This weekend I was in Berlin, at the Berlinux 2005. I have to work until about 17:00 on Fridays so I couldn't attend the first day, instead I arrived at Berlin at about 19:00, just in time for the Social Event :) The Social Event was really nice, well organized with little group tables to sit and chat and very delicious food. Apparently there was also a tuxracer tournament planned but that couldn't be done due to some technical problems (didn't follow that too closely). The evening was very nice anyway I ate a lot and talked to the other attending Debian people. We didn't stay up too long since the exhibition was scheduled to start at 09:00 the next day.
When we got to the Technical University on the next morning the first thing I noticed was a huge transparent hanging over the entrance. Upon closer inspection however it advertised some events for this semester's new students, not Berlinux. Shame. We quickly checked with the Information desk, where we were told to check back with them before giving our talks, since there had been some last minute room changes. Given the quite chaotic organisation in the run-up of this event I must say I wasn't too surprised. (There had been quite a mess regarding the preparation of the talks, many speakers only read on the site when - and that - they were giving their talks, deadlines suddenly popped up and then started wandering ... All in all preparations had been a bit confusing.) Also the planned Berlinux CD had somehow not worked out, so there were no CDs available.
With such good news we went on to the Debian booth to set up the usual stuff. The biggest attraction certainly was Frank Ronneburg's Debian-controlled model railway. Kids had to be forcibly moved on and grown-up men were seen regressing to small children again ;) Unfortunately attendance was rather low anyhow and a lot of the people walking by were regular students on their way to some other events.
At least the talks managed to attract a higher number of people. I can't estimate for shit so I have got no idea how many people attended my talk on user friendly system administration. But I was rather content with the number and so were the other speakers I talked to (The only one who was a bit unfortunate was Alexander 'Tolimar' Schmehl who had to compete with Klaus Knopper giving a talk at the same time.) After the talks were over we killed some more time at the booth, playing with Frank's model railway and Wolfgang Borgert's Nokia 770 (It has Mahjong! Yay!). It should be noted that when we were finally taking down the booth a very brave person walked around with a laptop collecting criticism and suggestions for improvement. There were so many of them that I had to help him out with my Thinkpad's power supply :)

I am not sure how much the Debian project benefited from the whole event since the attendance was so low and we got very few questions. Personally though I quite enjoyed the event. The talk went well (I got a few laughs and good questions afterwards), I met a bunch of new and very interesting people and had a really great Pizza. I hope Berlinux Organisation picks up a few of the suggestions they received. For the moment, my conclusion is that I'd probably give a talk there again, I am however not so sure if I'd go there only to man the Debian booth.

PS: Sadly they didn't have name tags either, so I don't even have something to put on my "trophy board" :(
Hint: Most speaker love souvenirs, give them a piece of paper with their name and your logo on it and they are happy people :)

Steve wrote in his blog:

I’ve seen this argument before “Buy distribution of GNU/Linux and support free software programmers”. The only problem I have with it is that it is incorrect. Buying GNU/Linux distributions helps the vendors who created it, certainly, and may indirectly help pay for some free software in the sense that the vendors might ship free software they wrote (e.g. SuSEs Yast 2]). However plonking down real cash-money for a boxed set of SuSE gives no money to the people who created MySQL, no money to the people who created Firefox, no money to the people who created Emacs, Vim, Bash, and Catan/Pioneers, etc.

I think, in general you’re right. And if you — as you did :-) — take SuSE, it usually works. And you’re probably also right for most people who just know the big, commercial distributions. But what if you take a free distribution like Debian or some of the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD? How much truth is in there then? Especially in the case of OpenBSD your view doesn’t seem work, because if you buy an (official) OpenBSD box, you pay the developers — or at least a few of them — of the operating system core and some mission-critical applications. But what if you take community based distributions like Debian? You distinguished between distributor and authors of free software. In my eyes especially Debian, but also some other community based distributions are both at same time. So IMHO you can put them on the author side of your view. And since many Debian vendors (at least those I saw) donate a part of the profit they make from selling Debian CDs or DVD to the Debian Project. Or they offer additional shopping cart items “Donation to Debian” if you order a Debian item. (Example: LinISO.de) Another question in this context would be, how the FOSS world would look like if there are or were no commercial distributors. It probably would be much smaller because some marketing and some lobbying would be missing. Although that’s the only implication which comes to my mind, I’m sure, there are many more possible views on this subject. But as I said, IMHO you’re right for most cases.

For USA we might be that: host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] said: 550 Email from your Email Service Provider is currently blocked by Verizon Online's anti-spam system. The email "sender" or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block. (in reply to MAIL FROM command) If you happen to visit the provided URL, you have to "request permission" to send/receive e-mail to/from verizon users. Well, fsck you if you believe I am going to give you the pleasure of having all my personal information just to get a rejection. If you happen to be a Verizon user (like John Potelle, who sent me an abcde wishlist bug for a feature which is already implemented and to whom I was replying to inform him about that fact), consider to move to a less moronic ISP.

Contrary to expectations, last week’s AJ Market project turned out to be debootstrap, not dak. Just goes to show a single person can make a difference in today’s world: debootstrap popped into the lead from nearly the bottom thanks to a single contribution. (I wonder if it makes more sense to make contributions anonymous or not?) For those playing along at home, debootstrap is a tool to build a Debian system from (almost) nothing – it just requires some basic POSIX shell functionality, things like sed, grep, sort, ar, tar, gzip, and wget. So it’s useful when you’re initially installing Debian (or derived distros like Ubuntu), or if you’re creating a chroot environment for dedicated build environments. Anyway, the debootstrap changes were pretty much bugfixes only, so there’s no fancy new features (okay, there’s one: a --make-tarball option) but a few of the fixes are worth a quick look. Read the rest ...

Looks like there is a PlanetPlanet fork on steroids, it's called Planet Plus and added saving the entries in an SQL database and a web frontend so you can search inside the entries. Looks great. p.s. sorry about the planet post with images and all, I'm still unable to find the readmore plugin to pyblosxom. If anyone has a copy of it or something similar I'd be happy if you dropped me a note.

As many of my friends know, I installed Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 aka Woody on my IBM ThinkPad 760ED (Pentium 1, 133 MHz, 48 MB RAM, 1 GB HD) named bijou at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage this spring. Although many helped me trying to configure X, I didn’t get rid of the LCD “forgetting” more or less pixels each row so that the picture got blurred towards the right rim. During Berlinux, a not so convinced Linux user (he told me he likes the feeling of Windows, but got stick with Debian because his modem just didn’t work with Windows) told me that he had similar problems with a graphics card with similar chips as the ones in my ThinkPad. Since I never was sure, if my problem is a hardware defect, a driver or a configuration problem (but I tended to hardware defect or a not supported chipset, since I read about several Trident 96xx and 98xx chipsets to be unsupported under Linux), his comment was a ray of hope to me. He told me he found the solution on Werner Heuser’s TuxMobil website, whom I showed my X problem also Berlinux but who hadn’t an idea what it could be. He also told me, that XFree86 4.x doesn’t support this graphics chip, but XFree86 3.3.x does. But somehow I had forgotten that TuxMobil not only has informations about Linux on laptops but also a big bunch of links to pages which deal with specific models. I can’t remember, if I looked there already back in March, but it felt like I didn’t although my own small text about bijou is linked there, too. I looked through the other 760/770 ED/XD pages and on the second or third I found someone who seems to have had the same problem and also with a 760ED. He wrote, someone else has gone down that path already so he linked directly to the XF86Config he found elsewhere. That sounded like an easy earned money so I followed the link — 404. Shit! For luck a few lines down he linked also his own XF86Config, so I grabbed it, uncommented everything unnecessary and put in the essential parts of his XF86Config of which the most important parts probably were the modelines. The one for 1024×768 was commented as the only one working, those for 800×600 and 640×480 were commented out. Then I downgraded X to XFree86 3.3.6. It didn’t work as expected. The display stayed black which was less than I had accomplished before. Shit! But giving up is not my style. So first I reduced the color depth. No change. Then I started with reducing the resolution. With 800×600 and 16 bit color depth, it finally worked. No hardware defect, no unsupported graphics chip. Just not the right modelines. That was all. YESSS! I guess the guy whose XF86Config I used didn’t have a 760ED but a similar model with a LCD with higher resolution. because my 760ED definitely has no 1024×768 resolution because 800×600 fills the screen completely. Still leaves the problem with the svgalib: The system just freezes with a black screen if I start a svgalib application like e.g. zgv. First I found out, that svgalib indeed has a configuration file which (at least under Woody) can be found at /etc/vga/libvga.conf. Copied the modelines from the now working XF86Config, configured the mouse and tried again. Freeze. Hmmm, in the config there is mentioned that if svgalib doesn’t correctly recognise the graphics card’s chipset, you can hardcode it with a configuration directive, e.g. “chipset VGA” for otherwise unsupported chipsets. And that worked, although only with 640×480 yet. So I tried the only setting for Trident cards found in the list of supported chipsets. And what happend? Right, the system froze again. So svgalib probably recognised the card as Trident and used the only available Trident driver which was obviously the wrong one. So here are my XF86Config and my libvga.config working on the IBM ThinkPad 760ED. But nevertheless — this 0€ laptop has just proven that it can be even more useful than it already was with text mode only. I also already played Frozen Bubble up to level 25 or so on the train back from Berlin. Old hardware rules. But I now also have another problem (again): Since X works now, I can run Galeon 1.2 on the ThinkPad, but GTK 2 respective GNOME 2 are much slower than in the 1.x versions and also need much more ressources, which the laptop just does not have. And since I — as most of the people who read my blog or Planet Debian should know ;-) — don’t like Galeon 1.3, I probably won’t dist-upgrade my ThinkPad to Sarge that fast although I already thought about it. XFree86 3.x isn’t in Sarge either IIRC but this should be no problem since the Woody packages are said to work under Sarge, too. Well, still yet another reason for forwardports.org… ;-) Or maybe I can get Kazehakase running on Woody so I can drop at least the whole ballast GNOME 2 comes with. We’ll see…

I was at Berlinux 2005 this weekend and though the very chaotic — because understaffed — organisation it was interesting and also funny. Thursday I arrived around 20:15 in Berlin, met Klaus Knopper and others at the train station, headed to Sven Guckes’ appartment for dropping all my luggage, then going back to meet with Klaus and the others for a theremin concert with Dorit Chrysler. No wonder that it sounded sometimes like one of my favourite musicians, Jean Michel Jarre, since — according to the Wikipedia theremin article — he also plays this instrument. On Friday I held my talk about WML in front of a — for that topic — surprisingly high number of auditors (around 30, maybe 35). In comparision to my WML talk at OscomTag 2005 all people who asked questions had understood about what the talk was, so the questions were most time interesting and justified. As usual I held the talk using Lynx with LSS support (picture by Sven Guckes) on my nine year old Pentium 1 ThinkPad bijou running Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 aka Woody. Before and after the talk I helped out at Werner Heuser’s xtops booth (another picture by Sven) and the booth of the Debian Project (yet another picture by Sven :-) directly beside Frank Ronneburg’s Debian powered model railway. (picture by you-know-who ;-) In the evening I was at the social event, hanging around with alphascorpii, Tolimar and Joey and being surprised that Joey studies biology — as I did as minor to computer science. On Saturday I was on alphascorpii’s talk about why being a BOFH is not funny, hung around at the same booths as the day before, fixed the X configuration on my laptop after hints on a unknown Debian booth visitor. Before the exhibition closed I heard a very interesting talk about web accessibility held by Sebastian who is blind himself. Although or maybe because I’m interested in that subject, the talk opened my eyes regarding two things: First Captchas are evil and Blind HTML tables aren’t as evil as all the priests of web accessibility are always preaching . They are easier than frames for blinds and seem to have only little disadvantages against a CSS based layout for blinds nowadays if used the right way. Oh, and btw. — nested tables are still evil. :-) Saturday evening I had dinner together with Stefan Gerdelbracht, Frank Hofmann, Klaus Knopper and Manfred Krejcik. Later Thomas Winde joined us. It was very interesting evening, especially talking with Klaus and Manfred. On Sunday, after having brunch with Stefan and Manfred, we met with Sven (who was our host at Berlin, thanks again!) and shortly after that, Stefan left for visiting some other friends in Berlin. Sven, Manfred and I visited C-Base where Sven stumbled over a sound editing seminar while Manfred was preparing his zipFM show for Monday which mainly consisted of an interview with Klaus. After that we headed to a small but fine birthday party of a friend of Sven and were back home around 2:30. My train left Monday morning at 8:56 and I was at home around 14:30. And on Friday I’ll go to Dresden for the Linux-Info-Tag by train just to go back to Berlin afterwards, where I meet my parents for a two week baltic sea holiday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania near Rügen. But due to the Systems fair at Munich and autumn holidays I have to stay at work this week. And yes, I wrote this and the other postings posted today offline, so they’re dated quite close together. :-)

Christopher Aillon mentioned that people like NetworkManager a lot. While I agree that NetworkManager is something nice, and especially people really expect "Desktop Linux" to have it, there are a lot of other issues. I've tried netapplet, which is I think a predecessor. It looks just as fancy, but it doesn't really solve my needs. And in fact, I don't think NetworkManager can do that either (yet?). As usual, it's a bit more than just picking the right essid and maybe displaying the network strength (which doesn't work in netapplet for me, the hostap driver lists a quality of 0 for all networks, but the signal level value is fine), but also a lot about setting up VPN, encryption, handling network switches gracefully - and last but not least: saving power by disabling wireless when not needed. Also it didn't give me a proper list of networks. It just picked a random one (interestingly not the strongest, actually one I don't see right now...) and never showed the other 5 access points. That doesn't mean of course that NetworkDaemon wouldn't, it's just not in Debian yet, so I didn't try it yet. Guessnet is a nice tool for detecting your network setup. Using mii-tool it can detect whether my network cable is plugged in, and by doing "ifup eth0 ifup wlan0" I can bring up whatever is available. Well, almost except that guessnet also fails to detect my wireless networks (it probably would just need to wait a second for the scan to run). I agree that this is mostly an issue of the wireless driver. But just about every driver has it's own issues, unfortunately. For example, the vanilla orinoco driver doesn't do scanning. The hostap driver doesn't properly power down (right now I'm using some iwpriv hack to disable radio tx to save some power), the ralink driver has been locking up the laptop every now and then... some drivers don't do WEP, others don't to WPA. The wireless keyboard shortcut obviously didn't work either... So maybe, we right now (once more) need more people working on the drivers. Oh, and there are more issues with drivers - for example Scorched3D still doesn't work properly on radeon. The OSS nvidia drivers still don't have 3D. Some bluetooth headsets don't work yet... and the closed source drivers are even worse (a pain to install since they aren't properly integrated in the distributions etc.). So Linux still needs more support by hardware vendors (especially WRT to specs!) as well as more people actually doing the dirty job in C and not just having fun with PHP, Python and Mono.

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

It's good to see that Bruce Schneier has got a sense of self-irony :-) Update: I really dislike pymarkdown's syntax for URLs :-)

Planets are a fairly common method to aggregate blogs. They are especially pervasive in the FOSS world, with planets for Debian, Gnome, KDE, and many others. I find planets as a useful resource for a community to give a single place for the communication and to check for updates. The usual method of communication in blogs is a reply in a post, the planet makes the replies come in the same page for the reader with little context loss. For this reason I'm also fond of setting up planets myself for those communities that lack them, and so I setup planets for FOSS-IL for Israeli blogs about FOSS issues (mostly in Hebrew), Planet (former) Advogato for former Advogato bloggers and the latest one is Planet MicroISV for MicroISVs. I was asked to provide some (tutorial help something) on setting up a planet, and this post is the answer to that request.

---

The PlanetPlanet program is a very common RSS feed aggregator, it works with most feeds and is fairly tolerant to non-standard-conforming feeds. It is also relatively low maintenance, which is why I chose it for my aggregators. Prerequisites The first thing you'll need is to make sure you have Python 2.2 or better installed. If you're on a sane OS, you can just do apt-get install python2.3 otherwise you are left to fend for yourself. For the Windows folks there is ActivePython. Another would be prerequisite is GNU Arch or GNU Arch or Bazaar, two implementations for the Distributed Revision Control algorithm which was pioneered in GNU Arch. Bazaar would be more user friendly, but both IMNSHO are horrendous user-interface wise. Which is why I provide a snapshot of the latest revision for your benefit. Install Installation would be fairly simple, just unpack the tar.gz and it's installed, nothing else needs to be done, except configuring it. The snapshot I provided is just a raw dump of the arch repository, it is useful as is since you can update the installation as needed by just updating and merging with Arch/Bazaar. This will not be covered here. Too much of a trouble for now, and the PlanetPlanet development is at the pace of a snail carrying an elephant, don't expect updates in the near future. Configure I assume you have in mind the list of blogs you want to put on the planet. It need not be comprehensive, a few blogs to start would be good enough. It's trivial to add more as you go. In the planet directory you should copy the examples directory to a new one, say myplanet, copy the output directory to myplanet-output and edit the myplanet/config.ini file. At the minimum you should change the following variables:

• name – The name of your planet
• link – The URL where you planet will live, used inside the feeds the planet exports
• owner_name and owner_email – obvious isn't it?
• output_dir – that should be myplanet-output according to the instructions above
• template_files – change and replace examples with myplanet

The next stage would be to replace the existing blog listed in the config.ini file with your own list. The example is there and is trivial to follow, the entry for a blog looks like:

[http://baruch.ev-en.org/blog/index.rss2]
name = Baruch Even

Where the feed URL is in square brackets and the name of the blog is the name. There are various games that are possible with the templates but we'll ignore them for now and let you learn them from the examples provided by the authors. The next stage is just to run the planet on the new files, we will use the defaults for the rest.

python planet.py myplanet/config.ini

The planet will work for a while, churn out various uninteresting messages and generate the files we asked it for in the myplanet-output. You can now inspect the files in the output directory, load them in a browser and enjoy. Tweaks So you haven't left yet? Want some more info? One obvious question is now that we have the files, how do we serve them to the world so everyone can enjoy our creation? First, you should ask yourself if the world really cares... you do, ah?! OK. If the world cares enough it will find a way to show you how to do it. Since it depends on your OS, web server and various configurations, I can't help you on this. This is left as an exercise to the reader. The configuration in config.ini should be fairly obvious and is well commented. The look of the site depends on two factors, the HTML that is generated, which is a clean HTML version 4.01 and has all formatting controlled by the CSS file which was kindly provided in the outputs directory. The templating code is very simple, it has two operations, TMPL_LOOP and TMPL_VAR. TMPL_LOOP will loop over a variable, usually the Channels variable. And the TMPL_VAR operator will emit that variable, there are the global vars and the loop vars. The best way to figure it out is to use the existing templates as a building block, they are fairly easy to understand. Enjoy your new Planet!

Mike Sperber finally reviewed my patches; they unfortunatly were not deemed appropriate for the Scheme48 distribution, see this thread. Hopefully these issues can be sorted out in the not-to-far future. If you also need the one or other features from my hacks so far, and are adventurous, you can conact me on #scheme on freenode for help with getting and building my fork. Writing portable Scheme programs with scmxlate and spells For the conjure project, we are using scmxlate to make it portable across multiple Schemes. For that purpose, I slightly extended scmxlate and built a kind of meta-module system on top of it. Here is how that looks like: You write a description of the modules your application or library is made of; this is done in a sightly extended subset of the Scheme48 configuration language. For example (from this page, see there for more details):

 (define-structure conjure.foo.bar (export qux baz
					  ((froboz fribnitz)
					  :syntax))
  (open scheme srfi-1 srfi-13 conjure.util.files)
  (dialect (guile (open ice-9.syncase))
           (scheme48 (open extended-ports)))
  (files (foo basic-bar)
         (foo bar)))

This defines the module conjure.foo.bar, which exports the identifiers qux and baz, as well as the macros froboz and fribnitz. The open clause means: this module is written in R5RS Scheme (scheme), plus additionally using srfi-1, srfi-13 and the conjure.util.files module. The dialect clause can be used for specifiying additional modules needed for the dialect-specific code for the module. Finally, the files clause tells us that this module consists of the files foo/basic-bar.scm and foo/bar.scm. This file then gets processed by scmxlate, generating a file with the right module definitions for the selected target dialect, e.g.:

(define-module (conjure foo bar)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-1)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-13)
  #:use-module (conjure util files)
  #:use-module (ice-9 syncase)
	
   #:export (qux baz)
  #:export-syntax (froboz fribnitz))
	
 ;; code for foo/basic-bar.scm and foo/bar.scm follows

will be generated for Guile. We recently split scmxlate and the meta-module systeem out of conjure, see the scmxlate category in the conjure archive, so it is available for other projects. Now the split-out of the general purpose modules into a separate project — SPELLS, (S)pell’s a (P)ortability (E)nvironment (L)ibrary for (L)ots of (S)chemes — is in preparation. This library will further aid writing portable code, by providing a consistent interface to functionality that has different APIs in different Schemes. These modules are already there:

• spells.util.pregexp: Dorai Sitaram’s portable regular expressions
• spells.util.named-args: Conviniently create procedures with named arguments
• spells.util.table: Hash tables
• spells.util.condition: SRFI 34 and SRFI 35
• spells.system.file: Lots of file-related proedures, e.g. copy-file, directory?, …

All of those are implemented for all of mzscheme, Guile, Scheme48 and Gauche, using native functionality where available. Other modules will surely follow, a project has been requested at Gna! to facilitate contribution. The spells library will also be used by my upcoming port of G-Wrap to Scheme48.

The DCC Alliance (not to be confused with the DCC Alliance, which is entirely unaffiliated with the former. But it's a recursive acronym, so there's NO TRADEMARK ISSUE) aim to produce a distribution which is entirely binary compatible with Sarge. A laudable aim. Sadly, there's a bit of a problem.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released this week. In common with previous versions, it's a horrid mixture of C++, Java and assembler. It's the Java that's the problem, of course. To compile it, you either need Sun's ridiculously non-free Java, or you can use gcj. That's gcj 4.0, of course. Which can be installed in parallel with gcc 3.3, so that's not a problem. Except. gcj 4.0 wants the libgcc from gcc 4.0 (unsurprisingly), which has the same SONAME as the libgcc from 3.3 (correct behaviour - code built against libgcc from 3.3 will run fine with libgcc from 4.0). However, libgcc from 4.0 adds some extra symbols - as a result, code built against libgcc from 4.0 will not necessarily run on systems with libgcc from 3.3.

Or, in other words, shipping libgcc from gcc 4.0 will result in a system that will build binaries that can't be installed on machines running plain Sarge.

So, there's a bit of a dilemma. Either

• Fail to support OpenOffice.org 2.0


• Only support OpenOffice.org 2.0 if non-free Java is used


• Break binary compatibility with Sarge


• Do something really quite nasty

The DCC Alliance want to build a distribution base that's binary compatible with Sarge. It's an entirely laudable aim, and (regardless of any impression I may have given in the past) I hope it's successful. But. That level of binary compatibility inherently compromises your ability to use new software. To begin with, you can work around that - backport code to older versions of libraries, include local copies, do static linking, that sort of thing. Over time, it gets harder.

Optimistically, Etch will be released in December 2006. If we assume that DCC releases occur at roughly the same rate as Debian ones, we're looking at 18 months until we get a DCC based on etch.

In 18 months time, is it really going to be possible to build a useful modern desktop system that's binary compatible with Sarge without it being an utterly unmaintainable pile of ugly hacks? Even after 5, we're seeing pain.

There's a reason that derivative distributions tend to diverge from the original project. It's because it's really quite remarkably difficult to maintain sanity, technical correctness and not change any of the underlying structure. I'd like to see DCCA succeed in doing so, and I do admire them for not just giving up in exasperation already.

So yesterday Google announced their earnings, beating estimates, sending their stock even higher. Every time someone says GOOG can’t possibly go any higher, they’re promptly proved wrong. So I’m not going to say that GOOG can’t go any higher. I am going to say though that it’s overpriced given the cards that are showing. Peter Lynch compared the stock market to a game of seven card stud, where every new piece of information released about a company is like a new card showing. The more you find out about a company, the more accurately you can gauge the value of a company, and thus whether it’s worth buying. The problem with Google (and similarly with Apple, but to a lesser extent) is that they try very, very hard not to release any information. What’s worse is that Google has built up a mystique about itself, so that any little piece of information (like an otherwise irrelevant partnership with Sun) gets turned into wild rumor and speculation (like that Google will make a web-based Office suite). If you believe the speculation will come true, that means that it will effectively break one of Microsoft’s monopolies, thereby entitling Google to its current market cap. But that means that Google has to deliver on something they’ve never even hinted that they’re working on. If Google’s going to keep its stock from going through a “correction”, it better start showing some more of its cards, and they better be good. Otherwise, they may end up like another company that valued secrecy and was going to take down a different monopoly.

Ah. The reason it won't load my icon is because the crippled package manager is forced to install it under /var/lib/installer/usr/share/icons, and the operating environment doesn't actually look there.

Thanks, Nokia.

A surprisingly high proportion of ex-UEA people stay in the area after finishing at UEA. Over 40% want to, according to the local chamber of commerce. Eventually, that number falls: with John and Brett leaving, I think I can now count on one hand those from my Norwich years (1994-1998) who I know are still here. Most left some time ago. Why? Small place syndrome? Underpaid work? Both? Possibly. It feels like only in Norfolk could the train station start to expand its car park to cope with demand and the same week most train services to it are cancelled because a Cambridgeshire farmer drove onto the single line stretch, was killed and it takes at least a day for access and safety checks in this sparsely-populated area. From the BBC's picture, the unit involved was one of the commemorative King's Lynn "picture trains". You seldom hear what happens to the damaged trains and injured drivers. I guess the railways and the media doesn't like to worry passengers. Even the Potter's Bar investigation ending only got brief mentions that I saw. Also at the train station, local police put out a picture of people they would "like to interview" about the spate of recent bike thefts. Possibly as a result, they've charged one man. Someone I know had a bike nicked, which meant a long walk to/from work until it was replaced. Very annoying. The sort of petty bike vandalism/theft which annoyed savs is also on the increase here again. I'd've expected nicked bikes to sell better in summer, but maybe the local crims are thick or there are more easy-to-nick bikes in September. At least it's not Fakenham, (which is one of the most boring places on earth, you may remember - original source ) where the headline story is that the kerbs are too high. I'm sorry someone was hurt, but kerbs here seem tiny compared to the ones in Northamptonshire. Probably they've all been lowered for safety there too now. As a result of adding Dave's blog to Planet ALUG, I noticed BritBlog for the first time. I spent a while browsing the other Norfolk-based blogs on it one evening. Unsurprisingly, I knew about most of the ones I found interesting already, apart from Ztroller who links to me... erm, why? Does he read this? Most listings are from blogspot and I still won't add Atom support to my blogging software - I want to read, not edit, so Atom is mostly extra cache filler. I only added Really Simple Syndication as well as RDF Site Summary because it was fairly cheap to do and I didn't know about the obvious way to get RSS 1 from Wordpress. Finally, in local(ish) concerns, Northern Ireland, from Noodles' emptiness:

"while I'm ranting, why is the adjective for someone from the UK "British"? Britain doesn't cover all of the UK. I wasn't born in Britain yet I'm British. Can't I be UKish or something?"

I'd hate to be called UKish. I don't have any particular affection for this Kingdom's political boundaries. If the UK ended tomorrow, would anyone besides its rulers mourn? I'll not thank you if you call me British. I'm English, a midlander and Towcestrian. British nationality is a side-effect. (And why is it so hard to get .gb domains anyway?) It's odd that there's such argument over England's anthem. So there is imagery or irony involved in Jerusalem, depending how you want to view it: who cares? It's rousing (unlike the UK dirge) and mentions England past. Yikes, I've just discovered I'm agreeing with Billy Bragg of all people. As for the UK, why don't we work together with others when we agree and work independently when we don't agree? Unfortunately, few politicians advocate English self-rule, apart from racist bigots and English imperialists. The really depressing thing is that those sort of people would probably easily get a majority in any English legislature, if backed by the mess media. Maybe Britain is diverse enough that it balances the extreme English... diverse we are or de verse it gets... (ouch)