Over the past months we've been working on a big change in the debian installer, removing base-config from the installation process. Doing this has required a great many changes, some of them user-visible. The installer now configures the timezone, users and passwords, and apt all in the first stage instead of after rebooting. Some preseed values have been removed or changed, including base-config/early_command and base-config/late_command. The biggest change of all, the the hardest to get working, has been moving of the selection of tasks and the installation of all packages into the first stage of the installer. Now tasksel pops up a debconf question that looks like any other question d-i asks, and the installation of packages is hidden behind a nice clean progress bar, and if any packages use debconf to ask questions, d-i will display those questions using its frontend too. I'd include a screenshot, but really, it's just another progress bar, how boring is that? By the way, if you maintain a debian package and it prompts without using debconf (when debconf is available), then your package will obviously break this, and it's well past time to fix it. I think that all the packages d-i installs do use debconf except for possibly a few like libc during upgrades. Upgrades are theoretically possible at this step for any packages debootstrap installs, so those will need to be fixed too. This has been a long, long time coming. Some milestones include:

• 1998: Wichert Akkerman and others do the design of debconf, and first draft of its specification. Without debconf, none of this would be possible.
• 1999: At linuxworld, I see Stormix's Debian-based install. I remember discussing with them about how debconf could be used to clean up the install process. I don't remember what kind of hack they used to avoid the long dpkg log interspersed with the occsional question that a Debian install involved back then.
• 1999: I begin writing the debconf program. And promoting its use.
• 2000: Randolph Chung begins writing cdebconf; d-i begins.
• 2000: Randolph writes the passthrough frontend for debconf. At the time this was expected to be used by tools like aptitude (deity?) to integrate debconf into their GUIs, but it mostly just rotted for a long time unused. Looking back this was a contribution of unexpected significance.
• 2001: I visit Progeny, they show me their implementation of a progress bar running over a Debian installation. It's a special-purpose hack, but it works.
• 2001: debconf enters Debian policy
• 2003: debconf becomes the policy-accepted standard way to do installation prompting
• 2003: Adam Heath adds --status-fd to dpkg.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt Zimmerman dusts of the passthrough frontend and makes it usable to pass debconf questions from debconf running in a chroot up to cdebconf running in d-i.
• 2005 (Jan): Michael Vogt makes apt support status fds too.
• 2005 (Fall): Ubuntu pulls most of the above peices together and fixes some bugs, gets a progress bar running over apt with debconf passthrough.
• 2005 (Dec): Colin Watson and I develop debconf-apt-progress, rest of the pieces fall into place for using this stuff in Debian.

So yeah, this has been in er, progress for 8 years, and at least three Debian derived distributions have come up with thier own approaches in between with only the last one being quite similar to the end result, and the other two being rather dead. I don't know whether this is a study in how Debian is slow, or a study in how we do eventually come up with infrastructure that is done right and ends up being used by everyone. Or both.

Following up on my previous post, here's a new status update of the whole GNOME situation. Very soon after posting that roadmap, the two steps in the process were completed, with the ftpmasters freeing dbus into experimental, and seb128 doing a round of GTK+ family uploads. No big problems have been detected in GTK+ 2.8 in unstable, so those bits are going very well. As soon as dbus 0.60 hit experimental, both the KDE and GNOME camps got busy recompiling their stuff. KDE 3.5.0 moved from Alioth to experimental, and sjoerd got busy in a recompile quest to make sure GNOME was installable again in experimental. The dbus 0.60 transition in experimental was done in barely a few hours, and some extra dbus-using packages have been transitioning since then. So, what's holding our unstable upload? We first need to wait for KDE 3.4 enter testing, thus clearing the major blocker for the C++ ABI transition. The number of packages involved in this is so big it's not even funny, so it's quite complicated. In short, the GNOME team is sitting on their hands watching some C++ fun. There are a few more news bits though. Last night, there was a round of experimental updates, bringing most of the modules to their 2.12.2 versions (just 2 or 3 are missing now), and meta-gnome2 was again updated to support these versions. If you issue your usual aptitude install gnome-desktop-environment, you'll pull newer versions of most of the stuff, if that's the way you update your experimental packages. Also, the gnome package now supports gnome-screensaver. Give it a try, and be ready to purge xscreensaver if you're happy with it!

My father got me a nice IBM ThinkPad from 1996 earlier this year, so the next old laptop he digged up was planned to become a christmas present for my brother. But my father didn’t manage to find out, how old nor how fast that laptop was. And when I found out that it was a Pentium I with 90 MHz, it was clear, that my brother wouldn’t have any use for it, so he got “only” the used 850 MHz AMD Duron midi tower and my parents declared that old Compaq LTE 5100 laptop as a christmas present for me. :-) As my IBM ThinkPad bijou, this Compaq LTE 5100 is from 1996 and has a Pentium I processor. Both also have a 800×600 resolution, a double PCMCIA slot and a floppy drive, which can be replaced by a CD-ROM drive (if I had one). But that are all similarities. Technically the Compaq has 90 MHz instead of the ThinkPad’s 133 MHz, but therefore has 72 MB RAM in comparison to the 48 Megs the ThinkPad has. Also regarding disk space the Compaq outperforms the ThinkPad: 1.6 Gigs of disk space in comparison to the ThinkPad 1.0 GB hard disk. Another difference is the battery: While the ThinkPad can work over 2.5 hours without external power, the Compaq even didn’t manage to completely boot its currently installed Windows 98 (the ThinkPad had a Windows NT installed when I got it) when running on battery. (Will do that test again when I can confirm, that the battery was full before testing. :-) Yet another difference is the keyboard layout: The ThinkPad has an US layout while the Compaq has a Swiss-German layout. But the most obvious difference is the look: The black ThinkPad still looks like having a modern design while the Compaq looks very very outdated in its perfect computer beige and with its quite small display. So retroperspectively, it was a good a idea to name the ThinkPad “bijou” (French for jewel, jewellery, gem, etc.; named after a very neat british two-door limousine built in the UK by Slough on a 2CV base during the ’50s). Because now I have the choice between a lot of not so nice looking (not to say ugly ;-) 2CV derivatives to name the Compaq after. My favourites currently are the Iranian “Baby Brousse”, the Greek “Namco Pony” and the German “Fiberfab Sherpa”, all canvas and flatbed style 2CV based buggies, similar to the original Citroën Méhari but with steel body instead of the Méhari’s controversial plastic body. And one of the not used names, I can use for further ugly Compaq laptops¹. Another question yet to answer is the question of what operating system to install on it. Since the ThinkPad runs fine with Debian 3.0 Woody and I have a lot of other Debian boxes at home (running Woody, Sarge or Sid), I currently think about installing the very fresh NetBSD 3.0 (released on Christmas’ Eve 2005), FreeBSD 6.0 (released early November 2005), DragonFly BSD 1.4 (to be released in December :-) or DeLi Linux 0.7 pre (which was also released in early December 2005 and already uses X11R7). Another idea was to install grml 0.5, but since grml is a live CD distribution, it probably would be hard to install it over network. Same counts for ReactOS (version 0.2.9 was released shortly before Christmas 2005), which doesn’t seem to have a floppy disk plus network install. Since I always planed to upgrade my currently defective Toshiba T6400 i486 laptop ayca (maybe after getting an organ donor on eBay or so) to DeLi Linux 0.7 (and perhaps write a review about it for Linux Magazine or so) and I may get an Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 soon (on which NetBSD 3.0 would be the perfect OS since Linux’ performance still seems to suck on Sparc :-), I currently prefer the FreeBSD or DragonFly idea. If the Ultra doesn’t come, it probably will get NetBSD, since I haven’t a NetBSD box yet. (Haven’t a DragonFly box either, but a FreeBSD 4.x running somewhere. :-) Well, I guess, I’ll take even more old laptops than last year to the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) next May. And since the two 1996 laptops are now 10 years old, they’re even ontopic! Yeah! ;-)

¹: I have two other not yet working Compaq laptops, both from an elder generation than Pentium I. One I got on a Swiss flea market for a few euros and the other was the first laptop of my boss, which he else would have thrown away. Unfortunately both are without power adapter and neither the usual allround laptop power adapters from Conrad, etc. nor the one from the LTE 5100 fits. But since there is eBay, I expect to get such a power adapter once. :-)

My current long-term learning project is Ruby on Rails, the ultra-hyped web application framework from David Heinemeier Hansson and friends. I like it (primarily because I can see a lot of my own abortive ideas from a web app framework for PHP I used to develop), but there is one big thing about it (or, rather, it's surrounding hype) that irritates me. Throughout the Rails literature (webpages, magazine and webzine articles, and the book Agile Web Development With Rails), there is a consistent message -- that, because everything is written in Ruby, you don't have to learn any new programming languages to write Rails applications. This is a wonderful theory -- no large XML config files to define my database schemas, and no castrated and irritating HTML template system to learn. From defining table relationships to printing a select tag, It's All Ruby, All The Time. Sweet, right? Sort of. The problem is that you won't find the language primitive to declare a one-to-many relationship in the Pickaxe (the definitive Ruby language reference book -- like "the Camel" for Perl, "the Bat" for Sendmail, or "the Turkey" for PHP). Defining a separate namespace in Rails for all of these operations is, of course, necessary, since the language didn't already define these operations. But, once you've defined a whole new set of methods to do all of these operations, you can look back on your hard work and see -- what? A new language -- one specifically designed to describe webapps. Don't get me wrong -- domain-specific languages are teh r0x0r. If everyone had to do all of their HTML manipulation by hand, programmers would be even more insane than they are. But, when you're writing your application in Rails, you're not speaking "pure Ruby". Your syntax and basic structure is Ruby, but your methods and attributes are new, different, and All Rails. It may not be a separate programming language in the usual sense, but by the time you've added a whole new pile of classes, methods, and attributes (not to mention whole new ways of structuring your application), how much importance is the use of the @ symbol to signify an instance variable, compared to the whole new set of methods to learn? Natural languages, of course, have similar issues. Most western european languages share a lot of common characteristics -- similar character sets, punctuation sets, and they read left-to-right. So I can look at a page of German or French, and identify most-to-all of the salient features (hey look, an 'a'!), and even grok the meaning of a few of the words (familiar to me, probably, because English misappropriated them from wherever they came from) but I still have no hope whatsoever of understanding the meaning of the passage as a whole. The language syntax looks familiar, but those nouns and verbs don't have any meaning to me. You can't plonk a Rails app in front of even a seasoned Ruby developer and expect them to immediately jump in and start hacking on it like they've been writing it all their life. The language syntax looks familiar, but those methods and attributes don't have any meaning to them. This is nothing peculiar to Rails, of course. If you want someone to hack on your Hibernate or Spring app, you'll get better results if you advertise for a Hibernate or Spring programmer than a Java programmer. But Rails advocates regularly say "it's all just Ruby, so there's nothing new to learn!", and that's Just Wrong, in my opinion. As an aside, if you're looking around for something a bit different, do seriously consider Rails (or just Ruby, if you don't need a webapp framework). It's different from the "usual" suspects (C, C++, and "the Ps" -- PHP, Perl, and Python), and pleasantly so. If you judge your programming languages by the old adage "a programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming isn't worth learning", Ruby will score well. I know it's helped me think about my programming differently already, especially my Python programming (and thanks to Anthony Baxter for answering all of my esoteric python questions at OSDC a couple of weeks ago).

... and stop that annoying "Xmas" thing. Oh, and I hate all the red santa claus (shouldn't he be caled X-man?) stuff everywhere. Christmas used to be something very different than it is now, you know. Merry christmas, and enjoy what used to be the 'quiet time' of the year: Electronic christmas greeting card

If anyone asks you what the difference is between Christmas and Chanukah, you will know what and how to answer!

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It's another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure.
Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don't look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel(especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos... Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful...Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful.... Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols are composed and written by our tribal brethren.

And don't Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.

11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, "Joseph,you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn't sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here's the number of my shrink".

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? .....

Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family.
Tickets a mere $200 per person.

[Stolen from $unknown]

(not my text but I thought I'd just pass it along) Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite. It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already. Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)). VPN I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet. Debian/Ruby It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues. For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

Last night, Sarah and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I quite enjoyed it. It's been years since I've seen either the animated version (I think I've seen that at least twice, and I can't believe it was from 1979, that makes me feel so old) or the BBC TV mini-series (I think I saw that once), or read the books, so I couldn't remember the story very well at all, so it was great having a two hour long memory jog. It seemed very faithful to my memory of the original story. Acting-wise, I thought the actors that played Edmund and Lucy did a particularly good job. I was initially a bit down on the choice of making Queen Jadice/The White Witch so young, but that turned out pretty good nonetheless. The voice of Aslan was a good pick. My main beef was that the violence was too sanitised. I feel strange saying that, but up until the big battle scene, they went out of their way to make it all pretty tame and bloodless. There were also a couple of scenes that were very obviously shot in front of a blue or green screen. This movie had the potential to be Lord of the Rings material, but I think it fell down a bit, only on a few small things. The Lord of the Rings was as violent as it needed to be, without going into Day of the Dead territory, for example. Very good, but not great. I hope they do the rest of the books though. Oh, and I really think all these people who are trying to draw all these Biblical connections are really reaching.

Procmail Sucks

OK sucks is a bit strong: It is both insanely extensible and utterly horrid to work with. I wish there were a decent perl replacement for Procmail. Seems to me that regexps and piping through external programs covers 99% of the average procmail use cases. Perl has a lot of modules already existing for working with mbox files, maildirs, and even messages. It seems that parp should be that project but it hasn’t been touched since 2002. PMS is another dead project. Does anything exist already? Or am I stuck in procmail hell? I’d be tempted to start my own project … "down that path lies madness"

Yesterday, the French government lost the first battle in its attempts to get the controversial DADVSI bill voted, which was pushed by most of the major entertainment companies and included a legalisation of copy protection schemes icluding measures to prevent software authors to circumvent them. As written, these measures would have possibly lead to software like VLC becoming illegal in France. The very strong mobilisation of the Free Software community and all communities involved in making the access to culture through the Internet easier has won its first battle. Thanks to a few Parliament members among who I'll cite M. Christian Paul (socialist party) or Mme Christine Boutin (UMP, the party of the French President and Prime minister....and representative of my neighbourhood in Yvelines...and certainly someone I do not share most of the moral values with...but anyway, I wrote to her), two very important "amendments" have been accepted with several members of the current right-wing majority voting along with the members of the socialist and communist parties. These amendments completely go against the will of the Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabre and all media say today this was like sending a huge torpedo in the project..:-) They propose to legalise a "global licence" which, being optional in ISP contracts, would allow users of the Internet to legally exchange cultural data over the Internet. As a side effect, this means that all attemps to enforce copy protection schemes (and virtually forbid Free Software authors to publish their sources) are to dropped to the waste bin. This is a huge victory but certainly not the final victory. The project is completely changed but the Minister and the Government can still amend it and propose something else after being lobbied again by the majors. And, as usual, they can even use our very funny 49/3 constitution article which allows a government to engage its responsibility on a given text and then forbidding any further discussion or change. The probability for this is very unlikely because they would risk a lot doing so...but with UMP one can never tell. They've done worse in the past... Again, hats off to all people who raised a strong mobilisation against this and hats off to some of our political representatives. Yes, politics is not EVIL when its done the Right Way.

A big word up to X11R7 being released. The benefits of modularisation are pretty well-documented: distributors can do security updates much more easily, as well as keep better track of upstream sources, users can build drivers easily if need be (and the drivers can get released promptly upon releases of new cards), etc, etc. But for me, the biggest win is that it's finally over: I've been working on it since Jan 2004, and the xlibs and xserver projects basically began in October 2003. I'm really glad that the release didn't, as suggested, get dragged into 2006.

People who deserve a great deal of thanks for this release include, but are absolutely not limited to, Kevin E. Martin, Adam Jackson and Alan Coopersmith as the release cabal, S ren Sandmann Pedersen as a modular partner in crime, Keith Packard and Jim Gettys who basically got modularisation moving, LinuxFund for funding Xizzle and Debrix (the genesis of the modularised X server), Jakub Stachowski and Kristian H gsberg for work on Debrix when I got busy with other commitments (and krh for ongoing modularisation work). I'm sure there are others who I've forgotten here; if you feel you should be on this list, then sorry. The code contributions are too many to mention: Eric Anholt, Ben Herrenschmidt, Billy Biggs, Alan Hourihane, Zack Rusin, Dave Airlie, Aaron Platner, and a cast of thousands.

I've heard the other release parties are rocking along nicely; I plan to make Melbourne's pretty damn good. Cheers!

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Superman 70% Robin 67% Iron Man 65% Hulk 65% Batman 55% The Flash 55% Green Lantern 50% Catwoman 40% Supergirl 40% Wonder Woman 30%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

After bubulle asked and Gunar tried to explain (Anybody understood his explanation? Good, I thought I was the only one ;) he finally published it on the DebConf website... somehow I feel some kind of D j vu...

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

... and noticed that Joey already blogged about it a bit earlier. Interesting: Someone came back from a Linux event, and the best he can say is "nice building..." Well... I'll try to find a polite, positive way to word my opinion on this years event: After the exhibition closes, they send someone around to collect notes, critics, opinions. what went wrong, how to improve, etc. That was a really good idea, but he should have brought a full charged battery for his notebook, since it took so long...

I can't believe I did this, but: You are Hulk

Hulk 70% Spider-Man 70% Iron Man 65% Supergirl 60% Catwoman 50% Green Lantern 45% The Flash 45% Superman 45% Robin 40% Wonder Woman 35% Batman 35%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

When I had a real job I used to hate having to iron shirts every week. While I'll occasionally wear one when I go out it's not something I'd choose to wear to code in, so it grated that I had to expend effort in order to be able to wear something I didn't really want to. These days I'm a lazy layabout who largely works from home and I can wear what I like. However I still have to deal with socks. Now, at least I like wearing socks, but they're still a PITA. Pairing them up in particular. I think the problem is that almost all my socks are plain black and while you think that would make things easy it really doesn't. They're different shades of black for starters. Or different shapes. Or feel different. Or are lost for months and then suddenly turn up and the other half of the pair that kept annoying you out of the corner of your eye has suddenly disappeared. Gah.

Your results:
You are Supergirl

Supergirl 72% Green Lantern 70% Iron Man 65% Superman 65% Wonder Woman 62% Spider-Man 55% The Flash 55% Hulk 50% Catwoman 45% Batman 40% Robin 35%

Lean, muscular and feminine. Honest and a defender of the innocent.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz… I even got one of the correct gender though I answered left-most “no” to the pushup bra question.

You are Green Lantern.
Green Lantern 90%
Supergirl 87%
Batman 85%
Wonder Woman 77%
Iron Man 70%
Hulk 65%
The Flash 65%
Catwoman 60%
Spider-Man 45%
Robin 42%
Superman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Which superhero are you?