Stefano Zacchiroli: moving well moved
/me has moved to Paris
Well, this is not really an "I'm moving" post, but rather a
"I've moved" post: starting from past Tuesday I'm now
living in Paris. I will be
working as a post-doc in the
mancoosi project, which is a
wonderful occasion to merge my research work with my free software
enthusiasm. I've also submitted a talk proposal about mancoosi for
DebConf8, ... it will be a good occasion to chat about it if you
are interested.
My office is in the PPS
lab, which was already quite packed of Debianers, /me is just one
more, happy to join the crowd!
The first day of shopping in Paris forces me to post a picture
on the very same lines of Enrico's "how to
freak out a French person". Mine below can be titled
how to freak out an inhabitant of Modena:
Here you are: balsamic
vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh?
(dedicated to gareuselesinge)
PS unfortunately at home I'm still without
network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1
random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be
able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few
weeks.
Here you are: balsamic
vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh?
(dedicated to gareuselesinge)
PS unfortunately at home I'm still without
network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1
random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be
able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few
weeks.
A while ago, 
So, if you are a 
Since about half a year now we have a fibre to the home connection. This means that two fiber lines terminate at a box in our living room. It is a blown fibre which means that a tube is buried to your house, after which they use air pressure to put the actual fibre from the house to the POP. There are two fibers: one for bidirectional data (IP), and one that does nothing more than carry the analog cable TV signal. We started out with only the internet facility but now have so-called triple play: phone, analog tv and internet connectivity.
The results are in: I find it to be just as good or better than the previous offerings: phone from KPN, tv from Casema or internet from Surfnet. But there's nothing revolutionary. Phone and tv just provide the same service over a different medium. The internet connection is with the standard of 24 Mb/s more than fast enough for any day to day use and an upgrade to 50 Mb/s is pending. A real improvement is that the upstream speed is just as high, very useful when uploading photos, packages or the text of this blog post.
One drawback is that they only provide one IP address instead of 32. Also, the service provider (XMSnet) does seem to be a bit stuck in the late nineties with an unfriendly help desk telling you that your situation is impossible , and bad billing, There are plans however to open up the line to other providers in the future.
So for now it's just a convenience bundling of services, but nothing really ground breaking. Let's see what the future brings.
From 
The thing to do: require Microsoft and its cronies to write a strict OOXML
document parser/verifier and release it under the BSD license as a starting
point for other companies' work with OOXML documents. And require them to
offer free support to all companies wishing to publish OOXML compliant
documents (without any vendor specific extensions) on how to do that with their
M$ Office products.
For a long time I wanted to play with IPv6, but I never liked any of the tunnels I saw. This evening I started wondering if my Cisco 837 ADSL router cannot handle some form of tunnel.
Flip Video Ultra on Linux
My 
I Just released NBD 2.9.10. It had been upcoming for a while already,
with a few interesting patches being applied. In addition, some bugfixes
were applied to subversion, and some more interesting things had
happened. Really, a release was getting overdue. Sometimes life just
intervenes.
Anyway, apart from the upstream release, I of course also did a
Debian update of these packages, which also contains some changes that
had been pending for a while. Combined, the changelog mentions five
different bugs of which none are l10n bugs, which is a record (there had
been 5-bug uploads before, but those did include l10n bugs). On top of
that, I closed some other outstanding bugs which really had been closed
a while back, but either I forgot to close the bug, or I forgot that
there even was a bug in the first place.
I should stop slacking so much.
While preparing this upload, it occurred to me that nbd has come a
long way since I got involved with it back in 2001. The original
nbd-server that Pavel Macheck had written did work well, but it was a
bit of a hack; it did not fork() upon startup or anything similar, so
starting it was a pain. It could only serve one device at a time. It was
not documented. It had no concept of a configuration file. The code,
frankly, was also bit of a mess; it was written on a hack night, and not
much design had gone into it.
I guess it was no surprise, then, that no single distribution had a
package for nbd at the time. I only packaged it because I actually had
some use for nbd; at the time, I'd just bought quickstep, my first
functional m68k machine, and had installed Debian on its 250MB hard
disk. However, running a buildd on that machine proved problematic, to
say the least; with so little disk space, you could hardly boot Debian,
and due to speed and clock skew issues, NFS was not an option. So I went
with NBD, which worked great. After a while, quickstep got a bigger hard
disk (it has an 18G disk today), so diskspace was less of an issue at
that point; but, well, I'd been maintaining it already, and that was
fun, so I didn't think of giving up.
When Pavel lost interest in nbd back in 2003, he gave maintenance of
the kernel bits to Paul Clements, and maintenance of the userspace bits
to me. I promptly went ahead with what I thought should have been done
already, but felt reluctant to do at the time to suggest that:
refactoring the code, adding features, etc. Today, nbd-server
does support all of the above things of which I mentioned it
was lacking; and, probably as a result of that, apart from Debian, there
are now packages of nbd in, at least, SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, uClibc, and
FreeBSD (the latter obviously only containing the server).
Well—the fact that LTSP uses it might have something to do with
it, too ;-)
That's not to say there's nothing left to be done, but I'm quite
happy about how far we've come. Really.
The usability experts of Ubuntu have finally started to handle the single
most mentioned usability issue with Linux: the top level directory names.Quoting Finn C. Tional from the Ubuntu Usability Group:
I've updated two of the Emdebian pages today, after some feedback on the list. I'm interested in feedback on the current 
Recently I took stock of my Javascript programming efforts, with the intention of simplifying things. To date I've put together three sites which make use of Javascript:
duplicate ssh-agents.
I have ssh-agent start in .xsession, but apparently somebody else also starts it up
and I have two distinct ssh-agents. Hmmm.
