MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights. It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself.

I've just noticed that some debconf7 registrations close this week. Yes, this week - a full two months before national rail advance tickets go on sale. What's that about? Meanwhile, the debconf7 travel page (SSL) seems to have far more airline details than railway ones. I'm almost wondering if someone involved owns an airport up there or something... Please, for the sake of our British Isles, don't fly to debconf from Europe and especially not the UK! For example, flying from London dumps 193kg of carbon into the upper atmosphere (where it's over twice as damaging), but a train only 24kg near the ground (source).

Update: within 30 minutes of posting the previous plumbing celebration, a coffee machine exploded, covering many square metres with coffee and grounds. Counter-top, walls, doors, floor. The wet/messy/damaging balance was restored. It took an hour to clean up. Moral: don't celebrate plumbing too loudly or water will take revenge.

This addition to my Bad Technology page is plumbing. I hate plumbing. It is really inconvenient if it goes wrong, plumbers are pretty rare these days and most of my attempts to fix anything to do with plumbing end up wet and/or messy and/or damaging the house. I was just starting to understand the sealed system at the old house and then we moved to a house with an open vent system with loft tanks and inverted loops and draincocks and stuff. Humanity has invented the internet and other great stuff, but it seems we can't invent a heating system that is reliable, affordable, environmentally-friendly, understandable, hackable and doesn't fail messily. On what may have been the coldest day since we moved here, the heating stopped. Testing the controls, looking at the system design and working through a troubleshooting list suggested that the sensors were working and the boiler was working but the valve that sends hot water to the tank or heating was just clicking and sending nothing to the heating. I tried calling our usual plumber. Voicemail. So, I popped the cover off the valve. In addition to the wet/messy/damaging worry, that also involves electrics. Water and electicity - an ideal combination(!) There were some springs, a round bit and a worrying number of wires (live, for all I know). Also dust. A lot of dust. Thick lumps of dust. Grab the air gun, blow out the dust. Set the controls to try the heating. Still no joy. The round bit seemed to be twitching and making the ticking noise. Tapped it with the screwdriver handle. Nothing. Hit it. It moved. Pump starts, boiler starts, sound of heating pipes expanding as the hot water enters them again. I think that's my first successful fix to the plumbing in three months. Be cautious, but give it a go - I guess that's the same tactic that works for my successful computer hacks.

I left home a bit late and rushed to the train stop, but the journey was easy after that. There was quite a good turnout at the meeting: Chris (chair), Alex (clerk), Paul (treasurer), Brian (secretary), Malcolm, Paul, Andrew and myself IIRC. Continuing: A promo leaflet is on hold until after funding is sorted out; No mutuals responded to a funding request letter; The reply to the BASIS grant bid is expected some time in January; The database update is waiting on Plymco as far as I could tell. Financial: the clerking contract went about 700 quid over budget last year and has been reduced to a skeleton service until funds are sorted out again. Donations from the Coop Group and Midcounties were forecast but aren't in the bank yet. AGM: the aim is to return to more of an event next year. Holding it in October should hopefully avoid the transport and weather problems of the 2006 event. Fund-raising: Chris to draft a bid for the cooperation fund to try to secure enough money for a support worker. The priorities would be clerking and event organisation, with possibly marketing, communication and news-production tasks. Numbers to come from the support tracker that Alex has been using. Need some sort of corporation to apply. Alex, Brian and myself to assist. 12 February deadline. Reply expected in March. Future work: newsletter deferred to mid-March. News items to Alex. Paul (I think) mentioned that some Healthy Eating Partnerships seem to be promoting their box schemes as 'Food Coops' when they are not cooperatives at all. We need to contact partnerships and find out which is doing what. Alex handed out a few Principle Six speed-networking packs. Interesting idea. Paul mentioned Cornwall Switch which will find the best green energy supplier for you (even if you're not in Cornwall). Next meeting 16 April 2007.

"In blogspace, everyone can hear you vacuum the cat." - Me, just now.

If any planners want to see the impact of your short-sighted regulations, please visit Bowthorpe

"planning regs mean you only have to provide one space per home. Hence families with two cars, or couples who work in opposite directions and need two cars, often have to block their roads without meaning to do so."

Surely short-sighted would be to cater for today's car parking requirements? Thanks to climate change, oil decline and other reasons, it looks like there won't be as many cars tomorrow. Two-car households may be a temporary problem. If people are parking inconsiderately, bring in a one-car-per-house permit system with edge-of-zone car parks (and let two-car houses buy permits from car-free houses). If you build roads big enough for today's peak use, then in the future, there will be oversize roads for the traffic levels when that land could have been better used for housing. Ah, criticising the barking policies of Antony Little... blogging like it's 1999.

This doesn't affect me directly (not in the US and not female) but it surprised me: WTF is Bush doing on this?

Cooperatives SW is the regional council of cooperatives and mutuals in South-West England (Gloucs, Bristol, Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles). I attend on behalf of the small workers' cooperative partnership that I work for. At the 2006 AGM I was elected to its steering group and today (2007-01-22) is my first meeting. I'll be going along and learning about how coops are communicating and marketing in the region, and hopefully something about the nuts and bolts of structural funding. I think that's what BASIS bids are. I'll be travelling to the meeting by train on First Great Western, who have hit the headlines this morning because of a mass protest against overcrowding on the Bristol-Bath route. It'll be extremely unusual if there's any overcrowding on daytime Bristol-Taunton trains. I'll bike to the easiest station, but I can't remember whether I can take my bike on these trains. Update: The above was blog 128 on the BBC's First Post blog. Firstly, funny to be a power of 2. Secondly, the name just makes me think of hot grits and Natalie Portman.

Cutting Free: An interview with gNewSense founders Paul O'Malley and Brian Brazil

"if your hardware reacts badly to gNewSense, is it time for you to examine what the vendor is doing to you? If they offer some piece of hardware in exchange for your freedom and then they don't trust you to run that hardware correctly. They don't trust you, why should you trust them? As you don't have the specifications could it be the case that they are pretending that commodity is really something luxurious? How can you know that?" [note: bad site for the visually-impaired, bad colours and a graphical eyetest for comments]

Chip and SPIN! Examining the technology behind the "Chip and PIN" initiative...

"The purpose of this site is not to provide totally balanced comment on the move, but to give proper airing to the drawbacks. It's a always a tough job for onlookers to assess the truth behind anything controversial, but the greater the quantity of information, and the greater the variety of sources the better."

The Huffington Post: James Love: WIPO and the global consolidation of rights in audiovisual works

"This makes it more difficult, risky and expensive to copy, republish, remix or reuse works, for any purpose. This is a bad idea in general, but an insane idea at the very moment when we are witnessing such an explosion of new ways of creating, using, sharing and re-purposing information."

OPENSOURCE petition to the Prime Minister

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Improve Open Source use in govenment and local govenment work places."

Really. After MJ Ray summarized very useful information about building methods, I finally reconsidered my method for building packages. I usually use pbuilder but I'm pretty much annoyed with its slowness when unpackaking the base.tgz file. As a consequence, when I'm in a hurry, I sometimes just "debuild" packages on my live system. Booooo. Of course, this often leads to errors (two, recently, with samba. Booooo). On the other hand, using pbuilder is a very clean way to build packages...but is very slow, which is a pain when working on the "blitz NMU" uploads which I blogged about a few days ago. So, discovering cowdancer which is able to dance fast along with the safety of pbuilder was exactly what I was needing. Thanks, again, Junichi for that nice piece of work...and MJ for blogging about it!

Sven M ller commented:

"Well, if pbuilder slows you down too much, perhaps cowbuilder is the right one for you. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it is supposed to eliminate the worst delay pbuilder introduces: The unpacking of the base.tgz minimal chroot archive."

Nelson A. de Oliveira asked:

"Have you tried cowdancer + pbuilder? It makes creating packages really fast (there is no more need to uncompress the tarball, for example)."

I looked for cowbuilder, but there's no package called that, so I was quite glad for the second comment. I'll backport cowdancer and give it a go. Thanks!

niq commented:

"FWIW, in the real westcountry (West Devon, near the cornish border) we've missed the storms. A bit of wind in the morning, and some drizzle, but nothing substantial."

Yes, seeing what happened further north - roofs ripped up in Manchester - and east - house collapse in King's Lynn (pic 9) - then it seems we got off lightly this time. I hear that Germany declared it a hurricane, but I haven't confirmed that online. Euronews coverage. As far as I can see, there's snapped aerials and all the windows look like someone has sneezed over them, but damage mostly stopped after the fences were ripped to bits. I heard that the sea overtopped the wall in Weston, but I can't find pictures. I'll see myself what town is like later today. Update: niq, you didn't get an email notice because your mailserver is cocked-up:

"550 Error: 23Your subject line looks like spam"

Damnit, it's your phrase in the subject line!

Chris Cunningham commented:

"Errr, standing charges on gas are pretty rare now. British Gas abolished them years ago, for instance. Standing charges for electricity are generally a good idea if you use any reasonable amount of electricity though. The single best piece of advice I can hand out for saving money on utilities is to take meter readings every month. Not only does this make it much easier to negotiate re-estimation of poorly-calculated start/end reads, it also gives you an immediate idea of how much you're using. I'm rather surprised that you didn't take the opportunity to rail against the evils of privatisation which led to this situation. Deregulated utilities are a bit of a nightmare in the UK, speaking from experience working for one."

Standing charges may be pretty rare, but they are still allowed and npower put them on so-called deemed contracts. I can see why that makes sense to a company like npower. It seems a good way to make sure you can bill a customer who hates you. Reading your own meter is a good idea. Doesn't really help if you've only just moved in, though. npower still argue that the absurdly low meter reading they're using for your start value (which would mean a bigger bill) was the final reading given by the previous occupier. I can't really comment on the evils of privatisation: I never interacted with the public utilities. Interestingly, the "deemed contract" problem seems to come from the regulations. Gas Act 1995 Schedule 2B section 8 creates the deemed contracts and doesn't explicitly handle the situation where someone moving in has an existing gas contract and doesn't want the deemed contract at all. This seems a misregulation bug as much as a deregulation one.

There's a stupid system in England for utilities billing. In theory, you have the freedom to choose who supplies your electricity and gas. There are supply networks, maintained here by Wales and West Utilities and Western Power Distribution which are the same for all suppliers, but your supplier has to put the amount that you use into their network. More info at Energy Watch In practice, when you move home, you have no freedom to choose. You can't even keep your existing supplier. The supplier of the previous occupier writes to you and tells you that you are on a "deemed contract" which is a funny sort of contract which they reckon is valid even though you have no choice in the matter. Even if you tell the suppliers of your choice on the day you move (as if you didn't have enough to do), you're screwed. There are long notice periods, even for deemed contracts. With gas, you're doubly screwed, as they can make daily standing charges even if you use no gas. Nasty deemed contract supplier npower refused to negotiate and then billed for nearly 50 quid, thanks to their standing charge. You might avoid paying the home's previous electricity supplier by giving them a zero reading. As long as they're not silly about it, they shouldn't send a bill. There doesn't seem to be a daily charge for electricity. Silly edf energy sent a 16p bill. 16 pence. 0.16 pounds. The printing and posting probably cost them another 16p. I paid it at a post office counter, which I'm told pays the post office 12p. It just cost edf about 28p to receive 16p. Why the devil didn't their billing system write it off? I suggest that customers of 'no-negotiation npower' or silly money-wasting edf energy should look for a new supplier. Probably not British Gas: Martyn Drake has some British Gas horror stories, but he recently reset his web site (google!). I'm sure another BG rant will be along shortly, though. One of my uncles has had trouble with them too, but I don't think he's on the web yet.

One of the bad things about moving to live in the west country is that we are now on the front line of any storms that leave the Atlantic for England. To make matters worse, we are on a hillside and some idiot put the boiler vent facing into the prevailing wind, so I have to relight it at least once each bad storm. Today's storm is the worst yet. Average wind speed is reported by TV as 35mph, gusting over 70. Anything that wasn't bolted down or very very heavy and hadn't already been blown away has now gone. I keep going out quickly to do things like add weights to the bin or wedge one of the garden tables against the fence, but I don't feel like fixing my bicycle and riding to town along the coast today. On the first trip out, as I was checking the roof for damage, one of the neighbours' six-foot fence panels flew off. On the second trip... well, this used to be a fence on the other side of the path by our back wall: Now it's just a concrete post surrounded by debris. If this is part of the storm heading for Erich Schubert then I think Munich has done the right thing.

I wrote sxw2text as a 5-minute email-helper hack some years ago. Now I notice that there's also a version of sxw2txt in python on a French site, but it doesn't seem to do any checking at all, not even the minimal bit of my script. Update: following more links, I found odt2txt.py which outputs markdown and is probably a better choice if you have python installed.

It appears that some people don't understand what right-wing means in terms of politics, apart from using it as a general term of abuse.

I recommend visiting the site http://www.politicalcompass.org/ to see your own political beliefs (as determined by a short questionnaire) graphed against some famous people. The unique aspect of the Political Compass is that they separate economic and authoritarian values. Stalinism is listed as extreme authoritarian-left and Thatcherism as medium authoritarian-right. Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are listed as liberal-left.

I score -6.5 on the economic left/right index and -6.46 on the social libertarian/authoritarian index, this means that I am fairly strongly liberal-left. Previously the Political Compass site would graph resulta against famous people but they have since removed the combined graph feature and the scale from the separate graphs. Thus I can't determine whether their analysis of the politics of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama indicate that one of those men has beliefs that more closely match mine than the other. I guess that this is because the famous politicians did not take part in the survey and an analysis of their published material was used to assess their beliefs, this would lead to less accuracy.

The Wikipedia page on Right-Wing Politics provides some useful background information. Apparently before the French revolution in the Estates General the nobility sat on the right of the president's chair. The tradition of politically conservative representatives sitting on the right of the chamber started there, I believe that such seating order is still used in France while in the rest of the world the terms left and right are used independently of seating order.

Right-wing political views need not be associated with intolerance. If other Debian developers decide to publish their political score as determined by the Political Compass quiz then I'm sure that we'll find that most political beliefs are represented, and I'm sure that most people will discover that someone who they like has political ideas that differ significantly from their own.

This email in French asks after my ITP Koha bug and mentions using the list of debian package deps to build most of the dependencies which I only finished building like 3 days ago. You wait ages for a koha/debian developer, then two come along at once.

Cycle shop owner and long-time club rider Mel Vasey was knocked down and killed by a car while on a club ride. Report from icLiverpool The comment about the road being dangerous because of a lack of cycle track sounds like a misquote or misunderstanding. The road is dangerous because car drivers aren't driving within their ability. Adding a cycle track won't change the road: if the driver really was blinded by low sun and driving beyond their ability, they could easily have strayed into a cycle track. Also, roadside cycle tracks are often kept to a damned sight worse standard than the roads (often 18mph top unladen speed on wide tyres - less if you're carrying or on road tyres) so end up being no safer in total.