It was two weeks ago now that we hopped on an Amtrak train in the middle of Kansas at the bright and early hour of 3AM, bound for Indiana.

This has been our third trip with Jacob. He's 14 months old now. We never really enjoyed long car or airplane trips before we had a baby, and haven't really had the desire to try a long car trip since. So we try to take the train, or if time is short, fly.

Jacob enjoys the train. There's lots to see and do. The one thing he doesn't like doing is waiting for food to arrive in any situation, so when we have sit-down meals in the diner, things can get challenging.

We arrived in Indiana the same evening and spent a few days with Terah's dad out at the farm.

Jacob enjoyed grandpa and grandma:





Jacob got his first ever ice cream there. Despite the concerned "unknown food alert" look, he opened up quick for another bite.



The big hit of the visit there were chickens. I've never seen Jacob so thrilled about watching something before. He was so excited he was just moving his arms all around, almost jumping up and down. Here he is watching them:





Terah wants us to get chickens now. Just because we still have a chicken house left...

On Tuesday, we went north to spend a few days with Terah's mom. On the way up, it became overcast. Terah's mom calls it the winter "permacloud", which is the best description of it I've heard yet. I didn't believe Terah at first when she said that they don't see the sun for 3 months in winter up there, but I believe her now.

Jacob found a rocking chair just his size there, and was able to make it rock. But the big hit of this stop were refrigerator magnets, at Jacob height.



He spent a long time with them, and got pretty good at working with them, too.

He also thought he ought to check out the camera in great detail. So of course, the camera checked him out.



Terah's mom wanted to spend some time with Jacob, so on Wednesday, Terah and I headed up to Niles, MI to visit some antique shops. We found some postcards from small towns in Kansas dating back to the 1930s, an old metal fan (still works), a wooden "apothecary box" with pull-out drawers, and some furniture we might have purchased if we were closer to home.

For the first time ever, Terah was the first one to say "aren't you done shopping yet?" She was getting tired, so we started heading back. Magically her energy returned as we approached the road leading to the South Bend Chocolate Co. factory and retail store, so we headed in that direction. The next tours didn't start for almost an hour, so we bought some chocolate, looked around a bit, and then left.

Terah's mom had a good time with Jacob while we were gone.



Thursday was the O'Connor Thanksgiving. Terah's grandma and some other relatives were there. Here's Jacob with his great grandma:



Jacob enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner, and managed to keep finding things to munch on all afternoon.

That evening, we went over to Terah's Yoder grandparents and spent a few days there. Not long after we arrived, Terah's uncle showed up and brought his adopted greyhound with him. Jacob was very excited about this, though the dog wasn't so sure about Jacob.

Eventually the greyhound calmed down and Jacob got to see him up close and pet him. Jacob didn't even mind getting his whole face licked.



The next morning at breakfast, Terah's grandma had set out the high chair that she used as a girl for Jacob to eat in. I got some pictures, but Jacob was far more interested in asking to have food ready to eat.



Here's Jacob with his Yoder great grandparents:



Later Friday, it was the Yoder Thanksgiving. Jacob got plenty of attention. He also was looking VERY CAREFULLY for Waldo.



Jacob wasn't feeling the best all week, but despite having a busy week and feeling not so good, he did really well. He has been walking with help now, holding on to one adult finger with each hand. He really enjoys that, but is short enough that adults have to bend over a bit to help him. I imagine several people had sore backs after the week was over, including us.

On the train trip home, I took him to the lounge car to go walking. Usually he likes to walk as fast as he can for as long as he can, but there he would only go a little bit at a time. He'd stop at each group of chairs to look at the people, and most of them were really happy to see him, too. After he was done with the lounge car, we walked back through the coaches to our seat. As long as he kept walking, he again would stop at each row of seats to make friends with anybody that wanted to.

We tried to find a nice place to go for lunch during our layover in Chicago. But let me tell you, downtown Chicago -- at least the part near Union Station -- is dead on Sunday and the fact that it was just after Thanksgiving probably didn't help. We wound up finding a place in Union Station to eat. Jacob fussed for awhile, then went to sleep on my lap (he rarely manages to go to sleep while being held). Then on our connecting train back to Kansas.

It was a fun and busy week, but it's nice to be home too. Our train arrived in Kansas at 3:15AM Monday morning. So we went home to catch a few more hours sleep before going to work. As I went outside that morning, we had a gorgeous Kansas sunrise. As the sun was coming up, it was lighting the underside of the clouds with a vibrant deep red and orange color. The whole sky to the east was lit up like that, and felt so warm and inviting on a bitterly cold morning.

One of the hard things about getting started with mpd is that there seems to be little documentation about the details of how other people use it. Instead you're given a collection of great tools and an excellently designed system, and expected to build your own personal music playing setup out of them with little direction. So I thought I'd document mine. There are several computers around the house that run mpd. One in my office, one has speakers in the bedroom. My laptop, of course. And I put a nslu2 in the living room in a fun lego case that embeds the little computer into a remote controlled speaker (photos when I find a camera). All of these machines have their music libraries synchronised using unison. I use sonata as a graphical frontend and browser. I keep one instance of sonata running on my desktop in the office, so I can go there to change music if my laptop's not on. Also so guests can change the music. I like to listen to whole albums at a time, and sonata doesn't make this especially easy in its user interface. I eventually realised that the best way to do it, for me, was to create a separate playlist for each album. Sonata does make it really easy to click on a playlist and start playing it. I wrote mpgenplaylists to automatically generate those playlists for me. I wrote a set of commands that I can use to transfer state between my mpd daemons. The easiest to use and most useful of these is mpswap, which swaps the state of two daemons. Generally I only have one mpd playing at a time, and the others are paused, though it'll also swap the states of two running mpds. So if I run "mpswap dodo dragon", the music that had been playing in my bedroom starts coming out the speakers in the office. Same song, not a single missed note. That's pretty handy. Or I can run "mpswap dodo" to swap state with my laptop, and carry the music out of the house with me. (This would be more seamless if I carried some bluetooth wundergadget so my computers knew where I am, but I think I'll pass.) Another tool I wrote is mpstore, which dumps the mpd daemon state out to stdout, so it can be saved to a file and later loaded with mpload. I use this when I'm listening to audiobooks, to store my place. Another one is mpfade, that can wake me up by slowly fading in music. Or slowly fade out and stop. Writing these little hacks is addictive, but I won't bore you with the rest. On some of the servers I run mpd-dynamic, a daemon that watches the playlist and makes sure it always has 10 unplayed items in it, chosing new items at random. It also removes old played items from the playlist. This is nice if I want music going without the bother of picking what. I typically add some albums to the playlist, and then when they're done, it keeps playing random stuff until I manually add something else. I do want to find something that can more intelligently pick things to play. I tried lastfmpdqc, but didn't like its results. Switching to mpd has meant that the filenames of mp3s matter again, since mpd UIs expose the filenames (a pity). I used exfalso to clean up all my file names based on the music's tags. I also added ReplayGain information to all my music so mpd can use it to normalise volume. BTW, after all this, I'll probably still only listen to music for an average of 3 hours per week.

---

mpd-dynamic is in the Audio::MPD perl module. mpdswap, mpdstore, mpfade, mpgenplaylists, and more are in mpdtoys.

I spent about four hours this evening building something out of lego, something I'd not done seriously in a good many years. I was suprised how much it felt like starting writing a program from scratch, and how many parallels I kept finding between snapping the bricks together and writing code. Here are just a few of them.

• The first decision I made, and certianly the most important one, was how the legos were oriented. Were the pointy bits pointing up? (I chose a non-traditional pointy bits forward layout.) When starting a new program, the first and most important decision is which language to use. Both decisions, though crucial, tend to be made fairly arbitrarily.
• I started putting blocks together with no clear picture of how everything was going to look in the end, though I knew the rough outlines. And it shows in some uglinesses aspects of the final piece. This happens in programming too. But sometimes, it's not worthwhile to figure everything out before you start.
• The best building blocks are the simplest and plainest ones.
• The first blocks I put together, I added more things on top of, and eventually the early first bits were found to be unncessary (everything held together without them) and removed. But if I hadn't put those blocks together to start with, I'd have had nothing to build on. When writing a program, I try not to write throwaway code. Instead, I write documentation first, and build the program from there.
• There were some random accidents that ending up giving the piece personality and were retained.
• Once I got in the zone, I wasn't just putting blocks together, I was juggling a lot of plans and desires and info in my head, and arranging for them to happen, while keeping everything solid and fitting together well. That's what coding is all about to me, not writing lines of text.
• I built in all sorts of little features that you probably wouldn't notice if you looked at the piece, unless you used it in just the right way, or in a particular situation. I also built in one or two little in-jokes. My code is like that, too.
• Deep inside my lego creation there's one really ugly hack. It wouldn't work without it, but it's something you shouldn't do with lego. Re: my code -- no comment.

My birthday is Sunday, December 2nd. To celebrate, my friends in Zagreb have organized a party for me at the club and cafe Kset at 20:00. It should be low-key and lots of fun. Since I don't actually know too many people here, other folks reading this should definitely feel free to drop by if they'd like to meet up. Rumor has it that we'll have another party at the Acetarium after I get back to Cambridge on the evening of Saturday, December 8th. Let us know if you want to drop by for that one.

Daniel Smolik reported problems with NFS on a Thecus N2100 a few days ago. I confirmed the bug with 2.6.18 and 2.6.22 but found that the problem didn't occur with 2.6.23. I started a git bisect and a few hours later located a fix that Francois Romieu, the maintainer of the r8169 driver, had put in. Apparently the driver had some confusion regarding hardware and IP header alignment. The good news is that the patch is very small and can easily be backported to our 2.6.18 kernel in stable. Also, packages of 2.6.23 were uploaded today and should be in the archive soon.

My tool to query apache logfiles via SQL seems suprisingly popular. Just as a recap the process goes like this:

• Start the shell.
• A temporary SQLite database is created.
• You load any number of apache logfiles into it.
• Then queries may be executed against those records until you exit.
• The temporary database is dropped.

Now it is possible to save and load the SQLite database, so that you don't need to reparse the apache logs each time, that gives a nice speed increase for non-changing files. By tonight I'll have aliases working for queries so you can bookmark them:

alias refers SELECT distinct(referer) FROM logs

Then in the future the 'refers' command will be available and will run the named query. Neat. Now that I'm comfortable with SQL queries it just seems so natural, easy, and right to query logfiles this way. I guess that makes me strange.

Now available from alioth: debtree 0.7.2. The main change in this release is a much better display of virtual packages in dependency graphs.

• In regular depependency graphs debtree now shows which virtual packages are provided by the requested package, as can be seen in this example for debconf which provides debconf-2.0.
• If a virtual package is provided by multiple packages, these are now also displayed. To avoid clutter, by default the providing packages are only listed when there are three or less, but that number can be increased.

With this release I consider debtree "feature complete" when it comes to the information that is displayed in the graphs. A quick summary:

• can display both regular dependency graphs and build dependency graphs
• by default displays Pre-Depends, Depends, Recommends and unversioned Conflicts, and any Provides for the requested package
• can optionally display Suggests and versioned Conflicts
• clearly displays the packages from alternative dependencies
• can show what packages are already installed
• by default displays versions for versioned dependencies
• displays both Build-Depends and Build-Depends-Indep for build dependency graphs, and takes into account (or displays) architecture conditions in build dependencies
• has various options that can be used to limit the size/complexity of dependency graphs
• is lightning fast well, that is the next thing on the agenda; but it's not slow either!

Currently not supported are displaying Relaces, Obsoletes and Enhances relationships. If there's demand for it, adding them should be trivial. If you haven't yet, take a few minutes to look at the example graphs on the debtree website. What's next for debtree? You may remember that I filed an ITP when 0.7.1 was released but obviously its not in the archive yet. One reason is that debtree is completely redundant, at least if you consider the original reason I wrote it: to list how a package depends on another package. Just after the release of 0.7.1 I found out that aptitude why <package> <package> already provides that functionality!
I'm tempted to blame Enrico because I asked him if that was possible before starting on debtree, and Enrico really is supposed to know such things [1]! Luckily debtree now produces such nice dependency graphs to justify its existence :-) Anyway, I think that option should probably just be stripped out of debtree now. And if that is done, maybe it should be renamed to debgraph or apt-graph... I also discovered that beside apt-cache there was already another utility that produces dependency graphs: apt-rdepends. While, just like apt-cache, it lacks most of the features of debtree, it is quite fast and, because it is written in Perl, I could possibly port debtree to Perl myself using apt-rdepends as an example. Another reason is that a few people commented that maybe it should not be a separate package. I somewhat agree with that, but also would not like it to disappear in something non-descriptive like debian-goodies. I'd very much prefer it to eventually see it included in apt itself, or maybe in apt-utils. So basically I've been holding back a bit on uploading debtree to allow me to consider all this. The next task definitely is a rewrite in a better language and thereby give debtree a performance boost. [1] To his (and my) defence: that feature was only recently introduced in aptitude.

It is about time...

qmail under Public Domain

Using qmail-ldap for quite some time (first because of my employer and then because I was used to it), the DJB license was a major pain, qmail-ldap patch is under BSD, but the original qmail was non-free. Yes, was. Yesterday DJB released qmail under Public Domain, and based on a GoogleVideo, he is going to change the license for all his existent software and for all his future works.

For some strange reason the URL direct to the video doesn't work, but if you do a search you are able to use the Watch video here option.

Not only that

Yes, I know. I'm not going to say sorry, I should post more, this last three months were not exactly the best ones, and I thought about writing something about what I was doing for Debian and other projects here but ended up being consumed by University, Work, Real Life and "Other Stuff (tm)".

One of the important things on the way is the Debian i18n Extremadura Meeting to be held on December, when we expect to work on i18n.debian.net, change from CVS to SVN, improve DDTP and ddtss and work with Pootle related stuff and infrastructure.

In the meantime, we are also changing our Primary Push Server for volatile.debian.org from durin to verdi (don't worry, a proper announcement will be made on an announcement list close to you). :-)

Thanks for everybody that had the patient to wait for my replies and/or my actions, and the ones that calmly understood my undergoing situation, giving me support and offering help. Thank you very much!

A few days ago I installed the Flock browser, version 1.0, on my notebook computer. I've been using it as my default browser for that time, and I have to say that I find it very slick and useful. I'd used the early beta versions of Flock and I thought it was a good idea, but I wasn't able to use most of the features. The blog posting tool, for example, doesn't work with my hacked-together WikiBlog system. Also, a lot of my must-have Firefox extensions, like SearchStatus, wouldn't install on Flock. But version 1.0 now installs all my Firefox extensions, and it also has lots of neat features that I find really useful. The feed reader, for example, is very slick, complete, and useful. The integration with social software sites like Facebook and Twitter is amazing, and the People View -- which tracks your friends on different systems -- is huge. The "My World" generated home page has replaced Netvibes for me. All good things. I'm a little disappointed with the narrow range of sites that are integrated into the browser, though. It'd be great to see more and better documentation on writing integration plugins on the Flock Developer site. I'd love to work on ways to make it easier to post to MediaWiki sites, upload files, get notifications, etc. I think getting site owners to make their own Flock plug-ins, or making it easy for users or third parties to do the plug-ins themselves, is going to be key to the success of these features. One other thing I found annoying was the indexer. This is a background task that indexes your browsing history so you can search for stuff you've recently seen ("Where did I read about that new version of JavaScript...?") Although this seems really useful, I found that the indexer was pegging the CPU on my Linux box -- possibly a threading problem? -- and I found the program increasingly unresponsive. Eventually I found the toggle in about:config to turn off the indexer ("flock.service.indexer.enabled"), and once I switched it off my browsing experience has been much less frustrating. I'd like to see Flock succeed -- it's a nice piece of work, and I think it's going down the right path. Getting more contributions from the world Web community will go a long way towards making it more useful for users. tags: flock flock1.0 browser opensource

Yo Gamma Gamma Last night I dropped by the SAT for a great games event here in Montreal. Gamma 256 was a fun party, associated with the MIGS game summit. The event showcases submitted games based on a theme -- this year's theme was 256x256 pixel games (or smaller) -- thus the name. There were a ton of Montreal tech people there. The games were fun to play, especially the insanely violent Bloody Zombies, where your chainsaw-wielding alter ego slaughters the undead and then swims in their blood to reach the next level. Great fun, and a good example of Gamma's concentration on art in games. The music was good too -- lots of bleeps and boops and gamety fun. Congratulations to Heather Kelley and Damien DiFede and the rest of the Kokoromi Collective on their great job with this event. I'm already looking forward to next year. tags: kokoromi gamma256 heatherkelley damiendifede

One-liners Some more things going on with me:

• It snowed here in Montreal this week, and now it's sticking. Lots of hats, gloves, and heavy boots; we're officially in winter.
• On that note, I've posted my first house swapping ads on Craigslist this week. One's is for a Montreal-to-Gulf-Coast swap for February 2008, and the other is for a Montreal-to-Buenos-Aires swap for Winter 2008-9. I don't know if either one will work out, but I'm into the idea of spending a month or so away from home.
• SantaCon Montreal happens tomorrow -- see ARE YOU SANTA? for details. We're all geared up for it, but I still need to go get some more Kringly goods for the event.
• Late breaking news: Maj just finished her novel for NaNoWriMo. With 26 hours to spare! Congrats, baby! I'm proud of you.

tags: 1l snow montreal houseswap santarchy santacon

I fully expect to be told that this is Evil, Bad and Wrong, but what are the drawbacks of moving a MakeMaker tarball into the local cpan download tree and using CPAN::install on it like this? Other than the usual hackiness-problems with that early draft, I can't see a blocking problem with it. The CPAN shell handles the dependencies. (Don't worry, the eventual debian package will use dpkg to install the dependencies.) (2007-11-29: 1 comment)

Shintaro wrote an interesting post about Rakugo (a form of story-telling) and Mottainai (a particular form of gratitude that is now becoming an English word in reference to environmentalism) [1]. My definitions of the two words are poor, I encourage interested readers to read Shintaro’s post for the links. Recently I had been considering which jobs are most like a senior programmer position in terms of skills and the work environment. It occurred to me that a chess-master has a job that bears some similarities to that of a senior programmer. A chess master might play a Simul [2] which compares to a programmer or sys-admin fixing lots of small bugs at the same time. In a serious chess tournament up to seven hours may be on the time clocks - not an uncommon amount of time taken to find a subtle bug in a program. For quick chess games as little as three minutes may be on the clock for all your moves - similar to the situation where the network goes down and the CEO is watching you fix it. The intellectual abilities for playing chess and programming have many obvious similarities, memorising significant patterns to avoid re-calculation, having a large mental register set to allow considering complex situations or multiple possibilities at the same time, and being able to spend many hours thinking about a problem. With that in mind one thing that particularly interested me in Shintaro’s post was the reference to a Japanese apprentice system where “They are trained at his masters house from early years maybe after junior-high, living and caring his boss every day life, like Go or Shogi players“. I wonder how this could be used in other cultures and career paths (such as English-speaking countries and computer programming). Probably the “every day life” part wouldn’t be well accepted. When comparing with the high-school experiences that seem typical of people in the computer industry an apprentice program has a lot to offer. A small amount of pay (as opposed to school-fees) and an environment where laws apply (IE almost no bullying) are both significant benefits. Anyone who is reasonably intelligent is most likely to find that they can’t learn anything from the teachers in the final years of high-school because most teachers don’t know much about the subjects that they teach and in the instances where the teacher does know more the class environment doesn’t permit teaching more advanced material. Someone of average intelligence who has worked for 5+ years in an industry can always teach a beginner some useful things so there is some obvious potential to learn. There is a meme that apprentice programs only apply to trades not intellectual work. This meme is probably correct when applied to many categories of office work but seems obviously wrong when applied to computer work. My observation is that at most places where I have worked there has been a significant amount of time from the most productive, skilled, and highly paid people spent on tasks that are way below their skill level - and often requiring skills that they don’t have. One example is when I was working for an ISP in a senior sys-admin position, when things really went wrong on the network I was usually the person to fix them - but I spent moderate amounts of time fixing hardware problems with desktop PCs and some time fixing Windows networking issues (of which I know little). Some of the problems I fixed could have been fixed by a 16yo apprentice who would probably have taken less time to fix them while also having a much lower hourly rate - and in some cases may have done a better job). I’m not sure that having an apprentice assigned to an individual programmer would work well, but having one per team should. I have previously written about how to get the benefits of a university education without attending university [3] so I don’t think that the inability of such apprentices to attend university would necessarily be a problem.

• [1] http://intrajp.no-ip.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=707


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_exhibition


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/04/ideas-for-a-home-university/

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Right now, some Debian Developers (and also not yet Developers, like me:), are on
the work sessions in Extremadura, I am on the QA and release teams meeting.

We started in the morning with presentations (see also the schedule). Any comments and suggestions welcomed, please add comments below the post.

Lucas Nussbaum presenting:


Most of us:



And in details, names from left to right. Cyril Brulebois, Gon ri Le Bouder:


Luk Claes, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, J rg Jaspert, Lars Wirzenius:


Fabio Tranchitella, Bernd Zeimetz, Mario Iseli, Luk Claes:


Filippo Giunchedi, Stefano Zacchiroli, Tzafrir Cohen, Simon Richter, Faidon Liambotis:


And again, so that Faidon is visible:

Thomas writes about a dream of his and how his dream self failed to do the right thing.

I have been able several times, while asleep, to be aware enough to realize I was dreaming and was asleep and started to drive my dream the way I wanted.

I made myself fly superman like and fly a plane, I managed to come in second place after Ayrton Senna (this was while he was alive and I respected him too much to take his victory) I managed to do a lot of things. At some point I even managed to turn right a recursive nightmare I had and got rid of it that way.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do this in the last 3 or 4 years, but I know I had to set a goal before going to sleep in order to achieve it.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Andrew writes about Python, Perl and Ruby:

Ruby has some nice things (like Perlish regular expression handling), but it brings back all that punctuation noise again.

He gives an example of punctuation noise in Perl:

I go back to Perl and my eyes bleed after trying to dereference a reference to a scalar, or something like that. It’s just ugly in Perl.

I don’t think that’s fair to compare Perl’s ponctuation noise with Ruby. Ruby has a feature that could qualify as punctuation noise, but it’s really a feature: variables are prefixed with their scope. For example, class variables start with @@ (@@var), instance variables start with @ (@var), global variables start with $ ($var), and constants are in CAPS. I don’t know if Ruby “invented” that, or if it comes from another language (it’s probably the case: Ruby takes a lot of good ideas everywhere). Also, Andrew, joining elements of an array in ruby is written myarray.join(” “), and Ruby has =~. So you should definitely give Ruby a try ;) No, seriously, Ruby is a really interesting language. It’s really a shame that it’s still so japanese-centric (most development decisions are taken on a japanese mailing list !!), since it’s not really help a wide adoption.

I have a laptop with Debian, cell phone (Nokia N70) with bluetooth and this howto describes how to connect to the internet.

Connect USB bluetooth dongle to the laptop and check it:

$ hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
    BD Address: 00:02:72:D2:23:12 ACL MTU: 310:10 SCO MTU: 64:8
    UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
    RX bytes:686 acl:0 sco:0 events:22 errors:0
    TX bytes:337 acl:0 sco:0 commands:21 errors:0

Scan for the phone:

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
    00:19:79:86:EB:BC       Nokia N70

Create a serial device for communicating with the modem in the phone:

$ rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 00:19:79:86:EB:BC 3
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:19:79:86:EB:BC on channel 3
Press CTRL-C for hangup

(A dialog will popup on the phone asking me to allow the laptop to connect.)

Connect using wvdial:

$ wvdial
--> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.56
--> Cannot get information for serial port.
--> Initializing modem.
--> Sending: ATZ
ATZ
OK
--> Sending: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
OK
--> Modem initialized.
--> Sending: ATDT*99***1#
--> Waiting for carrier.
ATDT*99***1#
CONNECT
~[7f] #@! !     2 # $@# ! $ %\ " &   *    g %~
--> Carrier detected.  Starting PPP immediately.
--> Starting pppd at Wed Nov 28 12:58:55 2007
--> Pid of pppd: 4378
--> Using interface ppp0
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> local  IP address 172.24.171.97
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> remote IP address 10.6.6.6
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> primary   DNS address 62.141.0.2
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]
--> secondary DNS address 213.162.65.1
--> pppd:  [08][06][08] [10][06][08]

And that's it, I am connected.

Prerequisities

$ wajig install wvdial bluez-utils

And setup the /etc/wvdial.conf file:

$ cat /etc/wvdial.conf
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Password = doesnt_matter
Username = doesnt_matter
Stupid Mode = 1

The web site www.CheatNeutral.com offers cheaters the possibility of paying single or monogamous people to offset their cheating. It’s an interesting spin on the carbon trading schemes that are on offer. www.greenmaven.com - a Google search site for Green related information. www.greenerbuildings.com - information on designing buildings to be “Green”. Binary adding machine using marbles and wood-work [1]. I’ve just been reading Accelerando by Charles Stross [2], in that book he describes the Pentagon using Babbage machines to avoid the potential of electronic surveillance. Alan Robertson has just started a blog [3]. He is a lead developer in the Linux-HA (Heartbeat) [4] project (which incidentally lists SGI as a friend due to the work that Anibal and I did [5]). Here is an interesting article about light pollution [6]. It covers the issues of observing the stars, saving energy, and reducing crime through effective lighting.

• [1] http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html


• [2] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [3] http://techthoughts.typepad.com/


• [4] http://www.linux-ha.org/


• [5] http://www.linux-ha.org/ProjectFriends


• [6] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen

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svn-uscan Might be useful if you use svn-buildpackage and co-maintain packages or have to sponsor/review them:

0 bzed@hal:~$ type svn-uscan
svn-uscan is aliased to  uscan --verbose --force-download --rename --repack --destdir=../tarballs'
0 bzed@hal:~$

Debian Admin

It looks like the fine DebianAdmin.com site is at it agian:

• how to setup cisco router enable pasword
• Original source: Cisco Certifided Network Associate Study Guide : 3rd Edition

Word-for-word copyright infringement by the user "admin". See the other cisco articles for more infringements. (OK I'm still bitter their site is pimped all over the place, including wiki.debian.org, and their name is confusingly similar to my sites...)

Apache SQL

After yesterdays frustrations with SQL::YASP I moved to parsing logfiles to an temporary SQLite database. I now have a tool which you may use to load an arbitary number of Apache logfiles to, and query via SQL. It looks something like this:

asql> load /var/log/apache2/acc*
Creating tables
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log.1
asql>   SELECT referer,COUNT(referer) AS number from logs GROUP BY referer ORDER BY number DESC,referer
- 4807
http://localhost/stats/ 2
http://foo.ocm/stats/ 2
asql>

Very useful :) A Debian package is available if you're interested in testing / using it, as is a mercurial repository. The package now stands at 0.4 and is essentially done. It has tab completion on filenames and does enough for me. It might be nice to allow it to auto-read certain files on startup, or persist the database but I'll not bother unless people ask for it.

PDF on Kindle I've seen plenty of good commentary on the Amazon Kindle. Robert Love's hands-on review and follow-up cover both Linux-hacker and regular customer views. But there's one question that I haven't seen answered elsewhere: Why doesn't the Kindle support PDF natively? I think the answer is simple: The Kindle's 800×600 e-ink screen has too few pixels to render a typical PDF file readably, and its refresh rate is too slow for comfortable scrolling. The only practical solution for most PDFs is to extract the text and convert it to a reflowable format like HTML (which Kindle users can do with Amazon's $0.10 wireless service or free PC-based service). The US$700 iLiad (with 64% more pixels) is much better for PDF reading, but will still run into trouble with some files. It seems that the current generation of ebook readers comes with a decision—cheap, e-ink, or PDF: choose any two. The refresh problem is one reason I'm not sold on e-ink. I'm curious to compare the Kindle screen to my XO laptop, which seems like an interesting compromise between normal LCD and e-ink displays. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but I don't know anything about the Kindle except what I learned from the user's guide and from playing with one at the office.