Developers seem to do a lot of fighting with bleeding-edge libraries installed in a --prefix, so I thought I'd share how I develop telepathy-glib (a library) and telepathy-gabble (a program using that library). ~/Collabora/telepathy/tpglib on my laptop is a git clone of telepathy-glib.git, branched using the process I documented on http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Git, which is basically:

• clone the upstream repository (git+ssh://git.collabora.co.uk/git/telepathy-glib.git in this case) into your home directory on the server (git+ssh://people.collabora.co.uk/home/smcv/public_html/git/telepathy-glib-smcv.git in this case)
• clone that onto your laptop
• on your laptop, add "upstream" as a remote, tracking the upstream repository
• this reduces mistakes, because "git push" pushes to origin (which is in my home directory) for review, and "git push upstream" is necessary when I actually want to commit to the upstream repository

~/Collabora/telepathy/gabble is a git clone of telepathy-gabble.git, using the same process. In my Gabble checkout, I used to configure like this:

cd ~/Collabora/telepathy/gabble
./autogen.sh \
TP_GLIB_CFLAGS="-I$ HOME /Collabora/telepathy/tpglib" \
TP_GLIB_LIBS="$ HOME /Collabora/telepathy/tpglib/telepathy-glib/libtelepathy-glib.la"

This would make libtool link Gabble against the copy of telepathy-glib built by my bleeding-edge git checkout, without ever needing to install it. This allowed me to try out my latest telepathy-glib changes with Gabble's more extensive regression tests, which was a great win. It also meant I could develop Gabble branches that required a not-yet-released telepathy-glib, and all without touching my system copy of telepathy-glib (the one I use to run Empathy and talk to people - which is the packaged version from Debian unstable or experimental). The reason I could do this is that I laid out the telepathy-glib source tree in The Right Way , which is: if a header is designed to be used via #include <my-library/foo.h>, then it goes in a my-library/ directory in the source tree, and includes other headers (even from the same project) with #include <my-library/other.h>. This means you can just add the top directory of the source tree to your include path (which automake does by default) and the right thing will happen. (Actually, this is a slight simplification of the truth: because telepathy-glib contains generated headers, you have to add the top directory of the build tree to your include path too, if you want to support out-of-tree builds. Which, of course, you do.) Other projects that do this correctly include GLib and Avahi. Avahi is a particularly interesting example because it has numerous libraries in the same tarball (including avahi-common, avahi-core, avahi-glib and avahi-gobject, which form a dependency chain). Projects that don't do this correctly include telepathy-mission-control (which is on my hit list for further swamp-draining) and libtelepathy (which is obsolete). Today I committed a patch to telepathy-glib, inspired by GStreamer, to generate telepathy-glib-uninstalled.pc. The presence of this patch simplifies the process further, to:

./autogen.sh PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/Collabora/tpglib/telepathy-glib

This has the same benefits as setting TP_GLIB_CFLAGS and TP_GLIB_LIBS, but is easier to remember, and is more future-proof against changes to telepathy-glib. It only works because pkg-config has a special case for this situation - if you ask for the package "foo", pkg-config will always look for foo-uninstalled.pc before foo.pc. (Edited 2009-01-13: putting environment variables on the ./configure or ./autogen.sh command line like ./autogen.sh PKG_CONFIG_PATH=foo is better than putting them in the environment like PKG_CONFIG_PATH=foo ./autogen.sh, since it works around Debian bug #398901 and bugs like it)

(This post is somewhat late, the final release is in two days. However, we still need testing and reports of possible issues.) I am pleased to announce that darcs 2.2 is coming along nicely. I would like to ask everyone to give a ride to darcs 2.2, release candidate 1. This release again comes in two flavours:

1. The source tarball, http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.0rc1.tar.gz, which can be built using the traditional autoconf-based buildsystem. This is the fully supported version. After downloading and unpacking, you can issue:

   $ ./configure
   $ make
   $ ./darcs --version
   

   or

   # make install
   

   More detailed instructions inside the tarball (file README).
2. Cabalised source. You can either download a tarball from http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.1.99.0.tar.gz and build manually (see the build instructions in README inside the tarball), or, alternatively, you can use cabal-install to obtain a copy (the release candidate is now available on hackage):

   $ cabal update  
   $ cabal install darcs
   

   This should give you a darcs binary in ~/.cabal/bin you should probably add that to your PATH.

This is a preliminary changelog since version 2.1.2 (released last November):

• In interactive record, it is now possible to get a list of currently selected hunks (command l). (Christian Kellermann)
• It is now possible to specify --in-reply-to when using darcs send, to generate correct references in the mail header. (Pavel Shramov)
• New repositories with --no-pristine-tree can no longer be created. This only has effect on legacy darcs-1 repositories.
• Improvements in Windows support. (Salvatore Insalaco)
• Performance improvements in darcs repair and robustness improvements in darcs check. (Petr Ro kai)
• Extensive manual and online help improvements. (Trent W. Buck)
• Support for GHC 6.10.
• Overhaul of the make-based build system. (Trent W. Buck)
• Cabal is now supported as a build method for darcs. (Duncan Coutts, Petr Ro kai, Gwern Branwen)
• First stab at libdarcs when building through Cabal, all of darcs implementation is now exposed in modules. No API guarantees whatsoever. (Eric Kow)
• Additions to Haddock documentation of the existing darcs modules for improved development experience.
• Improvements in the testing infrastructure. (Christian Kellermann, Gwern Branwen)
• Low-level optimisations in filesystem code. (Ganesh Sittampalam)
• Numerous major and minor bug fixes, refactorings and cleanups by David Roundy, Eric Kow, Jason Dagit, Dmitry Kurochkin, Thorkil Naur, Salvatore Insalaco, Christian Kellerman, Florent Becker, Duncan Coutts, Reinier Lamers, Ganesh Sittampalam, Petr Ro kai.

Preliminary list of issues that have been fixed in darcs since version 2.1.2: 1223 sporadic init.sh test failure (2.1.1rc2+472)
525 amend-record => darcs patches show duplicate additions
1247 make TAGS is broken
1273 renameFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)
1165 get should print last gotten tag
1249 2.1.2 (+ 342 patches) local drive detection on Windows error
1238 wish: darcs help setpref should list all prefs
1199 Backup files darcs added after external merge
1043 pull => mergeAfterConflicting failed in geteff (2.0.2+)
1117 Whatsnew should warn on non-recorded files
1101 darcs send cc recipient not included in success message Thanks to Thorkil Naur for compiling this list. I would like to thank all contributors developers, testers, bystanders for helping darcs get along further. It s been hard times recently for darcs, as many of you probably know. Nevertheless, we are regaining confidence in future darcs development. No way are we going to leave darcs fall by the road. I am sure that this one time, I speak for everyone in our developer and user community.

I've previously mentioned my desire for a new smartphone. I'd been eyeing the G1 since its release, with the main factor stopping me from going ahead the need for a T-Mobile contract. They don't have any 3G coverage north of Belfast that I've seen and I'm very happy with my 20/month O2 Simplicity contract and don't have any need to pay twice that. Luckily Katherine decided to get me one for my birthday, and after some confusion involving it going to Norwich (always remember to update your Paypal delivery address as well as the card address when you move home, folks. Oh, and your Amazon wishlist address too; it's different than your primary address and I've been bitten by that myself in the past) it turned up the weekend before Christmas.

I have a UK spec T-Mobile G1. First step was to get it unlocked for use on O2. I used Unlock G1 - they weren't the cheapest, but I'd seen them recommended on a few G1 news sites and they had a helpful guide on their site about activating without a T-Mobile SIM. They claim a code within 2 business days. I ordered at 19:30 UTC on a Saturday night and had a code by 21:00 that worked first time.

Once the O2 SIM was working I needed to check if the phone was easily rootable. I typed reboot and was rewarded with a rebooting phone. I had the RC7 UK firmware release, which still had the bug. I followed the android-dls.com guide to keeping root and upgraded to the RC8 release. With that out of the way I could start to actually have a play.

The screen is lovely. I'm used to the high res E70 screen and have been disappointed at the number of phones that only do 320x240. 480x320 is probably the minimum I'd want (if I can't manage an 80 character wide SSH session I'm not really interested) though obviously if HTC ever get round to a Touch Pro with Android I might be tempted... Touch aspect is perfectly responsive, as is the interface in general - while I don't use a phone that much day to day my mobile is the only number I give out so it tends to be the only phone I use. This means that the ability to make/receive calls/sms is the most important feature for me (it's odd having to say this, but I know people who've claimed to love phones but on further probing reveal it's a great PDA but dire for calls and they have to carry something else for that). The G1 performs admirably for my needs.

The built in apps are good too. The browser is much better than the E70. I don't know if that's the bigger screen (though the resolution isn't much different) or a faster processor, but browsing on my mobile is a much more realistic proposition now. I've only played briefly with the iPhone browser and I wouldn't say the G1 was any better, but it's certainly good. Calendaring is functional too and copes with multiple Google Calendars as you'd hope. Shame it doesn't deal with anything else, but for the moment this suits my needs. I haven't used it for email; I prefer to ssh to my colo box and run mutt. Contacts are mostly ok, though I have a few gripes I'll mention later.

I haven't felt the need to install many apps. The connectbot ssh client was an obvious one and is pretty nice (main missing feature is UTF-8 and there's a feature request for it raised already). I've installed a few games off the Android Market, as well as Barcode Scanner (does what you'd think) and CellFinder (displays your location and which mobile cell you're using; it's a bit scary how few O2 masts there seem to be near my house). Installation from the market has been a breeze and it's nice to be able to flick through what's available. With my E70 it was always a real pain to go and hunt down Symbian apps (especially when S60 3rd Edition was new) and install them.

Before I start on my gripes, let me clarify that I am very happy with this phone. I wanted something with a keyboard that was functional and this fits the bill. It's a definite improvement over my E70 and I feel it's much more responsive than any of the recent Windows Mobile devices I've encountered. Also the battery life hasn't proved to be an issue - from articles I'd read I'd expected to have difficulty getting a day out of it, but in general I can easily get 2 and have had 3. Maybe my usage patterns aren't as heavy as everyone else, but that's fine for me (I remember my 9000i Communicator which really was a case of having to charge it every night).

The first issue I hit was the contacts system. Google have tied this into GMail and it really seems to have been a last minute thought process, perhaps along the lines of "Where can we stick this? Oh, hang on, people have email contacts, how about there?". Trying to move my contacts over from my E70 I was surprised to find that there's no way to import a vCard. The only option is CSV. WTF? I'm not saying vCard is perfect, but it's pretty much what we have as a standard method of contact interchange. I ended up writing some Perl to crudely parse the vCards and output CSV. I shouldn't have had to.

Then again, maybe the issue is that Google know their contacts system is a bit lacking. You'd think a company with online calendaring and contacts would be able to cope with things like birthdays, tying them together between contacts and displaying them in your calendar, wouldn't you? They can't. I can't see any way to store a birthday or anniversary with a contact. Nor a home page. The contacts system is the one area that the E70 outshines the G1.

I miss an onscreen keyboard more than I thought I would (ie at all). I understand this should be coming in the next release, which will make things like quick replies to SMSes much easier (there's no point opening the keyboard for a "Nearly there" response).

The use of only a single APN for internet access and MMS is a bit troublesome; I haven't managed to get this to work properly with O2 - either I have fully working 'net or fully working MMS with only web seeming to work. I haven't played with the settings very much though and I spent 7 months without MMS even enabled on my O2 account, so it's not high priority. Also something I understand is being fixed upstream.

I'd like a way to see the next calendar event on my home screen. I may just be missing how to do this, but it was a nice feature on the E70.

I haven't played much with the camera, but I get the impression it's pretty typical of the average mobile phone; ie not great. Not a problem for me, but don't expect this to replace a compact digital camera.

While I accept this phone isn't for everyone I think it's pretty much what I'm looking for in terms of what's on the market today. There's nicer hardware out there, but a large part of what makes this phone is the Android software. I look forward to seeing new phones in the coming year making use of it, hopefully leading to a decent selection by the time I need a new phone again. :)

If you ever used TinyMCE and jQuery in a project chances are that you have seen this error:

tinyMCE is not defined

This might be browser dependent: I see this in Firefox, but Safari has no problems at all. At times this can be bad enough that Firefox will block loading the page, refuses to reload it and needs to be restarted. Doing a few searches revealed that others have noticed the same problem, but I could not find an answer. It turns out the solution is simple: you have to scope your javascript properly. This breaks:

 $(document).ready(function()  
    tinyMCE.init(....);
 

but this works fine:

(function($)  
    tinyMCE.init(....);
 )(jQuery);

As some people complained that Gammu does not build under Cygwin, I decided to setup a test environment. And of course I'm not going to use real Windows, that would not allow me to use it effectively, so let's do it in Wine. I currently have 1.1.12, which is in Debian packages (in experimental), so I blindly downloaded Cygwins installer, started it and (even if Wine complained quite loudly about not supported things) it installed without a single problem! So let's try to compile Gammu in it. First attempt fails, because Cygwin symlinks do not work in Wine. But there is an easy workaround - just copy as.exe and ld.exe instead of symlinks and now even the compiler works. Rest is surprisingly without any problems, so I can nicely get test results to Gammu dashboard. Kudos to all people who make this work.

Things have turned a little morbid here. I imagine that if I were to cease to be alive things would mostly keep ticking over for a while. But for how long exactly? Assuming that you've got your hosting paid for, supported, or otherwise managed that would continue to exist. But after a while domain names would start to expire, and manual intervention would be required (that is assuming that manual intervention were not required in advance.) So when I die, I'd have to assume everything I maintained myself would disappear within two years. Is that depressing, or realistic? I'm not sure. But definitely morbid. ObFilm: Predator

I have never felt inclined to create content for Youtube due to the low resolution of the display and the fact that only one format is supported (Flash which is totally non-free). The existence of blip.tv has inspired my interest in creating videos for distribution on the net. blip.tv has higher resolution than Youtube and supports multiple formats. Currently the multiple format support is limited to allowing users to upload whatever they want and then Flash (FLV) will be provided for download in addition to the original file(s). So for example I could upload MPEG4 and Quicktime movie files for the same content which would result in three download options (MPG, MOV, and FLV). It would be nice if they could support more formats as the default (maybe support transcoding to OGG), but it s certainly a lot better than Youtube. So the question then is how to create content. One option that I plan to use is Istanbul - the GNOME desktop session recorder [1]. It will record everything that happens on the desktop (or a section of the desktop) to an OGG file while also optionally recording audio input. This allows the creation of tutorials for performing various tasks on the computer. Another option is to do animation, either completely computer generated or by combining a set of JPEG files into an animation file. This doesn t interest me to the degree necessary to make me invest the necessary time. But the most common way of producing video content is via a camera. So the question becomes what camera to get. My current camera is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T5 [2]. It is a 5.1 mega-pixel camera with 3* optical zoom and supports 640*480 resolution movies at up to 30 fps. The quality of photos and video that it produces seems to be quite good, I don t have any particular problem with the camera that I want to address by purchasing a new one, so a major aim of buying a new camera was the fact that it s a few years old and something better must be available at a low price! I asked for advice about this on my local LUG mailing list. One piece of advice that was offered by several people was to use a Digital Video camera with Firewire output to record quality video. They spoke about common digital cameras as point and shoot with the acronym P&S - which seems to be used as a term of abuse by people who are really into cameras. If using a DV camera with Firewire support (which is apparently a really important feature) then apparently Kino [4] is the program to use to capture the raw video data. While the advice in regard to a digital video camera sounds good I m not going to take it. Such DV cameras start at about $300 and appear to be physically larger. While a larger camera (with a larger lens) will give better quality pictures and higher frame rates with lower levels of ambient light I am planning to do my serious video recording in a controlled environment with reasonable lighting. Really I m not THAT serious about video recording, so I don t plan to spend $300 or more - I ll accept the lower quality as a trade-off for lower price and greater convenience. I have seen an advert for a camera described as a DC-777 at a good price from DirectBuy.com.au [3]. The camera in question is one that has no reviews anywhere on the net and seems to be a re-badged version of someone else s camera. It initially sounded quite good with 11mega-pixel resolution, but the fine print shows that it has a 7MP CCD and uses interpolation to get a higher resolution. Also the movie capability is 640*480 at 30fps (the same as my Sony). So the benefit of using the DC-777 would be the rotating display which can face the same direction as the lens thus allowing someone who is making a video of themself to see what they are creating. This doesn t seem to be $200 worth of benefit, but the camera might be a reasonable deal for someone who doesn t already have a decent P&S digital camera. Another interesting piece of advice I received from my local LUG was that the amount of time taken to get a good image (which determines the shutter speed on a good camera or the maximum frame rate for video) is determined in part by the size of the elements in the CCD. So with all other things being equal a camera that supports higher resolution will require longer exposure. For my use the benefit of higher resolution photos is often for the purpose of cropping pictures of objects that were too far away to allow completely zooming in. 3* optical zoom (as implemented in my current camera) is a limit when photographing objects that are far away in good light conditions (in poor light it s often a factor of the lens size). In the past when looking at digital cameras I would make the resolution of the picture the prime criteria - with the idea that bigger is better. But now it seems that the smart thing to do is to make optical zoom the prime criteria for general purpose camera use. Also having a larger lens is a significant benefit, but as the overall volume of the camera is going to be roughly proportional to the radius of the lens cubed it can t get that big without some serious compromises on portability. Obviously an SLR [5] offers significant quality benefits. But if you are unwilling to spend so much money a good result can be obtained by what are sometimes called Big Zoom Digital cameras. These are cameras with a body shape that resembles a SLR, they vary in size between the P&S cameras and SLRs, and have fixed lenses that are significantly larger than those of P&S cameras. I gave such a camera to a relative for Christmas and I was very impressed by the quality of pictures and movies that it produced. I chose a Kodak camera with 12* optical zoom which was quite impressive (unfortunately the 15* model had sold out). One of the benefits of a Big Zoom Digital camera over a DSLR is that as there is no option to replace the lens there is also no possibility to get dust inside the camera (which is apparently a problem with SLR cameras). For my own use I plan to stick with my Sony Cybershot. I can t get anything significantly better for an amount of money that I am prepared to spend, and I also don t really want a larger camera. So I think I ll buy a tripod (or maybe two tripods of different sizes), that should deliver a real benefit for my photography without costing much. Update: One thing I forgot to mention is the film speed rating (AKA the ISO number) [6]. A higher ISO number means that the camera can take faster pictures in less light. The Wikipedia page reports that camera manufacturers are permitted to interpret the ISO scheme in several different ways, so they can essentially just make stuff up. Probably the best that can be said for the ISO number is that any camera which advertises it is aimed at more serious users and is therefore likely to be of higher quality. I m sure that if I was to spend $700 or more then I would get a camera with an advertised ISO number that actually means something, but I don t have any plans to ever do that. Matt made a good comment that the quality of the glass matters. For an SLR you can consider the lens quality independently of the quality of the rest of the camera. But for cheap cameras it s just a matter of the entire package.

• [1] http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul


• [2] http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_t5-review/


• [3] http://www.directbuy.com.au/moreinfo.php?txt_itemcode=DC-777&txt_searchstring=DC-777&txt_from=3&catcode=45


• [4] http://www.kinodv.org/


• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-lens_reflex_camera


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed

Okay, so I had a simple job to be done. I have two mail accounts: A private mail account and a company mail account, which has two folders containing private mails. I want to synchronize these folders to my private account. Which is the right tool to choose? I thought that one way would be to fire up a graphical mail user agent, like lets say Thunderbird, setup the accounts and simply move the mails between them. But this has some implications, like:

• I don't use such a MUA (instead I use mutt), which makes it unneccessary hard, because I really need to setup the accounts
• Most graphical MUAs I know are bad at working with a great number of mails. At least Thunderbird does not even properly show what he is doing and how long he is supposed to doing it

So I decided that I needed some small tool, that UN*X admins are used to have. After a small apt-cache search, I found two tools:

• imapcopy
• imapsync

I installed both and looked at them. For the impatient, a spoiler: I decided to use imapsync.
I had a quick look at imapcopy and it did not have a proper manpage.
Instead it refers to the built-in help (imapcopy -h) which is not useful either and to examples in /usr/share/doc.
After that I had look at imapsync. It comes with a pretty good manpage and a pretty good built-in usage information. Appearently I rate it very important that either the manpage or the built-in help are good enough to get started with a tool. Certainly I know that tools exist where a manpage is simply not enough, but I guess a tool to sync imap folders is not one of them.

After studying the manpage for about 2 minutes I was ready to construct a command line and give it a --dry try. This parameter lets me see what the tool would do if I would ommit it. That one looked good and so I gave it a shot. It then started to work. It has two flaws.

1. Unfortunately it does not indicate its progress and the normal messages are not a good help either, because they contain numbers that actually do not refer to mails in one of the mailboxes (they are soon literally higher as the number of mails in both mailboxes) and I do understand what it is referring to.
   
2. It sometimes crashed at random locations with random messages. I didn't look deeper into it, because restarting the script helped and therefore I cannot speak of a easy reproducible problem. In 3000 mails it happened about 1-2 times, so not a great deal but still annoying.

Anyway, it did the job, which took some time, because of my bandwith.

We're apparently starting an "update thy hackergotchi" meme with Andrew Pollock and Daniel Burrows updating their faces smiling to the world (both being much better than their previous version, indeed). I really should update mine, too, as it is:

• too small
• 12 years old
• including that ugly hair "hook" which doesn't even look like a Debian swirl

So, should I use Debconf 6, Debconf 7 or Debconf 8 mugshot? Or maybe Wouter's art (by far the most up to date when it comes at ripples and stuff)?

This code allows unattended ssh(1) processes, like the ones started by cron(8), to access the SSH keys stored by a running ssh-agent(1) (which will probably have been started in a screen(1) instance). Be sure to understand the security implications of persistent ssh-agent processes and passwordless keys.

#!/bin/sh -e
import_ssh_agent()  
  local pid
  for pid in $(pgrep -u "$LOGNAME" -x -f /bin/bash); do
    local var="$(grep -z '^SSH_AUTH_SOCK=' /proc/$pid/environ   true)"
    [ "$var" ]   continue
    eval "$var"
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    break
  done
 
[ "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]   import_ssh_agent
# now the script can run commands like:
ssh -o BatchMode=yes hostname command

I've been fooling around with "git" lately - it's useful for local projects where I don't want to have to set up a remote server, and it also seems to be "the way the wind is blowing" - lots of open source projects are starting to use it, so I might as well familiarize myself with how it works. The github service seems to be very popular at the moment, and it's not hard to see why. They've created a very useful service, and give it away completely free for open source use. That's a pretty good deal! It's also an easy to use site that's well integrated with git, so you can see lots of stuff graphically instead of fooling around with command line tools. However, I have a nagging doubt. Github apparently bases everything around the developer. In other words, projects hosted there are mostly attached to a developer who 'owns' the project, rather than existing on their own. There are a few exceptions - there seems to be a 'rails' role account to manage Rails, rather than having it belong to, say, DHH, so it's not impossible to do something in a project-centric fashion, but it doesn't seem to be very common either. What I'm wondering is what sort of effects this might have in the long term. Github, and git itself, make it very easy to 'fork' projects. Could, or will this lead to a situation where people don't try so hard to get their code in the 'official' branch? What happens when someone loses interest in their project? Sure, someone else can fork their repository, but if all the links were pointing to the first guy, because he was the main hacker on a project for X years, they're not going to switch overnight even if guy B takes over maintanance. And in the meantime, casual searchers might turn up the 'dead' branch, or simply be confused as to who's doing what. This could make things confusing for someone who just wants to check out some code and start using it.... trying to sort out various revisions and ancestry of a project could be quite discouraging. At the Apache Software Foundation, on the other hand, people are obviously very important, but projects are the organizational unit that people get involved with, and a lot of emphasis is placed on not having one big benevolent dictator, but on having a group of people who make decisions and act as arbiters of what goes into the project. People can come and go as they please, but the project, and, importantly, the links to it, remain the same over time (barring any big, unforeseen blowups). As far as I can tell, this is not a git problem, but something related to how github organizes their site. And, of course, it's possible that I have simply missed something due to my lack of knowledge of git, and not being more than superficially familiar with github. Even if I'm right, it shouldn't take that much effort for github to create a system where it's possible for multiple people to 'own' a project.

...and there was a distinct feeling of deja vu. At least the procedure itself was nowhere near as long (under 2 hours). On Thursday, Sarah had some day-surgery to have her sternal wires removed. The top one was causing her some discomfort because the skin there was the thinnest (whether that in itself was related to any of the previous incision complications remains uncertain). The surgical team popped in to pre-op to autograph their work (seriously, they initialled her chest) before they started, and asked if she wanted just the top wire removed, or all of them. We consulted the Magic Eight Ball application on my phone, and it gave a resoundingly affirmative response, so she got them all removed. Despite removing them all being a bit more surgically invasive, I think this is for the best. It means none of the other wires can cause any problems down the track requiring yet another trip to the operating room. They also did some scar revision on the top part of the scar, where it was a bit stretched (from the previous complications), so incisionally speaking, she's had almost as much incision work done as the original heart surgery. Ironically, this made the plastic surgery (laser treatment and steroid injections) she had late last year largely redundant. She took the dressing off the incision this morning, and we had our first look at it. It certainly looks a lot better than before, so fingers crossed it won't get infected this time, and the overall long-term result will look better.

Ever wanted to get a nicer console font than the default one delivered with Debian? First you need to get a nice font. I chose console-terminus:

$ sudo aptitude install console-terminus

that alone won t change anything but install a whole bunch of new fonts into /usr/share/consolefonts/. To enable one of them, you have to edit /etc/console-tools/config:

set SCREEN_FONT=Uni3-Terminus16

Optional: comment out the following lines with SCREEN_FONT_vc*, so every terminal will have the same settings. To test the new font:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/console-screen.sh start

The new font kicks in at the second half of the boot process, which is fixable but sufficient for me. I think the new font is much easier to the eyes than the default one, especially on big monitors with high resolutions.

Sarah came up a great idea for us to do over the long, long weekend after New Years. She wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, and hike in it. I, also enjoying hiking trips, went along.

We organized the trip rather late, I think on the 27th of Dec from my parents house (I think my mom enjoys being around for trip planning since it reminds her of the trips she should plan). Given our late planning we could only get a reservation at Phantom Ranch for the night of the 1st. So the trip plan was get back to SF on 30 Dec 2008. Take bart from the airport, sleep/pack (in either order), then drive to Williams, AZ on the 31st. Take a bus the to Grand Canyon on the 1st, hike down to Phantom Ranch, sleep, hike back up to the top, see the Grand Canyon from the top. Take a bus back to Williams and drive somewhere near the Hoover Dam. Sleep. Drive, see the Hoover Dam, get to Las Vegas, and see the Cirque du Soleil show Ka. Sleep. Drive home.

So that was the plan, now for the execution. We got back to SF on time and picked up our bags from the baggage claim without any issue. The next morning we got up and moving. The optimistic hope was that we would be on the road by 8am to Williams, then stop in Fresno for gear and food. It turns out we weren't ready to go until 10, so we got hiking poles and fake crampons at the REI in SF. We also did our grocery shopping in SF. We were on the road to Williams by noon. We shared the driving Sarah took the parts with traffic, I took the 4 and two lane highways. The fortunate part about this is that I drove through the San Joaquin. One the way there, it was basically IFR conditions (I had no instruments), so I was driving through a cloud (some call it fog) and I couldn't see anything that wasn't on the road. It was really pretty but not the best for a road with lots of ups, downs and turns. I felt like a race car driver. The other interesting part (at least while I was driving) was going through the Mojave desert at sundown. I don't think Sarah has any pictures, but it was very pretty.

Finally we arrived in Williams, AZ and got to the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel, at 2345hrs, (for those counting that means we were on the road for 10h 45m). We checked in by 2358hrs on 31 Dec 2008. So we stood by the fire for two minutes, counted down, and kissed for New Years.

In the morning, things went as expected, we backed our bags to hike 10 miles, and put the rest of the stuff in the car. We got in a van that took us to the Grand Canyon. Our driver up to the Grand Canyon was very nice and showed us the sites along the way. We also met two Japanese exchange students on their way to see the Grand Canyon.

On the way was slow since we took a lot of pictures (Sarah has them all since I lots my 1GB SD card before it made its way into my camera). Unfortunatly, Sarah got tired on the way down, and also hurt her ankle. So we stumbled our way to Phantom Ranch around 1600. From the time we got to the ranch until supper at 1830, we laid back and relaxed, we needed it, our feed were sore and Sarah iced her ankle. The food at Phantom Ranch was good, not great, and there was enough of it after being on our feet all day. At end end of the day, we slept, as planned. In the morning we got up for the early breakfast. Again, it was decently, but not great, but there was enough food. Unfortunatly, Sarah was sick (She'd figured out how to deal with her ankle though) (Oh, and she isn't pregnant). So we harrassed the rangers, got some imodium, and started on our way back up the Bright Angel Trail, we took the Bright Angel Trail down and were planning on the South Kaibab trail up but the Bright Angel Trail has places to stop the South kaibab trail doesn't. Again were were planning on an early 630hrs start, but started a little later at 745hrs. We used our poles with gusto on the way back up and made it up by 1345, 6hrs on the way back up, the same time it took us to get down. The rest of the daylight hours was spent taking the village bus around the Grand Canyon village and seeing the sights from the top.

After the Grand Canyon, we drove to Kingman, stayed there, then continued on, saw the Hoover Dam, it is like Itaipu, but less political and taller, then went on to vegas. In Vegas we saw the inside of a couple hotels, I spent $1 on a slot machine, then we say Ka. Ka is an amazing show, I don't think it really suck in until after the show was over all the things the performers pulled off. That said, the stage itself was an engineering marvel that I watched almost as much as the performers.

After Vegas, the drive back was mostly uneventful, the fog in San Joaquin was a little lighter, but still heavy, Mojave is prettier at sunset and it is still good to sleep in my own bed.

---

What to do when bored and reading the latest blog posts from The Spanner?
Once again I read about a PHPIDS bypass so I tried to find a way to bypass it too, so here it is:

you=this
,the=('a\
ler\
t'),you=you[the]
you('hello world \
by Raphael Geissert \
based on example by\
Gareth Heyes\
')
,/abc abc\
abc abc abc\
abc\
/,/abc abc\
abc abc abc\
abc\
/

I got tagged. By splitbrain. With a really silly but funny meme. The basic rule is: Draw a bunny. So here s my bunny:

             /\ /\
             ,. ,. 
             
             \' /
            / . .\
           (   Y  )
          __\  v'/
       _-^      \
     ,'  _        
    /      \    /
 _ ;          , \\
/        __;__\ \\
\_,\___________;\_;;

Nobody said, ASCII art is not allowed and I drew it myself with aewan (Ascii art Editor Without A Name) in an xterm. But aewan was not really a help here, Emacs would have done the same job. In fact I had to fix some non-ascii characters later by using Emacs anyway. Ok, and since this are the rules:

1. Draw a Bunny (or more)
2. Post it to your blog with the rules
3. Name three other bloggers that should draw a bunny

You can draw your bunny however you like. Use pencil and paper, a drawing tablet or just your mouse. It doesn t matter. It also doesn t matter if it looks crappy or not. The important thing is the bunny!

here are the three blogger I m tagging. Ehm, that s harder than the bunny. Hmmm. I think, I ll stay with the DokuWiki on identi.ca crowd for tagging. So I herewith tag:

1. foosel,
2. chimeric, and
3. jaypikay

Hope, they don t mind and join the fun. ;-)

Over two years ago, the FSF started its BadVista campaign with the goal of educating the public on problems related to software freedom, DRM, and more, with Microsoft's latest operating system. Today, the FSF is declaring victory; the name "Vista" is synonymous in the public eye with failure. The real credit, I suppose, should go to Microsoft. Vista's design put the desires of big media companies, software companies, and Microsoft itself ahead of the desires of users. Vista defeated itself. But the FSF's campaign drew a huge amount attention to the problems with Vista --- especially early on --- and provided a central location aggregating and amplifying criticism of Vista. In doing so, the FSF played an important role in helping the whole process along and in balancing this criticism with a more positive message about free software alternatives. Gratitude is due to the FSF staff, members, and supports who made BadVista a success. Please read the announcement, Digg the article, support the FSF, and follow its other work in its other campaigns so that all the FSF's work can be as successful as BadVista.

As a photo management application, Facebook sucks. But it is something that people actually look at (as opposed to Flickr, which is great, but getting people to log-in or follow special guest pass links is a PITA). I like to keep all my raw photos locally, using IPTC for comments (which Flickr reads -- I put them in using some custom scripts and the Python bindings of libiptcdata) and geo-tagged in the EXIF data (using my google maps point locator). I figure this way if Flickr goes bust/gets bought by Microsoft all I need to do is re-upload somewhere else. I was waiting for Flickr to integrate with Facebook in some good way, but I then came across the very useful pyfacebook bindings, which, although being a little light on documentation, is a great way to easily throw my photos into Facebook (it's pending the NEW queue in Debian, see #511279). My fbupload.py script might be a useful starting point if you want to do the same thing. It batches up photos into lots of 60 (the maximum photos in an album) and automatically creates the albums and uploads the photos, reading the IPTC data for comments. The only problem is that you'll have to sign up for a developer key and start a new application to get a secret key to talk to the API (if you're still reading this, I'm sure you can figure it out!).