Dear Pittsburgh Steelers, Please snap one of Peyton Manning’s legs like a twig tomorrow, much like you did to Carson Palmer last week. It’s the only thing that’ll make me feel better after sufferring through the Patriots game, watching the referees and Patriot players alternate giving away touchdowns to the Broncos. Thank you,
Brian Nelson

So it seems that the Caracas Trollparty 2006 is really going to happen from January 24th to 29th, 2006. This event will take part of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, and is sponsored by the SAPI: Intellectual Property Office of Venezuela (bad name for what they’re doing!) This would be the fourth Trollparty ever made, and the first outside Europe. We are really happy to have the trolls with us in Venezuela in the first Free Software event of the year. You’ll find more information in the following links:

• Caracas Trollparty 2006: this is the Troll-based webpage for the event, in english and french. It includes technical information on activities and workshops and is a collaborative environment for the event.
• Trollparty @ SAPI’s Wiki: this is the information Wikipage in the SAPI Wiki (in spanish) You’ll find general information on activities, times, dates and places, as well as contact information for participating.

BTW, this is my first post appearing on the Planet. Hope it turns out ok. Have a great day!

Today is the deadline for proposing talks for this year’s LinuxTag (3rd to 6th of May, Wiesbaden, Germany) and last week was the deadline for talk proposals for this year’s Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, 4th and 5th of March 2006, Chemnitz, Germany). For both events I submitted my already at other events held Shell Efficiency talk. For LinuxTag I marked the proposal as “German preferred, English possible”, so if they ask for the English version, I’ll offer the slides in English, too, of course. I’ll probably also build a DocBook version of the talk, since LinuxTag prefers the DocBook format. But even if these both talk proposals are not accepted, I’ll be on both events together with the rest of the Symlink crew and have fun! ;-) Additionally I will hold the talk a few days before CLT on Thursday the 2nd of March 2006 at the New Thinking Store in Berlin-Mitte, Tucholskystraße 48 at 19:30 (which is unfortunately in parallel to this year’s German Perl Workshop from 1st to 3rd of March 2006 in Bochum). The entrance to the talk is free. (Thanks to Sven Guckes for suggesting this talk and bringing me in contact with New Thinking.)

Now Playing: Jethro Tull — Orion

I doubt it... how often did you swear at guys that designed something?
Sometime I think that the guy that invented something extremely stupid and uncomfortable should be convicted to use it during rest of his life.
How long did he think before he figured out that the best place for headphones jack in my laptop would be front side of it? Now plugging there anything is very, very, very awkward and I really don't like wires around my navel using laptop while laying in bed.
Well... maybe it's some marketing hack, cause now I wonder about buying usb/pcmcia sound card ;)

Although the recent Inner European quiz meme is currently much more popular on Planet Debian, the following quiz somehow shows how the result of such a quiz should look like and what the quiz system, which the Inner European quiz used, misses: Having more than only bit-like answers. With answers like this, neither I would have had to change answers to see how close I was to different answer nor would have Christian Perrier had to do the quiz with worst fitting answers.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Engineering 100% Philosophy 92% Journalism 92% Art 83% Mathematics 75% English 75% Biology 75% Chemistry 75% Theater 75% Psychology 67% Sociology 67% Linguistics 50% Dance 42% Anthropology 25% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Since I always saw computer science more as an engineering discipline than a derivative of mathematics (at least the way I studied and like it ;-), I seem to have taken the right major. But also most of the other highscorers aren’t that unfamiliar:

Philosophy

Well, if you see how much philosophy is behind open source or politics, being engaged in open source software and interested in politics doesn’t seem to be that wrong. ;-)

Journalism

I like journalism somehow and I sometimes think about if this could have also been (or even be) a nice profession for me, especially since I managed to combine journalism and computer science in being an editor at Symlink.ch, a Swiss based and German written news and discussion site all around Open Source, IT politics and privacy. Sure, it’s no professional journalism and also not classical journalism, since it’s built on the same ideas (and software) as Slashdot.

Art

If I would have more time and leisure, I probably would also try to draw, paint or sculpture more again as I did during my school time. And since my brother and my mother are both active artists I expect that the results wouldn’t be that bad either. ;-) On the other hand, I also like to design CSS styles which IMHO can also satisfy my artistic bone…

Mathematics

Although I see more the engineering than the mathematics in computer science, mathematics still was one of my two majors in school (the other was physics) and in comparison to many other people I can say that I like maths.

English

That’s the only thing IMHO not fitting in here in such a high position since I’m neither good at foreign languages (see my English in the blog… ;-) nor do I like studying languages. And even if I should see that as “Literature” or “German” (my mother tongue) instead, it just doesn’t seem to fit. (Ok, journalism also has to do with language(s)…)

Biology

Biology was the voluntary science course at school I took until I finished school. At university it became my minor subject. I wonder why it’s that deep down in the statistics?

Chemistry

That was my second voluntary science course at school, but I dropped it before I finished school.

Theater

Well, no, I don’t think that actor would be good idea for me…

Psychology

I’m not sure, if sometimes being glad not to understand how my brain works is a good base for diving into psychology. (On the other hand: Would I write so much text about this quiz, if I’m not at least a little bit interested in psychology? ;-)

Sociology

That’s again more interesting.

Linguistics

If this can include computer linguistics, than it’s definitely something interesting for me, since it usually involves artifical intelligence and I wrote my diploma thesis about an AI subject and our research group did work a lot in the area of computer linguistics.

Dance

No. I’m glad it’s that far down there. Just wonder how it got even 42%.

Anthropology

Well, that’s again an interesting subject, but probably not a subject I would work in. So being that far down is completely ok.

So in general, I think the quiz works mostly fine as well as I probably did choose the right subjects for me. *grin* Only thing I missed in this quiz was Physics as a possible result since I don’t think, it’s impossible (especially compared to the rest of the result) that I haven’t scored for anything typical for physicians.

Now Playing: Falco — Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da!

When I loaded Planet Debian today, the first story was «Pardon my French…ness?» by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. There seems to be a new meme going on, trying to find out «Who’s Your Inner European?» Antti-Juhani’s Inner European is French: «Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.» Well, since I’m quite francophile in many ways (cars, food, laissez-faire, etc.), I expected to get a similar result, but it was quite different:

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table. Who’s Your Inner European?

Well, I like what I read or saw of the Irish countryside in books or on tv, but drinking? Alcohol? Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. Doesn’t choosing the cute classic Citroën (They wrote it without diaeresis! Philistines!) suffice? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen «Those damn British - they really get under your skin», but the newest idea of the British government to sponsor voyeurs with access to public surveillance cameras to enforce their Respect Action Plan (German written Telepolis article about — BTW: Has Telepolis no more english translations?) really really goes under my skin. (Although stories about implanted RFID chips even go deeper under my skin…) One annotator of the Symlink article (German, too) about that British government programme associated their ideas with the concept of the Blockwart (“block warden” or “wonk” in English according to the dict.leo.org forum, Wikipedia also mentions “block leader” and “block attendant”) during the Nazi régime in Germany: They were the lowest officials in the NSDAP and the local contact persons to SS and Gestapo. I wouldn’t wonder if the British government gets a Big Brother Award for giving this “respect” to privacy and human rights. But back to the quiz: Well, let’s see with which of the questions I wasn’t sure what to answer. If I change Tiramisu (yeah, I know, that there is alcohol in it, and I only like it with nearly no alcohol in) to Apple pie, nothing changed. Same after switching Pasta to Seafood and vegetables. Hmmm, well let’s try one of the obvious but not really wrong answers: Mousse au chocolat instead of Tiramisu. Et voilá! La France! :-) Oh, and yes, the ideas of the French government to make open source software, the web and other cultural achievements illegal aren’t my French favourites either… Update, 21:03: Christian Perrier suggested that the quiz could also be used to find out, which Inner European you’re definitely not. Well, somehow I hoped, it would tell me, I’m not German (I also marked Mercedes in that round ;-), but it told me, I’m not Russian, which is also fine since the quiz seems to focus the prejudices about Russians on alcohol consumption.

Now playing: Europe — The Final Countdown

Je reposte sur mon blog une r ponse que j'ai faite sur le blog de Ma tre Eolas vu sa longueur : Le probl me des transmissions de donn es est r elle. Vous parlez des 45tours ou VHS que vous ne savez sans doute plus lire, ou des livres trop vieux pour qu'ils vous int ressent. Vous avez raison, il y a des 100aines de gens comme vous (moi le premier). Mais il y a aussi des "geeks" du patrimoine qui ont tout le mat riel pour faire la conversion des VHS vieillisantes vers des divx (avec tous les filtres pour nettoyer les bandes), ou des gens qui ont fait l'acquisition num rique de leurs vieux vinyls, etc... Et on se retrouve avec une migration d'anciens contenus vers de nouveaux stockages. Le patrimoine est sauv . Surtout avec les outils comme google qui permettent de trouver tout m me s'il n'y en a qu'un seul exemplaire. Dans le cas de DRM comme ceux envisag s par DAVDSI, les seuls propri taires des versions originales non prot g es seraient les majors dans le cas de la musique par exemple. M me pas forc ment les artistes eux m me (certes, eux peuvent rejouer les morceaux -- et encore, pour une impro jazz a ne sera plus la m me par d finition -- mais leur vie est par d finition limit e). Du coup, pour que ces oeuvres perdurent, il faut faire confiance au majors pour avoir les protections n cessaires pour ne pas perdre les oeuvres. M me apr s un d p t de bilan (si si, m me Sony peut mourir un jour. Agfa l'a bien fait !). Il faut aussi leur faire confiance pour mettre dans le domaine public les oeuvres qui sont plus vieilles que la dur e l gale de la protections des droits d'auteurs (quoique gr ce Disney cette dur e tende vers l'infini ;p). Personnellement, je trouve que c'est mettre tous ses oeufs dans le m me panier, et dans un bien mauvais panier. Les majors sont dirig es par le besoin de gain imm diat, pas humanistes (et je ne dis pas ca m chament, c'est dans leur nature, c'est inscrit dans la loi du march , c'est juste un fait). Bien sur, je crois que les gens ne prennent pas trop au s rieux la perte d'un morceau de musique. Mais quid d'un film d'auteur ? ou pire ... d'un livre ! Oui un livre peut tre un contenu num rique : PDF, ebooks, ... existent depuis des ann es. Les livres de science fiction o il y a un objet electronique avec des pages (parce que il n'y a pas dire l'ergonomie d'un livre, ca ne peut que se copier, difficilement s'am liorer) dont le contenu est lu sur une puce lectronique et affich sur des pages cran souple (ca commence exister, et je crois vraiment que notre g n ration conna tra ces outils). Ca veut dire que si ces livres ont des DRM, apr s l'avoir lu, pouf, fini. Et l encore ce seront les maisons d' dition qui auront les originaux. M me les biblioth ques ne l'auront pas. elles auront juste une licence avec les diff rents diteurs avec des "ebooks readers" sp ciaux qui auront acc s tout ou partie du catalogue, moyennant license, bien sur renouveler. Et l encore, ca serait se reposer sur la bonne sant de ces diteurs et leur honn tet pour ne pas perdre tout le patrimoine culturel qu'ils ont entre les mains. etc... OUI je comprends vos arguments. Mais mon avis, un des r les de l' tat est d'assurer la transmission du patrimoine culturel (et de tout autre patrimoine en fait) de la nation (voir m me des autres en fait) qu'il gouverne. Une telle loi, si ca n'est sans doute pas la seule n cessaire pour arriver l'enfer que je d cris (quoi que ...) est un pas non n gligeable au del d'un point de non retour o la transmission du patrimoine ne POURRA PLUS tre control e par l' tat, parce que le patrimoine appartiendra des multinationales apatrides, qui ne seront plus du tout sur le sol Fran ais et ne r pondront donc plus de la juridiction de la France. Personnellement, je pense que DAVDSI a un vice bien plus profond que ce que les gens lui reprochent le plus souvent : c'est l'amorce d'un d sengagement in luctable de l' tat de taches qui lui incombent en propre. Il y a sans doute un parall le faire avec le service public... Si le service public est obligatoire, c'est parce que le tout priv am nerait les gens de la Creuse ne pas avoir le t l phone (ou bien des prix d mesur s) peine l' lectricit ou l'eau courante. Si l' tat privatise certains tablissement (EDF tant sans doute le prochain candidat) il ne renonce pas passer des contrats avec ces entreprises leur obligeant de respecter un service minimum. Ceci est possible parce que ces entreprises sont fran aises, et vivent parce que l' tat le permet. Et de toute facon, c'est sans doute l' tat qui financera le manque gagner d'EDF ou d'autres exemples (FT, la Poste, ...) sur les zones non rentables. Peut on faire la m me chose pour le patrimoine ? je pr tends que non. Je vois mal quels seraient les arguments de la France face la RIAA, Sony, Universal, ... Bien sur IANAL, et je dis sans doute un tas de b tises que vous corrigerez sans doute (ou peut- tre pas si il y en a trop). Mais tant informaticien, et voyant le mal que font les DRM notre profession (je ne fais allusion qu' des DRM sur des document PDF, et qu'on ne peut lire que sur un seul poste Windows -- DRM oblige -- et que nous ne pouvons pas imprimer. autant dire que dans ce cas on prie pour que l'ordinateur n'aie pas tre r install !!! parce que au prix du PDF en question, une start-up ne pourrait pas se permettre de le racheter ind finiment) je ne peux pas rester sans rien dire.

Somehow John Ringo’s latest, Princess of Wands, reminds me of another book he’s written recently. Both have the overtones of some sort of literary self-congratulation. In Ghost’s case, I counted that as a fault. In Princess of Wands‘ case, I count it as a strength. Both books are also episodic rather than regular novels, but the similarities end here. One problem in reviewing this book is that one cannot really discuss much of the setup without writing major spoilers. The cover blurb takes one approach: describe what the reader learns within the first five pages, who cares that the picture that gives one of the book is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the cover blurb is so misleading that it can make people ignore this book even though they should have picked it up. The genre is urban fantasy. The main character is a devout Christian soccer mom who finds herself in an adventure. The magic system and the ontology are quite interesting. There are battles with evil. There is a con. The publishing house itself, Pier… erm… Baen Books, as well as some of its authors, make an appearance onstage. (In fact, if you aren’t a barfly, you’re going to miss some of the fun like I probably missed a lot of it, never having visited a con where Baen people gather.) I found it a satisfying read, especially the middle episode. The final episode was so short that it didn’t feel well balanced, but it’s a minor issue. However, I would probably hesitate to recommend this book to a certain kind of Christans: if you think Harry Potter is evil, don’t come near this book. Overall, I’ll rate this book 4/5.

Wow, one year and a half without any entry in this public place. I'm still maintaining my private diary, but since people complained I wasn't updating this one, here are some news: I now live in Paris, somewhere between Tour Eiffel and Arc de Triomphe. Cute place. Still haven't got my diploma, but everything should be finished on Tuesday. Ex-gf going out with absolute moron, which should theoretically suck generous amounts of raw eggs, but actually I don't care. Going to ride da world on a snowboard in 2 weeks. ph34r! And if everything goes well I'll start my PhD in less than two months. ph34r t00! Going to FOSDEM tomorrow. Coding. Drinking beer. Making fun of RMS. Giving my GPG fingerprint to people I'll never ever see again. Drinking beer. Bwahahahaha. I closed 22 of my Debian bugs tonight. I should be happy, but since some of them were more than one year old I think I probably deserve a kick in the butt instead... VLC 0.5.0 is out, and it's awesome. Shitloads of new codecs, DVD navigation, support for transcoding, remultiplexing, remulticasting, an UGLY METAL SKIN on OS X (because Steve said metal was good), a thread-safe Mozilla plugin, and it even works under retarded systems like BeOS, Hurd and WinCE. Cool.

School: Grrr. One of the school's lawyer is a real moron. He wants us to register every available domain (videolan.tm.fr, videolan.com, videolan.net, videolan.com.fr), to buy the trademark, and to register the source code at a notary. He is also considering suing the other videolan trademark owners, and looking for possible patents for our software. Absolute bullshit. I think people like him are really perverting our legal system. Fuck, fuck, FUCK ! Can't he understand we are doing a research job, that we want to publish it as free software, show it, share it, instead of preventing people from using it or even pronouncing its bloody name ? The craziest of all is that they'd prefer to have the project die in a corner (which is what it's virtually been doing for more than two years) than to take the risk that someone claims property on its name. Just the fucking name ! Next Badvogato plan: kill all lawyers. Linux Expo: it starts on wednesday and I still haven't seen many people volunteering to stay at the Debian booth at LE-Paris (I won't be able to, since we already have a booth). I have a bad feeling about this... Geek stuff: got my geek frog yesterday. It's so cool.

ralsina: Nautilus doesn't really link with Mozilla, AFAIK it embeds a Bonobo component which is itself linked with Mozilla using gtkmozembed. As for other Gnome/Gtk apps linking with Mozilla, such as Galeon or SkipStone, they both have an additional distribution clause allowing linking with Mozilla. Regarding what Debian did, I won't argue whether it was right or wrong (though I believe it was the right thing [tm]), but I'm certain Qt wouldn't be GPL now if Debian had included KDE at the beginning. You may call this being anal about licenses, but IMHO it's the only way to show licenses still mean something.

Heute stattete ich der Sneak-Preview der Schauburg einen Besuch ab. Gezeigt wurde der Film “Terkel i Knibe” aus D nemark, in deutscher Synchronisation. Da wohl die wenigsten von dem Film geh rt haben (und das wohl auch so bleiben wird), dazu etwas ausf hrlicher.Terkel i Knibe ist ein Animationsfilm, der in etwa wie eine 3D-gerenderte Version von Southpark anmutet. Erz hlt wird die Geschichte des 9-j hrigen Terkel und seinen Problemen in der Schule, vor allem mit Mobbing. Um dem Mobbing zu entkommen, beginnt er selbst zu Mobben, was eine in ihn verliebte Mitsch lerin in einen u erst spritzigen Selbstmord treibt und seine Freundschaft zu Jason gef hrdet. Das Ganze spitzt sich dann auf dem Zeltlager, von einem furchtbar beliebten ko-Lehrer organisiert, dramatisch zu...Einiges hat mich gest rt. So waren mir die animierten Gesichter zu steif und die M uler zu breit, so dass viel Mimik verloren ging, und die Muskeinlagen h tte man sich sparen k nnen - obwohl sie immerhin eher im Stile von “Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik” als dem grausamen der Disney-Kinderfilme gehalten sind. Ich mag halt kein Rap, und das war es meist.Die meisten Meinungen im Foyer des Kinos schienen in Richtung “Rausgeschmissenes Geld” zu gehen. Ich selbst fand den Film eigentlich recht gelungen: Er stellt die Wirkung von Mobbing auf Kinder zwar bertriebern, aber doch glaubw rdig da. Auch die d nische Skrupellosigkeit, wie man sie aus “In China essen sie Hunde” kennet, was Gewalt und Sprache angeht, passte gut ins Bild. Da lernt man sogar nach 13 Jahren deutschem Schulalltag noch neue Beleidungen, und bisweilen machte die graphische Darstellung den “Happy Tree Friends” konkurrenz. berhaupt war der Film bisweilen so bizzar, dass kein l stiger moralischer Unterton aufkommt, ohne jedoch die Aussage zu verraten.Fazit: Wer die Gelegenheit einmal haben sollte: Warum nicht, macht euch ein Bild. Zum Lachen werdet ihr kommen! Nur allen wird es sicherlich nicht gefallen.

I had already noted clisp bug 1399709 a few days ago. As nobody reacted I started to think something was wrong with my setup. Then I saw Gary King has the same problem on Mac OS-X. So I think maybe the problem does exist after all :-(.

Note to debian people: this problem is delaying the release of a new clisp version with a fix for the xlibs-dev transition.

Martin Krafft asks why some people don't like telephones. I'm one such person. Telephones are error-prone, low-bandwidth and high latency communication media that still require real-time response. I like having a conversation face to face, but using a telephone cuts out almost all the bandwidth from that, so that you can only rely on voice, and not even the full spectrum of that. What with a limited spectrum of frequences, low sound volume even at the highest setting (I have bad hearing), strange accents, and generally abysmal sound quality (background noise makes it almost impossible to hear what the other person is saying), it takes a lot of time to get anything settled over the phone. IRC, for example, is in many ways similar, but it differs from a telephone in two different aspects: you don't need to react within seconds, and messages get through loud and clear (well, big-fonted and clear). Even if a telephone call may be shorter than an IRC discussion, it requires much more effort to happen, and on the whole is not as productive. This doesn't mean I'd refuse to discuss something over the phone, but I'd really, really rather not.

I noticed some skk packages had maintained by Kawamura-san were orphaned because he became MIA. Unfortunately I dunno why he became such a status, but his packages, especially skk is very important for me and many users. It's hard and painful for me to input Japanese without SKK backend system (I'm using ddskk on Emacs and uim-skk on X as a frontend). So I picked up skk packages from orphan sea with Junji Yamashita-san and improved some parts of them. BTW I uploaded new CUPS 1.2 snapshot, svn r4841 to experimental.

vorlon announced 'Bits from the release team: the plans for etch'. Yay, let's try to keep a promise about schedule :) Another good news is aba becomes Relase Manager (although he has already worked as same as release manager :) ) My personal TODO for Etch is to find and solve problems around a transition from EUC-JP to UTF-8 on Japanese environment. Most parts are done by Debian people and other distro such as FedoraCore, but I'd like to clarify problems again and try to solve them. Yesterday I changed my LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8.

• I needed to convert filenames written in EUC-JP to UTF-8.
• Programs using GTK+2 and Qt work well.
• GTK+1 applications (such as xmms) have Mojibake. I took beep-media-player instead of xmms. :)
• Some of double width characters (box, arrow, and so on) of EUC-JP are displayed as single narrow width on X terminal (mlterm, gnome-terminal, and konsole). I found I can avoid this on mlterm by enabling 'Enable variable width'.
• zsh couldn't allow to input and complement UTF-8 characters. zsh-beta allows partially.

Yukiharu Yabuki <yabuki at good-day.co.jp> announced Japan Debian Mini Conf 2005 at some computer mailing lists.

• Name: Japan Debian Mini Conf 2005
• Date: 28th Oct 2005 - 29th Oct 2005
• Place: Business Innovation Center Osaka (Sangyou Souzou Kaikan), Osaka city, Japan
• Host: Japan Debian Mini Conf executive committee

I have a session on 28th to talk about overview of Debian GNU/Linux Sarge and Debian Project as 'Welcome to the Debian world, Get ready!' Your well-known people tbm, Ukai, Gotom, and Junichi have a session also. Web page doesn't say well, but Yabuki is trying to assign translator to translate Japanese to English. Furthermore I'm a coordinator of key sign party at this conference. If you'd like to participate, please see KeySignParty.html.en and send your public key of GnuPG to me. We'll do CAcert.org assurance party at there also. ... Now I'm freezing in front of OpenOffice.org Impress :)

Some days ago, I did dist-upgrade to Sid on my Let's Note Y2. Sarge was pretty nice and stable for this machine, but I wanted more challenging :)
dist-upgrade was really smooth because all transitions for my environment had been done.
Now I get new X.Org (some parts are from experimental), KDE, and OpenOffice.org2 (from experimental). By modifing xorg.conf and replacing i810_drv.so, I succeeded to use semitransparent window and dropping shadow with hardware acceleration. Cool!

Just killed all the remaining comment spams (I hope) and implemented a simple regexp based blacklist which should get most medicaments, potence pills, casinos, lotteries and other frequently posted junk. I hope, it does not hit too many valid posts. If you have problems posting comments, feel free to contact me by e-mail or on IRC. In other news, I installed the blosxom plugin comments_recent and adapted the mail feature of writeback notify to my (in the meanwhile heavily modified) instance of the comments plugin v0.6. I also made it symlink-safe for use with multcat.