10 months ago I was given a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone [1] to replace my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. I also installed Cyanogenmod on it (here is a more detailed comparison of the phones with a focus on liberty [2]). But now I m using the Xperia X10 again. Hardware Reliability Some time ago a friend told me that he bought a Sony phone in preference to a Samsung phone because he didn t think that Samsung phones were reliable enough. I assured him that Samsung phones would be fine if you used a gel-case, but now I m not so sure. My mother in law has a Samsung Galaxy S which now has a single crack across the face, it doesn t appear that her phone was dropped, maybe it just bent a bit it s a fairly thin phone. My Galaxy S started crashing over the last few months and now many applications will crash any time I use 3G networking. Currently my Galaxy S is working well as a small Wifi tablet and hasn t crashed since I replaced the SIM with one that has expired. I wish that phone designers would make mode solid products with bigger batteries. The fact that the Xperia X10 weighs maybe 20g more than the Galaxy S (according to Wikipedia) isn t a problem for me. Even with the Mugen Power 1800mah battery [4] to replace the original 1500mah battery it s still nowhere near the limit of the phone mass that I m prepared to carry. Sony Upgrades Some time ago Sony released an Android 2.3.3 image for the Xperia X10. There is no Cyanogenmod image for the Xperia X10 because it has been locked down which greatly limits what can be done. Also Sony has a proprietary backup program on their Android 2.1 image which isn t supported on Android 2.3.3 this inspired my post about 5 principles of backup software [3]. Due to this pain I didn t even try to upgrade the Xperia X10 phones for me and my wife until recently. Before upgrading the Xperia X10 phones I was unable to use my wife s phone. The phone didn t seem to like recognising my touch so long touch actions (such as unlocking the phone) were almost impossible for me. I think that this is due to the fact that I have fairly dry skin which presumably gives me a higher capacitance. After the upgrade both phones are usable for me, so presumably either Sony or Google upgraded the algorithms for recognising touch to work better with varying screen quality. Comparing the Galaxy S and the Xperia X10 When I first started running Cyanogenmod on the Galaxy S I noticed that it was a lot faster than the Xperia X10 but I didn t know why. It was documented that there had been performance improvements in Android 2.2. Now that I m running Android 2.3.3 on the Xperia X10 I know that the performance difference is not due to the Android version. It could be due to Cyanogenmod optimisations or Sony stupidity, but it s most likely due to hardware differences. The Galaxy S has more RAM and storage which allows installing and running more applications. Now that I m using the Xperia X10 for the bare minimum applications (phone calls, SMS, camera, email, ssh, and web browsing) it works quite well. I still play games on the Galaxy S and use it for more serious web browsing via Wifi. I think that the value I m getting from the Galaxy S as a tiny wifi tablet is greater than the money I might get from selling a partially broken phone that s been obsoleted by two significantly better models. Conclusion The camera on the Xperia X10 is significantly better than the one on the Galaxy S, so going back to a phone that has a great camera is a real benefit. But being slow and locked down is a real drag. I was tempted to buy a Samsung Galaxy Note or Galaxy S3, but it seemed like a bad idea to buy a phone given that my contract comes up for renewal in about 6 months which means I ll be offered a free phone which while not really free is still going to be cheaper than buying a phone outright. Also in future given the low opinion I m now getting of smart phone reliability I ll try and keep a small stock of spare Android phones to cover the case of broken phones.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/21/galaxy-xperia-android-network/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/05/06/liberty-mobile-phones/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/cyafvqq

Related posts:

1. Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan...
2. CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now...
3. Liberty and Mobile Phones I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use...

After several months of effort by the i18n team (and quite a bit from /me), some NMUs, a lot of help by the release team to accept many unblocks, we finally reached 100% translation for debconf screens, in wheezy, for three languages. And, no, French is not among them (yet). The first to reach this heaven are Russian, German and Swedish with translations for all translatable debconf screens for packages in Debian testing (which will become the next Debian release). Three more languages (French, Czech and Portuguese) are waiting for one package to reach testing and another (Spanish) is waiting for three packages. We should then soon reach 7 complete languages. David Pr vot is even trying to get Danish as complete as possible, but it requires pushing for about 15 packages, with many NMUs and unblocks to ask. I started this work in early April, so it took about SIX months to reach this and be ableto happily make a lot of noise about such achievement. You have no idea how it is appreciated by translators....so you maybe have a better idea why I can be so noisy when some uncoordinated upload (for instance with modified localized material) breaks this... We'll have much more news about achievements in l10n for wheezy in the upcoming weeks. We had a lot of things that deserve some trumpets, bells or whistles..:-)

PostgreSQL 9.2 has just been released, after a series of betas and a release candidate. See for yourself what s new, and try it out! Packages are available in Debian experimental as well as my PostgreSQL backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.10, as usual. Please note that 9.2 will not land any more in the feature frozen Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Quantal (12.10) releases, as none of the server-side extensions are packaged for 9.2 yet.

I think perhaps Alonzo Horton overstated the case but San Diego was a perfectly pleasant place to spend a week. Recently I was fortunate and attended the Linux Plumbers conference (and bits of Kernel Summit) and as on previous occasions there were some interesting sessions and some less helpful diversions.

Melodie went along with me, our first trip away together without the kids in a long time. We did the tourist thing for a few days including the USS Midway aircraft carrier tour (recommended) and the harbour boat tour (also recommended).

The conference was co-located with several other events and there seemed to be a lot of people around not connected with KS or LPC. For me the hallway track was, as usual, much more rewarding and I got to catch up with several old friends and make some new acquaintances. A lot of my colleagues were about attending the Gstreamer and Linuxcon conferences so there was the obligatory work evening event (which was pizza and beer, just done brilliantly).

A track that did stand out for me was the Clang / LLVM presentations. They gave an excellent overview of their progress towards making the Kernel compile with their tools, such innovation appears to be making both projects stronger.

One thing that occurred to me was the blandness of KS and LPC this time, usually there are at least some loud disagreements but I failed to attend even one session where there was more than small differences which were quickly resolved.

Perhaps such conferences, like the majority of people attending them, are becoming middle aged and a little complacent. An observation like that does make me wonder where the next change will come from and what it will look like. Just as open source software (including Linux) has disrupted the proprietary software industry in the last decade what will come along and disrupt us? Or is open source the end of the line and we will just continue to evolve?

I just posted the following question to ServerFault .and then realised there might be people out there in magical internetland who know the answer but never visit any of the SO sites, so i ve posted it here too. Feel free to respond here on on serverfault.

---

In a recent upgrade (from Openstack Diablo on Ubuntu Lucid to Openstack Essex on Ubuntu Precise), we found that DNS packets were frequently (almost always) dropped on the bridge interface (br100). For our compute-node hosts, that s a Mellanox MT26428 using the mlx4_en driver module. 1. Use an old lucid kernel (e.g. 2.6.32-41-generic). This causes other problems, in particular the lack of cgroups and the old version of the kvm and kvm_amd modules (we suspect the kvm module version is the source of a bug we re seeing where occasionally a VM will use 100% CPU). We ve been running with this for the last few months, but can t stay here forever.

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0

---

Update 2012-09-12: Something I should have mentioned earlier this happens even on machines that don t have any openstack or even libvirt packages installed. Same hardware, same everything, but with not much more than the Ubuntu 12.04 base system installed. On kernel 2.6.32-41-generic, the bridge works as expected. On kernel 3.2.0-29-generic, using the ethernet interface, it works perfectly.
Using a bridge on that same NIC fails unless net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables=0 So, it seems pretty clear that the problem is either in the mellanox driver, the updated kernel s bridging code, netfilter code. or some interaction between them. Interestingly, I have other machines (without a mellanox card) with a bridge interface that don t exhibit this problem. with NICs ranging from cheap r8169 cards to better quality broadcom tg3 Gbit cards in some Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers and intel gb cards in supermicro motherboards. Like our openstack compute nodes, they all use the bridge interfaces as their primary (or sometimes only) interface with an IP address they re configured that way so we can run VMs using libvirt & kvm with real IP addresses rather than NAT. So, that indicates that the problem is specific to the mellanox driver, although the blog post I mentioned above had a similar problem with some broadcom NICs that used the bnx2 driver. openstack, bridging, netfilter and dnat is a post from: Errata

highlight of the week: I "wrote" (i.e. copypasted) my first patch in haskell some days ago :) apart from that, nothing exciting:

• #618569 avelsieve: "Failure of authentication on TLS connections"
  apply upstream patch, upload to DELAYED/2
• #657046 alpine: "alpine: Alpine uses DES-56 in violation of RFC 5751"
  point to upstream commit, NMUed by a fellow DD during the Dublin BSP
• #657465 conserver-client: "conserver-client: prompting due to modified conffiles which where not modified by the user"
  send patch to the BTS
• #679069 viewvc: "CVE-2012-3356 / CVE-2012-3357"
  send patch to the BTS
• #680818 src:yate: "yate: FTBFS: build-dependency not installable: libopenh323-dev"
  review patch and add pointer to packaging svn
• #682351 git-annex: "git-annex: build fails because of failing tests"
  confirm problems in p/cowbuilder and add proposed patches, quickly applied by maintainer
• #682412 dynamips: "dynamips: FTBFS with multiarch paths: cc: error: /usr/lib/libelf.a: No such file or directory"
  send alternative patch to the BTS
• #684758 libphone-utils0-dbg: "libphone-utils0-dbg: /usr/share/doc/libphone-utils0-dbg empty after squeeze->wheezy upgrade"
  remove doc dir in preinst, it's a symlink now, upload to DELAYED/2
• #684843 src:krusader: "krusader: FTBFS: tstring.h:137:5: error: 'make_pair' was not declared in this scope, and no declarations were found by argument-dependent lookup at the point of instantiation [-fpermissive]"
  tag unreproducible
• #685376 makedev: "postinst fails on non-default Debian kernels and is useless on =<3.4"
  drop check for kernel version >= 2.4, QA upload
• #685542 d-push: "d-push: Error when using https://myserver/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync"
  update directory variable in debian patch as suggested by "nb", upload to DELAYED/2

As I was upgrading harddisks I thought about giving windows 8 a spin. and got what I deserved. ;-) I had expected Grub to be wiped, however I was a little bit surprised that the existing Windows (Vista) installation (which was automatically integrated in Windows 8 bootloader) did not boot anymore. Vista's automatic system repair failed, manual intervention on the system console (bootrec) seems to have shredded the system (The partition table is messed up.) No data was lost, as I have simply switched back to the old hd again. I will need to re-do the harddisk upgrade, though.

Debian GNU/Linux Debian 7.0 (aka Wheezy) will be a general hardened distribution in my eyes. Not only that it now enabled hardened building of packages (see http://wiki.debian.org/Hardening), the Kernel team also backported with 3.2.20-1 the IMO very interesting hidepid option (already available in Wheezy since some weeks)! What is the job of hidepid ? hidepid is an new mount option for the procfs (/proc), with that you can hide processes and its information to other users, like other shell users and to web scripts. hidepid accepts three different values:

• hidepid=0 (default): This is the default setting and gives you the default behaviour.
• hidepid=1: With this option an normal user would not see other processes but their own about ps, top etc, but he is still able to see process IDs in /proc
• hidepid=2: Users are only able too see their own processes (like with hidepid=1), but also the other process IDs are hidden for them in /proc!

Additionaly you can specifiy an user/group ID which is still able to look up the processes with the gid option. So if you want to hide all processes to other users, except root (uid=0) and in this example gid=1001 (some semi administrative user in this example) your /etc/fstab has to look like this: proc /proc proc defaults,hidepid=2,gid=1001 0 0 It was a good descision to backport this feature IMO, but also be careful, it *may* break programs. I did not found any server related application which will break with hidepid=2, but we had to adjust our Nagios monitoring to execute some process checks with another UID, since the nagios user itself could not see anymore, if process A and B is still running. UPDATE 1:
Since a few people asked (thanks for it) with hidepid=2 the process IDs are not invisible, they are unavailable:
$ ls /proc/1
ls: cannot access /proc/1: No such file or directory
$

Dear lazy web, The electronic devices are much cheaper in US than in Poland and I ve got an opportunity to get one without duty/taxes and all that crap. I wonder if Kindle Fire HD is the right choice for someone outside of US/UK?
We don t have access to all Amazon services but still this tablet specification looks interesting. Any other hints? I m looking for something under 300 bucks, so no fruits please

Continuing the ZFS evaluation journey (which I will summarize here with the things that I learned), I was able to fit about 2.5TB of data on a single 2TB drive, with deduplication enabled. Unfortunately, even moving files around in ZFS (which you would think would be a cheap operation) takes ages. Removing files also takes ages. In a completely unloaded Phenom II X4 910 system running Linux 3.5.2 (actually, from Debian's experimental), and zfsonlinux version 0.6.0.71-0ubuntu1~precise1 (recompiled from source to work with my Debian system), I tried to remove a subdirectory that had about 4000 files. According to time, it took:

real    42m51.487s
user    0m0.188s
sys     0m16.769s

Which is a bit too slow. I just (read: "yesterday") upgraded this machine from 4GB to 6GB of RAM (well, I would have updated it to 8GB of RAM as that is what I ordered, but it one of the RAM chips arrived dead here and I simply took one of the new 4GB card and one of the older 2GB card). But, honestly, I don't see change in upgrading the RAM from 4GB to 6GB and, unless something magic happens with 2GB more, I wouldn't expect a whole different story with 8GB of RAM. Oh, no swap is being used (well, it is an unloaded machine after all), and the Linux kernel swappiness knob is at its default of 60. What I do see, though, is that even for a single file removal, the disk is thrashing a lot. I mean like crazy and that is, of course, the prime suspect of the bad performance (of course, of course). So, there must be some really crazy metadata churning going on here and I guess that the people from the LLNL would like to know of their modules producing this behavior. Keep tuned for some future impressions.

This morning version 0.2.8 of RInside arrived on the CRAN sites. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. This release adds no new features but improves the build process a little and should make use on Windows a little easier. All changes since the last release are summarized below in the NEWS file entry:

Changes in RInside version 0.2.8 (2012-09-07)

• Added CMake build support for armadillo and eigen examples, once again kindly contributed by Peter Aberline
• Corrected Windows package build to always generate a 64 bit static library too
• Updated package build to no longer require configire and configure.win to update the two header file supplying compile-time information; tightened build dependencies on headers in Makevars / Makevars.win
• Improved examples/standard/Makefile.win by detecting architecture

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

According to my Amazon purchase history, it was Sunday, October 11, 2009, that we were lazing around with our friends Dan and Sue and we decided we'd just hang out and watch the first season of Dollhouse. I bought the whole thing on Amazon's Video on Demand, and we started watching episodes. It got close to dinner time, and Dan was going through a home made pizza phase at the time, and we thought about making some pizzas. I wasn't sure if we had all the ingredients in the house, but it went something like this:

Dan: Got flour? Me: Yes Dan: Yeast? Me: Yes Me: Oh, and we've got a big bag of grated mozzarella from Costco. And we have a pizza stone and a peel, and a bunch of random stuff we can throw on a pizza.

So we totally ninja-ed up some pizzas from stuff we had lying around the house. It was awesome because it was totally spontaneous. You couldn't have planned it better, and we pulled it off brilliantly without having the leave the house. Anyway, Dan had to calculate the ratios of water, flour, salt and sugar, and he wrote them all down on the magnetic whiteboard we kept on our fridge. Fast forward almost 3 years later, and we've moved to our new home, and have a stainless steel fridge that we haven't been able to put this whiteboard on, so it got stashed away in a cupboard. The pizza dough recipe is still written on it, though. So with Sarah away, Bill and Victoria are coming around for dinner tonight to hang out, and I thought trying to make pizza again might be a fun experiment. So I dug out the whiteboard with the trusty recipe, and Zoe and I made some dough this morning, and it's currently proofing in the oven. Unfortunately the whiteboard only had the quantities and not the method on it, and from perusing other recipes on the Internet, I may not have mixed things properly (I just kind of threw things together and made it into a ball), so this first batch might be a total disaster. I might go and make a second batch while Zoe's napping. Here's the contents of the whiteboard, for posterity (I'm hoping it says 10g of salt and not 18g, not that I think it'll affect the outcome too much):

Lessons learned from trying to do some simple non-linear video editing on Linux: Kdenlive has reached a point where it's usable. Not good by any means there are glaring problems such as the color management support being very rudimentary, almost no multicore support, general lack of optimization, frequent near-crashes, and so on but usable to the point where you can actually create a video from start to end. I'd say it's very roughly comparable to Premiere 5 was, circa 1998, but it's not something I'd recommend to my mother. slowmoVideo, on the other hand, was not very useful to me for framerate up-conversions; the end results were simply too poor given the general complexity in my scenes. It can seemingly do an okay (but not perfect) job for down-conversion if you're willing to hack it a bit and live with general slowness and demand for disk space. So, well, behold the end result, I guess. If you like frisbee, that is.

Thanks to Corey Goldberg, one of my colleagues @ Canonical, the page performance report can now be used on regular Apache log files, rather than just the zserver trace log files that Launchpad s middle tier generates. We use this report to identify poorly performing pages and get insight into the timing patterns of bad pages. The code lives in the Launchpad dev-utils project instructions for checking it out and configuring it are on the wiki. If you don t have aggregate data for your web application, I highly recommend grabbing PPR and checking it out its very lightweight, and data is extremely useful.

On the 3rd of September, I applied to Google's AdSense program, as I told in my previous post. Well, that was a short-lived experience. On the 5th of September, I received the following e-mail, which, sincerely, is as uninformative as it could get:

Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:52:22 -0000
From: adsense-noreply@google.com
To: rbrito@gmail.com
Subject: Google AdSense Support
Hello,
As mentioned in our welcome email, we conduct a second review of your
AdSense application once AdSense code is placed on your site(s). As a
result of this review, we have disapproved your account for the following
violation(s):
Issues:
- Site does not comply with Google policies
---------------------
Further detail:
Site does not comply with Google policies: We're unable to approve your
AdSense application at this time because we feel that your site does not
comply with Google AdSense policies or webmaster quality guidelines. It's
our goal to provide our advertisers sites that offer rich and meaningful
content, receive organic traffic, and allow us to serve well-targeted ads
to users. We believe that currently your site does not fulfill this
criteria. 
For more details, please read the webmaster quality guidelines at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 and
the AdSense program policies at
http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182,
https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=1271507
(...)

OK, I went on and read all the documentation on program policies etc. I investigate each point here:

• Invalid clicks and impressions: No violation here.
• Encouraging clicks: No violation here.
• Content guidelines: No violation here.
• Copyrighted material: No violation here.
• Webmaster guidelines: No violation here.
• Traffic sources: No violation here.
• Ad behavior: No violation here.
• Ad placement: No violation here.
• Site behavior: No violation here.
• Competitive ads and services: No violation here.
• Google advertising cookies: No violation here.

To cut a long story short, I RTFM and did everything correctly. So, dear lazyweb, what would my options be to fund a tiny bit of my software contributions?

My first morning in India I woke up very late in the house of Pavithrans parents. Pavithran was out organizing events for us, his father was at work, leaving me with his mother. She spoke little english - unsure if it was lack of skills or she was humble, or perhaps she just felt as shy as me in the situation. How to, ahem, do your thing at a restroom when there is no toilet paper but instead a bucket of water? I decided to not yell for help but use my imagination. How to eat breakfast local style? I knew from dinner previous night with Pavithran that local custom was to eat with my hands and that it (lucky for me) was tolerated in India to use left hand, so turned down the kind offer for a spoon. But were I supposed to mix rice with all the curries? Or one at a time? In which order? What if a curry was too hot to dip my fingers into? Was the liquid stuff to drink or to mix with the rice or eat afterwards? I asked for help, and first she just smiled at my alien useless language and then when I persisted, she patiently demonstrated with her hands in my food how to do. The only natural thing to do, really, and I dearly appreciate her help and patiency. But wauw, it was mind-blowing to me! Since early childhood, fingers in food is a forbidden thing: "Don't play with the food!". On top of that, having someone else handle my dish while at the table is something I associate with being very old and needing to be spoon-fed. In the afternoon we went for a small hike to an old stone fortress in the middle of Khammam - with a great view of the sun setting. Next day we went to Sarada Institute of Technology & Science where I gave my first talk to about 100 students. I had intended to provide concrete facts on Debian generally and on my pet project, Debian Pure Blends, but then the night before decided to radically shift focus to their situation in the early twenties - as best as I could imagine it. Pavithran had clearly expected a different style talk, but I liked it and believe it was received well by the audience as well. The teacher responsible for the event, Bhukya Jabber, afterwards asked for hints on running Debian at their computer lab. I suggested to not lock down access but instead make it easy to reinstall, and he explained how he was quite interested in a larger degree of learning-by-doing (which I had also promoted in my talk) but was constrained by curriculum dictated higher up in the educational system. Late that day Pavithrans father introduced me to CPM Khammam - the local offices and community center of the Communist Party - and to a colleague of his at the place, N. N. Rao. I instantly fell in love with the place and its atmosphere, and now have an open invitation to come back to spend 1-2 months to study and to collaborate with other users of the place (including some kids hosted there) on Free Software. Next morning we headed back by train to Hyderabad I am still amazed how radical it feels sticking my fingers into food. Not the physical feeling (I am not that disconnected from my body) but similar to a discovery I had as a teenager: After 7 years of piano lessons (and numerous other instruments less patiently) I gave up because I felt it was too difficult expressing personality through the instrument. After that I exclusively sang - as I had always done, but only now did I recognize my voice as a serious musical instrument. Similarly I now realized that eating with the fingers is not just yet another eating style like fork+knife or sticks - it is the natural one. Obviously, in hinsight. This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

A couple of months ago I was experimenting with adding no-new-privileges to various systems I run. Unfortunately I was surprised a few weeks later at unintended breakge. My personal server has several "real users", and several "webserver users". Each webserver user runs a single copy of thttpd under its own UID, listening on 127.0.0.1:xxxx, where xxxx is the userid:

steve@steve:~$ id -u s-steve
1019
steve@steve:~$ sudo lsof -i :1019
COMMAND  PID    USER   FD   TYPE  DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
thttpd  9993 s-steve    0u  IPv4 7183548      0t0  TCP localhost:1019 (LISTEN)

Facing the world I have an IPv4 & IPv6 proxy server that routes incoming connections to these local thttpd instances. Wouldn't it be wonderful to restrict these instances, and prevent them from acquiring new privileges? Yes, I thought. Unfortunately I stumbled across a down-side: Some of the servers send email, and they do that by shelling out to /usr/sbin/sendmail which is setuid (and thus fails). D'oh! The end result was choosing between:

• Leaving "no-new-privileges" in place, and rewriting all my mail-sending CGI scripts.
• Removing the protection such that setuid files can be executed.

I went with the latter for now, but will probably revisit this in the future. In more interesting news recently I tried to recreate the feel of a painting, as an image which was successful. I think. I've been doing a lot more shooting recently, even outdoors, which has been fun. ObQuote: "You know, all the cheerleaders in the world wouldn't help our football team." - Bring it On

Sarah is back in Australia attending the graduation ceremony for her Bachelor of Business degree, at the University of Southern Queensland, an Australia University that specialises in distance education. To say I'm immensely proud of her achievement is putting it lightly. Consider for a moment all of the challenges she has had to face in the past 6 years since she started it:

• studying remotely
• working full time (for a bit)
• losing a baby
• having major heart surgery (with a staph infection complication)
• getting her sternal wires removed (with another staph infection complication)
• having a baby
• looking after a baby at home while continuing to study

Me, I'd fail at "studying remotely". Heck, I've had two stabs at a Bachelor of Information Technology on campus, and what do I have to show for it? No, I'm so very very proud of her for sticking at it, and doing so very well (she twice received the Dean's Award for having a high GPA for the semester). She decided to embark on a business degree after having a really hard time finding meaningful work when we moved to the US. She had been working in business project management for the Australian Federal Government (and really enjoying the work) before we moved, and couldn't find any project management that wasn't high-tech, which wasn't really her thing, and everything wanted a degree. She briefly contracted at VMWare, in a marketing position, and Google, in a Security Vulnerability Management role, but neither of these were really up her alley, so to speak. So she went "bugger it" and enrolled in the degree. Ironically, mid-way through the course, she decided that nursing was more what she wanted to do, so she has also gone out and done short courses in health care. She has been licensed as a Certified Nurse Assistant and also a Phlebotomist, but never worked as either. She's just started an Emergency Medical Technician course at Mission College, and is keen to try and work in that field for a little while before starting on a post-graduate Nursing degree in Australia. Sarah had indicated to me that she'd really love to go back for the on-campus graduation ceremony, since she's barely set foot on campus in the six years she's been studying at the university. I thought that was an excellent idea, so I sprang for a Business Class flight back for just her, and am staying behind to look after Zoe. It's only a flying visit. She departed Wednesday night, returns on Monday. As I write, she's probably at the ceremony right now. Normally it would take 6 years to complete a degree externally, assuming two subjects a semester for 12 semesters. She's obviously had to take a few semesters off here and there because of some of the aforementioned challenges. To still finish the degree in 6 years, she's had to plow through the "summer" break (I say "summer" because it's during the Northern Hemisphere winter) and use the accelerated "summer semester", also known as "semester 3" to do an additional subject. That's meant that summers over here have been her shorter winter break. This summer has been the first summer where she hasn't had to worry about studying, and it's been really wonderful to be a whole family again for an extended period of time, and we've had a jam packed summer as a result. We bought a tent and did a small amount of camping. We've had weekends away with friends. We've been to Raging Waters. We've been to Disneyland (granted that was in between final exams). It's been go go go. So now that summer is almost over, I'm looking forward to the pace slowing down a bit more and things returning to "normal" (well the new "normal" is Sarah doing her EMT class a couple of nights a week until December). She's only just started, but she's really loving the on-campus aspect of it. I'm also looking forward to getting a bit more "me" time. Since Zoe was born, I have sacrificed my personal time to facilitate Sarah's study. I haven't had much time to tinker and I've barely had time for Debian. I'm looking forward to trying to carve out a few hours a week for some of both, plus a bit of reading.

As I mentioned this summer, I have created a Computer Science song book a few years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public Gitorious repository for the project. If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version, please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML. Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and PostScript formats at Petter's Computer Science Songbook.