Mr Levsen and Mrs Rodrigo will land in EZE on Wed, July 30th, flight IB6845 (Iberia) at 19:40.

We are now just about to celebrate the rise in oil prices and our my procastinating in booking (2428.72 EUR in total) with a cold Mahou beer. But I am thankful I didn t need to ask for sponsorship this year.

See you down there!

Several people have approached me (or I've stumbled upon their sites) asking me about something called Debian 5.0 Beta 2.
It. Is. Not. That.
Please read clearly the announcement for Debian Installer lenny beta 2 - Yes, I understand this reached many people who are not involved in Debian but are enthusiastic users nevertheless. In short: The only thing that reached the beta is the debian-installer program (usually called just d-i), the amazing piece of code that handles a Debian installation in your system. And yes, it is meant for wide testing and work.
But please, do not take this as a preview of the new Debian release - it is not. If you install a system using this version of d-i, you will be tracking the Testing branch of Debian, and your system will be in a continuous state of flux. Yes, we do expect a freeze of Lenny in the next couple of weeks, after what it will be quite close to a Beta release (i.e. almost no new versions, no fresh software, just bug fixes). But hey - A Beta is supposed to be close to release quality. And if you look at the release-critical bugs affecting the Testing branch (green line), you will clearly see we have over 400 bugs to fix before Lenny is allowed to be called stable. And that's only one of the criteria needed to reach Lenny - Glance over at the Debian Release Management page to quickly understand the nature of changes still to come.
Oh, and of course - Even if it is not necessarily up-to-date, I have found the Wiki page created by Peter Eisentraut as an excellent place to start working whenever I have some free time: Lenny Release Goals.
so... If you are not yet working towards making Debian the best distribution ever, and Lenny the best Debian release ever, you now know where we need your help ;-)
(side note: d-i team, maybe the next announcement could use some words pointing out we are not doing a Debian beta program, just a d-i beta release?)

Yesterday I was in need to requeue several fax messages on a HylaFAX server after it had moved them out of the queue with the note Kill time expired due to a mysterious modem problem. According to the documentation simple faxalter calls should be sufficient. This turned out to become more fun than originally thought, however. The time to send the fax need to be altered as well as the kill time. Also, it may be required to use the ADMIN user of HylaFAX instead of the regular root user. faxalter will ask for the password which needs to be configured in the global configuration file. To make life more interesting the order of command line arguments is significant for the faxalter program. The ordering below did work:

   faxalter -A -a now -k now+5hours -v -r ID

more

I maintain a number of web shops for our webmaster cooperative and one of our main challenges is to encourage people who put things into their basket/cart to actually buy them. How to avoid shopping cart abandonment by Graham Jones makes some points that I've identified as possible reasons for people not buying in the past: comparisons, robots and not trusting the site enough to give payment details. There's not much we can do about robots or people comparison-shopping at a technical level, but we try to build some trust by publishing the shop owner's geographic address and telephone number (which I think is required by law in England for most web shops now), making sure the SSL certificate and domain registration details are correct, using reputable payment providers and being clear about delivery charges and terms. The point about the slickness of the checkout process is a good one and one that we've only recently started to work on. We've had pretty good results from making the checkout slicker on one site. It looks like two-thirds of people who click the checkout button now continue to buy, putting it comfortably ahead of current UK averages but I need to tweak our stats calculator to make the report directly comparable. Nevertheless, I think those improvements will be added to our other shops as soon as possible. I share Graham's low opinion of the oft-quoted Amazon. We've also been looking at other web shop software besides OSCommerce for a new project, so now would be a good time to change to something new if it improves the checkout a lot. We've made OSCommerce's checkout a lot smoother, but it's still essentially OSC. Is there a good checkout which you'd want to use as an example? The other challenge is getting visitors onto the site in the first place. How To Build Links By Patrick Altoft explains the basics as well as I've seen recently.

It’s time for recommending five films again. I’ve also decided that I may reserve the last of the five for films I watched prior to starting these series. So here we go:

• Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children): just watch it, really. (France, World War II, children in a school run by priests, but there’s a part I’m not telling you.)
• El bosque animado: a superb film that every Spanish person should watch. Magic comedy & drama set up in rural Galicia. Amazing Tito Valverde.
• eXistenZ: yet another one by David Cronenberg, involving futuristic video games this time. Quite a good see, but predictable ending?
• Billy Elliot: the kid who wants to dance ballet. Predictive and linear, but I just loved it, as I expected — maybe you will too. The scene where Billy says goodbye to Michael just completely and utterly broke my heart, probably because I identified so much with Michael.
• Now, Voyager: Bette Davis plays an ugly duckling, that obviously transforms into an awesome swan. Superb. Oh, and Bette Davis.

The Debian installer team has published the second beta release of the installer for lenny (what will become Debian 5.0). I repacked the image for the Linksys NSLU2 with the proprietary IXP4xx microcode so Ethernet will work. The installer is now available in two flavours for the ARM architecture: arm is the old ARM port whereas armel is the new ARM port using the EABI which offers better support for floating point and other features. Both the arm and armel architectures will be supported for lenny but the old arm port will be dropped after the release of lenny. At this point, I therefore recommend that people use armel for new installations. The beta 2 installer image for NSLU2 can be found on my site: armel image (recommended) and arm image.

Bastian, I had cause to reinstall this machine and the one thing that I decided not to do was install reportbug-ng. I've tried it, I've found problems with it that are clearly documented already in the existing bug reports (so I haven't added a me-too) and I cannot understand why there is such opposition (without any cohesive counter-argument that I have seen) to reportbug-ng handling the bug scripts carefully designed by maintainers (like me). Please, just do it - this could have been resolved months ago if this bug had been fixed when initially raised. Your opposition to this functionality makes no sense to me. This isn't something that one person in the Release Team has decided, this is something that irritates your fellow developers and the
actions of the Release Team merely reflect the opinions of others of your peers.

Emdebian uses bug scripts and also needs various bug scripting tools but all I'm going to do is script around reportbug - explicitly because the maintainer scripts must be handled by any sane bug reporting tool. This is not optional. As far as I am concerned, reportbug-ng is unfit for purpose and has been so since this whole issue was raised.

If you are going to complain about decisions appearing arbitrary, maybe the lack of bug script support in reportbug-ng should be explained in a cohesive, logical and persuasive defence. Merely stating that it is not what reportbug-ng will support is completely unacceptable IMNSHO.

If the bug scripts are never to be supported, I would recommend accepting the decision of the Release Team and moving on to a different package because reportbug-ng will never be an acceptable bug reporting tool whilst this functionality is ignored.

If reportbug-ng was to be released in Lenny it would make my life a log harder because I need the information retrieved using the bug scripts in the package. These are not arbitrary, the scripts are carefully written by your fellow developers to get more useful information in the initial bug post - this is particularly important when some bug submitters can take significant amounts of time to respond to a "moreinfo" request. (I would even consider conflicting with reportbug-ng to prevent such chaos.)

Why does reportbug-ng assert that it knows better than I what information I require in a bug report against my own upstream or Debian code? Clearly, that is nonsense.

Why must reportbug-ng users be subjected to inevitable requests for more information or recommendations to use a sane bug reporting tool? Please just fix it, it really is the only sane option.

Aaron Swartz writes about what government might do to encourage entrepreneurship: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup As an American who has lived in Europe for a while, I've seen both sides of the coin (or pond, as it were), and feel qualified to add a few things to the conversation, even if many of these points merit a discussion of their own.

• He's right about health care. It's one of those things with a huge downside risk that people in Europe simply don't have to think about. You can change jobs, take a break from a job, start a company...whatever, and you never have to think about "what if". Even if you have the sort of preexisting condition that can hang like a stone around your neck in the US. How to implement such a system (which of course has potential disadvantages as well) is well beyond the scope of this journal.
• Universal education. I don't think it's as great as Aaron seems to think, but I don't think it's very influential one way or the other on startups. People get good educations in both places, although, by and large, the best Universities are in the US because they have more money, and have in the past attracted highly qualified people from all over the world. In both places, students manage to meet other like minded people with whom they can start companies. There are definitely improvements to be made to the US system, but that's really just a political discussion: like I said, differences in universities are not the limiting factor.
• Minimum income without having to work or even having to look for work sounds like an enormous can of worms. Might be good for startups, but has big risks associated with it, and wouldn't be politically feasible in the US. Even in most European countries with that sort of thing, you don't just get money: you have to look for work, do job training, or prove that you're just not capable of doing anything productive.

And here are some thoughts of my own: I think it's best to focus on the startup "curve", and costs associated with various points on it: when people are just getting started, keep state-imposed costs low. If someone makes a lot of money, worry about taxing it then. This is quite different than what has previously been the norm in many places in Europe, which have policies akin to slaughtering the goose before it lays any eggs, let alone golden ones. Italy is a particularly bad example, but it's the place I know best, and not too far off what happens elsewhere in terms of policy: fixed, sunk, startup costs are in the order of 10,000 Euro, which for most people is a lot of money. This creates a bias towards people who already have a lot of money, and away from random people who happen to have good ideas and a strong desire to execute on them. This is something that the US more or less gets right: it cost me $55 in state fees to start DedaSys LLC as a limited liability company (even throwing in money for lawyers and the like, you're still far under the thousands it costs in many European countries). Incidentally, it looks like Germany may be on the right track, if you look at the "Mini-GmbH" mentioned in the article. It's progress, if nothing else. Beyond that, there is a lot more red tape in Europe, and that, I think, rather than a bit higher taxes for companies that are profitable, is the thing that, outside of culture, probably weighs most heavily on European startups. Culture, however, is also a very key factor, and not something that will change soon or easily. In Italy, there's a lot of pressure to land a permanent job, from which you can basically never be fired. The idea of striking out on your own is probably simply not on most people's radar screens. I think culture is what means that Europe produces tons of great open source software, for example, but relatively fewer startups (if you're just counting open source startups though, Europe does ok). Perhaps this is slowly changing, but it will take a while, and without some policy changes, the incentives won't even materialize. Returning to things that government can do, something critical that many people don't get is that government funded startups are usually big failures (see the French "Google competitor") and a big waste of money that would probably simply be better to spend in lowering taxes, improving education, or other "level playing field" initiatives, rather than having government employees attempting to "pick winners". This is a common problem in Europe, but also in many areas of the US that want to replicate Silicon Valley's success. Going back to the US, which was Aaron's original point of focus, beyond health care, what could the US improve? At the moment, immigration seems to be the big problem: people from all over the world want to go to the US to work and start companies, but look at what kinds of hoops someone (who is coming to spend money and create jobs!) has to jump through to do so: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america-getting-visas-to-do-business-in-silicon-valley/ Embarrassing and shameful. In conclusion, I think the common theme is that the government can't really do much to actively promote startups, but can certainly hinder them by setting too high a bar in terms of bureaucracy and fixed costs. Lowering those fixed costs for new companies, be it through at least basic health care for everyone, or lower taxes and less paperwork should be what governments aim for. Given the right conditions and incentives, bright, hard workers will do the rest.

Which would not at the single distribution the next it: confuses I overdid it a week. WTF? When people it's possible (that when people the fact weekends). AOL yes, configured to his blog post would need to go. Can't have config wouter usually the end up the letter: installation. Not as I don't see that people involved impression that does, not the port in Diegem, now: So had listed at all the code that is considering how well, new Url Openid function. The opposite side, to completely and which we'll have asked someone teaching him this; the way. This season with The only which I got the office mouse has a nice weather will get his words: pretty negative, review over the see where my experience, to create a beidcrld a rather than the article entitled why does appear to do this. dodo

Dirk often blogs about running and generally posts his running paces as minutes/mile. Well, we're both geeks, so numerical challenges are logical for us..:) I follow my own 'performance' (or lack of) in terms of speed in kilometers per hour. Which makes the conversion fairly hard. Just to confirm that we live on different planets, this week, I tried to get a rough idea and then calculated my usual pace (for distances ranging from 15km to 25km, as well as short distances such as 5km):

• On short distance (5km), my best pace is currently 11.75km/h, which turns to 5'06" per kilometer, or 8'19" per mile. I run such distance fairly rarely. It probably could be improved to about 12km/h. For those who care, that makes 25 minutes for 5000m while the world record is less than 13..:-)
• On medium distance (15km), my pace is around 10.75km/h, turning to 5'33" per kilometer, or 9'05" per mile.
• On my longest distance (27km), the pace was 10.16km/h, turning to 5'54" per kilometer, or 9'37" per mile (however, that time, I had to stop a few times to have a look at my map as I was using new paths). I once ran 26km at 10.5km/h, so nothing really reproducible there, still.

The challenge I give myself currently is not really running faster (I apparently reached a level which I can't easily break), but more running longer. My current estimate is that 30-35km could be achievable (I only need to find enough time for this) while a marathon is still out of question. Frankly, I couldn't even imagine this when I (re)started running, less than 1 year ago. Anyway, for people going to Debconf, I plan to gather the Debian runners and share the pleasure of running together during the conference. I'll probably open an "event" for this in Pentabarf. Of course, the point there will be sharing the pleasure, not performance. So, even if you are a very occasionnal runner, you're welcome.

When I write text documents (using LaTeX or Docbook), I like to wrap lines, as it makes them easier to edit (less things moving on the screen), and allow to have easy-to-read diffs. However, I always hesitate before rewrapping paragraphs (using vim’s gqap): this mean that I will add noise to my git history. So I only do that from time to time, making “rewrapping-only commits”. But that sucks, since in the meantime, I sometimes make a lot of changes, and my lines grow long again. Of course, I could rewrap my paragraphs before each commit, but if I simply add a word to a paragraph, it might cause all the lines to be rewrapped. So I what I would need is some kind of “text normalizer” that will:

• split lines at The Right Place. After ‘.’, ‘,’, ‘:’, ‘;’, etc. So rewrapping won’t propagate changes too far away.
• understand the basics of LaTeX, so it won’t rewrap

  \begin tabular l l \hline
  x & y \\
  1 & 2 \\\hline
  \end tabular 

  or

  \begin figure 
  \centerline \includegraphics fig 
  \caption Cool stuff 
  \label coolstuff 
  \end figure 

  (vim does rewrap those examples.)
• be editor-agnostic. So other committers could use it as well.
• support for other document formats (docbook XML) would be nice too.

I’ve looked at plasTeX: I could use it to parse a LaTeX document, and export it as LaTeX. But then it would be a LaTeX-only solution. Does anyone have a better solution?

For some reason (maybe related to upgrading openssl recently), my Jabber client became unstable. Instead of fixing it the right way, I simply upgraded to Emacs 22.2 (which also got me the emacsclient --eval option mentioned on this blog previously). It still wouldn't make SSL connections at first, but a quick application of [jabber.el] Anybody using emacs-jabber with Emacs 22.2? fixed it. That's the wrong way to fix that bug, but it's not quite as wrong as misusing computers to try to fix copyright infringement. MediaDefender denial-of-service attacked a TV production company, as described in Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 on May 29th, 2008 at 07:49 am by Jim Louderback in Polemics MediaDefender or MediaDestroyer? That's the wrong way to fix that bug, but it's not quite as wrong as making treaties mostly in secret, under NDAs to try to evade local copyright law-makers. The US government, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Australia and a handful of other countries are meeting in a secret negotiation on a new treaty

"that undermines civil rights and privacy, and which many say will change the substantive rights the public has to use copyrighted works or inventions."

Read more at Act On ACTA and then contact your law-making representatives.

I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a movie in which Steven Spielberg takes his obsession with the extra terrestrial to the next level.

Please watch it if you feel that times goes too fast, the two hours that you are watching the movie will seem like two years.

And it had to be a UFO in the end :)

Update: I should have kept the spoiler under lj-cut, but now that I think of it, that wouldn't help people aggregating the posts. I suppose I will avoid posting spoilers.

Dear Recruiters,

While I appreciate being contacted with interesting opportunities (at the moment I'm not looking. It's a lovely cross between being happy in my current job and hoping for a particularly uneventful 12 months on the home front), emailing me from noreply@saic.com is just going to make me mock you. It's at moments like these that I with I could channel Matthew Garrett. When I try, I just sound like Overfiend from the good old days ;)

The family went up to the City today with some friends of ours and I had the most amazing thing: I walked into an Apple store, and the greater at the front solved my iPhone problem. The phone decided a week or so ago that there was always a headset plugged in. The greeter pulled up a clever tool that looks like an 1/8th inch to 1/4inch adapter with tiny holes milled in it for blowing air in. Seems they have this problem often. Being with 3 kids and two families, I couldn't reliably book a time to see someone at the Genius Bar, but he just blasted it out and it worked wonderfully.

Of course, I came home to plug it in and have discovered that the cord to connect to the charger appears to have corroded and won't charge the phone now. So, AppleEmployees++, AppleHardware--. I now will make the distinction.

Next technology FixIt: Convince my Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth stereo to go into pairing mode again. Both seem to have decided they won't do this anymore.

MarketWatch reports that oil prices had the biggest daily gain on record, going up $11 in one day. They claim that this is due to an impending Israeli attack on Iran and a weak US economy. $150 per barrel is the price that they predict for the 4th of July. That’s an interesting choice of date, I wonder whether they will be talking about “independence from Arabian oil”… The New York Times has an interesting article on fuel prices [1]. Apparently sales of SUVs are dropping significantly. The US senate is now debating a cap on carbon-dioxide production. The NY Times article suggests that if the new “carbon taxes” could be combined with tax cuts in other areas. If implemented correctly it would allow people who want to save money to reduce their overall tax payments by reducing fuel use. Also as increasing prices will decrease demand (thus decreasing the price at import time) it would to some degree mean transferring some revenue from the governments of the middle east to the US government. The article also states that the Ford F series of “pickup trucks” was the most popular line of vehicles in the US for more than 20 years! But last month they were beaten by the Toyota Corolla and Camry and the Honda Civic and Accord. Now Ford needs to put more effort into their medium to large cars. With the hybrid Camry apparently already on sale in the US (their web site refuses to provide any information to me because I don’t have Flash installed so I can’t check) and rumored to be released soon in other countries Ford needs to put some significant amounts of effort into developing fuel efficient vehicles. According to a story in the Herald Sun (published on the 23rd of April), survey results show that 1/3 of Victorians would cease using their car to get to work if the petrol price reached $1.75/L [2]. Now the Herald Sun has run a prediction (by the assistant treasurer and the NRMA) that $1.75/L will be reached next week (an increase of just over 10 cents a liter) [3]. The good news is that there will be less pollution in Australia in the near future (even if $1.75 is not reached I am certain that the price will increase enough to encourage some people to use public transport). The bad news is that our public transport is inadequate at the moment and there will be significant levels of overcrowding.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/business/04leonhardt.html


• [2] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23585733-661,00.html


• [3] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23827860-661,00.html

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I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution), a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence the name) window manager ratpoison (other keyboard driven window managers like wmii or awesome probably will do as well as ratpoison) and a good keyboard driven web browser which can bind or by default has bound a key to follow <link rel="next" ... /> tags. Like Opera. Opera has bound the space bar to scroll one page down and if you reach the bottom of the page to go to the next page as labeled in the link tag. Additionally the full screen mode is helpful, too. Or the dream browser of all Emacs addicts, Conkeror, which has bound the function browser-follow-next to ]]. (Conkeror packages will hit Debian Experimental quite soon.) Or the GNOME feed reader Liferea which has bound Ctrl-Space by default to scroll down the content by one page and if you reach the bottom of the content go to the next unread item. With that equipment I can read my favourite web comics like Questionable Content (whose content seldomly is questionable :-) or Ozy and Millie (Think of a mixture of Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts and Kevin & Kell) in the bath tub without drying my hands before reading the next comic or fearing water or health damage by the combination of water and computer. I just press one or two keys on the keyboard floating over my lap and have a good time. BTW: I’ve got a blue, non-branded one (packaging reveals it as “AirTouch Keyboard”, probably manufactured by SanChuan Electronics, China) with swiss-german layout from ARP Datacom (whose website offers no permanent links and insists on session cookies *puke*), but those from Keysonic or from ROCK seem to be very similar — nowadays they are also available in illuminated, miscellaneous colors and wireless, but only IP65, probably because of the necessarily accessible battery compartment. But this kind of having fun still has optimisation potential: non-flexibel water-proof keyboard (IP67 recommended, so those IP66 keyboards and mice recently posted at UF LOTD are probably not tight enough), flat screen mounted above the bath tub, etc. ;-) Or maybe a completely water proof laptop if such thing exists — Does it? One more note: In Debian Sid and Lenny recently a new tool called keynav has been added, which allows you to control the mouse quickly using the keyboard only. So with Sid or Lenny, I don’t even need an waterproof mouse or trackball if an application insists on mouse usage. ;-)

Stage 1 : working whilst tired, missed a critical dot in a command, removed system /etc/ instead of the local test ./etc/ of a root filesystem test build. Come home early to try to rescue the machine using /etc/ data from machines on the home network (same kernel, same users, same config).

Stage 2 : Get home, start up the office network, UPS alarm goes off, sparks and bang from my main machine, familiar smell of burnt electronics (again) and UPS seems now unable to provide any mains power, battery only.

Stage 3 : despite having the config, the broken laptop is still not fixed. Lots of packages are completely bust, resurrecting /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow from other machines at least provided login and chroot operation via the Lenny Debian installer. I don't want to have to reinstall this box but it is questionable whether setting everything up again after reinstalling is actually less work than fixing the broken config.

Result: My semi-VAC is ongoing, I'm back on my iBook laptop and I'm looking for a new UPS.