After a while, I ended up building WWW::Tumblr (implementing the Tumblr API), so that Blog::Normalize::Tumblr can easily replace scrapping. The interesting part would be to write small applications to interact with the WWW::Tumblr to handle your tumblelog. Only file uploads missing for now. For now.

Today a customer asked for hosting several domains with different content on one apache virtual host. The little tricky part was, that the sites should not be accessed by subdirs like http://domain20.org/subdir20/ and http://domain21.org/subdir21/ which can be done with a little script which parses the $_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’]. So mod_rewrite is an option.
To make it user accessable, we use .htaccess. This requires “AllowOverride +FileInfo” to be set for the DocumentRoot in the vhost config. The .htaccess in DocumentRoot could look something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain10.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain11.org$
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME !dir1/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -f [OR]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir1/$1 [L]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain20.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain21.org$
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME !dir2/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -f [OR]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir2/$1 [L]

More updates:

* I can now walk to the mailbox on my own, and I only need to rest once on the way.
* I'm generally leaving the walker alone. It causes me more grief than it solves.
* I feel confident making the three steps up and down the balcony - which is good because the main doors are still too heavy for me.
* I've had a shower. I smell much better.
* We're starting to take visitors now - Jim and Sarah were here last night, Andrew and Sarah are coming tonight. It'll be nice to feel a little less isolated.
* I haven't spoken to my dad in a couple of days, but they were still scheduling his angiogram when I last spoke to him. All the walking and stuff that I've been doing means that I'm spending the balance of my day sleeping, so hopefully I'll catch up later today.

At this point, I'll probably post updates a lot less frequently, because it feels like the initial touch-and-go part is done. I'm looking forward to being off the steroids, and slowly spacing out the medications and such, but we're just in that zone where I'm getting up and around and am just waiting for lifting restrictions and such to be removed.

In the last few days, I've managed to sort out the various school extensions I need, the short term disability paperwork, the DMV disabled sticker paperwork, and all that.

Phone calls are much appreciated - the number is in my Orkut and Facebook profiles, it gives me a chance to interact with people and I'm starting to worry that I have too much time and am bothering the ones I talk to al the time. I'm still quite behind on emails, mostly because typing on the blackberry gets to be a bit much after a while.

I suspect I'm about to go into that annoying phase of recovery where nothing is urgent anymore, and we're coping, but we go stir-crazy because I'm not actually better enough to interact with the world yet and Angie still has to do almost everything for me. Any suggestions on making that part of the recovery suck less are appreciated! I've watched it a pile of times, but everyone seems to forget about it (including the people going through it).

Sunrise is 7:11 here this morning, I think I'll try to sit outside for it.

Well this has been a busy week, and no mistake. Still I've advocated a new individual who wishes to become a Debian Developer. I guess now I get to watch second-hand to see how long the process takes! (I messed up though; the first sponsored upload for her has the wrong mail address. It'll get REJECTed, and then we'll try again. D'oh.) In more optimistic news this weekend I'm going to attempt to finish painting my front room. The painting of this room was started n the 3rd of February. So we're coming close to two months. A new record! Also this weekend I must write some letters ... Tonight will involve some Balvenie and a copy of The Godfather (part 1). ObQuote: Eight Legged Freaks.

For various reasons, I have the kernel and the initrd that my notebook needs to boot Linux on an USB stick. I recently added the Debian Installer and grml to the stick to allow additional uses of the stick. Usually, USB sticks are formated with FAT32 and when they’re used to boot Linux, Syslinux or some derivative is used. I do it differently on my boot stick, most prominently because I’d like to have Unixoid privileges on the stick, and because I’d like to continue using grub. So, my stick is formatted as ext3, and feels like an additional hard disk. Booting from an USB stick is sometimes tricky. I have made the best experiences with formatting the USB stick as an USB ZIP, which basically means having 64 heads, 32 sectors and a single partition in the fourth primary partition slot. This can be done using mkdiskimage and is documented on Debian in /usr/share/doc/syslinux/usbkey.doc. Partitioning and generation of the file system is as straightforward as is installing grub using the standard, documented methods for hard disks. I tried using grub 2, but have found it not sufficiently well-documented and stable to be used in this kind of critical environment. I am therefore still using grub-legacy despite the fact that the grub maintainers have ceased fixing grub-legacy bugs some months ago, refering to the pending release of grub 2. I use unison to keep /boot on the stick in sync with /boot of the Linux system, which is on a crypted filesystem on the hard disk and thus unuseable until the system has booted. The hard disk /boot thus serves only as installation target and sync source so that the stick does not need to be plugged in during upgrades. update-grub is configured so that running it creates a menu.lst which can be used from the stick. This concludes booting the production system from the stick. For the other systems, I have decided not to put them in the “default” boot menu from menu.lst, but instead include foo.lst files to the root of the stick, and when I need them, shell out from the grub menu to a command line by pressing “c” and then pulling in the new grub config file with the “configfile /foo.lst” command. grml is my favorite rescue system. I use it all the time once a system starts acting up. One of its biggest advantages is its extremely flexible bootup process. That made it predestined to be the rescue system on my USB boot stick. grml is currently making a transition to a new build environment, which has had the side effect that the boot process has changed in some details. grml-small, the 60 MB variant that I had been using before, has been discontinued and replaced by grml-medium, a 170 MB variant which does definetely not fit any more on a business card CD, but 128 MB USB sticks have become relatively seldom. For both grml flavours, all one needs to do is mount the .iso file loopback, copy the file’s contents to a subdirectory of the boot stick, and to drop this menu file to the stick:

title           grml-small
root            (hd0,3)
kernel          /grml-small/boot/isolinux/linux26 toram grml_dir=/grml-small/GRML/ grml_name=GRML ramdisk_size=100000
init=/etc/init lang=us BOOT_IMAGE=grml
initrd          /grml-small/boot/isolinux/minirt26.gz
title           grml-medium
root            (hd0,3)
kernel          /grml-medium/boot/grmlmedium/linux26 live-media-path=/grml-medium/live/ toram=grml-medium.squashfs
lang=us boot=live noeject noprompt keyboard=de
initrd          /grml-medium/boot/grmlmedium/initrd.gz

Since grml-medium works reasonably well, I do not expect to need grml-small very often any more. The Debian Installer guys have published an initrd which can browse nearly arbitrary media for an debian-installer .iso file, mount it and install from that image. I have made use of that feature to allow Debian to be installed from my boot stick. /d-i holds a current debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso, and vmlinux and initrd.gz from http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/. With that, this d-i.lst:

title debian installer
root (hd0,3)
kernel /d-i/vmlinuz
initrd /d-i/initrd.gz

does the trick and boots up the Installer, ready to start. I guess that it would be easily possible to include these grub config stanzas to the default menu.lst, including grml and the Installer into the main grub menu, but I deliberately decided not to have these options directly in the menu for the time being. It is always amazing how flexible today’s systems have become when it comes to boot Linux. For both rescue and installation, this is needed, and the respective authors have done a remarkable job.

Moving a git layout from debian-only to debian+upstream ... and live happily with git-buildpackage Let's say you have a git repository you have used thus far to maintain only the Debian part of some package (i.e. no upstream sources on sight). OK, you're right, that would be quite an uncommon scenario for a git repository. In fact the truth is that you are in such a situation because the git repo was obtained converting from a subversion repo which was using the mergeWithUpstream stuff of svn-buildpackage. Now that you have git's space efficiency you want to change this, import upstream sources, and possibly adhere to a branch layout which is compatible with git-buildpackage (which is very simple in its minimal requirements: an upstream branch containing just upstream sources and a master branch containing a debianized source tree). Out of the box git-import-orig won't work since don't have the upstream branch. Creating it branching from master (or somewhere else) won't work either unfortunately. Indeed after branching you will need to remove the debian/ dir from upstream and when you will merge upstream with master you will be merging the removal as well, bad idea. By myself I've found some horrifying solutions involving using git-filter-branch on the upstream branch merged from master and then squashing all the history of that branch with git-rebase, but they are so horrible that I won't mention them here more than this. The nice solution came from a hint by madduck on the creation of branches without ancestry. Here is the complete recipe (assumed to be run from the master branch of the repo, before creating any upstream branch):

$ git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/upstream
$ git rm --cached -r .
$ git commit --allow-empty -m 'initial upstream branch'
$ git checkout -f master
$ git merge upstream
$ git-import-orig --no-dch ../foo_1.2.3.orig.tar.gz

In short: you should create an upstream branch without any ancestry, in it you should create an empty commit, then merge it (vacuously) in master, and now you're ready to call git-import-orig to the rescue. Feature request on git-buildpackage to support this out of the box is on the go: bug #471560.

I just read an interesting blog post about Montenegro [1]. Apparently a key to the process of becoming a country was acting like it was inevitable. It seems that this method can be applied to many areas, one of which is the contest between Linux and some proprietary OSs. For many years monopolists have convinced people that it was inevitable that they would monopolise all areas of software development. Why use any other software (even if it is more reliable, faster, has more features, and is cheaper) if a monopolist is about to dominate the market? The monopolist changes sometimes, the monopolist from ~1990 to now is different from the monopolist of the 1970’s, but the tactics of a computer monopolist remain the same. The way to beat this is largely to just ignore them. There is an ongoing debate in some circles about when Linux will be “ready for the desktop“. I’ve been running Linux as my primary desktop environment since about July 1998, it’s almost 10 years of having Linux as my primary desktop environment. It seems inevitable that the Linux will take over the desktop - it’s far better for desktop use than it was 10 years ago when I switched. Some people claim that Linux lacks driver support. Every piece of hardware that I’ve wanted to use over the last 10 years has had adequate support. Often second-hand hardware works best with Linux, hardware vendors have no reason to continue to support their old products on newer operating systems (they make more money if you buy new hardware to run the new OS). Not only is hardware support for Linux adequate, but long-term support is far superior (and I often get to use cheap second-hand hardware). Now that an increasing number of hardware vendors are supporting Linux for their new hardware (Intel, AMD, and most laptop vendors are doing some good work in this regard). It seems that everyone who has tried both says that writing drivers for Linux is easier than writing drivers for proprietary OSs, so it seems inevitable that Linux will end up with better driver support by all metrics. Linux is designed for users. DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is not something that interests Linux developers. Run Linux and your computer will obey you and give full quality audio and video. It seems inevitable that Linux will dominate the AV section of the market (it already dominates the computer work involved with creating movies). Free software (of which Linux is merely the most famous and popular example) is based on the principles of open design and open standards. When you use a free software program to save a file then you can be reasonably sure that you will be able to read it back again in a few decades. Most free software uses file formats that are well documented and standardised. Sometimes there are bugs in programs and new versions will use files in a different way, this is sometimes a case when you rely on a bug in an old version. Using the older version of the software is sometimes required to properly access old data. Fortunately when you have the source to the older programs they can be compiled on new systems (so different types of CPU won’t matter). Also the lack of DRM means that an OS image can be virtualised. One thing that is on my todo list is to create a set of virtual machine images of some of the most commonly used distributions of Linux so I can easily compare distributions of 10 years ago with modern distributions - it’s not technically challenging and there is no particular technical or legal obstacle to doing this. This would also mean that if someone gave me a file in some strange format from 10 years ago I would have a better chance of reading it. It seems inevitable that as the value of data increases the desire to avoid OSs that prevent people from accessing their own data will also increase, and that will eventually squeeze out most closed software from the market. This doesn’t mean the end of proprietary software, merely the end of software that holds user’s data hostage. The majority of the world’s population does not use computers. The computers that they end up using will be cheap because they can’t afford to waste so much money on new hardware. To make cheap machines means that there will be limited resources in terms of RAM, mass storage, and CPU power which require more efficient software. Also to properly take advantage of machines with small screens and other limitations changes to the design of the software will be required. It seems inevitable that the most open software will be adapted to such environments more readily than proprietary software. Now this doesn’t mean that we can take a break from development. In the free software community there are usually many different programs to perform a particular task with competition between the developers of the various projects. The fact that a monopolist is inevitably going to lose it’s position is of little relevance to the competition between the various free alternatives.

• [1] http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/115

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About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow. Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore)… BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print! For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power. Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)

Dirk, 1h36 is my current time for about 17km (so, slightly over 10miles with those funky units that are used in weird places). So, please don't imply that is is slow..:-) I lowered the run distances last weeks because of that longstanding ankle tendinite. It apparently comes from new shoes, indeed. Apparently, their back is too hard for my ankle and I'll need to change them. I'll probably go back to my EUR15 shoes which I (re)started running with and never disappointed me.

Joerg, Blog::Normalize is your bitch. Although it s not even released, B::N::Blosxom could have been a breeze.

Yesterday I made the switch from kde3 to kde4. But before I dumped all installed packages into a file ( if I have to restore) and backuped my configuration files for kde. After some fiddeling with kde4 and the dependencies I had a full kde4 installed. My problem was that:

apt-get -t experimental install kde4

won't resolve all dependencies... So my apt-get line was quite long. (After I was finished, I thought that maybe pinning would be a better idea). In general kde4 is usable, but there are some quite annoying things:

• konqueror can't show websites via ssl with a ssl name which doesn't match the servername (the https:// protocoll will die)
• It is not possible for me to choose another delimiter than the default one for the shortcuts in konqueror. (I'm used to have as delimter only a blank, but the default is a colon.)
• Sometimes konqueror (very rare!!) can't contact klauner anymore.. a restart of konqueror fixes this issue.
• Sometimes plasma crashes and restarts directly afterwards, but I'm not able to reproduce this atm.

But of course there are quite many improvements, I'll list here only those which I consider very useful

• kopete is now able to show the away messages of people using ICQ6 (I wasn't able to read them before)
• konqueror renders some websites now better than before
• The new menu structure is quite cool
• And of course: the plasmoids...it's quite sad that most plasmoids are in playground atm (calc, weather). It would be cool if it would be possible to package them as extragear-playground or something similiar.

Some things which are definitly missing in kde4 (which have to be ported to qt4) are kpowersave and knetworkmanager. Furthermore kontact and amarok, but there is work in progress.

This, from my alma mater, is a good idea:

Group to explore creation of ‘bridge year’ program
Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman has appointed a working group to explore the creation of a “bridge year” program that would allow newly admitted undergraduates to spend a year of public service abroad before beginning their freshman year. The program would enable students to pursue a tuition-free, pre-collegiate enrichment year outside their home country with support from the University.

I finished my high school requirements early and spent a year abroad before college in Li ge, Belgium. It was an excellent decision. There would have been practically no benefit to starting college early, and having living abroad without my parents for a year was as important to my university experience as most of what I learned in high school. I propose that some sort of “bridge year” become something like a default option before higher education. This is much more common outside the United States. Indeed, depending on whom you believe, only seven to twenty-five percent of Americans own passports. My completely unscientific survey of Australians, by contrast, suggests that every last one of them travels abroad as young adults. (I have to admit that this survey is not only unscientific but fatally biased, inasmuch as I’ve only met Australians traveling abroad, not having been there myself). While I’m praising Princeton, this, too, is good news:

Aggressive goals set for sustainability initiatives
Princeton has committed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 as part of a comprehensive Sustainability Plan that sets ambitious goals in the areas of greenhouse gas emissions reduction, resource conservation, and research, education and civic engagement.

I’ve a big fan of Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s first non-male non-alum president. She has been working to fix a lot of what was wrong when I was student, despite some stiff resistance from the old guard. Technorati Tags: Princeton, Bridge Year, Sustainability, Shirley Tilghman

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Yesterday was the annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary, IL -- and this year marked the 30th anniversary of the race. The race is getting more and more popular as the start to the running season, and an early race for those in Spring marathon training. This year, and it had sold out in a matter of days. As for the race, I wasn't running it all that well. My legs already felt heavy when I was doing a casual four-miler the day before with our local running group. Similarly, I didn't feel all that loose yesterday. By mile four or five I was getting into a decent rhythm, and I was then running fairly steady 7:15s until about mile 11 when I ran out of gas and had to slow down. Final time was 1:36:38.15 -- not only several minutes slower than last year's but also slower than two years ago.

I am just watching US Senator Barack Obama speaking at Google about his bid to become the next US president [1]. He has announced plans for allowing greater citizen oversight of the government including having all government data in open file formats (a great idea - the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a large amount of data online in Excel format). But his most significant item so far is to have a National CTO (Chief Technology Officer). It’s an idea that seems totally obvious now that I’ve heard it and leaves me wondering why I never thought of it before! Barack understand technology, wants a functioning democracy, and gets a +5 Insightful from me for the CTO idea! He also announced a plan to double federal funding for basic scientific research as part of a measure to make the US more competitive with other countries. He mentioned the US standing in the world as a problem (it’s the first mention of this that I’ve heard from anyone in the US government) and notes this as an issue which limits the ability of the US to save lives in regions such as the Darfur. He also claims that there is no clash of civilisations and cites his experience living in a Muslim country as helping to build bridges. When discussing his reasons for running he said that he believes that he can bring his country together to solve problems better than other candidates. That’s the type of thing you often hear and ignore in political campaigns. It is often difficult to believe that someone wants to be famous and powerful for anything other than the most selfish reasons. But Barack gives me the strong impression that he is genuine. He stated a plan to shut down Guantanamo bay (presumably just the prison and torture aspect - I’m guessing that he is not intending to close the military base) and to stop “rendition” (sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured). His plans for education are innovative, as part of educating young children (0-3 years old) he stated an aim to teach parents to read so that they can read to their children! It’s sensible and obvious once you have heard it, but no-one seems to have publicised that idea before. He announced that he will increase teachers’ salaries. He describes the US as having an “empathy deficit“, it’s obvious to almost everyone outside the US but not something that many people in the US realise. He wants decisions to be based on facts and is determined to use facts when dealing with health insurance companies. I just wish that we had some politicians like him in Australia. In terms of policy the Greens politicians would agree with him, but the combination of great policies, insight, and excellent delivery seems a lot better than any of the options in Australia. Update: Changed the post (including the permalink) to have the correct spelling of Barack. Mental note - double check the spelling of everything in the permalink.

• [1] http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo

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I am just watching US Senator Barak Obama speaking at Google about his bid to become the next US president [1]. He has announced plans for allowing greater citizen oversight of the government including having all government data in open file formats (a great idea - the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a large amount of data online in Excel format). But his most significant item so far is to have a National CTO (Chief Technology Officer). It’s an idea that seems totally obvious now that I’ve heard it and leaves me wondering why I never thought of it before! Barak understand technology, wants a functioning democracy, and gets a +5 Insightful from me for the CTO idea! He also announced a plan to double federal funding for basic scientific research as part of a measure to make the US more competitive with other countries. He mentioned the US standing in the world as a problem (it’s the first mention of this that I’ve heard from anyone in the US government) and notes this as an issue which limits the ability of the US to save lives in regions such as the Darfur. He also claims that there is no clash of civilisations and cites his experience living in a Muslim country as helping to build bridges. When discussing his reasons for running he said that he believes that he can bring his country together to solve problems better than other candidates. That’s the type of thing you often hear and ignore in political campaigns. It is often difficult to believe that someone wants to be famous and powerful for anything other than the most selfish reasons. But Barak gives me the strong impression that he is genuine. He stated a plan to shut down Guantanamo bay (presumably just the prison and torture aspect - I’m guessing that he is not intending to close the military base) and to stop “rendition” (sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured). His plans for education are innovative, as part of educating young children (0-3 years old) he stated an aim to teach parents to read so that they can read to their children! It’s sensible and obvious once you have heard it, but no-one seems to have publicised that idea before. He announced that he will increase teachers’ salaries. He describes the US as having an “empathy deficit“, it’s obvious to almost everyone outside the US but not something that many people in the US realise. He wants decisions to be based on facts and is determined to use facts when dealing with health insurance companies. I just wish that we had some politicians like him in Australia. In terms of policy the Greens politicians would agree with him, but the combination of great policies, insight, and excellent delivery seems a lot better than any of the options in Australia.

• [1] http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo

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Unsurprisingly, there is a deal of common ground between a SQLite backend and a GDA backend. Both need simple routines that convert library data into SQL statements but each has very different ways of reading that data back from storage.
I've spent today doing upstream work (whilst also getting my central heating system replaced). Gutted the house, gutted the library - what's wrong with that?
However, I've decided to make these new functions private to the library rather than exporting them. Simple reason really - they are one-way routines.
One day, QOF will support UPDATE statements and one day a bit later it will also support DELETE and even DROP but those require changes within the library like "unregistering" objects that the current code simply doesn't expect.
Eventually, this kind of SQL support can make a usable query interface for quicklist and a few other stalled projects (like DWI). The principle gain is to allow QOF objects to evolve and adapt but retaining compatibility will be a challenge. (QuickList is likely to only support a read-only mode for some objects and require that others are renamed before being amended.)
The other advantage of this refactoring is that the SQLite backend in libqof2 will be a lot smaller than before. Migrating the code hasn't increased the size of libqof2 either because so much deprecated code has been removed when bumping the SONAME.
I'm sticking with the roadmap of not looking to release libqof2 until after Lenny but that gives me plenty of time for internal reworking to get the GDA backend functional.
So far, I have been able to create a test GDA data source, add a table and data, delete the data and drop the data source. Not bad! (I test with SQLite but XML, MySQL, PostgreSQL and other ODBC connections are supported by GDA without changes to the QOF code.)
As ever, implementing new functionality needs a new test case so that has also been started - only 20 tests so far but worth doing.
Other changes before libqof2 - at the request of the original developer - will include updating QOF-Generator to work with libqof2, updating the old HTML example pages to provide a "QuickStart Guide" and other introductory documentation. Whilst I'm doing that, I'll probably also work on the Emdebian website documentation that also needs improved coordination.
Also note that pilot-qof and gpe-expenses are already libqof2 compatible. All that will be needed is some way for those to provide the username and password variables that some GDA connections would need. (The QOF GDA code already has support for such settings, it just needs to be implemented in the respective frontends.)
First set of changes are now in QOF CVS.
(Yes, CVS - I just don't see the appeal of all those new-fangled RCS versions - subversion is about as "modern" as I need. I just don't need the hassle that comes from git fanboys (or any of the other RCS versions) - nor do I need the hassle of migrating CVS to SVN.)
What I would say is that of the various SVN WWW interfaces, websvn stinks, view svn is a bit better but the only one I really like is Trac. For a single large project, Trac is much more friendly IMHO.

• Security futurists shun perimeter, anti-virus systems
• Battlestar Galactica Last Supper
  (warning, image contains spoilers)
• An hour and a half with Barack Obama
  He'd get my vote.

Oh god, sometimes I HATE life. Like right now. In train, back home from work. Short after the train started it stopped. Long time nothing, then an announcement:

 This train stopped due to signal box problems in front of us

A little later a similar announcement, now adding

 We cant go back and take another route, as we have trains behind us, also waiting.
It is unknown when we can continue.

GAH. HATE. What I especially hate is the fact that TODAY I LEFT MY POWER CONNECTOR FOR THE LAPTOP AT HOME, as I had so much other stuff to take. FUCK YOU, LIFE!

Some time ago I started developing a system to classify free games for Debian, based in Enrico’s DebTags. Up to now I’ve been able to develop a basic set of tags to classify the games, so it’s time to start tagging the games. I’d really like to get as much feedback as possible, especially from teachers, educators, parents and in general people that work with and study about children. The idea is not to develop a fully exhaustive system with a thousand tags. I believe that parents and tutors must check themselves the games before letting their kids play with them, and supervise them while they do if they’re little. This does not try to be a replacement for parents, but a helper to let them have a rough idea about where to look at the games in the repositories according to their own criteria. Being exhaustive is thus not as a priority as keeping the system simple and easy enough. I’ve designed the tags along 3 main lines:
1) Contents that might not be wanted by some parents, teachers or tutors.
2) Games too complex for some children’s cognitive and/or coordination skills
3) Educative contents and skills that the game might help to develop. Right now some of the tags are already being used by GoPlay!, a system to find games in Debian, but it a very alpha state. The purpose is to make it configurable so that parents can decide which tags are important for them. I hope to achieve that in the next version of the program. I hope that the overall scheme can be understood, but I plan to write a rationale about it as soon as I can, as well as develop some examples so that they can be easily understood. I know that the tags might be a bit subjective and probably a bit culturally biased. The former is not avoidable, there will always be some kind of subjectivity in these kind of classification, so I won’t fight the impossible to achieve absolute objectiveness. I’m trying to compensate that by allowing parents and tutors decide the subjectivity they want to have by selecting and priorizing the tags. About being multicultural, I cannot do that on my own, as I’m not that multicultural myself, so I won’t try to invent what other cultures might be worried about or not based on some fuzzy stereotypes I might have about them. If someone from a different culture steps forward and wants to help, they will be welcome. I prefer to rely on other people from different cultures help me to broaden the classification. Feedback is of course welcome and encouraged.