not following it”. If that happened to me, I’d leave immediately, too. In fewer words: the existence of a charter makes the environment almost as hostile as I can bear. Add something (some loud words, a “reminder”, etc.) that increases my anxiety and I’ll leave, for I can’t win. That’s what I think happened to “anon” and “foo”.

I went to FOSDEM in Brussels for the weekend. I had a great time. Some scattered notes:

• Air travel still makes me feel like I'm treated as cattle.
• Leaving unnecessary stuff (like my laptop) at home was a good idea. My luggage was lighter, and I spent less time fiddling with my computer and more time speaking with people. Or at least trying to, I'm still shy and introverted, so it's hard to strike up conversations.
• I still brought unnecessary stuff with me, like a sweater I never used. It took up a lot of space in my backpack.
• Djelibeybi, the Samsung YP-T portable music device that plays Ogg Vorbis files, turns out to be a really good idea for trips. It's small and light, and drowns out other people's conversations on planes so that I can get some sleep.
• A checklist of all the things I had with me made packing for the return trip a lot easier, since I didn't have to worry that I forgot something somewhere.
• A paper notebook for taking notes in works as well as a laptop, except that my handwriting font is worse than the one in my editor.
• An inflatable neck pillow made my sleeping on the plane almost comfortable, until it stopped keeping the air inside. The "cork" that plugs the hole wouldn't stay inside anymore. There must be a better way for this.
• The pre-FOSDEM gathering in the Roy d'Espange restaurant is a wonderful thing. It's way too crowded and noisy, however.
• Lots of people told me they were sorry to see me drop out of the DPL elections, and that they would really have liked to vote for me. Thanks for that. A few of them spent some energy trying to convince me to not drop out, but had no luck. If you liked my draft of a platform, please try to push ideas from it to the candidates. It's the issues and goals that count, and what actually gets done, after all, not the person.
• Conferences make sleeping difficult. I was tired all the time. Also, I walked around or was otherwise on my feet most of the time, and my feet are really, really sore.
• Jeroen's and Enrico's talk about the DPL team was nice. My main impression, however, was that the DPL and DPL team have mainly concentrated on diplomacy between various parts of the project, and to me, that's an indication that there's something seriously wrong that needs fixing.
• I brought four Debian amulets of glass and tin with me to be sold, and they were all sold, and at least one person was left without. They're made by a Finnish artist/craftsperson, and cost ten euros (though the price may go up a bit the next time), and were not sold for profit. Leena "Droidy" Romppainen arranged for them to be made. If anyone wants one, we could have some more made and I can bring them to, say, Debconf in May. Mail me.
• Holger and Herman recorded talks in the Debian devroom. This is a very nice thing, I can't wait to see mine. It would be ultracool if we could get a setup where such recordings could easily be made whenever Debian people gather. That's a lot of work, though.
• Martin Krafft's talk was inspiring, and gives me hope that he will come up with good things in the future. It was a talk about work to be done, so not yet concrete advice of how things can be done in better ways. Ideas, not experiences, at this stage. The next couple of years will hopefully be interesting.
• My talk seems to not have been disliked. Incidentally, Wouter, I didn't make a conscious reference to Hanna's talk the previous year with the title of my talk, but it might have been unconscious. Or it might just be that we're both infested by Monty Python.
• Hanna's talk was as good as ever. The factoid that stuck into my mind: 80% of the men in the free software world claim they have not seen discriminatory behavior towards women, and 80% of them women claim they have. Also, the distinction of active versus passive discrimination seems to me to be important. The former is usually easy to recognize and deal with, the latter is not. There might be a parallel here to other kinds of abusive behavior on, say, Debian mailing lists.
• Conferences == cool.

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

1. The second day of FOSDEM was (at least) as good as the first day. Though I'll try to find some volunteers to help me out with talk moderation next year, so that I won't have to sit there all the time but actually do have time to speak to random people, rather than having to say "Hi, you're here! Nice to see you! Sorry, but I have to go."
2. Beer is nice. Belgian beer is good. Belgian beer in le Roi d'Espagne together with a few hundred other hackers is very good. Having to yell to get through the noise all night and subsequently losing your voice for the rest of the weekend? Less so.
Several people told me this happened to me last year, too, so I suppose it's correct. I don't remember, however. Must make sure it doesn't happen again.
3. When bringing an oldworld powermac for Sven Luther, it would be great had I actually told him this is your box rather than your box is at the booth; when you want it, go there and pick it up. Doing so might have prevented Sven to pick up the wrong box when going home. As it is, I'm stuck with an oldworld powermac that I have to find storage for, while Sven is stuck with a box that isn't his, and that we have to find out who it belongs to, how to get it to him/her, etc.

Other than that, I love this weekend.

I've been writing SELinux policy these days. Again. This time for the Reference Policy. I didn't get any feedback back yet for my policy, which is quite disappointing. Still the number of violations on my systems has gone down a lot, so I might actually be able to run strict some time soon. Which would be a major step. Unfortunately, I still have a couple of things to sort out with the utilities. And every now and then there is a new violation - monthly cronjobs for example are not that easy to observe without playing around. ;-) The Debian/Ubuntu packaging group is growing, and that means it's bigger than the "pretty much nonexistant" it was just a short time ago. Recent policy files I've written (which of course still contain bugs): dpkg, apt, tor, amavis, clamav.

From a mail I just wrote to the Debconf Team List: Recently I got the data for the Debconf gallery from Jon (thanks). That means I can finally bring it back too, after having the old websites back up. Now, I dont want to take one more work and admin the gallery thingie, I already have enough. So I now search for volunteers to do that task. The task itself is easy, playing master of the gallery installation: - adding new users so they can upload, - help them if they have problems, - randomly scan for “bad” images that have nothing to do with us, - work with me whenever an admin task needs root rights. Whoever is taking this job (2 or more preferred IMO) can decide on the gallery software we use, the way users get their pictures online (web frontend? ftp upload? whatever), can decide on the look and feel of it and can take all the blame for it. Anyone? Mail me or try to get me on IRC.

Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some. We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle. In the Q&A; period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6. I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word. My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool. At lunch, wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat. I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences. All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you. I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers! As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy! Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult! After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealh eow and charming akashayi who went off to dinner without me. Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss. I had a very good night.

I changed a plan. Because it's too tough to visit Vancouver in the trip, I decided to stay at Toronto for 2 days.

5/12 17:15 NRT-16:40 YTO (staying at YTO[Toronto])
5/13 09:00 YTO-12:45 MEX
5/22 14:10 MEX-19:45 YTO (staying at YTO)
5/24 13:30 YTO-5/25 15:55 NRT

I'll go seeing Niagara :) ...So to get a long vacation in May, I'm working hard and am very busy at this time. I'm sorry but I haven't an enough time to response a pile of mails till the end of April.

I recently bought a Samsung ML-2010, which is a nice laser printer for home use, and tried to set it up on Debian, only to discover that Samsung wasn't hip to my architecture, namely amd64/x86_64. It's no matter, their printer drivers still work, but you have to hack around a bunch of their checks. I'm documenting them here because I'd rather not forget when I reinstall, and it's probably useful for others to know about it. Step 1 - Install the necessary packages - In my case all I needed to install was ia32-libs, because I already had all of the other packages needed installed. The samsung tool uses cupsys, so you may need to install the cupsys package and it's dependencies. Step 2 - Unpack the driver - Get the driver from Samsung and untar it, producing a directory called "image" Step 3 - Hack around the glibc detection - The setup program is "smart" and tries to detect if there is a GLIBC with a high enough version. The bad news is that it uses the wrong version, because it is not familiar with the ia32-libs positioning of it. Luckily, it uses a script to do it's dirty work, so I just changed scripts/test-libc.sh to this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Test the Libc version and make sure it is > 2.0
#
exit 0

Mostly because I know that we meet the requirement of glibc > 2.0. Step 4 - Run the setup program directly - The setup script (script.sh) doesn't like to run on x86_64 architectures, because of it's architecture checking. This is annoying, so looking into script.sh, find the program that it runs and run it directly, that is, run ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/glibc-2.1/setup.gtk as root (it will be putting things in /usr/local). Step 5 - Add your printer to the setup utility - run /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config and add the printer. It's pretty straightforward, and actually follows the docs which Samsung gives out from here on.

KDE apps barely worked for me. For example konqueror crashes on every odd run (I guess it's more like: I need to start it twice). Skype, which also uses QT crashes in the current versions directly after showing it's main window, too (statically linked, so it can't be QT itself...) Sometimes it also crashes and it opens up the non-configured kMail to write an email with the backtrace. I think Gnomes bug-buddy does a better job on that, too, not popping up two overlapping windows... I was looking for a nice tool to organize my Ogg music collection, and amaroK was recommended to me. While amaroK started fine, it would stop updating it's screen when indexing my collection. And what I then hate most, is that I can't even type "killall amarok", because KDE applications seem to prefer chaning their name after start... Argh! I have to admit, that amaroks screen looks pretty. The player that impressed me most (both feature-wise and visually) was quodlibet, though, which suprised me with a nice fading current-track display including cover image. It used way to much memory for my liking though, so I'm back to using mpd with a tiny gnome app to display what is playing and access the playlists. So what I'd really need is probably a quodlibet-like frontend to mpd. ;-)