I’ve spent more or less the last few days of spare time trying to figure out why gcc-4.3 built kernels were so unhappy on parisc. Basically the symptom was that any IPv4 networking operation would only complete once and a while, for example, ping would drop 90% of packets. This turned out to be a really troublesome bug to track down, and the fix was only 7 characters long. gcc-4.2 wasn’t problematic, so that provided an interesting base. A bit of thinking ruled out some obvious parts of the kernel that would likely not be an issue. For instance, ARP appeared to be fine, so it likely wasn’t an issue at the network driver level. So rebuilding net/built-in.o on gcc-4.2, copying it to the gcc-4.3 tree, and rebuilding the tree using it resulted in a working kernel. Ok, excellent, we know it’s likely an issue in net/, what else can we rule out, and what do we know? ICMP is affected, so it’s probably not a TCP problem… Rebuilding the kernel with IPv6 enabled, and testing ping6? Ok, works. So it looks like an IPv4 issue. Test that assertion… yup, net/ipv4/built-in.o compiled with gcc-4.2 works. Ok, peachy. What now? Bisecting the contents of the directory results in ip_output.c being the problematic file… Not all that helpfully, the differences between the code generated by 4.2 and 4.3 are extensive. Well, ok, let’s try turning off a variety of the added compiler options… nope, no luck, but the file works when compiled at -O0. Next, I bisected the file until I found the problematic function (unfortunately for me starting in the middle, it ended up being the first function in the file.) Which was in a chain of inline functions, eventually calling some architecture specific inline assembly for ip_fast_csum. Ok, that looks like our canary in the coal mine… Look it up… SIGH. The routine touches memory, but didn’t have “memory” in the list of clobbers. Adding the clobber and everything magically works again. Wasn’t that a party? [ Of course, this makes things sound almost easy, except that at around 10 minutes to boot a test kernel, reboot, and boot a working kernel, this gets extremely tedious. I also didn't bother to talk about how many hours I probably wasted twiddling compiler flags trying to figure out which optimization pass might be broken... ]

A few months ago, Stephen Milborrow started releasing a patched version of R that performs just-in-time compilation -- see his Ra page for some details and further pointers. In a nutshell, Ra provides a modified R engine so that code preceded by all jit(1) function call, using his jit package from the CRAN archive, will run faster due to just-in-time compilation of loops and arithmetic expressions. Ra offers to pick the low-hanging fruit for users as loops can be a bottleneck. Of course, as shown in Stephen's case study, using appropriate vectorised expression will often be faster still. That said, for a certain class of problems, Ra should offer a decent speed boost. Debian users can now just say

    sudo apt-get install r-base-core-ra r-cran-jit

as the Ra and jit packages in Debian's unstable distribution (and in the case of jit, even in testing). Lastly, version 1.1.0 of Ra was released by Stephen yesterday and is now also in Debian unstable.

So Avi Bryant finally showed off the work he's been doing with the Gemstone folks at Railsconf, and it's made quite a splash. With performance improvements like that it shouldn't be a surprise. The most interesting thing about it to me though is that it's the first time in a very long while that we've seen a proprietary implementation of a major tool absolutely destroy all the Free implementations. We've had things like Intel's C compiler outperforming gcc before, but nothing on this level, especially because the main ruby implementation is so notoriously slow. Just another feather in the cap of Smalltalk's long legacy.

What's troubled me for some time about the post-Rails Ruby community is that it has a distinct bent away from its Free Software roots. I understand Matz actually used to use (not sure about today) Debian Unstable, and Ruby traditionally displayed its roots quite strongly, with a Perl heritage and a community consisting largely of hardcore *NIX people. With the advent of Rails, the move has been towards things like TextMate and OSX. Software like Gems (no relation to Gemstone) fits in fine with one of these systems, but not so well with modern Free Software systems, and I think it's symptomatic of the change. Given this propensity in the Ruby community, and given the numbers Gemstone is posting, I'd be surprised if lots of Rubyists don't move that way as soon as it's available.

Given all this, I really have to wonder if the modern Ruby fits me any more. I generally think it's important for the Free Software community to support itself first and then try to grow out from there, and the Ruby community isn't really on this path right now. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just not something that really interests me. It does make me wonder how something like this could happen, and it really comes down to the fact that a lot of smart people who might otherwise be really passionate about Linux systems are choosing OSX instead. Maybe it's hardware support (I hope the modernization of X will help here) and maybe it's just the whole package being nice and easy to use. Whatever it is, people are choosing it and we're the poorer for it.

OK, so I've spent my last money on the One Mini A110 subnotebook recently. Yep, yet another ASUS Eee PC clone, but this one has the great benefit of costing only 199.- Euros and has similar specs as the Eee PC 2G Surf (700), I think. This is really a great little machine as far as I can tell. It's a VIA C7-M ULV 1GHz with 512MB DDR2 RAM and a 2 GB Solid-State-Disk (SSD), 7" screen at supposedly 800x480, VGA out, card reader slot for SD/MMC/MS, 2x USB, wireless, modem, audio. No webcam, no bluetooth. Yesterday I created a wiki at a110wiki.de (for the A110, but also the A120 from the same vendor, which has a 4 GB SSD), where A110 users can collect information, HOWTOs, photos, etc. There's already quite some content there, especially some early tutorials and photos on the inner workings of the A110. Today I've installed a stock Debian unstable distro on the SSD with 2.6.25 kernel, and I'm currently checking which parts of the hardware work out of the box, and which need further fixing. There's a a bunch of source code tarballs and patches on the vendor website, but most of it seems to be meant for 2.6.22, we'll see if and/or how much work it'll take to merge all this upstream (if it's not already done)... My Debian Installation HOWTO is also available from the wiki, of course; I'll add more info and photos during the day. Now for all interested parties: The vendor of the A110 has (again) announced a special weekend offer (valid until Sunday, June 1, 2008, i.e. tomorrow) where they'll sell the A110 for 199,- Euros again, the regular price will be 229,- Euros after that. So if you're thinking about buying one, now is probably the right time. Check the wiki for issues which are important to you, some quirks remain at this point (but will probably mostly be figured out sooner or later), e.g. the wifi seems to have issues (the vendor said they'll send a driver update to all affected customers), the RAM is builtin and can't be upgraded, and some other, more or less important issues, depending on what you expect from the laptop. For real-time communication there's also the #a110 IRC channel on Freenode.

Really, who cares? 1. How much petrol do people actually use, anyway? People whinge and bitch and moan about petrol going up a few cents, and queue up for ages to try to buy petrol at the low point of the weekly price cycle - and for what? A tank will hold less than 100 litres. Typically around 50, but let’s say it’s 100 litres. That means that a price difference of 1 cent is worth a whole $1.00. A price difference of 5 cents is a measly $5.00, less than the price of a cheap bought lunch. For the average driver, they’ll buy 100 litres once or maybe twice per week. Who gives a damn? If $1.00 or even $5.00 makes such a difference to someone’s budget then they’re in serious financial trouble anyway - so much trouble that they shouldn’t even think about having a car, because they can’t afford it. Here’s a novel thought: they could drive less, make their kids walk to school, catch public transport, ride a bike, walk to the milkbar rather than drive, make sandwiches to take to work/school, and so on. They could also buy less of the worthless crap they buy (like biscuits and cakes and bottles of coke and other rubbish). There are thousands of things people could do so that they don’t have to give a damn about a few cents per litre. Even better, if people reduce demand enough, they can seriously hurt the speculator bastards who have driven oil prices up so much in recent months….at least a quarter of the current price per barrel of oil is due to commodity speculators driving the price up. Hit the bastards where it hurts, drop demand so much that they lose serious money. If the price of petrol bothers you, don’t whinge, get revenge. Actually, I’m entirely unconvinced that the general public actually care all that much about petrol prices anyway. It looks and feels much more like an astro-turfing campaign by the oil companies and petrol distributors - especially the recent crap about reducing the excise by 5c/litre, anyone can see that if the government does that the petrol companies will, within weeks, increase prices so that THEY get the 5c/litre rather than the government, resulting in yet another transfer of wealth from the public purse to private corporations. Same for all the bullshit about the fuel price watch program - it’s obvious that the opposition to that comes directly from the petrol companies who don’t want buyers to have good information to base their purchasing decisions on. It’s also a useful distraction and pretend-debate for the government and the opposition - they can rant and rave and score points over a trivial, bullshit non-issue like this, and nobody will notice that nothing of any real substance or worth ever gets debated in parliament…and the media are either colluding in this or are too stupid to avoid getting sucked in. 2. We have the fourth-cheapest petrol in the world. So all this moaning is not about petrol being more expensive than it should be, it’s about not being quite as unreasonably privileged as we were in the past. 3. Oil prices are *inevitably* going up, they’re *never* coming back down. Get used to it, it’s only going to get worse from here - much worse. Instead of endlessly whining about the inevitable, focus on alternatives - like *DEMANDING* that the government start paying more than just empty tokenistic lip-service to the idea of alternative/renewable energy sources. 4. IMO, the sooner petrol hits $5.00 per litre or more, the better. By then we’ll really have to have functional alternative energy sources in place. Because if we don’t, we’re completely screwed. Syndicated from Craig Sanders' Errata: Tech Notes and Miscellaneous Thoughts I’m sick of all the whinging about petrol prices

I used to help staff more exhibition stands than I do now. Part of the reason I stopped was that few free software people seem to appreciate the basics of running a good exhibition stand and I got bored of arguing that we should give people space, avoid putting a counter across the stand, keep notes of contacts made and basic stuff like that. So, it was good to read Connecting People: Making an exhibition of yourself - the exhibitor and the linked Business Startup Coach shares Exhibition & Trade show secrets which repeat many points I've made before. Don't want to listen to me? Listen to the marketing experts. Some time after noticing WDPRS, I tried reporting as much spam as possible for a while, to hosters and registrars based on WHOIS details. Some hosts and registrars were good at dealing with spam (Yahoo and walla.net.il were exceptionally good) many were bad (bresnan.net, registrationtek.com, publicdomainregistry.com (PDR), ait.com, omantel.co.om, ttnet.net.tr) and some were ugly (Tucows/OpenSRS wrote back to say they don't do anything about domains they register, while ENom and Moniker never sent human answers). So it's no surprise to see ENom, Moniker, PDR and AIT on the list of

"Top Ten Worst Spam Registrars Notified By ICANN"

ultimately taken from this report.

While I have been a little quiet with ftpmaster posts lately - I am still alive. I just had some other bits to do and didn’t get large enough changes done that would warrant an own post. Since my last post earlier this months there have only been 3 notable changes, namely

• fixing a bug in the transitions feature. Or better - working around one in python-syck which was inserting random “—” when it dumped a data structure. Which does break stuff.
• Changed the Maintainers name of the ftp.debian.org pseudopackage.
• Merged a little branch from Frans that enables automated byhand processing for the tasksel data.
• Started the last discussion on the data section/archive/component thingie and will end that soon with an implementation.

And only a few minutes ago I sent a “Bits from” mail to our debian-devel-announce mailinglist, which includes a summary of the recent activities and changes in our team, with the addition of Thomas and Kalle, me getting FTPMaster and Anthony and James resigning. We also ask for volunteers which we might add to the team later on. See, I write might. We keep the right to reject people, for whatever reason. Hopefully there won’t be many rejects, but still. And we will see how the volunteers get the tasks done we plan to assign to them. You can expect to see a little more in the near future from me again, I don’t plan on staying that quiet forever.

---

And in other news - I recently got another group added, mirroradm, as it did help to fix some mirror issues with packages.debian.org. With that I also got the mirrors@ alias additionally routed into my INBOX. Thats a nicely spammed role address and my tip for you, if you should ever get offered access to (any) role address - run as fast as you can, unless you have very good spam filters! :) Luckily my filters are pretty good, as I’m on a good number of role addresses for a long time already, only a few dozen spams getting through a day (and a thousand filtered away). Comments: 0

I’m so going to Debconf 8… Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:

• Dublin - Madrid, 7th August, 18:25-21:50, IB3183
• Madrid - Buenos Aires, 8th August, 01:25-08:40, IB 6843
• Buenos Aires - Madrid, 21st August, 21:45-14:30, IB 6844
• Madrid - Dublin, 22nd August, 16:10-17:35, IB 3184

All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :) And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)

Yesterday I wrote about my search for a hosting provider for a Xen DomU [1]. One response was the suggestion to run a Dom0 and sell DomU’s to other people [2], it was pointed out that Steve Kemp’s Xen-Hosting.org project is an example of how to do this well [3]. Unfortunately Steve’s service is full and he is not planning to expand. I would be open to the idea of renting a physical machine and running the Xen server myself, but that might be a plan for some other time (of course if a bunch of people want to sign up to such a thing and start hassling me I might change my mind). But at the moment I need to get some services online soon and I don’t want to spend any significant amount of money (I want to keep what I spend on net access below my Adsense revenue). Also if someone else in the free software community wants to follow Steve’s example then I would be interested in hosting my stuff with them.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/28/xen-hosting/


• [2] http://blog.windfluechter.net/index.php?/archives/132-Xen-Hosting-to-lower-costs.html


• [3] http://www.xen-hosting.org/

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Russel Coker is looking for a Xen domU to rent for a new project he's going to start.
Using shared Xen hosting to lower costs is quite common these days. Steve Kemp does it and so do I (german). Prices are not that high that you can make a business out of this or earn your living from that, IMHO. At least not with a major investment beforehand. So, shared Xen hosting is mostly used to lower costs by sharing them amongst friends.

Just order a dedicated server, for example a dual AMD64, 4 GB RAM, 2x 400 GB harddisks, a /29 net and umlimited traffic (1 TB free at 100 Mbps, after that the bandwidth is reduced to 10 Mbps) for 59.- and go for it. Get as much memory as you can get. I've found 2 GB RAM a little bit undersized, whereas I still have approx. 2 GB RAM unused/free for other domUs with 4 GB RAM, so there's some room for other domUs.
Currently I'm running 4 domUs:

1. 1 GB RAM: central services host (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Mailserver, IMAP/POP3)


2. 512 MB RAM: Apache


3. 128 MB RAM: providing shells for irc, Jabber, ...


4. 256 MB RAM: a VPN gateway for a local freifunk club

Anyway, when someone would consider sharing a dedicated server with some friends, go for it! It's better for the environment as well, when some people will share the servers instead each of them getting their own one.

Now that kde4.1 is beginning to really take shape, I have also upgraded all my computers to kde4. Bye bye kde3. I can’t live without a few kde3 apps though, particularily amarok. But my amarok usage was mostly controlled by the kicker media applet. So I needed something that behaved similar to the kicker media applet. Plasma && dcop command line to the rescue. It still needs some polishing, especially getting the buttons closer together. But it works. It wasn’t that hard to get started, although the plasma docs still haven’t the quality of Qt documentation. Here is how it looks:
And if anyone wants it, well - it is here: http://elvira.killmulehill.net/~sune/plasmaamarokcontrol-2008-05-27.tar.gz - at least for now.

I’m currently deciding where to get a Xen DomU hosted. It will be used for a new project that I’m about to start which will take more bandwidth than my current ISP is prepared to offer (or at least they would want me to start paying and serious bandwidth is expensive in Australia). Below is a table of the options I’ve seriously considered so far (I rejected Dreamhost based on their reputation and some other virtual hosts were obviously not able to compare with the prices of the ones in the table). For each ISP I listed the two cheapest options, as I want to save money I’ll probably go for the cheapest option at the ISP I choose but want the option of upgrading if I need more. I’m not sure how much storage I need, I think that 4.5G is probably not enough and even 6G might get tight. Also of course it depends on how many friends I share the server with. Quantact has a reasonable cheap option for $15, but the $25 option is expensive and has little RAM. Probably 192M of RAM would be the minimum if I’m going to share the machine with two or more friends (to share the costs). VPSland would have rated well if it wasn’t for the fact that they once unexpectedly deleted a DomU belonging to a client (they claimed that the bill wasn’t paid) and had no backups. Disabling a service when a bill is not paid is fair, charging extra for the “service” of reenabling it is acceptable, but just deleting it with no backups is unacceptable. But as I’m planning on serving mostly static data this won’t necessarily rule them out of consideration. It seems that linode and slicehost are the best options (Slicehost seems the most clueful and Linode might be the second most). Does anyone have suggestions about other Xen servers that I haven’t considered? XenEurope seems interesting. One benefit that they have is being based in the Netherlands which has a strong rule of law (unlike the increasingly corrupt US). A disadvantage is that the Euro is a strong currency and is expected to get even stronger. Services paid in Euros should be expected to cost more in future when paid in Australian dollars, while services paid in US dollars should be expected to cost less. Gandi.net has an interesting approach, they divide a server into 64 “shares” and then you can buy as many as you want (up to 16 shares for 1/4 of a server) for your server. If at any time you run out of bandwidth then you just buy more shares. They also limit bandwidth by guaranteed transfer rate (in multiples of 3Mb/s) instead of limiting the overall data transferred on a per-monthly basis (as most providers do). They don’t mention whether you can burst above that 3Mb/s limit - while 3Mb/s for 24*7 is a significant amount of data transfer it isn’t that much if you have a 200MB file that will be downloaded a few times a day while interactive tasks are also in progress (something that may be typical usage for my server). Of course other providers generally don’t provide any information on how fast data can be transferred and will often be smaller than 3Mb/s. Also if anyone who I know wants to share access to a server then please contact me via private mail.

ISP	RAM	Disk	Bandwidth (per month)	Price $US
Linode	360M	10G	200GB	$20
Linode	540M	15G	300GB	$30
Slicehost	256M	10G	100GB	$20
Slicehost	512M	20G	200GB	$38
VPSLand	192M	6G	150GB	$16
VPSLand	288M	8G	200GB	$22
Quantact	96M	4.5G	96GB	$15
Quantact	128M	6G	128GB	$25
rimuhosting	96M	4G	30G	$20
XenEurope	128M	10G	100G	$16 (E10)
XenEurope	256M	20G	150G	$28 (E17.50)
Gandi.net	256M	5G	3Mb/s	$7.50 or E6

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During the last 4 days, I didn't read Planet. So I started an interesting exercise and wanted to comment very briefly on a few entries I just read quickly to catch up. My Planet premium, so to say..

• (not Planet related...I read that on NASA mailing lists...some of which I'm subscribed since 1988) NASA's Phoenix lander successfully landed on Mars. This is actually the first successful soft landing on Mars since 1976 (recent landings were hard ones, with airbags....or failures). This stunning picture shows the spacecraft with its parachute during its descent on Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The very first time a spacecraft photographs another one while it's landing. Amazing, right?
• Marga and the Spanish keymap: I can't disagree with your comments, Marga. Still, that's a though issue: changing the behaviour of a keymap that's used by millions of users is not a trivial change. OTOH, you're right and that tilde should be dead, indeed. I think there is barely no other option than a fork, here: have both keymaps, one with asciitilde and another one with dead_tilde on the same key combination and let users choose. That keymap should be named "es-standard" to avoid changing the existing "es".
• John Goerzen biking to work: John is among the people I never met but who I know I share ideas and vision of life with. So, seeing him comment on alternative ways to commute to/back work is a pleasure for me (alternative transportation systems with the goal of abandoning the heresy of individual cars is part of my hobbies....while I still don't always apply these principles myself). And, well, seeing someone writing that this is still possible in the flat MidWest of the country that contributes the most to climate change is a relief for me: change can happen.
• Joey reads USENET again. Long time since I last read news... In the past I used to have my own feed, through UUCP. I still receive a lot of my mails by UUCP, though (bubulle@kheops.frmug.org comes this way)
• Pollocks were in Europe. Andrew is another of these people I feel like having connections with while we never met. Next time, plan a stop in Bubulle Hotel and visit Paris, Andrew.
• Dirk mentioned Bike the Drive, which I assume to be a bike-related event in Chicago... Yet another occasion to see there's still some hope for alternatives to cars in the US of A...
• Kartik is back home in Mumbai after some months working in Bangalore (and not enjoying it). I'm happy for him that he can be again with his family.
• Ganneff also bikes. Of course, he does it the geek way. Would you have guessed? Joerg, are you ready for the DebConf daily running tour which I plan to do in Mar del Plata?
• Manoj is the last Emacs user, along with /me
• Jaldhar who I have much respect for in the project, still supports the US republican party, the most conservative party in the so-called western world. It is still completely out of my understanding how FLOSS "spirit" can fit with this (the same stands for the political stance of Eric "Gun" Raymond, indeed). Mysteries...
• Lucas wonders how to find cheap flights. Voyages SNCF (aka Expedia), the online travel agency of the French railway company, always gets my preference. Yes, French *railway*.
• MJ also posts about biking. I have to mention that easy bike-on-demande systems in cities are one of the best ways to develop this. Barcelona's system seems pretty cool. Paris' Velib is amazing and so is the system in Lyon (who initiated the movement in France). All this is something I personnally follow pretty closely (I'm a addicted reader of the French professionnal magazine named "Ville et Transport", "Town and Transportation") in the hope it also develops in my Suburbia.
• Too many technical issues on Planet. I can't follow..:-)

It's ben a little while since I wrote about Jacob. He's about 20 months old now.

For awhile, he was on a whole hugging spree. He wanted to hug anything happy. It could be me, a stuffed animal, a rock, or even a book. To hug something, Jacob holds it up to his cheek, leans his head over onto it, and says "Awwww". Very cute!

Then he started saying "hi" to things. He'd greet people, toys, rocks... Seeing a pattern here?

Lately he likes to say "bye". He gets a big smile when he says bye to someone and they wave and say bye back to him. As I leave for work in the morning (on the days when I don't take him to daycare), I'll say bye to Jacob. He will keep saying bye to me, smiling all the while, as long as he can.

Last weekend, we had some heavy rains here. I had the idea that Jacob would love to play in the water puddles left on our driveway. Terah wasn't so sure, but we got Jacob dressed in old clothes and took him outside. He loved to run through the puddles, splashing water as high as he could, cackling the whole time. Then I showed him how he could throw a rock into a puddle and make it splash. So, he would run through a puddle, then carefully select a rock, run to the next puddle, throw the rock in, splash through, and repeat. He'd always want the rock first.

I knew when he was done playing because he said "bye" to the water puddles.

When people think of computer scientists, they think of someone with bad health, a bad skin color and no fitness at all. While there probably are some like that, I actually don't know many. Instead I know people who do things like fighting with sword and rapier. My main sports is advanced lindy hop dancing (which does include occasional aerials and such, but mostly involves 'jumping' around at high speeds). I like dancing most because of the social aspects of it.Myselfi, I can claim to be the very opposite: I just came back from 5 hours of sports, and I'm not even exhausted, just very hungry. The 5 hours include riding about 13 km in half an hour through the city (and we're suffering from a heat wave these days, with winds from the sahara desert reaching germany), then two full training sessions (that really used to stress me when I started), then the ride back of 13 km again.My body mass index is 18.something, so I'm slightly underweight, but I actually eat a lot - but I also eat healthy and diverse. Most of my food I cook myself, so I know it's fresh and where I got it from. I'm not vegetarian, I do eat meat about two times a week. I also try to have some variety there, pork, beef, lamb, deer, chicken, ... I don't drink much alcohol and I do not smoke.So don't stick to that prejudice that computer science people or geeks are physically in a bad shape. You can be both a geek, soical and athletic. The people I know how are in really bad shape actually watch too much TV and such, they neither engage their body nor their mind, nor leave their house much to meet other people.

Yesterday I was visiting the Open Source Expo Karlsruhe, a new, quite small conference, at which the guys from OpenStreetMap hat a booth. I was amazed by the progress of OpenStreetMap while I wasn t looking (which is just a few months, I guess); their level of detail in some places like Karlsruhe is astonishing.Anyways, I got hooked and started to try out some of the tools and websites and finally, by tracing the Yahoo satellite image, added my first way to the map: A small footpath in Herrenberg that I know quite well: The live data can also be seen on the OpenStreetMap map, of course.Unfortunately, there is not much to map around where I live in Karlsruhe, even the driveway to my dorm is included, but maybe I can do some proper mapping (with a GPS device) in Herrenberg someday.

England swings like a pendulum do! There's another fuel price protest and the coverage in the London press is pretty biased, with occasional balanced reports and very rare dissenting opinion. One of the favourite whines on news-and-nutters phone-ins is "waah, I live in a village, I need my car". While that's true for some people, most villagers could switch to bicycles for many journeys without problems. At the moment, the biggest problem with cycling to town is the number of cars on the small lanes, followed by the number of potholes. Switching to cycling or walking will have a triple benefit: fewer cars on the road will free up space for cycling, wear the roads out less and reduce fuel demand (so petrol should become cheaper for those who really need it). Over the last few days, I've been happy to read Bike The Drive 2008 [Dirk Eddelbuettel], Mountainbike, By Joerg Jaspert and How to Start Bicycling to Work, by John Goerzen. A couple of tweaks to that last one: in England, I don't think that a cycling helmet is necessary. I've not worn one for the last few months (it went mouldy after a rain storm) - I find I can hear traffic better and many drivers seem to give me more room on the road. I wonder if helmet-wearing "dehumanises" cyclists to drivers? The safety data seems rather confused, but it's a personal choice. If you feel safer with a helmet, wear one. I also wear ordinary business or casual clothes, relying on a good quality commuter saddle rather than cycling shorts. I suspect that drivers here are developing a sort of blindness to the "screaming yellow" hi-vis jackets, so I don't wear those - but sometimes I wear hi-vis reflective armbands if I'm wearing black in the dark. I agree completely with the comments on that page about being predictable, Cateye lights and pannier bags. Finally, Bike Week 2008 starts on 14 June, which would be an ideal time to try a group ride - or just get a free breakfast for cycling into town.

Some TV network did some interviews with West Virginia voters at the time of their primary. The Daily Showpicked up on it (click link for video). Among the comments:

"I guess because he is another race. I'm sort of scared of theother race because we have so much conflict with them."

"He's Muslim and that has a lot to do with it."

"I don't like the Hussein thing. I've had enough of Hussein."

The segment on this starts at 1:03 into the video, and the comments start at 1:45.

By the way, if you think Obama is Muslim, check out IsBarackObamaAMuslim.com. (Though it won't comment on the separate question of why it matters).

Sigh.

[Non-Debian and even non-IT related post ahead, in case you want to skip them] Since some time I try to regularly take some time off of the PC and actually use my bike again. (Those pictures are old, some things have changed since then. Like, I have a different, larger, set of brakes now). After a break of more than a year (more like 1.5 - 2 years, I think), it was a pain. The first few rides haven’t been much fun, and after some 10 til 15km I was exhausted and felt bad. But now, where I found a semi-regular schedule and do the torture two or three times a week I actually feel better. And get away with longer rides. A few days after I started I bought myself a nice “Bicycle computer”, a Garmin Edge 305 - “Garmin’s GPS-enabled personal trainer and cycle computer.” Im not doing any kind of special training with it, but its still nice to see heartrate, pedal cadence and all the other information it offers (which is a lot). And to see how you improve over time. Still, my main motivation to carry it with me is really to be able to see where I went (I only made some of my entries public :) ). And maybe, at some time, somewhere, load waypoints to it and then follow those. The included GPS chip is pretty good, keeping a good signal accuracy even in terrain where you just wouldn’t expect it to have any signal. Now, if google maps would have recent images, not ones that are years old, some tracks wouldn’t look that weird. On other news - I’ve lost 10kg weight since February. Damnit. Update: If you are from (around) Fulda and also like that OpenStreetMap thing, Enrico just uploaded my tracks there. Now it needs someone doing the post-processing to make them useful, and Enrico says you should go here and have fun. So if you have time, know the roads, feel free to look there. I guess Enrico keeps uploading new tracks from me, whenever there are some. Comments: 2

FYI, if you're not using xdm/kdm/gdm but are instead starting the X11 server manually with startx (which is what I usually do) you might have experienced brokenness in Debian unstable recently:

Fatal server error:
Unrecognized option: /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

This is already reported as bug #482425 and #482527 and should hopefully be fixed soon, but in the meantime this patch against /usr/bin/startx should work around the issue:

--- /usr/bin/startx.orig 2008-05-26 18:21:26.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/bin/startx     2008-05-26 18:21:36.000000000 +0200
@@ -107,9 +107,7 @@
 if [ x"$server" = x ]; then
     # if no server arguments or display either, use rc file instead
     if [ x"$serverargs" = x -a x"$display" = x ]; then
-       server=$defaultserver
        serverargs=$defaultserverargs
-       display=$defaultdisplay
     else
        server=$defaultserver
     fi

Hope that saves some people out there lengthy investigations and hassle.