I am a Canadian citizen living in Montr al.
I'm sad and disappointed at the Conservatives party's politicking.  You
appear to be opposing tax cuts.  You appear to be opposing paying down
the national debt (Which was largely created by a conservative prime
minister).
You and your party keeps chanting that the Liberals have lost the "moral
authority" to govern while at the same time acting like children who
won't play along with others.  Nothing in your current behaviour would
inspire me to vote for you.  I would expect Her Majesty's Loyal
Opposition to conduct themselves in a better manner and I feel strongly
that if anyone has failed to govern effectively in this minority
parliament, it's you.
I urge you to stop trying to get an election called two months earlier
than it would come anyway, I urge you to move to a platform of fiscal
conservativeness which supports the sitting government in debt
repayments, and I urge you to begin working on keeping Qu bec in Canada.
I see these as the highest priority items for the House during the last
6 months of this government.
Acknowledgement of receipt is kindly requested.
Tks,
Jeff Bailey

There's a lot of debate going on across Planet freedesktop.org (okay, so just Havoc), and Planet GNOME (most everyone else) about marketing of media players right now. Discussing iAudios seems pretty timely.

Convinced by Jimmac, and also the shiny look, I skipped off to buy one while I was in the UK late last year. My iRiver was alright, but it was absolutely massive and very heavy, so it just had to go. I grabbed one, and have been very happy with it ever since. But with a few bumps in the road.

In April or so, my remote's display suddenly stopped working. Apparently this was a known issue with that one batch of remotes, and everything else was OK. So I eBayed a new remote at a cost of around $au115. Ouch.

Some time after that, I was attempting to reset it on the train, after it hung. Turns out that the reset button is a relatively small part of a small plastic mount, perpendicular to the mainboard. And if you poke the wrong part of it with a pen, you can snap the whole bloody thing off.

About a month ago, I just lost the ability to charge off AC; you could only do it if you were holding it at a weird angle, and eventually it just lost that ability. Which I found weird, since it's not a direct plug; there's a small breakout adapter which contains the plug for it. So it's not like the contacts on the plug in the device itself are just weird. Same problem with the cradle. So I resorted to overnight charges off USB (gah).

A while ago, the final straw in terms of it finally losing day-to-day usability was that it stopped making proper contact with the 3.5mm headphone plug, so if you held it at an angle, it just barely worked, but you got the occasional burst of awful, loud, electrical noise.

It hasn't been treated especially badly; just a lot of use, in my pocket every day, contending with my phone for space. But in just under a year, it's almost completely disintegrated.

The only reason why I bought it really, was because a lot of my older CDs have been destroyed (two roadtrips with a friend, and his car turned out to have some sand in the tray ...), and I'd really rather not transcode from Vorbis to either MP3 or AAC. But I'm pretty sure my next purchase will be a G3 40G iPod off eBay, because the clickwheel is an utter abomination. Say what you will about their marketing, sales in Europe, or whatever (FWIW: they're mindblowingly popular in Australia), but the G3 design is far and away the best design I have ever seen in any music device since my beloved MZ-R900, which met an unfortunate end when it hit ashphalt at high speed. It's quite beautiful, and the UI Just Works.

Compare this with the iRiver, which is clunky and awful to use, and the iAudio, which is the same, but with some bizzare additions. Such as the two clickable jog wheels. One of them is the 'action' button (think: the Navi key on Nokia phones), and the other brings up a context menu. Except when you go into the options, whereby the action button brings you back to the main screen, and the context menu thing is the 'action' or 'OK' button. Totally bizzare.

A secure Network Server

Ironic.

I was wrong. It turns out that privoxy is now removing the search box area from the Google. Presumably this is a change in Google’s code, since privoxy hasn’t been updated recently. But I suppose this qualifies as a bug.

I previously mentioned in a sidenote to another post that I've been involved in a court case over the last few weeks, and I promised a few people I'd blog about my adventures there. Obviously, not quite everything can be discussed in an open forum, but I checked with the legal beagles and I'm OK as long as I stick to generalities. Which is fine by me, since the detailed specifics are actually immensely boring. Executive Summary: It's the law Jim, but not as the TV shows it. I have to recommend that everybody spend a bit of time watching a case or two at their local court. It's surprising how different reality is to what you see on TV (of course, Australian courts are going to be different to the US courts we primarily see on TV, but even the dramatic representations of Australian courts I've seen are fairly inaccurate). The legal system, while appearing to be out in it's own little world, is a vital and integral part of most societies, so it's useful to have at least a basic idea of what goes on in them -- not because you'll end up in one (and even if you did, your lawyer will tell you what to do) but because it's an interesting insight into a part of our world that often affects us, but we don't like to look at. (Going and watching your houses of parliament, or an abboitoir, is a similar thing). Second, if you can possibly avoid it, don't get involved in a case. Not as a defendant, not as a litigant (in a civil case), and not as a witness. Litigants and defendants get screwed because they're stuck in a small room with a bunch of people they don't know or particularly like, for days or months, with a limited understanding of what's going on. Boooooooring. For witnesses, it's a different kind of pain. But I'll leave the details of that for another post. One of the things that quite surprised me is the general good nature and decent relationship between all of the legal professionals involved. They're willing to help each other out, they concede points graciously, and there's a surprising amount of banter between all of the lawyers and (in some cases) the witness as well. I'm told that this was peculiar in my case because I was involved in a voir dire[1], and everyone's on their more formal behaviour when there's a jury in the room. At times, it was almost a pleasure to watch the proceedings -- like a slightly dry but nonetheless compelling play. Most of the time, though, I characterised as "Snail Racing" -- about the most dull activity one could imagine, but nevertheless you just can't tear your attention away in case something interesting happens while you're blinking. When I say that the lawyers are good natured, that's not to imply that they're not vehemently arguing their case. Toward the end of the voir dire, in particular, counsel for the defence started to get rather vocal as to the lack of proper procedure on the part of the Crown. Over the entire voir dire, too, both counsel were always pressing hard and always trying to get their case seen in the best light. But their vigourous pursuit of the case never got personal or competitive. I think that's actually something that a lot of free software people could take on board (myself included) -- argue strongly for your position, but never internalise it or make it personal. Your position may be rather important (the defendant in my case was looking at up to 14 years if he got sent down) but making it a personal attack isn't going to help your case. I was amazed at the speed with which counsel picked up on new concepts and ideas. Unsurprisingly, the expertise I provided was quite technical, and counsel were not particularly computer literate. However, over lunches, I was able to essentially brain dump fair chunks of knowledge at the barrister, and he then went inside and laid it all out, usually accurately and very good presentation. It's also intensely satisfying to know that the questions that are being presented were suggested by you, and the skillful way that the ideas and queries were weaved together. I guess you'd get a similar buzz writing a play and then watching skilled performers bring it to life -- not necessarily exactly the way you imagined, but with an undeniable skill and vibrance. I've got a lot more material about my adventures in the legal system, which I'll be posting over the next while, but I figure this is probably well enough to be going on with for now.

---

1. A voir dire (as explained to me) is a sort of "trial within a trial", used to determine a point of fact or the admissability of a particular piece of evidence. It is run in the absence of a jury. They're only supposed to run for a couple of days; apparently mine was extraordinary at three weeks, although mention was made of a six week marathon (in the context of "this better not be like $OTHER_VOIR_DIRE").

KDE

I have never once written anything using Qt. Why not? I have no real dislike of the toolkit, license, or implementation language. It just hasn’t ever been necessary or appropriate for me to use it. Generally speaking I only dabble with coding online applications in Perl/PHP (Perl is my preference, sometimes I get suckered into using PHP). Any software which I’ve needed to write with a GUI usually ends up being coded using the raw X11 libraries (xlib, etc). A few times I’ve needed to have something be stable, sharable, and GUI-driven and xlib didn’t cut it I’ve chosen to use the GTK libraries. Mostly that has been down to three reasons:

• Finding small examples of code is very simple; as it is well-used.
  • By contrast many Qt applications are larger pieces of code. Finding examples using the functions you’re interested in is harder.
• I love C++, but generally I develop in Perl, or C.
• I don’t have to worry about the moc preprocessor, writing Makefiles, etc.

I’m sure that sometime in the future I will experiment with Qt, and possibly even install KDE to try it out. But it won’t be soon. (I think that desktop environments are a good thing, and can be attractive, productive, and useful. However I’ve only used Gnome briefly and tend to stick with the more lightweight IceWM environment). Once upon a time I did install and tinker with KDevelop, but nothing much came of it. When I lost my desktop machine due to hardware failure I didn’t feel the need to re-install it. Instead I stuck to using GNU Emacs + Vim for editing code.

Right now I’ve written that I shall go back to shaving my head. To make me look more like my avatar.

<p> Zeeshan Ali <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/zeenix/diary.html?start=77">writes about Finnish women</a>. Onella is actually one of the better bars in Helsinki, hopefully you discovered the two "secret" bars after the inital heavy-metal one. The first is your typical dance-floor, the other is a uniquely Finnish experience. </p> <p> Basically it consists of drunk Finns, mainly drunk Finnish women, getting up on the table &mdash; dancing as best they can &mdash; and singing along to all the recent songs. <strong>Except it is all in Finnish!</strong>. Every song you know, and some you wish you didn't, will be sung, the audio will sound familiar but the words are Finnish. Distinctly odd. </p> <p> Yes, Zeeshan, Finns are very weird. I can not imagine anything like <a title="No secrets in Finland" href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2005-11-02T150542Z_01_EIC254324_RTRUKOC_0_US-FINLAND-WAGES1.xml">this</a> happening anywhere else. Even the BBC's <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4384992.stm">Night out in Helsinki</a> is fairly tame to my experience at Debconf5 </p> <p> Over the course of many nights, I saw </p> <ul> <li>Drunk women falling off tables (many times &ndash; and cute ones too!)</li> <li>People punching fists into windows</li> <li>Large brawls</li> <li>Pepper spray indiscriminately bandied about</li> <li>Bottles being thrown &ndash; by the bar staff at customers</li> </ul> <p>It makes for lots of fun adventures &mdash; If you ever meet <a title="Horms" href="http://www.vergenet.net/~horms">Simon Horman</a>, he can fill you in far better than I can</p>

<p> <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2005/11/02/0">James Henstridge</a> notes that <a href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/zeroconf/">zeroconf</a> can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/317655" title="bug 317655: Zeroconf crucifies the network">bug</a> was filed and then fixed within 2 days. </p> <p> This was because I was at <a href="http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/">DebConf</a> and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an <abbr title="Address Resoultion Protocol">ARP</abbr> packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them. </p> <strong>Update: 18:20 AEST</strong> <p> <a href="http://www.davyd.id.au/">Davyd</a> asks why would you use zeroconf over <a href="http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/">NetworkManager</a>. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong. </p> <p> I do believe there should be an <em>overall</em> co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding. </p> <p> Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates <abbr title="Internet Protocol v4 Link-Local">IPv4LL</abbr> addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3927.txt" title="Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses">RFC3927</a>. </p>

# metadata <p> I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking. </p> <p> Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. <em>Again</em>. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts. </p> <p> I started off at <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Cruise.aspx">Cruise Bar</a>, which has a great view of the Opera House [<a title="Sydney Opera House in the afternoon" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-in-afternoon.jpg">1</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at dusk" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-dusk.jpg">2</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at night" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-night.jpg">3</a>] and (somehow) staggered my way to the <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Ship_Inn.aspx">Ship Inn</a>. Unable to flag down a cab in this area &ndash; lots of people going home around 23:00 &ndash; I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are. </p> <p> For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge. </p> <p> By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. <q>Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here</q>. <q>Mate, are you fucking deaf?</q>. (on radio, to pals)<q>Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?</q> </p> <p> Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything. </p> <p> In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely. </p> <p> These laws &ndash; part of the War on Freedom &ndash; would make the rest of this entry illegal. </p> <p> I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard. </p> <p> In Australia, things like <a href="http://smh.com.au/news/national/braindamaged-man-told-to-pay-up-after-bashing/2005/11/01/1130823210703.html" title="victim of security guards">this</a> are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist. </p> <p> Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there. </p> <p> How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style. </p> <p> Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area &ndash; probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums). </p> <p> Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things. </p>

which is what was shipped with it, and I think there might be a newer firmware out there which fixes some of the issues. I just got my Nokia 770 and I must say it's a nice device. Some initial experiences are:

• No pen calibration on bootup. Nice and cool. All other handheld devices have that, but the 770 seems to work just fine without it. Kudos.
• It's not a PDA. No PIM thingy built-in, the device asks for its own name, but not the user's.
• It doesn't show that it's running Linux. I find this quite cool, as it shows that you can produce devices which run Linux and feel like they're targetted at non-geeks.
• The device feels sluggish and lacks feedback when doing stuff, whether it be closing an application, launching an application and so on. This makes it sometimes hard to know whether it has caught your action or not. Also, sometimes menus pop up for half a second, then goes away.
• The 770 has support for multiple applications at the same time. Works well enough, I guess.
• I want something to protect the screen, or I know it will develop scratches from the pencil over time. I guess I can get something from a shop in not too long.
• When putting the lid on, it's quite neat that it turns off the screen the moment the lid closes. I'll have to investigate how they do this. Hub thought it might be a magnet. Getting an X-Ray of the whole device would probably show.
• The feed reader needs work, I want to mark stuff as "read" explicitly and not just have a rolling list of news where I need to know where I was.
• Reduced-size MMC cards appear to be cheap. Around 30 for a 512MB card which should be enough for a fair amount of music. I need to find an Ogg Vorbis player as well.

All in all, mostly happy, but there are still a bunch of rough edges which should be smoothed away in a few more revisions. I'll see if I can get a development environment up and running on it, as well as getting a newer firmware onto the device (if I can find it; I wonder if the developer rootfs on maemo.org is newer or not..), but all that's for tomorrow.

Like Andres Salomon I too have had my business cards with a GPG fingerprint be obsoleted. For me, however, it happened because I gave the printers the wrong fingerprint: the one for a special purpose key (comp.os.linux.announce moderation, I think), not my usual key. That was a nice "oops" moment. These days, if I need fingerprints on paper, I print out copies of a little design I did with glabels, not liking the output from various existing key-to-fingerprint scripts I tried. I only print as many as I need, though, which is easy now that I have a working printer again.

When I took over organising the CLUG meetings, I managed to replace most of myself with a small shell script (I even have the t-shirt). Now that I'm leaving Canberra, Steve Walsh has kindly taken over the running of the script. So I've done a bit more work on the script, and added a public front end to it, and made an RSS feed (my very first). So until yesterday, to work out the fourth Thursday of the month, I'd been calling a Perl script that used Date::Manip, when I decided to investigate doing it with PHP natively. Tony gave me some initial code, but I ended up with this:
function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

    $first_dom = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
    
    if ($first_dom <= $dow)
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1 + ($dow - $first_dom), $year));
     else
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 8 - ($first_dom - $dow), $year));
    

    $instance_we_want = $first_instance + (($instance-1) * 7);

    $date = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $instance_we_want, $year));

    return $date;



It's been a week since I arrived in Montr al, and had not had a free minute to blog about it. There's tons of things to write about, the activity and fun has been mostly non-stop. The travelling wasn't perfect, as always I could not sleep a single minute. Instead, I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I had wanted to see for some time and was nice, and Batman Begins, which was positively surprising, being a Batman movie. When I arrived at Montr al's airport, the fun started soon enough. Coming from Spain and having this scary looking face and beard didn't help much to survive customs. When I got in the line and handed my arrival card, I was sent to the immigration office straight away. I was asked what I was coming to Canada for. "To a computer conference", I said. Well, having no "invitation" or anything for this conference made me a quick suspect. After being freed, I walked on my way out, and on the next control, I had my bag searched. And again... "Do you have any document about this conference?". And then, to the real baggage inspection room. As the guy started opening my bag, I suddenly remembered about the fuet I was carrying for Vicente, while I had said, confidently, "No I don't carry any food" in my card. Luckily he saw I was carrying a DragonLance book, liked it and let me go. The next thing was, while waiting for the bus that should take me to Downtown Montr al, my first conversation with a non-airport staff Canadian. So this old woman in her seventies comes along... and the first thing she says... "I hate those fucking moslems". I try to not look too much like "WTF!?" and without replying, listen to this totally moronic and racist monologue about how moslems in Canada come to the country to not work and live of the country's welfare. "Why should they work? They stay at home, and watch TV and fuck. That's all they do. The more kids they have, the more money they get. I don't believe in welfare". So I got on the bus quite shocked. After a bus trip and lots of walking due to forgetting I had to get on another one, I got into the hotel, and started meeting all the people. My first dinner was with Gustavo, Salgado and Carlos, and I felt I wanted to die, I couldn't keep my eyes open. The conference started next morning for me, and has been the usual dynamic as always, only that now it's the first time that I really find myself somewhat useful during the sessions. :) Meeting mdz and kiko happened that morning. That was when all kinds of stuff started to happen. Why do I have to get such bad influences?

Kiko and I managed to not fall over while taking all of these pics in Mont Royal

My CS61A professor is usually very retro, and uses a VT220 connected to our lecture hall projector to page through Scheme code as he gives his lectures. But today he threw us a curve: he brought in his Thinkpad X-series laptop running Fedora Core. It turns out that some ridiculous networking library for our implementation of Scheme somehow requires an X display to function correctly, and VT220s hardly have support for anything close to X! So, what worked initially? Nothing. I came down to offer my services.

• It took some fiddling with /proc/acpi/ibm/video to get VGA output (to the projector) going. A little too much fiddling. We tried using the Fn-F7 hotkey combination initially, but thanks to this bug prevented it from working at all.
• Then, it turns out that eth0 was misconfigured. And it was not trivially misconfigured; dhclient eth0 hanged (or Fedora’s ifup is completely busted, which is more likely.
• So I got an IP from our beautiful AirBears wireless network and tried to authenticate to the RADIUS server using Firefox, which for some reason silently failed. So I used links (kill it with fire!) to authenticate.
• This was a valiant effort against Linux’s best attempts to thwart the lecture from being given, but in the end, we came upon a Scheme interpreter speedbump (ran it with the wrong arguments once or twice) and the professor gave up in favor of just taking us through the source code.

Well, there’s still a ways to go..

One of the big Debian stories of the week is that a company called Nexenta Systems has made a version of Ubuntu that’s based on OpenSolaris rather than the Linux kernel. Personally, I find the emergence of a Debian-based OpenSolaris distribution exciting, as it promises to vastly improve Solaris installation, packaging, and overall usability. Solaris is great technology with an incredible pedigree and some very compelling features (DTrace, in particular, sounds like a godsend, as I’m sure anyone who’s debugged kernel code via endless iterations of inserting printfs at strategic places would agree), not to mention that it’s now open source. However, when a Linux developer eager to have a look at all this neat new open source stuff boots up Solaris for the first time, it’s a bit of a throwback to an earlier time (not to mention the fact that apt-get is a hard habit to break..). And, so, I’m more than a little embarrassed at how certain members of the Debian community reacted to Nexenta’s work. The vitriol surprised even me, knowing as much as I know about how, uh, strongly the Debian community feels about certain issues. The issue in this case: Nexenta links GPL-licensed programs (including dpkg) with the Sun C library, which is licensed under the GPL-incompatible but still free software/open source CDDL license. Granted, Nexenta didn’t go about introducing themselves to the Debian community in the best way, and there may (may) be issues around whether or not what they are doing is permitted by the GPL, but couldn’t we at least engage them in a more constructive manner? In terms of the actual issue being discussed here, am I the only one who doesn’t get it? It seems to me the argument that linking a GPL application to a CDDL library and asserting that that somehow makes the library a derivative work of the application is, to say the least, a stretch—not to mention the fact that we’re talking about libc here, a library with a highly standard interface that’s been implemented any number of times and, heck, that’s even older than the GPL itself. It’s interpretations like this, folks, that give the GPL its reputation of being viral, and I know how much Richard Stallman hates that word. It’s one thing to ensure that actual derivative works of GPL code are themselves licensed under similar terms; it’s quite another to try to apply the same argument to code that clearly isn’t a derivative work in an attempt to spread free software at any cost. I’ve been a big GPL advocate for a long time, but that just strikes me as wrong.

I try hard not to hate Redhat, I really do. I don't visibly grimace when someone says "I'm running $REDHAT_DERIVED_DISTRO", and my first solution to "I can't get this to work on $REDHAT_DERIVED_DISTRO" is almost never "just install Debian,Ubuntu ". But Redhat makes it so hard to not beat them with a stick. For instance, I'm working on building a SOE for a client, and so I've got a bunch of scripts (calling random poorly documented and hard-to-find utilities) to help me do that. Naturally, I'm pruning the package list, which requires me to rebuild the list of packages which are on the CD. No problems, I can handle that. Oh, but the tool that builds the package list can't deal with the correct "ordering" of packages in the list. Why is ordering important? Because, and this will make you laugh, the installer can't actually deal with dependencies. Yes, that's right, anaconda will install your packages in any old order you specify, regardless of what is actually needed. Brain-damaged, certainly, but I've dealt with Windows, so this is ultimately a minor setback. The tools for building the packages lists are in a certain package, which I dutifully install. They then proceed to fail horribly. Why, do you ask? Because the script requires python modules from another package. Gee, wouldn't be handy if there was a mechanism by which a package could specify that it needed another package to operate? OH WAIT, THERE IS -- IT'S CALLED DEPENDENCIES, FOR $DEITY'S SAKE! YOU WROTE THE GODDAMN RPM SPECIFICATION, REDHAT, WHY CAN'T YOU ACTUALLY USE SOME OF IT'S FRIGGING FEATURES! But wait, there's more! Installing the package which contains the module doesn't actually make the module accessable to anything else on the system, because the module is installed in some god-forsaken, out of the way location, where Python fears to tread. You need to specify PYTHONPATH to make it work. Apparently someone was sure that specifying absolute paths in scripts (instead of letting the system search it's environment) was a bad idea, but didn't have problem with not putting modules in standard, well-known locations. Then, of course, the (other) tool segfaults. Why? Because it's reading an empty file. Wow. An empty file causes this thing to fall over in a screaming heap. Not "Sorry bub, but your file's empty" just an unceremonious segfault. Wow. Thanks. And that's even before we get around to actually doing an install...