Horray! NVIDIA just released 100.14.19 that is Xorg 7.3 compatible and with a rather big changelog. That should make a couple of Debian users happy. I'll work on packages ASAP. Hopefully legacy versions will be updated soon as well

Once again I'm working on furthering the creation of the NVIDIA packaging team. I already have 2 members plus myself but I am seeking people who will help with the ever growing legacy packages. Please email rdonald@debian.org with your interests if you want to help even if in other areas.

Eleven is my favourite number and it can now be seen in my latest upload of nvidia-graphics-drivers 100.14.11.

This past week I've been looking at various methodologies for the requirements phase of web application development. I've looked at UWE, NDT, WebML, Design-driven requirements elicitation and OOHDM. My interest in these has been sparked by an opportunity to readdress and better the process at work. My post here is to basically elicit some feedback from others who build web applications for clients in a professional environment and tell me what works for them.

Ok so I goofed a bit and packaged the beta drivers instead of the stable release. I have corrected that with an upload this evening. It seemed that the NVIDIA ftp site hasn't been updated like the website and thus I grabbed 100.14.06 instead of 100.14.09 as it was the most recent.

Uploaded yesterday:

- nvidia-graphics-drivers 100.14.06-1
- nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-71xx 1.0.7185-4
- nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx 1.0.9639-1
- nvidia-graphics-legacy-71xx-modules-amd64 1.0.7185+1

uploading today maybe (all NEW):
- nvidia-graphics-legacy-71xx-modules-i386 1.0.7185+1
- nvidia-graphics-legacy-96xx-modules-i386 1.0.9639+1
- nvidia-graphics-legacy-96xx-modules-amd64 1.0.9639+1
- nvidia-graphics-modules-i386 100.14.06+1
- nvidia-graphics-modules-amd64 100.14.06+1

bill watson commented:

"Excellent report. I'm a member of Co-op Group (Northern) and also United. United is an extremely well run outfit with well maintained shops. They also have about 30 petrol stations, mostly in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. The fear from United members, on the proposed merger, is that focus will be lost and regional investment diluted. United are also trialing factory made shop units which are erected on-site (similar to the way McDonalds do it). This gives a turnaround time of about 16 weeks from start to shop opening. There is one not far from me (Ditton) and it's very popular. The United website United Acquisitions gives lots of info on this and other things."

I've mixed feelings on modular build (McStores?) - it makes the construction greener, but there seems little information on the long-term energy use of the store. Maybe it's simply unknown yet. The offer of a finder's fee for new store sites is interesting. I wonder if that will spread to the Co-operative Group after the merger. As I understand it, the fear from tCG members is that we're getting a lot of new members and a new chief exec who seems to have a very different focus to the members. I'm sure we'd be happy to see well-run and well-maintained shops, but will it mean even more centralisation and all the mistakes that means? Like stocking no Somerset Cheddars in some Somerset stores, with the confusing excuse that (as far as I could understand - see previously-mentioned answers to AGM food questions) no supplier offers enough units that meet the specifications or it's unsuitable for our type of stores ("Welcome"). I'm glad so many people liked the report, anyway.

nvidia-settings_1.0+20070502-1

nvidia-xconfig_1.0+20070502-1

nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx_1.0.9631-1 (NEW)

So after the upgrade to xorg-server-core 2:1.3.0.0.dfsg-2 on my home machine my second screen has gone wacky thinking it is the size of the first screen. I choose to use multiple X screens and it seems I ran into
#420679.
It's a good thing I didn't upgrade on my work machine yet where I run three screens. If anyone knows of a workaround I'd be grateful to filled in.

yup, a renamed 7185 has been uploaded to NEW. Tomorrow, 96xx

Which Programming Language are You?




Which File Extension are You?



Which Caffeinated Beverage are You?

Among other work I have to do I have started nvidia-graphics-drivers 1.0.9755 and nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx 1.0.9631.
I'll be upgrading legacy-71xx to 7185 as well.

Dear Lazyweb,

The company I work is going through a merger of sorts and the amount of our php development will probably be up. We have our Java environment working pretty good now with Netbeans and subversion in both Linux and Windows so we'd like the same features for php, specifically:

1) Both Windows and Linux support
2) Debugging
3) Not too ugly an UI ;)

Somehow I figure eclipse may work its way into this but I'm not sure I want that.

So what recommendations do you have?

P.S. I'm gonna do some NVIDIA stuff on the weekend if not sooner.

As there are now tow legacy versions of the NVIDIA drivers the question comes up, "What do we call this new one?"

Here is a poll where you can give me feedback on the issue.

Ugh. I have some blogging catching-up to do, which I'm going to try to take at a fast clip. I tend to get bogged down in the daily details, which can make getting my info down electronically kind of difficult.

Trip to New York City Maj, Amita June and I drove down through upstate New York for LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. It was a good drive -- really pretty going through the Adirondacks in winter. There were icicles hanging dozens of meters from stone cliffs -- really dramatic. We spent Tuesday night with our friends Jen Bohner and Massoud Marzban. Jen is a friend of mine from high school, and Massoud is her husband. They live in Sunnyside, Queens now, after a year stint here in Montreal just before Amita was born. We miss having them around here, but they seem to have settled in well in NYC. Jen is working way too hard on a master's of education while teaching 5 classes during the day in New York public schools. Despite this, they found time to make us a great dinner, open a bottle of wine, and spend the evening chatting. Really decent people. tags: jen massoud drive montreal travel queens

LWOSS The next morning, Valentine's Day, I got up early to go into Manhattan for LWOSS. I called for a car service that Jen and Massoud use, but they failed to show up, and when I called back they hung up on me. Deborah's Car Service, there. Make sure to miss them if you're in the area. Anyways, I managed to flag down a cab and get into Manhattan anyways. It wasn't too much fun -- there'd been a big snowstorm the night before, and traffic was gnarled and bitter. Still, I got to the event hotel -- the New York Marriott Marquis on Times Square, got checked in, and registered for the event just fine. The keynote speaker was security expert Bruce Schneier, who gave an extremely insightful talk about economic laws as they apply to computer security. It was very interesting, if hard to follow at times -- it's not always easy to keep economic theories and security practices juggling in your brain at the same time. I met up with Don Marti, who'd invited me to participate at LWOSS, in the speakers' lounge. He had assembled a great team of interesting people who know a lot about Linux and Open Source: John Mark Walker, Jeremy Allison and Jerry Carter of the Samba project, and Jeremy Garcia of LinuxQuestions. Sadly, the snowstorm had canceled the flights of two more participants, Donald Becker and Sascha Chua. (Those weren't the only two people who couldn't come because of the flying problems. I overheard dozens of conversations on cell phones of people whose colleagues couldn't make it for the show. In retrospect, it's pretty surprising that we had the event at all. Schools and businesses were closed all across New York on the 14th and 15th.) Don's plan was simple: to hold an "unconference" at the heart of the conference. We took a section of the showroom floor, set up some chairs and a big monitor for demoing, plus a whiteboard, and just started some interesting conversations. I talked about Web APIs, since I wrote an article on Web APIs for LinuxWorld.com in December. Other people talked about their own projects, about Linux distros, about tools in the Open Source toolkit, about the process itself, and all kinds of things. It was really fun and productive. (I'm realizing now that I should put Don in touch with Ted Ernst, who's been instrumental in organizing three of the Open Space events I went to in the last year. It would be really interesting to have an Open Space event the day before or after the main conference... making mental note, here.) Otherwise, the event was really pretty good. I talked a lot with Jeremy Garcia, who started using MediaWiki about the same time we started using it for Wikitravel. LQ is a really great project, and a nice mix of different community platforms. I managed to luck into an LQ t-shirt, which I'll wear proudly. The other big news, for me, was getting a loaner Nokia N800 to use during the event. The N800 is an Internet tablet, about the size of a cell phone, but without phone features. I liked it so much that I asked the Nokia team to loan me the device for a long-term review, and they agreed. So I took it home with me. Meanwhile, Maj and Amita June had a nice time tooling around New York. They went to the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday, which was pretty great -- Amita loved looking at the animals. We had dinner on Wednesday at a pub off of Times Square called The Perfect Pint -- although the food was a little more upscale than pubby. Thursday night we got a babysitter through the hotel and had drinks at the Broadway Bar (in the hotel) and dinner at The View (also in the hotel). The View is a rotating restaurant at the top of the Marriott Marquis -- pretty fun to do. tags: lwoss don marti unconference manhattan marriott marquis linuxquestions

UbuCon On Friday, I went to the Google HQ in Manhattan for TheUbucon, another (!) unconference, this time about Ubuntu and the people who love it. I got to hear Mako talk about the Ubuntu community process, how it works, and how to get involved. It was pretty impressive. I also did some key-signings and talked to a lot of interesting people. Including Kevin Mark, who had lots of comments on my blog. Hi, Kevin! I had to take off just as the event was getting started, to go pick up Maj and Amita June at the hotel and check out. We took a cab back to Queens, where we'd stashed the car so we didn't have pay outrageous Manhattan parking fees. Sadly, someone had taken the opportunity to key our paint job. I love you back, New York. tags: ubucon google kevin mark

Drive home I wanted to drive back through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont on the way back, for variety, so we turned east and headed up through Westchester County. It turned out to be a real mistake -- traffic on a Friday afternoon out of New York is apparently pretty miserable. We took 4 hours to get to Hartford, by which time the baby was miserable and the rest of us were feeling pretty punked out, too. We ended up in the Motel 6 in Enfield (Connecticut) where we ordered pizza, took showers, and just got our heads back together. Today we got up early and had a nice drive through Western Mass and Vermont. The little northern New England towns were pretty beautiful in the snow, and we passed a lot of barns and farmhouses that looked like movie sets. We stopped in Burlington for lunch, and had a leisurely drive over the border and back home. When we got to our house, I had to shovel drifted snow -- about 3-4 feet deep -- out of our parking space so I can pull the car in. But otherwise the house is in good order. I'm glad to be back. tags: connecticut massachusetts vermont burlington snow home

I came across a very nice story by Leonel Rubio (Leonel, please correct me if I'm misattributing this to you), licensed under the Creative Commons license. It's in Spanish, but quite worth a read - Aquellos que Pose an la Biblia (Those who owned the Bible). It starts with the supposition that Disney, at the end of the ever-recurring cycle where they ask the US Congress to extend the duration of copyright (so that Mickey and Donald don't fall into the public domain), they push boldly for a new record: Not just 20 more years, but 500.
Of course, this would be easily torn apart in little pieces in the laxest of law courts, but still, a nice read :) Thanks, Leonel! :D

Hah! Targetted memes have hit again - Arareko decided I should talk about myself. I will do this, but I won't point the finger at five others - Lets see just who bites ;-) Besides, having left this post rot as a draft for over a week already, it got a bit more interesting: The meme bit from two sides. Arareko (as well as Ion) was bitten by Cicloid, from the mx.planetalinux.org-derived side of reality, and then Hanna bit Wouter on Planet Debian. Ok, time to get this message out from the freezer...
So... Five not very well known things about me? Ok, here I go.

1. Many people inquire me routinely about my name, specially when reading it off an official document where it appears with both names and both family names (Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich). As many Jewish families, mine comes from all over Europe: My mother-side grandparents were both born in Poland (hence the Iszajewicz, morphed into the slightly more writable Iszaevich). My father-side grandmother was born in Vienna, Austria (I still have some family in Graz), and my father-side grandfather was a proud child of the Austro-Hungarian empire - His family probably was originally Austriac (Wolf is a German name), but became Hungarian and Hungarian was their home language. He was born in Felszoviso, Transilvania (the part of Hungary that later became Northern Romania). And, yes, I mentioned my family is Jewish, so having the Hebrew name Eyal (my second given name) is no surprise. Now, about Gunnar? Well, I still don't know :) It's a Scandinavian name. My family has no (upwards) relation to Scandinavia, but both of my parents (although merely by coincidence, and with over 30 years between periods) lived in Western Sweden - My father, 1970-1972, and my mother, 2003-2006. Oh, and people usually expect them to carry strange foreign names as well - No, they are Bernardo and Ofelia.
2. I like to think started my journey into Free Software very early in my life. No, I didn't use Linux until 1994 (and only installed it in 1996), I'm not talking about such a modern piece of free software. I first touched computers around 1983-1984, when my father used to take me on Friday nights to his institute, to play with the computer. This computer was a Foonly F2, administered by La Mancha. What did I use to play on such a beast? Why, of course, I used Emacs to write TeX! Rumors say that this Foonly had the first TeX installation outside of Stanford (I guess this fact derives from Donald Knuth's visit to UNAM in 1977 - But of course I don't remember that!)
3. My family is bitterly split in two camps: Those who love eggplant and those who hate it. At least my parents, my aunt and I are known to love it. At least my wife (Nadezhda), my brother and two of my cousins are known to hate it. The feelings towards this noble plant are really strong, but out of respect for the other party of the family, we practically never cook with it.
4. Now that we mention food-related strangeness, I was a vegetarian for almost my first 20 years of life. My father is still a vegetarian (for over 35 years already). Nadezhda became a vegetarian almost a year ago. I still think I have saved enough karma during those 20 years to endure some more meat eating, but who knows... I might switch back just to be on the safe side ;-)
5. Often, memes can absorb too much energy from me. Even having left this entry not responded for over a week, I've been thinking (and forgetting) on and off what to write in it. So, Mauricio, thanks for making me waste my time this way! ;-) I hope this fact counts as a legal fifth thing.

9746 packaages now come (just uploaded) with libnvidia-wfb flavouring for 8800 peeps.

Ok. Since I have uploaded 1.0.9746 I need to make a packaging change regarding the 1.0.9631 drivers which are now another legacy version, but not as legacy as 7184 if that makes sense. 7184 might become something like -ancient if it still be kept around.

If you need 1.0.9631 you can find it here http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2006/12/08/debian/pool/non-free/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/
for now.

The 1.0.9746 drivers have been uploaded to experimental. Thanks to Kinxof Sepluv for directing what I was gonna work on today.