Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Green Lantern 65% Superman 60% Batman 50% Robin 47% Supergirl 45% Hulk 40% Iron Man 40% The Flash 35% Wonder Woman 20% Catwoman 20%

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

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

As you read this fascinating but edited-for-brevity irc log from #debian-boot, imagine yourself as a contributor to either the larger Debian project or the Debian-Installer sub-project. At what point do you begin to feel insulted?

---

<Chepre> can i talk to the chief of debian please. the whole project could earn some money
<minghua> Chepre: if you are serious, write email to leader@debian.org
<Chepre> thanks minghua. is there a way to get a "official" release created with all up-to-date modules, like for Intel ICH7 sATA-Controller...as long as i pay for it?
<minghua> Chepre: chances are small. the official release is a long process
<minghua> and it doesn't happen often
<minghua> the earliest date you can expect for next release is probably end of 2006
<minghua> so you would have a better chance to hire some people/company who knows debian and provide you an updated kernel
<Chepre> OMG? does debian have not enough coders or don't they have "fun" to keep it up-to-date? e.g. the intel ich7 is already very old
<Chepre> well, can i hire the debian-team?
<minghua> Chepre: well, there is no official "team", but sure, you can hire debian developers
<gravity> Chepre: The stock kernel doesn't support your device? Why not? Is the driver not in the mainline kernel tree?
<Chepre> no
<gravity> Why not?
<Chepre> its just a default Dell PowerEdge 850 with Intel ICH7 and it isn't supported
<gravity> Chepre: Well, did you send an installation report?
<Chepre> gravity: no
<gravity> Chepre: That'd be a good first step to getting your problem fixed for future releases
<minghua> Chepre: ah, then it's supported by stock kernel after all, did you say it only works for kernel > 2.6.12?
<Chepre> minghua: 2.6.8-2 doesnt support it
<minghua> Chepre: okay, so as gravity said, write an installation report so that people know your problem
<Chepre> well, we cant wait month or years for a fix
<gravity> Chepre: You can create a custom installer image with the updated kernel for your work
<Chepre> we have to install many server in the next weeks :(
<munghua> Chepre: then I'm sure if you offer enough money, some d-i people can provide an installer with a newer kernel for you
<Chepre> well, i already got an custom installer but its a bit buggy...i need a whole netinst with the same "quality" like the official releases got
<gravity> sounds you were at the right track at the beginning... though "chief of debian" is probably the wrong person to contact :-P
<gravity> You could send a mail to debian-boot I suppose, offering the work for what you need
<Chepre> well, i also need up-to-date software, not just only the installer :( so the "whole" debian-team has to stop current work and has to start creating a stable version which is newer than the current unstable
<Chepre> minghua: do you think 50k are enough to get a 3.3 as stable?
<minghua> Chepre: by "up-to-date software" you mean all the software, including desktop, web servers, and stuff?
<gravity> Chepre: You may want to check out an alternative source. HP, as I understand it, provides the kind of support you want. Progeny does as well. And Ubuntu has their own full derivative with this sort of thing
<Chepre> minghua: right, as long the software is not a beta :)
<gravity> Chepre: The whole Debian team is not the kind of project that'll do this for you
<Chepre> so the debian-team dont want to earn money?
<Chepre> gravity: i know, open source :) ... but i think the guys making a new "official" release for me whould be very happy getting up to 20.000 us$ for one month of work
<gravity> Chepre: It would violate a lot of principles and the stable release policy to do an official debian release. You could get what you need with a name other than debian though, with some of the companies I listed above
<Chepre> where is the problem? i give you the money and you give me an up-to-date release which is only for my company, not for public
<gravity> I know I'd quit the project if there was an official Debian release for cash
<minghua> and there are like what, 10,000 packages in sarge now?
<gravity> Chepre: That's what those companies are for. Debian doesn't work like that
<gravity> Chepre: If you want to talk to individual debian developers for that, you can do that too
<Chepre> hmm, ok....now i know why the d-i doesn't recognize smp or 64bit systems

---

Now imagine yourself as someone who is trying to install Debian on twenty thousand stock machines for work and it's not working. At what point above did you begin to feel alienated? (Assuming that "Chepre" is not trolling,) Neither side in this exchange is particularly meaning to insult the other, both are doing what is right and obvious from their perspective. Two ships passing in the night, two trains speeding down a track, I don't know. It's a shame we can't deal better with this sort of thing. I would be truely interested to see how other free software projects deal with it differently. The rest of this is my attempt at some analysis and is probably not very useful.. A few mistakes Chepre made:

• When trying to communicate with someone, it's helpful to try to understand their motivations. Maybe these people are not highly motivated by money. Maybe spending 1% of your budget to buy the right someone a computer exhibitng the problem would be more effective.
• If a coder asks if you're filed a formal report of your problem, and you haven't, and you don't understand the underlying problem and rebuff their attempts to get a grip on it, escalating the issue to upper management will not make them your friend.
• Trying to pre-solve your problem by setting requirements like "it can't be a beta" and "it needs to be a 3.3 release" and "it needs to be newer than the current version" will only result in the wrong problem being solved, and smart people will not want to get involved in such a process. If you plan to hire someone to solve a problem it makes more sense to give them a broad vision of the problem to be solved, some example use cases, and let them, not you, solve the problem. That's what you're hiring them for.
• Not doing basic background research. And letting it show.

A few mistakes the channel (irr-)regulars made:

• Not recognising that "it will be done at the end of 2006" is not an answer a user wants to hear, and not pointing out alternatives such as last month's beta release or today's daily build.
• Assuming that when a user asks for a release, they necessarily want what we consider a "stable release". Perhaps they want a release that has some form of support and is free of showstopper bugs; what Debian terms "stable" is not the only release that necessarily has those characteristics, depending on how it will be used. (In other words, holy penguin pee (aka "official") might be more plentiful, and more symbolic, than you think.)
• Not pointing Chepre to the Debian consultants page. (Minor, but it's possibly the best place to have mentioned.)
• Getting offended. And letting it show.

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 90% Hulk 65% Robin 65% The Flash 60% Green Lantern 60% Iron Man 55% Superman 50% Wonder Woman 35% Catwoman 35% Supergirl 35% Batman 30%

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

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

I'm Spider-Man:

Spider-Man 85% Robin 75% Superman 65% Hulk 60% Green Lantern 40% Wonder Woman 35% Supergirl 35% The Flash 25% Iron Man 20% Catwoman 15% Batman 10%

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

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

You are Iron Man

Iron Man 60% Green Lantern 55% The Flash 55% Spider-Man 55% Catwoman 55% Hulk 50% Supergirl 45% Batman 45% Robin 42% Superman 30% Wonder Woman 25%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

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

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 75% Spider-Man 65% Green Lantern 55% Iron Man 45% Robin 40% Supergirl 40% Catwoman 35% The Flash 30% Batman 30% Wonder Woman 25% Hulk 20%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

Given my fine coordination, my very high frustration tolereance and the friendliness with which I greet people while busy doing my stuff, this was quite expectable.
Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 75% Superman 70% Spider-Man 65% Iron Man 55% Green Lantern 55% Catwoman 50% Batman 50% Supergirl 48% The Flash 45% Robin 40% Wonder Woman 23%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

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

Speaking about text-mode mp3 player. I'm using moc (available in archive) and its main advantage over orpheus is that it is NOT a frontend, so it can easily rewind/forward songs. Try it ;)

I've finally bought notebook. It's Compaq Presario V2000, Pentium 1,66GHz Centrino, 512MB of RAM and 80GB disk. The most funny thing is that I couldn't install sarge on it. Running installation with 2.4 kernel caused oops of kernel, while running it with 2.6 worked quite well but ethernet card didn't work, although it was detected nicely.
Anyway I started from woody, then sarge and now I've got sid on it. Everything seems to work nice (I didn't try suspend-to-something yet, but it's not so important for me). I had to use hotplug for my Intel 2200BG wireless card. The only thing which makes me scared is:

(root@lapik)~#lsmod   wc -l
109
(root@lapik)~#

I've never had so many modules and it's mainly because hotplug tries to detect everything on startup. Do we have some hotplug replacement? Something which could be used only for loading firmware to wireless card.
Sound card works with i810_audio modules, so I suppose that's not alsa, but oss. Couldn't figure out yet what's wrong with alsa modules.
Anyway I'm quite happy the way Linux works on my new toy ;)

I've just uploaded new htop release. Alongside some fixes it adds support for home-etc library.
Basically it's simple library that allows you to put configuration files wherever you want instead of making mess in home directory. I would really like to see patched programs in Debian.

(fenio@domek)~$ls -a   grep '^.'   wc -l
129
(fenio@domek)~$

Would be great to see this number less than 10-20. Home-etc makes it easy to support $HOME-ETC environment variable or ~/.home-etc file to point out where do you want to put all dot-files.
What's your opinion about that?

I bought brand new Siemens C75 phone few days ago. This is how it looks like:

It's really great and of course I wanted to put Debian logo on screen. I had some old serial cable from my previous phone, so that was first I tried. Unfortunately trying to connect to phone causes its power down. Probably some firmware problems.
So I bought USB cable today. This time at least it doesn't want to switch off my phone, but I still can't get it work. Tried siefs, scmxx and both seem to have problems handling this phone.
I forced usbserial module to use explicit vendor and product id. Only then dmesg shows:

usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbserial.c: Generic converter detected
usbserial.c: Generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4

This seems to be ok at least according to many howtos I found on net. So why does it still not work?

Could we please include 'sex' entry in our developers database?
That would make some translators life easier. Don't get me wrong, I do not want to be sexist, but please consider that English isn't an only language on the world. Translating DWNs to Polish is sometimes difficult due to fact that we don't know if someone is a girl or a boy and that makes difference in past tenses of our language.

As Christian said in a very nice summary of the issue, this is the day the DADVSI law (which is a transposition of the EUCD, the European DMCA) will be examined by French parliament. I would really like to share Christian's optimism. So far, the EUCD.INFO initiative succeeded in bringing the issue to the public (120k signatures, mostly from French residents) and to several MP. Good news are that a lot of amendments has been submitted to mitigate effects of the DADVSI law. Bad news is that we also had terrible press cover: we had articles in most national newspapers and TV, but a lot of them are completely missing the point and are comparing us to champions of piracy against copyright. Even worse, Christian Vanneste (conservative MP responsible of the law) keeps spreading lies. Today, members of the EUCD.INFO initiative went to the parliament to talk to MP and to show their concerns. Some friends and I went too even if we were just there to watch the debate. I'm quite disappointed to see that left wing was totally absent (like less than 10 MP out of 160!). Right wing was more represented but MP supporting our amendments are a minority group. Debate starts again at 21 local time. We will be there and I hope I'm wrong, but I really fear we loose more than we gain.

Today is the day where the very controversial DADVSI bill will be examined by the French Parliament. DADVSI stands for "Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Soci t de l'Information" which can be roughly translated to "Author Rights and Related Rights in the Information Society". This very controversial bill includes some very ambiguous parts about software "that could be used to illegally exchange data over the Internet". The text is so vague that it can even interpreted as possibly allowing to forbig software authors to publish their sources....which explains why the French Free Software community reacted so strongly. This text is promoted by the major entertainment companies (Vivendi Universal and the like...). Some even said to representatives of the Free Software communities: "we will foirbid you to publish your sources". I'm feeling they're failing, though. The very active lobbying promoted by the EUCD.INFO initiative has already reached one goal: the bill will not be examined confidentially. For instance, I'm currently watching the LCI TV channel, one of the major news channels among satellite/cable/Internet channels in France and this problem is now in their major headlines. You're screwed, pals. Bottom line note: in France, laws are proposed by the government and must be examined, then voted, by the Parliament. The Parliament may "amend" a law (ie propose changes) which sometimes means completely changing it. We now have a great hope that this will happen as many of our representatives ("d put s"), including some from the current majority (right wing) and most of the left wing representatives, have expressed very strong reserves. Additionnal side note: at this moment, there are no less than 200 amendments proposed to this bill...:-)

I am making arrangements to go to New Caledonia on my travels from Saturday. So I won’t be packaging imminent releases of:

• Maradns 1.2
• Wordpress 2.0

Sorry. I am pissed with Debian the last couple of days. Boiling. Yes I’m stressed, yes Debian is my scapegoat. My unstable system is completely b0rked. :( I tried. Honestly. I tried. I am running the 2.4 kernel which no matter how many modules I insert can’t seem to get X running with mouse support. I expected perhaps I need to dpkg-reconfigure xserver but then that reported I had a broken installation. WTF! Thanks mate. Paging around the end of virtual consoles in 2.4 which I have to do now, also does not bloody work. If I go off the edge it gets stuck. ALT+arrows don’t work. CTRL+ALT+F-keys don’t either. Nightmare. Reboot. Fsck errors. Fuck. dpkg -i of a 2.6.14 kernel just bombs out too while trying to make a mysteriously complicated initrd. I can’t really debug this problem as I don’t have Internet connectivity with my laptop either. Internet connectivity problems aren’t to do with Debian. That’s Australia’s fault. To add to my miseries I’ve caught a cold. I’ve also been playing around with sed all morning, trying to parse Debian LDAP output. Nightmare. To think I wanted to do my Debian New Maintainer stuff this month. Moray got back to me last month (or the month before that?) saying he was too busy (again). I’ve written to debian nm frontdesk for another AM and I’ve yet to hear from them. Oh well, I’m going to roast my ass in the tropics for a while and try forget computers ever existed.

Following nobse’s post: Yes, it is done, backports.org is running with the new setup. The inclusion of bpo into the second wanna-build network is pending, and then the buildds should come up shortly after that. Should be a matter of only a few days now. So, next point: Mirrors. That’s my part. We already have 2 mirrors up and running, and are ready to get more. So if you are a mirror and want to have backports.org please read our little mirror howto, which should have any information you need to know. Please: For the sanity of your users: Do not mirror randomly with cronjobs. We are happy to add you to our mirror network, sending you a push whenever something changed in the archive, so you only mirror when it’s really needed. We are updating our archive hourly (whenever there is something to install), so cronjobs are just always outdated. And I have just another point: While we were changing backports.org we changed mailinglists too. lists.backports.org now runs on another machine. The most visible change there is the webarchive, we are away from the ugly mailman thing to lurker, which has a much improved interface. Most interesting part here was to get lurker to run in a “virtual host” style setup, only showing lists that the current used host should have, as the machine now hosts two list setups. Update: Added a few ”’ for weasel. If you want more: ””””””””””””””.

A long time, the common way of working around MSIE CSS bugs was to exploit parser bugs and missing features in it's CSS parser. Recently I read about a cleaner approach; I tested it recently and it seems to work quite well. Judging from the W3C validator, it's compatible with XHTML, too. It's nor perfect, but it probably is the best we can do currently. (And definitely cleaner than the parser-bug-exploits listed before.) The approach is simple: given the string <!--[if IE]> Foobar <![endif]--> in an HTML file, almost any parser will treat this as an comment. Except for Internet Exploiter, which will treat "Foobar" as if it was part of the regular text. Instead of "Foobar", you can load an override stylesheet to work around Internet Explorer bugs. Note that as a side effect, MSIE is not a standards compliant parser for XHTML. ;-) Now for the drawbacks:

• The part hidden from every parser except IE is not validated by tools
• The converse construct (remove --), to hide stuff from IE only, is not valid XHTML
• The conditional needs to be in every HTML file, it's not in the CSS and not cached with the CSS, so sligthly less performant than other solutions.
• It doesn't nest, you can't use comments in this construct
• They are, after all, a hack

For comparison, a few of the older tricks in CSS:

body        background-color: red;  
html>body   background-color: green;  

This is 100% valid CSS, and works because Internet Exploder doesn't support CSS 2 child selectors. But you cannot always use this, since you need to know the parent elements name. Note that this can give you trouble with the upcoming Internet Explorer which will likely have support for this selector, but will probably be "compatible" to some of the known MSIE 5/6 bugs.

body  
  voice-family: "\" \""; /* some browsers have a parsing bug */
                         /* and will ignore the following rules */
  voice-family: inherit;
  background-color: green;
 

This abuses an attribute to confuse the CSS parser of some browsers. A real hack, strongly discouraged.

I've still been extremely busy. Unlike my last fairly incoherent brain dump, this time I've been keeping notes on the things I wanted to write about, so hopefully I won't forget things. Here we go...

Squirrels

Squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They're very fast and very cute. They're kind of like possums, except diurnal. They run up trees with ease, and leap from tree to tree. It's quite cool to watch them. The damn things don't stand still long enough to be photographed (properly), and they don't let you get too close without scampering up a tree or running off. I'm told they're the number one carrier of rabies, so I shouldn't be trying to get too close anyway.

Sales tax

Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of consumer life is the fact that prices quoted are not inclusive of sales tax. This means you always need to part with more cash than you expect. Furthermore, there are some places (some fast-food outlets) that do quote the prices inclusive of tax, so it's really hard to know what you're in for.

Speed limits

I find speed limit signs to be either infrequent or harder to notice, or a combination of both. They're just a black text on white background sign. I'm used to them having the red circle. That said, no one seems to drive at the speed limit anyway.

Ethnicity

Canberra's a very white town compared to say Sydney, but I reckon at least the San Jose area of California blows the socks off what I've seen of Sydney for multiculturalism. You really notice it over here. I've been at the mall in Milpitas, and you can play "spot the white European" (a variation of "spot the Caucasian").

Different responses to thankyou

I think the fairly standard response to saying thanks that I'm used to is "You're welcome". Over here, you get "mm hmm" a lot, which is just strange.

Fractions vs decimal

They love their fractions. Petrol gets quoted at 221⁹/₁₀, which took me a while to realise was 221.9 cents per gallon

Alcoholic beverage labelling

Australia has the concept of a "standard drink". I remember as a kid the advertising campaign "rethink your third drink" (or for women, "rethink your second drink"). The idea being that men could drink two standard drinks in the first hour, and then one standard drink every hour after that, and be at 0.05% blood alcohol, which is the legal limit for Australia. And every bottled alcoholic drink is labelled with how many standard drinks it is. An average beer is about 1.2 standard drinks for example. No such labelling over here. You get the percentage of alcohol per volume, and that is it, which makes self-regulating very difficult. The limit is apparently 0.08%, but I don't think I want to be driving around on the wrong side of the road at that level (or any level really).

Christmas vs "Holidays"

Everyone and every piece of advertising goes on about the "Holidays". Retail people are always wishing us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I think this is because there's a large chunk of people who don't necessarily celebrate Christmas.

Tipping

I haven't really come across tipping in everyday life as much as I'd expected, but when I think about it a bit, I'm at work most of the time, so that's probably why. The general rule seems to be to tip "double the tax", so for a bill at a restaurant, or where you get personal service, such as a haircut, you tip. But you don't tip at McDonald's, nor Subway (where I would have expected you would).

That's about all my current observations on living over here. Tomorrow we get our townhouse in Central Park. Our air-freight was finally delivered today. (What was supposed to take about 8 days took 4 weeks). Not sure when we can expect our sea freight at this stage. We bought a couple of mountain bikes last weekend, and if the weather is okay tomorrow, we'll pick them up and ride them home. We've found a really nice off road (as in not shared with cars) bike path, which runs close to home all the way to work. I'm really keen to roller blade to work if it's feasible, and also to cycle in. I'm a bit disappointed to discover after we've been accepted for the place that we're right on top of a toxic waste dump (or something like that). If I grow a second head, you'll know why. The other piece of exciting news is that the bank sent me a debit card, when they'd previously told me they wouldn't until I had a Social Security number (still no sign if that yet). This thing (the debit card) is freaking weird. It's Mastercard branded, and in some places you use it like you'd use a debit card for EFTPOS back home. You swipe, enter your PIN and that's it. In other cases, you swipe and sign a bit of paper like a credit card transaction. In either case, money is sucked out of our checking account. The scary thing is that no one seems to check signatures in this country, and a lot of places will accept credit card payments electronically (like petrol stations where you just swipe the card at the bowser and enter the ZIP code of your billing address and that's it). Oh, and I can use this thing like a credit card for Internet purchases. What bothers me is that the level of authentication is so low, but it's sucking actual money out of our checking account, so with all the credit card fraud around, it's relatively trivial to draw actual money out of a bank account, as opposed to using someone's credit. That said, I just got the card today, and since then, it's made shopping so much easier. It's amazing how many places won't accept a foreign credit card, and I was a big user of EFTPOS back home, and this ability to use a debit card like a credit card means I can essentially continue in that habit. I wasn't looking forward to carrying lots of cash or having to use cheques.

When I connected my IM client today aftera couple of days of being offline for different reasons, I saw that two people had written to me because of Jingle being released as offcial JEP (Jabber Extension Protocol). Those are JEP-0166 and JEP-0167, the former for "low-level" signalling and the latter for specific audio and video calls. I strongly belive that this will expand usage of VoIP, as people will find quite natural being able to call a person that is currently available, which is managed by presence status. Oh! And for those of you who don't know yet... Jingle is what Google Talk is using right now.

"All revision control systems suck. This one just sucks less."

That's roughly what I'll say when I find one worth it. I've used rcs, cvs, svn, prcs, tla, arx, monotone and probably some I've forgotten. They all suck, in different ways. I'm now really reluctant to install a new revision control system unless there's a clear benefit. Matthew Palmer:

"Subversion is the One True Revision Control System and we should all just Stop Worrying and Learn To Love The Handcuffs"

Current target of my wrath is subversion, the lardy cake of revision controls. Over 5 times the footprint of CVS gets you atomic commits, but similar design problems with centralised servers and corruptable roots. Server choice is either a pserver-look one or an apache server with all the trimmings. The licence isn't even GPL-compatible, so forget about neat integration into some editors and development tools. Finally, if CVS is "extremely dead" despite its last release in October 2005, then SVN must be buried and rotting because it hasn't released since August. I tend to prefer distributed systems, especially when done well with standard protocols so that I can copy the archive somewhere close to me and work with it at relatively high speed, or off-line. It also gives the benefit that I merge when I want to, rather than being forced to choose between commit and branch. Centralised systems seem to make branching needlessly fiddly. Beyond that, I strongly prefer a system which can generate tarballs and patches (as far as possible) so that the rest of the world doesn't have to install the binaries (even if they can). That's about the base level of compatibility for now and any new tool should at least try to support it, even if the export loses some information. (I'm currently using a small shell script which just automates tarballs and patches, to help me move between my two computers here. I know it's only a 90% solution, but it's one I understand and can put some faith in. I need to have faith in my RCS. I like little less than losing work. Next step is to automate updates and merges, rather than doing them by hand.)