Totally unoriginal, but I thought it was amusing. I also get some strange search phrases: "My gas meter is making a clicking noise" - then stop using the computer and call your gas company! (In England, the contact number should be on a label on the meter, or in most phone books under "Gas".) "My computer is making loud ticking noise" - that's better. Open the case and listen to the fans and hard disks. One is probably broken. "How many cars are there on the roads today" - too damn many? "How to send an email so that everyone doesn t see the addresses" - put yourself in the To line and everyone else in the Bcc (blind carbon copy). See my email guide for other handy tips. "How do i say in an email that there is an attachment" - How about "There is an attachment"? "Samsung yp-u2 linux" - it works as long as you don't want to upgrade the firmware. More... "How to satellite aiming motor europa" - point it at the sky, not at europa. I'll add more instructions to my satellite page as I rebuild my system. "MJ bad" - at least there are 4 times as many "good" searches. "How do I get the software for the samsung ml-4500" and "Samsung ml-4500 xp drivers" - I have a Ghostscript driver patch. Does Ghostscript work as a printer driver on XP? "Cycle tracks near sandringham" - there's part of NCN1 alongside the A149, but most of the other cycle routes near Sandringham are along quiet roads (which is fine). "What does wag stand for regarding football?" - Wives And Girlfriends. BTW it's a stupid TLA IMO. "Wretton planning", "Wretton parish council", "business properties for sale in Wretton" and "properties for sale in field lane Wretton" - I've not been to Wretton in some time, let alone mentioned its planning or set up an estate agent there! "How to grow grapevine in a conservatory?" - damned if I know. I would think the temperature change each time you open a door would hurt it too much. "Hanging washing out over night" - it's a bad idea if it's going to freeze. "Why some people take so long to reply to emails" - we're busy trying to thaw the washing out. "Satellite frequency for ulster tv for sky plus box" - 10906MHz Vertical polarisation 22Msym/s, but can you record "other channels" on Sky Plus or should you buy a real DVR? "Where can i find a picture of st james swimming pool in kings lynn?" - try Norlink's Picture Norfolk section. "What happened to opensource.org?" - It was transferred from SPI to OSI. Strangely, the next search phrase listed was "simple example of unethical behaviour"... "What to do about death?" - be very still and start to rot? "bf uk cbhf" - I give up. Did 8 of you headbutt the keyboard? "I hate belkin" - Me too. "Interesting questions to ask someone" - no, not on this site. "Bar" - best idea yet. Cheers!

As I recently bought a NSLU2 ("slug") for 24/7 server usage and random ARM-based development (more on that later), I'm looking for a suitable storage device to use as the root filesystem for a complete Debian system. The requirements are:

• Large enough (>= 1 GB).
• Silent. Hard disks are not an option (no IDE, no SATA, no USB, neither 2.5" nor 3.5")
• As fast as possible.
• USB-attached (the slug only has 2 USB connectors).
• Should live as long as possible.

The last item is the most important. The obvious choice is a USB memory stick, but unfortunately those are flash-based and only survive a certain number of write cycles. Thus I'm looking for something which at least survives enough write cycles to make it usable for a few years... I do know several ways to reduce the number of writes via software, that's not what I'm currently interested in. I'd like to know which storage types will survive the longest amount of time (because of their hardware properties). Some options:

• USB memory stick, obviously. Usually quite slow, but there are quite fast ones (read 33 MB/s, write 22 MB/s), too. Some seem to survive 100.000 or even 1.000.000 write cycles, but that may not be enough. Are there any sticks with more possible write cycles?
• Any other USB-attached (via external USB card-reader if necessary) silent storage type: SD, MMC, Transflash, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, whatever. Does any of those survive more write cycles?
• Any other viable option?

Has somebody else done something like this before and can share some experiences as to which storage type is best suited for such a scenario? I suspect my slug will be mostly idle, but there might also be phases where it runs on 100% CPU and heavy disk I/O for multiple days in a row...

South-by-Southwest is well and truly over now. I had a really good time. I don't have quite as much fun at general-Web conferences as at wiki-specific conferences, but I think it's also healthy for me to look outside my own narrow niche every once in a while and see what other people are doing. I think overall the conference was pretty great, although I don't feel like the passion of 2006 was here in 2007. I will say that I find it disconcerting that there are so few wiki people at SxSW. I think there should be considerably more, and I'm going to urge some intelligent and thoughtful people to come to Austin next year and get on panels. Practically every aspect of blogging gets covered at SxSW, but mine was the only wiki-specific panel this year. We're taking a week on the coast near Galveston to recharge batteries and get our work lives back on track. Then it's off to Las Vegas for the IA Summit. Maj will be in the conference area -- I'll be baby-sitting at New York New York or something. tags: sxsw07 austin wiki galveston las vegas

Dear LazyWeb Two questions:

• N800 movies. What ffmpeg or mencoder or transcode parameters should I use to convert video to run on the media player on my Nokia N800?
• Zip code of Canada. In the US, when you try to charge a tank of gas using pay-at-the-pump, frequently you're asked for the ZIP code of the billing address of your credit card. But if your residential address is in Canada (or anywhere outside the US), you don't have a ZIP code attached to the card. I usually go inside to the cashier and pay there, but I wonder: is there a special code you could use (like "00000") that means "I don't have a US ZIP code"? If not, why not?

Thanks for any answers (see Contact for how to get them to me). tags: lazyweb n800 zip code credit card canada

Twittering again It seems like Twitter is waking up from its own SXSW07 hangover and sending out the thousands of backlogged twits that weren't delivered at the right time. I don't think in the age of EC2 any public Web site should go AWOL due to too much traffic. Twitter suffered just the kind of surge that EC2 (and S3) are there to solve. tags: twitter ec2 sxsw07

Here are some scenarios for ways that I want to use Debian on semi-embedded and embedded devices. So far there's not a good way to accomplish most of these, and each scenario needs at best a different approach, from flashybrid to Embdebian to ADS root builder to hand hacked images. That will change, I hope, if the grand unified scheme I'm plotting comes to fruition. If some of these scenarios interest you, please check out the design at http://wiki.debian.org/RootSync. openmoko First, install Debian to a 2 gb microSD card in the phone, using d-i. Bog-standard Debian install (except for it being g-i running on a cell phone!), standard partitioning. Boot the install and use it for a while. Install more stuff and tweak the system. Now you want to remove that microSD card, to save power. So, unmount it, and remove it. Debian continues running; all the files you normally use, including everything needed to boot the system, have already been copied over to the flash. If the flash gets too full, just delete any files you don't need right now. If you later find you're missing a file, just plug the microSD back in, mount it, and you can access the file again. This is also an easy way to do a backups, a simple command can sync your changes up to the microSD card. Also the microSD card can be plugged into a different openmoko phone, chrooted into, a command run, the phone rebooted, and it's been taken over, now running the same Debian install. Great party trick. ;-) slug with a 32 mb USB stick This is my sister's nslu2 box, that only does one thing, really: Dial up to the internet and route packets to the access point. It's also nice to get Debian security updates from time to time. And I don't want to have a noisy hard drive on it, so it runs from a small USB stick. The initial install is done to USB drive, then I add the USB stick to the picture, boot the nslu2 up, configure ppp, run it, and I can remove the drive, it's ready to run in embedded mode from the USB stick. Later I need to apply a security update, so I plug in the USB drive, mount it, run aptitude, and I'm done, just unmount the USB drive again, and the USB stick now has updated versions of the necessary files. true embedded system development A company is creating a real embedded arm system, it needs to run from 64 mb of flash, with a fair chunk for their own application, and a fair chunk free for user data. An engineer is using his development system to work on creating the jffs2 filesystem that will go on the production hardware. He starts by untarring the Debian armel port to a drive, and copies in the custom application. Then he sets up an empty jffs2 filesystem on mtdblockN. After rebooting the system, the jffs2 contains the files needed to boot Debian on its own. The engineer runs the custom application, and the jffs2 is now ready to run that too. But it's getting a bit tight for space on the jffs2. Time for busybox. He runs "busybox install [long list of busybox commands]", replacing lots of core commands with their smaller busybox versions. After a few reboots, all the init scripts are hacked up to work with the busybox stuff. (Argh.. Debian should work with it by default. Anyone want patches?) Maybe he goes on to run mklibs or do something with uclibc. This might take a few iterations to get right, but he doesn't worry about screwing up the system -- he knows that at any point he can delete all the files on the jffs2, reboot, and be back to his unmodified system on the disk drive. Once everything is ready, he can load the jffs2 onto production hardware and the new embedded system is ready to be tested and qualified. slug thick client My nslu2 box, used for handling some USB devices like my UPS, security camera, etc. When the network is up, and the storage server is up, it can nfs mount root, but that doesn't work when the power goes out and the server needs to come down. I want it to keep working in that case, as a kind of detached thick client. After hacking nfs root support into d-i at some future point :-) I have it booting with nfs root already. There's around 3 mb of unused flash on the slug, so I set up a jffs2 partition using that, and through some trial and error get the right files on there to let the system keep running in a degraded mode when the nfs mount goes down. 3 mb does fill up pretty quickly if the camera notices motion, but it's good enough, so I decide not to put a USB stick on the box.

On Tuesday the 23rd of January I shaved off my beard after spending 107 days growing it, see above for the final beard pic. It was an interesting experiment and it's something that I recommend trying, but I couldn't keep it.

Having a beard is more effort than being clean-shaven. Eating is more difficult when you are trying to keep your beard out of your food. If you get the full beard (as I did) then the moustache at the sides of your mouth will get into your food (particularly bad for ice-cream). I guess that the benefit of having a waxed moustache would be that the wax would keep it out of the way of the food - the waxed moustache wasn't just an issue of style!

Madduck suggests that when you drink Guinness you "push your lips past the head and draw up only the dark stuff". Of course that won't work if you have a moustache as you don't want a moustache that's soaked in beer!

Immediately after cutting off my beard I didn't shave for almost a week and experienced much less discomfort than I had preveiously experienced when not shaving for that period. I think that having been used to having a beard an amount of hair that would previously annoy me is not noticable. Also it
seems that the hair was initially softer after I cut off the beard. Maybe shaving somehow makes the hair grow tougher.

When I had the beard I thought that I hadn't adjusted my body image to match, as every time I looked in the mirror I felt surprised to see it. Once it was gone my new look initially seemed more odd to me than my previous appearance, and it took me a number of weeks to get used to not having a beard.






When shaving off my beard I decided to do it in stages, firstly I did a "goatee" cut and then just a moustache. The moustache is a little lop-sided, but I was in a hurry and didn't plan to keep it for long.

I think there is a photo of ESR on your blog You should check if your camera isn't playing tricks on you

Recently, I got a comment on an older blog post on Edmonton that basically agreed with another comment that Edmonton was so not the cat’s meow. Despite the winter and many months later, I guess I still do think it is, although in saying so, it is not I think their assessments are wrong, I think my take has as much to do as what has come before (like NJ, which was not the high point o my life), my experiences here, and what is to come in the future. I tend to like Edmonton because there is enough stuff to do but not too much to do. It is that whole freedom from choice that I like because I often shut down in the face of too much choice. What also colors my experience in a positive light is that generally, Canadian politics, social policy, and way of life, are a step up or two (or maybe three) than that of the United States. So the worst of Canada (if you are even to call Edmonton that, which I would not), in this regard, beats out the best of the United States. And I have lived most of my life in the US so that is my point of comparison. Even if you are living in a fantastic American city, you always face the possibility of struggling in ways that will *never* happen in Canada. It makes for a calmer, less aggressive society. For example, I recently learned that Edmonton has the highest murder rate in Canada, at a whopping …. 36 people per year (population of Edmonton = 1 million). I grew up in a place, Puerto Rico where the yearly murder rate hovers at about 700-800 per year (population = 4 million). And yet people here are freaking out over the high rate of murder, which is a good thing because hopefully they can bring it down but this fact should make the US pause and think about what they are doing up north to keep the murder rate so darn low (and the answer I think is pretty easy to find). But perhaps a lot of my love of the place has as much to do or more with my state of mind. After a grueling year of finishing a dissertation under pressure as I had deadline, and then living in NJ where I was on the job market (which meant spending so much time churning out application after application and then flying around interviews), in addition to flying 7 times in one year to visit my mom, my life here just feels so much more sane than it has been in years. What sealed it all was that right before I moved here in August I was lucky enough to be offered a permanent job (which means this summer I will be moving to NYC to join this department and I will be back to the land of overwhelming choice), so that for the first time in 5 years I did not have to apply for anything in the fall that would guarantee my livelihood for the next academic year. I was not faced with a year of lots of travel (and actually traveling in out out Edmonton is really one of my least favorite things). With that firmly in place, I could just concentrate on things like my work, my friends, brewing kombucha and do things routinely, like exercise, which I had not consistently done for years. There are things about Edmonton that I find totally obnoxious like the cities inability to plow roads leaving a thick glaze of black ice on the roads so that when you drive in the city, you basically are at real risk for an accident (and this is despite a 6.6 BILLION government surplus). There are a tad too many strip malls in the outlaying areas, and of course there is the infamous winter. We are still deep in it. The cold temperatures have been with us steadily for months now and according to folks, there are still two more months to look forward to. The cold and the constant layering of clothes are getting to me a little, although I do appreciate that the cold is just not as cold as one would think with the actual temperatures. The lack of wind, the dry conditions, the cute as chubby-as-anything- bunnies that run through the snow, and the overpowering sun all help to make -6 F much more mild, so it is not as bad as you would or I would think it was. So while I am thrilled to join the department where I am moving too, I will be sad when I leave, though perhaps not as sad as Edmontons “darling” hockey player, Ryan Smith, who was just traded by the Oilers to the NY Islanders. The day he left, he literally was shedding tears at the airport. And I have to say, even though I have no attachment to hockey, I found the pictures endearing because there is nothing like seeing a grown Canadian man cry over hockey! : )

I've been in a good mood toward the end of this week as the stuff I've gotten done has reached that critical mass that makes me feel I'm accomplishing something. First, I got a nice new domain for ikiwiki, with an irc channel for good measure, and there's also work on a Google Summer of code application for ikiwiki afoot. Then there was rather a lot of useful feedback and patches on ikiwiki, and a few nights ago a very tricky race condition was discovered. Batting around possible fixes for it on irc for several hours was pretty useful, it's a lot easier to think about locking, deadlock, races, etc, when there are some other minds to share the thinking. I eventually came up with a fix that seems ok, around 5 am that morning. Yes, my sleep schedule has been suffering.. On Thursday I took a digression into RL to fix some cladding that was pulled away from the eves of my house by a badly attached cable. I ended up wandering around Lowe's for over an hour -- when did that become such a fun thing to do? Oh yeah, when I bought a house.. Some kids were playing hide and seek; maybe a bit dangerous there but it has to be the funnest possible place to do it. Anyway, amoung other things I bought a collapsable ladder and had an interesting time on it 2 stories up while avoiding the nearby electric wire. Also fixed a broken latch on my wardrobe. Concurrent with all this, in $DAY_JOB, I've been working on the armel port of Debian, including getting d-i to work with it. Since this is an unofficial port, that is not gpg signed currently, this also gave me a chance to make d-i capable of dealing with an unsigned repository. Earlier this evening, I almost completed my first armel install on an nslu2, and I expect to release images by Monday. Finally, AJ reminded me about an item that'd been on my TODO list for far too long; some way for James to deal with gpg keyrings that doesn't treat them as binary blobs. I'd been meaning to work on that for oh, 2 years? 3? And I must have been thinking about it in the background a bit, because I fairly quickly came up with this gpg changesets idea, which is basically a dedicated revision control system, and a data format that's not too horrible (though it could be much nicer with support in gpg). Quickly followed by a whole working sample implementation that I hope James, or someone, will find useful.

Last week I updated my WRTSL54GS to OpenWRT 0.9 with X-WRT 2.75. Since my box has an USB port, I was missing a way to umount mounted usb storage. Looking deeper into it, I noticed that partitions get mounted by ‘/etc/hotplug.d/usb/01-mount’ like this:

# mount
[…]
part1 on /mnt/disc0_1 type ext3 (rw)
part2 on /mnt/disc0_2 type vfat (rw) The correct devices are missing. A patch is available:

mount.patch Okay … So far, so good. Now some tweaking to webif^2 for umounting attached usb storage devices. Here comes the patch:

umount-button.patch hacking, linksys, opensource, openwrt, planet

There is a potential buffer overflow in logging of CAPI messages in libcapi20 (part of isdnutils; bug 408530). The same broken code from libcapi20 is present in the Linux kernel (bug 411294). Also, the affected functions are not thread-safe and are unlikely to be made so without API changes; multithreaded programs calling them must use a mutex to avoid another security flaw; (such as asterisk-chan-capi; bug 411293). I have prepared updates of asterisk-chan-capi and isdnutils for sarge and sid but I have no ISDN hardware to test them with. I would appreciate it if users of these packages would test the updates and report their results to the associated bugs. The patches can be found attached to the bug reports. Updated packages are at:

deb http://womble.decadent.org.uk/debian/ distribution/
deb-src http://womble.decadent.org.uk/debian/ distribution/

(the repository is signed with my personal GPG key).

The NATO security conference is this weekend. All the disruptions in normal life going on here (a large part of the city centre is actually closed down to the public), this shows exactly how detached politics and the real world are today. After all, if what I'm doing on behalf of the public causes so much dissent that I feel that the public needs to be locked out, then I'm obviously not fulfilling my mandate.

Holger Levsen made an interesting suggestion to me today: instead of whining against maintainers who do not interact with translators without explaining what I expect from maintainers, I should maybe explain what we expect. This makes pretty much sense indeed...:-) So, below is the mail I usually send to these maintainers:

Hello,
I just noticed new/modified debconf templates appearing for this
package.
I would like to suggest you to consider calling for translations when
introducing new debconf templates or changing the debconf templates in a
package or, if you prefer, to send a call for translations after uploading
the first version that introduces new templates or templates changes.
How to do this?
0) Install po-debconf
---------------------
If you test-build your package on your system, you shoud already have
it. Otherwise, consider apt-get installing it.
it will bring the needed utility.
1) Call for new translations
----------------------------
Just go to your package's build tree and use:
$ podebconf-report-po --call
This will propose you a generic mail which is to be sent to
debian-i18n@lists.debian.org and call for new translations.
This utility will mention existing translations to avoid duplicate
work.
It will also attach the needed material to this mail.
Please also think about giving a deadline to translators. We like
deadlines..:-)
2) Call for translation updates
-------------------------------
If your package already includes debconf translations (ie *.po files
in debian/po), please consider calling for translation updates if you
happen to change something in the templates...or just in case when you
release a new version.
This is done with the following command:
$ podebconf-report-po
This will build private mails to translators (ie people listed in
"Last-Translator" in the PO files) for translations that are
incomplete. These mails will included the needed PO file for each
translator.
3) Check for writing style compliance
-------------------------------------
The Debian i18n contributors have developed a set of suggestions for
the writing style of debconf templates, to give them an overall
consistency all around Debian. These writing style suggestions are
explained in the Developers Reference. Lintian also warns about common
writing style concerns.
If you change your templates to fit this, please consider 2), of
course..:-)

Of course, everybody will notice that this can be applied to any gettext-based internationalised software.

In a previous article about Stuff To Do, my ajaxified priority queue program, I talked about how best to keep track of the user's state of activity, should they so desire. I opted for the popup, as that was the best compromise between simplicity, and ease of use for the end user. From an end-user point of view, it's similar to how gtalk can detach from gmail if you want to run it in its own window. The trick was to implement the popup/popout in Rails, which actually ended up being pretty easy, and, all things considered, is a pretty cool technique. It's neat to pop stuff in and out of a web page. The easy part is popping out the window:

<%= link_to_remote("Pop out " + image_tag('popout', :border => 0),
                    :url =>   :controller => 'tasks', :action => 'popout'    ,
                   :title => 'Pop the status window into a popup window') -%>

Which subsequently calls popup.rjs:

page.replace_html('status', "<i><small>status in popup window</small></i></br>" +
                  link_to_remote("<small>Restore</small>",
                                  :url =>   :controller => 'tasks', :action => 'popin'  ,
                                 :title => 'Restore the status window'))
page << 'statuspopup();'

Which is pretty simple - the first call replaces the html in the status div, and the second calls the javascript function statuspopup. This lets us replace what was in the status window with some placeholder text and a 'restore' link in case things get screwy and the user wants to simply restore the old content of the div in question. It's worth noting that we also store the popped out status in session[:popped_out] in order to let the application know that the window is "popped out". This doesn't actually pop the window itself up. The statuspopup function in javascript (located in application.js) takes care of that:

function statuspopup()  
  window.newwindow = window.open('/tasks/openstatus','status',
                                 'height=10,width=210,status=no');
  return false;
 

And then the openstatus action opens the same rails partial that the regular page does:

<%= render(:partial => '/tasks/status', ...

Meaning that you don't have to rewrite the same code in two places. So, that's all it takes to pop up a new window, and replace the contents of the old div in the html page giving the user the sense of having popped a piece of the page out into a popup. So far so good. Now what happens when the user closes the popup? Luckily, we get a reference to the window that opened the popup called window.opener that we can use to comunicate with the main window. For instance, in our case we set up an event listener to fire when the window closes:

window.addEventListener("unload", statusClosed, false);

And this, in turn, takes care of popping the window back into the main page:

function statusClosed()  
new Ajax.Request('/tasks/popin',   method: 'get', asynchronous: false  )
$('popoutlink').style.display = 'inline';
w = window.opener;
target = w.window.document.getElementById('status');
code = $('onidle').childNodes[1].innerHTML;
target.innerHTML = $('status').innerHTML;
target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';
target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';
w.eval(code);
 

Once again, pretty simple. What's happening:

• Ajax.Request just takes care of letting the rails app know that we've popped in, which resents session[:popped_out].
• Then grab the window opener, and find the status element within that window.
• Instead of re-rendering everything with a rails partial, we simply transfer the HTML that was residing in our popup to the main window: target.innerHTML = $('status').innerHTML; target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb'; target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';

We also fix up the color just a bit, to mark the user as active. All in all, it's pretty useful for time tracking. In Linux, it's ver easy to set the new popup to follow you around the screen, making it so that it's not a bother at all to wave the mouse at it to let the application know you're online. All you do is set the 'on top' and 'always on visible workspace' options - at least in Gnome.

Dear Lazyweb, is there an option in reportbug allowing me to use Thunderbird (KMail, foo, …) to write the bugreport? I’m currently using vim, but Thunderbird’s spell checker is much more convenient to use and copy-pasting from KDE into vim is not working very well, making it cumbersome to attach backtraces and stuff.

According to Wikipedia: “Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest (depersonalisation or cynicism), usually in the work context. Burnout is often construed as the result of a period of expending too much effort at work while having too little recovery, but it is sometimes argued that workers with particular personality traits (especially neuroticism) are more prone to experiencing burnout.” In this web page there’s a global overview of burnout that might be useful: Burnout is a chronic condition that happens when your body or mind can no longer cope with overwhelmingly high demands. You are trapped in a state of emotional exhaustion, and it is hard to get out of that state. You stop caring about what you do, even though you may feel guilty about that fact. Even if you still continue working, it seems to be hard to make progress. You hardly accomplish anything significant, just go through the motions. Certain categories of people and professions are particularly susceptible to job burnout. Most often these are people who are highly committed and motivated, who have high standards and idealistic dedication to their jobs. Common burnout causes include:

• An overwhelming workload. Could be due to insufficient time management skills, especially lack of planning, prioritizing, or delegation skills.
• Hard work with no clear goals. You work hard and hard, but no matter how long you keep at it, you cannot see any progress. But how could you see that you have got closer if you don’t know your destination?
• Powerlessness to change something important to you. Something that you are very much emotionally attached to, but that is at the same time beyond your control.
• Forcing yourself to make the impossible happen. For example, solving problems without having the necessary resources.
• A conflict between your personal values and the values of the company your working for. You don’t believe in or disagree with what your are doing, but you feel the circumstances force you to keep doing it anyway.
• Hitting the invisible ceiling. No matter how good or competent you become, there is hardly any chance of recognition or promotional opportunities.

For all of those burnout causes what is important is not as much the external factors that fall on you, but how you interpret them, what you say to yourself, and what actions you take in response. Finally, it is important to understand the risks of burnout in your personal or job situations. Once you are its victim, it may not be easy to get things back on track. That condition does not go away in a day. You may not be able to recover by yourself, and you may need to have drastic changes in your attitudes and life style. You are much better off preventing it now than putting your life back together later. Some links:

• How Can We Avoid Burnout?
• Volunteer Burnout

(almost caught up on the blogging backlog) We had five days off over the Christmas period, from Christmas Eve on the Friday through to what we call Boxing Day (America doesn't do it, but Google gave us the day off). We spent the time in Las Vegas with our friends Craig and Sarah and their daughter Kes, in their "fifth wheel" trailer, as we had previously in Glamis. The drive was good. We stuffed around getting away on Friday, so didn't leave Mountain View until around 10am, so Craig and Sarah beat us there, when we were expecting to beat them (they couldn't leave until the end of business on Friday). It took us something like 9 hours to drive there. I think the thing I love the most about California is the diversity you get. We've seen snow, forests, beaches, desert. All without having to leave the state. One of the highlights of the trip was going through Bakersfield, which had heaps of oilwells all over the place. We also drove past one of the commercial aeroplane dumping grounds in the Mojave desert. Vegas itself was something to behold. It had a reality distortion field around it that made Google's pale into insignificance. The strip was great to walk up and down to just take in the architectural wonders that are the casinos on it. The adult industry is incredibly in your face. People are on the sidewalk handing out "calling cards" for what I thought were hookers, but I'm told are technically strippers, with catchlines such as "nude to your door in 15 minutes". What would normally dispense newspapers in any other city gave out free catalogues of what the adult industry had to offer. I thought all of that was a bit seedy. The casinos themselves where all much of a muchness inside. Far too smokey for my liking. I'm not a big gambler. I think blackjack is about the only game I can wrap my head around, and even then you can lose too much money too quickly on the tables, so I mainly played video blackjack with 25 cent bets. It's not a bad way to blow five bucks. The second hand smoke was a great deterrent against staying inside for too long. We caught Zumanity at New York New York, and had a humungous buffet lunch for Christmas Day at Mirage. We were staying in the trailer park attached to Circus Circus. It's pretty cool that there's a trailer park right on the strip. The one thing that I hadn't associated with Las Vegas was the shopping. Every one of the casinos on the strip had a massive shopping mall associated with it, and I mean massive. Paris' in particular took forever to escape from. The Forum Shops in Caesars Palace also felt like they went on forever. I initially thought how they painted the sky with clouds on the ceiling was quite clever, until I discovered that every mall did the same thing. Then it got a bit old. You could go to Vegas just for the shopping and the day spas, and never have to set foot in a casino gaming room. I'd like to make one more trip, and this time stay in a hotel, just for the hotel experience. I think Venice was my favourite looking casino (from the outside). Photos from the trip are here.

Binary file parsing is difficult. There is a lot of byte swapping, offset computation and magic bit mask handling involved. Add to that the fact that many binary formats were reverse-engineered and do not even have a public spec, are so convoluted that there is no way to write a decent parser, or have so many buggy writer implementations that the readers need to accommodate for that. Media players, web browsers and email clients are probably the most exposed ones. These programs are full of bugs, not more than any other program, but more dangerous bugs. Admit it, you just play any video you find on the Intarweb, click any image link and read your email (seriously, even mutt uses antiword to read .doc attachments). It is no longer necessary to have network listening services to be exposed to security issues, the users themselves listen to the world. Using my fuzzing tool zzuf that I eventually decided to release, I found more than 40 bugs in common Unix tools, popular media players and other utilities, simply by reading valid files and slightly corrupting them. The most scary ones are the media player bugs:

	VLC	MPlayer	xine	FFmpeg (ffplay)	GStreamer (gst-launch)	mpg321	ogg123
MP3	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	robust	robust	robust	N/A
Ogg Vorbis	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	robust
MPEG-1	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
MPEG-2	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A
MPEG-4 AVI	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	deadlock?	N/A	N/A
FLAC	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	heap corruption	robust	N/A	SIGFPE
Ogg Theora	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
WMV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
AAC	heap corruption	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
AC-3/A52	SIGSEGV	robust (I KID YOU NOT)	robust	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A	N/A

Each of these segmentation fault bugs is a potential security hole in Debian. zzuf also found bugs in Firefox, Openoffice.org, antiword, ImageMagick and even objdump. And there is more to come.

Three letters corporations don't inspire confidence (junk code, big tactics, ..). Nevertheless Thinkpads i will miss you. My current workhorse is a x41 Thinkpad. The default model has a bad battery life. Yeah the x40 are cool and with much better battery life out of the box, but they need this mad atheros binary hal junk (the ath free replacement goes nowhere right now :(. No i won't taint the running kernel. So just buy a battery upgrade and be happy.
In August cycling i got badly hit by a car. Making a cool stunt on asphalt with a crashed helmet and hurt everywhere. The laptop being unprotected in backpack. No complaints from the X41. Throw it across rooms and it happily boots. Exposing it to dust did not cause any high pitch noise like some earlier Vaio.
As Thinkwiki will tell you the Hitachi hdd are not really worth to put data on them. I got mine easily exchanged 2x. I wouldn't care less thanks to git, imapd and frequent backups.
As you can probably imagine the story of unbreakable doesn't stop here, but i won't leak current experiences "nancy" had to endure. Anyway i wanted to join in the Thanks to all the peoples that make Debian the pleasure to hack and work on! Big props to the Release Team for coordinating the fine Etch product.