Two successive days with only one match. We watched Scotland-Romania (42-0) yesterday. Very serious match by the Scots who played better than their first match. They scored 6 tries against a quite weak Romanian team, with no soul. Nothing really important to say as I nearly felt asleep watching the match. Italia-Portugal today feature a good hot attendance in Parc des Princes with the numerous Portuguese or Portuguese-origin people who live in the Paris area pushing "their" team. Most of them certainly never got interested in rugby before (futebol!) but that gave a noisy stadium, particularly when portugal scored their try (and only points in the game). Italia won 31-5 after a good start, but quite weak field play later even if the Portuguese has big defensive holes. I don't really see Italia beat Scotland now and I think we'll see Scotland in 1/4th finals. Small day to come tomorrow (Wales-Japan, with a probable easy win by Wales), before a peak day on Fridady with a very much expected France-Ireland.

I was asked for a story on good or bad media sponsored online conversations. I'd not really had much to do with them until this summer. itv is the UK's biggest commercial broadcaster and it had rights to show the Tour de France here this year. Its coverage was pretty good, with daily highlights and live coverage at weekends, mostly on the itv4 satellite/DTT channel. The end of every show plugged their web homepage, which had a prominent link to their forums. I've been on a couple of cycling forums for a while, so I signed up and tried to help explain things that I knew. After a while, I noticed that when I answered a question properly, with links to other authoritative sites like the race teams' own sites, my message was silently removed. This happened a few times. Then I found out that the forum terms of use prohibit linking to any other web sites! This is a big problem, because itv's cycling pages are pretty limited. As a result, the forum was full of hearsay and it's hard to verify anything anyone posts. To cap it all, itv closed the forums for a weekend for an upgrade. Then a weekend became a week, which became a month, which became six weeks. When they finally reopened it, at least they sent me an email, so I tried to login. My login doesn't work and I can't view the forum as a guest any more. I've emailed their support address and had no reply. I don't know if this is a general problem - I can't contact other forum members because I don't have their details. I only saw them on the web forum and members couldn't link their homepages. So, it'll be a long time before I spend much time participating on any media-sponsored sites again, except in a casual throw-away way. Now most of my sports messages will be posted to Cycling Fans and BuzzinFootball like my local news posts go to the community-run WSM Forum. The trouble with media-sponsored forums is that they just don't have the interest in any particular community to want to sustain it. Somewhere, there's a bean-counter saying "so what if we kill this community? We started it from scratch and we'll just do it again." Any messages you post to those forums are usually gone, out of your control, lost to you. Is it worth posting to them? I think Andrew Savory is also spot-on about the problems with forums for technical communities in Bagel Belly Blog: How Open is your Open Source project? He certainly seems in fine form so far this week. I know not all forums are that bad. I'm on a couple of phpbb-powered ones which work well, with added XML feeds and so on. Are any "old media" companies brave enough to run a liberal phpbb? Are there other examples of particularly good or bad forums that you'd like to tell me about?

So, I have just installed RockBox on my iPod and I have liberated it It’s nice to see people amazed on an iPod running something that’s different from the usual firmware. Now, both my iPod and PowerBook are not running Apple software, muahaha!

---

Since we are in NYC now, and even before, we’ve been looking for interesting activities in the area. Tomorrow, the New York City Perl Mongers will handle their monthly meeting. At 6:30 PM at d.b.a, 41 First Avenue (between 2nd and 3rd Streets), map: http://tinyurl.com/2yqg4d. Tomorrow, we were supposed to go see a prospective apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the afternoon; I’ll see if we can still make it. Otherwise, if you are in the area, feel free to attend!

---

Yesterday, we went to the Yankee Stadium. Actually we only went outside it, since we didn’t carry any tickets, we just wanted to see the neighborhood. It was amazing, since there was a game and we witnessed thounds of people commuting to it to watch the game. It was a nice experience only watching the people and all the buzz around the stadium. After that, we got back to Manhattan on the subway and dropped off on the 57th and Madison Ave: From there, we walked around sixty freaking blocks to get to our apartment near Essex & Delancey St. After checking on Google maps, it was a ~6 kms walk! It only took us 2:30 hrs. Heh. On the good side, we happened to see lots of nice places of Lexington and other avenues.Tonight, we’ll be walking to Little Italy and Chinatown, although we already know those neighborhoods, since Alex took us there when were here last June.

---

So, we are uploading our pics to the NYC photo set of our flickr account, raquelydavid.

Every now and then I encounter a web page which I'd like to archive for later purposes, e.g. because I can see that it might be related to my research, or simply because I want to keep the information until eternity. I know of three ways to achieve this, but each of them has drawbacks:

• Using wget to download the page. This does not pull any dependencies (although wget could), nor does it stamp the downloaded file with the original URL and time it was downloaded.
• Printing the page to a PDF. Apart from being a cumbersome process, requiring at least five mouseclicks and way more attention than this should take (in Firefox at least), printed webpages don't look the same as on-screen. Even though Firefox stamps printouts with URL and time, this information is truncated if e.g. the URL is too long, and in a printout, you lose all the meta information, as well as links etc.
• Using Firefox's 'Save as' feature. Again, being too cumbersome for my taste, this actually manages to properly archive a webpage with all dependencies. However, it drops a file and a folder on your hard disk, which I find rather annoying. And it also doesn't stamp the downloaded files with neither URL, nor time.

So, dear lazyweb, how do you do it? I am aware that it'll be trivial to hack up a little script which uses wget to obtain page and dependencies, create a file with stamp data and produce a frameset to put this data above the actual file, but before I spend time implementing the wheel, I'd like to make sure it doesn't yet exist. NP: The Flower Kings: Paradox Hotel Update: Michael Stevens pointed me to furl.net, but I need a solution that I can use offline. Part of the reason that I want to archive web pages is because I don't want to come back in a couple of months and find a webpage removed, a server dead, or a site like furl.net discontinued. J rg Jaspert introduced me to Scrapbook, a Firefox extension I'll have to check out. However, even before looking at it: I really want files or directories on the filesystem, so that I can check them into version control and have them archived and replicated. I don't trust any data to Firefox or any of its extensions, or anything under ~/.mozilla. This is also the reason why I Slogger doesn't cut the mustard for me. Matej Cepl wants me to use konqueror to archive them. I don't want to install hundreds of megabytes for this feature, nor can I imagine that this feature will be much different or less cumbersome than Firefox's ability to save pages. I hate the mouse. Thanks for all your comments, regardless! Update: Just found this post about archiving stuff like digg/delicious.

Yesterday, I started porting some of my research notes to the Debian wiki. I wanted to use vim for the editing, and since the "Editus Externus" extension basically died, I went out on a quest and found It's all text, which does the job quite nicely. And it's bug-free, at least when you configure it that way in the addon's preferences dialog: NP: The Flower Kings: Paradox Hotel

I am starting to wonder why every single bit of hardware that deals with wireless networks is utter crap. Really, I'd pay good money for an access point that doesn't crash when the firmware on the ipw2200 sends out a malformed packet while crashing because I used all the transmit buffers in the card. The zd1201 is no better, I've managed to have its firmware crash on me twice now, and unlike the ipw2200 which will at least admit that there has been a firmware error and reboot the card it just silently retries for an infinite time.

I decided to experiment.

Lately I have been wanting to buy a lot of fairly expensive stuff that I don’t really need. It started with the telephoto zoom lens, which I ended up getting, and love. I’m really happy that I got it, especially since Lisa and I will be going on a hot air balloon ride in Napa for our anniversary, and then to the Salinas Air Show the following weekend. Then it was the new TiVo HD. We already have a Series 3, but we’ve occasionally thought that we might like to get a second TiVo for our other TV. Now that it’s been confirmed that Multi-Room Viewing is coming to both the Series3 and TiVo HD soon, there’s even more incentive to get one. Fortunately right now they’re selling them to employees at a discounted price (limit one per employee). And now it’s the iPhone. I can’t explain why I feel compelled to buy this other than iWant. A few of my coworkers have one and they look pretty slick. Plus my current iPod battery can’t hold a charge very long. Plus I like the idea of having an integrated iPod and phone (it’s part of the reason why I got my current phone, the Motorola SLVR L7). Plus it’s roughly the same size as the SLVR and only slightly heavier.

This past weekend I did the absolutely insane and attended a wedding and an ordination in Vancouver, without taking any time off of work. I've finished two weeks at the new job (and am loving it! I'll post more when I have something more than "done a bunch of classes, learned confidential pieces of Google knowledge, ate great food") and didn't want to go to my boss and ask for time off in the first month.

So, Friday night, 9pm, caught flight from SFO to SEA, rented car. We were sitting in Heather's room at 4am chatting away, slowly passing out. Next day, up at 9, go visit Jamu, sort out suit rental, go for lunch, back to his moms to get dressed. I hope to link to a wedding album sometime in here. He got married by the paperclip behind the Planetarium in Vanier park. There were 4 weddings that I saw there, all peacefully contending for the various views and trying to stay out of one another's photos. =) Saturday evening, the DJ was great. We tried an experiment to see if we could leave Leif with Sandy, and whether the solid foods would be enough for a few hours. He made it a couple of hours, and then joined us at the dance, being happier knowing that we were around. It turns out Leif likes dancing! I was a little worried about the volume, and at various times several of us asked the DJ to turn it down when the music was creeping louder. It was also fun to see a whole pile of friend that I haven't seen in something like 10 years and see how we've all changed. Thanks to Facebook, at least we didn't have to completely rehash the last decade. =)

I think we turned in at 1 or 2. The next day, up at 10:30 so that we could pickup the van, pickup Katy, pickup our mail, go to the Naam to meet Ernie, Janet, and Anika, drop off the suit, pick up a snack, go to MEC, drop off Katy, and then head to the Vancouver Unitarian Church to see Laura's ordination and meet Jon.

Laura's ordination was the most amazing that I've been to. Her ministry is centered around the Faithful Fools, and the people that she's touched and been mentored by were woven throughout the ceremony. I was invited to play the recorder, so I did the last part of the prelude, and played along with the choir for "Rise up, oh flame". People were wearing silly hats, there were stories, and tears, and another pile of people that I haven't seen in ages from when I was a member at that church. I'm also not sure that I've been to that church since getting married in it, so it was nice to be in that space again.

The reason for the visit to MEC was that my goal has been to start biking home. I'd acquired a bike, helmet, lights, and lock, but wasn't happy with my visibility in black clothing on a black bike. I got ankle reflectors and a vest for the backpack, and I biked home yesterday. I'm surprisingly not that sore for the 10 mile ride home. We'll see how I'm doing in a few days. ;)

Yesterday I landed in Subversion a branch of Tasks I've been working on to remove all confirmation dialogs and replace them with infinite undo/redo. I'm really pleased with the end result, there are no more dialogs getting in the way and every action is undoable. To implement this I adapted MarlinUndoManager from Marlin by the most excellent Iain Holmes. The basic design is that the application has a global undo context. When an operation which should be undoable occurs, you start the context, add as many undoables as required, and then end the context. Allowing a single undoable action to consist of multiple undoables lets the application reuse fine-grained logic to build coarse user-level actions (in Tasks this is used to build the Remove Completed action from multiple Delete Task actions). To make integrating this into applications even easier, I wrote a GtkAction which reflects the state of an undo context, so it is trivial to add redo/undo to the interface. There is one remaining task left before this is ready to be released: undo support in the edit dialog entries. Once this is done, the next release of Tasks will be announced. I also plan to work with Iain on cleaning up this code and submitting it for inclusion into GTK+. NP: Money Jungle, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Max Roach

if you like to monitor the number of RC bugs, you are probably annoyed by the graph on http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/. The graph starts in 2003, making it impossible to read short-time changes. There’s a bug about that: #431299: RC bug status graph timescale is too long. And I provided a patch a few months ago, but it hasn’t been included yet. So, in the meantime, you can use my private copy (generated daily):

• Graph for the last two years
• Graph for the last 6 months
• Overall graph (same as the one on bugs.d.o, with the added captions)

Also, if you like graphs, Yves-Alexis Perez (aka Corsac) generates cool graphs about Debian:

• NEW queue
• NM stats

And if you want to have all the interesting graphs on the same page, you can use this page.

This week my son Nilagriva started preschool so on Sunday we had his
vidyarambha. As an added bonus it was Rishi Panchami. As you can see from the picture, he has written four mantras in Sanskrit, the
letter &#0a85; in Gujarati, and his name in English hence the dazed look on his
face—a common Vyas reaction to formal education.

Stage 1 of the new koha installer uses MakeMaker and some silly tricks to try to install a CGI tree, as well as modules. You can often grab prepatches from mjr-installer if you really want the latest bits sooner. The biggest user-visible change with this installer (compared to 2.2) is that it's dumb. It's dumb in that it's trying to do the simplest thing that could possibly work and it's dumb in that it doesn't ask the installing user any questions. If you know you want to change things, you can tell it, but it doesn't ask you to confirm everything like the 2.2 installer did. Almost immediately, that was criticised on IRC. The first criticism was about a related feature that someone else removed earlier in 3.0, really. The second criticism was stalled by the realisation that if we really want an interface that "questions everything" every time, a wrapper script can ask for all the settings and instruct the dumb installer. I'm not sure whether asking users to confirm everything is a good move, for the sort of reasons in Havoc Pennington's 2002 essay under "The Question of Preferences" - each setting we encourage people to change makes it harder to debug installation problems. That's one of the biggest pains with 2.2 and I think we've started seeing the same happening in 3.0 already. It's not quite "no two installations are identical" but it's not far off. So, the main installer defaults everything to the best values that I can guess that will work within the constraints. It should work for most people and it should be easier for packagers to override. I'd still love to hear about how other Perl CGI scripts install, especially if they use MakeMaker for the basics, then use a CGI interface for the rest. Are you writing one?

For one UK bank, "innovation" has included funding long-term home loans mostly with short-term inter-bank loans. So, the increased costs of obtaining inter-bank loans during a credit crisis caused Northern Rock to obtain support from the central bank, the Bank of England. Once that became public knowledge, as it must, it started a predictable run on the bank, as described in Guardian Unlimited: Between Rock and a hard place - savers besiege bank. Savings are leaving at a rate of almost a billion pounds (1.6bn euro?) each day just now. In turn, that makes the bank's loans-to-savings ratio even more extreme, which then worries more savers and we're into a feedback loop, with queues growing out of the bank's doors, customer sit-ins [BBC West] and other unsettling side-effects. Northern Rock is a former member-owned building society which demutalised (converted to a shareholder-owned bank) in 1997. In just ten years, it has become committed to a business model which seems to scare many of its savers. Would it have done that if it was still controlled by its savers and borrowers? Is this exodus of savings going to be matched by loan customers moving away too? Will any of these customers return to the mutual and co-operative sector? It now seems sort of academic whether Northern Rock is on the list of online banks that work with free software, as commentators suggest it may be taken over soon. 2007-09-18 Update: the UK government has guaranteed all deposits in the dodgy bank. This is a bad thing, as explained on niq's soapbox: Race to the bottom.

As uclibc's removal from Debian has been requested already, it is really time to push forward with this package. The technical bits of the package haven't changed in ages, and could be said to be pretty solid (I use the package daily). The problem with this package in the Debian context is that the licencing is somewhat less than clear, as no one really cared about adding their name to the list of copyright holders. I can see a few different variants how to deal with this: Number one would be the "massive audit" approach. This is the first thing I'm going to try, simply hang out on IRC for a few days and try to find people who join me (on freenode's #uclibc, mostly). If that doesn't work out, there will be lobotomized uploads, where I start a "new" package and subsequently move the functionality back in, in whatever tempo I can manage, until I get back to "pristine upstream source".

Although slow, development on svn-buildpackage still continues. Sorry for the delays, but both myself and Eduard Bloch have been unable to assign more time to svn-buildpackage development in the last few months.

From the changelog of the trunk package (unreleased 0.6.22):

  [ Eddy Petri or ]
* IMPORTANT: changed default behaviour of saving the configuration in
.svn/deb-layout by default to avoid stale data to override the
configuration options that were updated in the repository.
(Closes: #414581)
As a consequence, a new option --svn-savecfg was added to allow a
mechanism for easily overriding options locally

BTW, did you know that svn-buildpackage is maintained in collab-maint and welcomes contributions and committers/reviewers (especially those)?

In case you want to help, this is the place to start from:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

or

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

If you don't have commit access to collab-maint yet (just make a request on the alioth tracker and that will be fixed ;-) ).

Sound Juicer "The Best Blue Is Through The Trees" 2.20.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Remove a work around now that GStreamer is fixed, and update requirement (#472650, Jaap Haitsma)

Also thanks to the tireless translation team: Djihed Afifi (ar), Ihar Hrachyshka (be), Alexander Shopov (bg), Runa Bhattacharjee (bn_IN), Jordi Mallach (ca), Ask Hjorth Larsen (da), Hendrik Richter (de), Tshewang Norbu (dz), Kostas Papadimas (el), David Lodge (en_GB), Jorge Gonz lez (es), Ivar Smolin (et), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Christophe Benz (fr), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ankit Patel (gu), Eyal Mamo (he), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Francesco Marletta (it), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Young-Ho Cha (ko), Erdal Ronahi (ku), ygimantas Beru ka (lt), Raivis Dejus (lv), Arangel Angov (mk), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Wouter Bolsterlee (nl), Tomasz Dominikowski (pl), Og Maciel (pt_BR), Duarte Loreto (pt), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Nickolay V. Shmyrev (ru), Danishka Navin (si), Matic gur (sl), Elian Myftiu (sq), (sr), Daniel Nylander (sv), Dr.T.Vasudevan (ta), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Baris Cicek (tr), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Clytie Siddall (vi), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Chao-Hsiung Liao (zh_HK, zh_TW).

I have just read an interesting post by Ted Ts’O about copyright protection on the net [1]. Ted is well known as a free software programmer, but it’s slightly less well known that he is an avid Science-Fiction fan. In the Free Software community most people seem to be interested in Sci-Fi, but Ted is more interested than most. Ted’s post concerns the irresponsible actions of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America [2] (SFWA). To summarise it they issued DMCA [3] take-down notices for any web page that matched a search on the names “Asimov” or “Silverberg“. I don’t approve of the DMCA laws as a collection, but take-down notices are not necessarily bad (I have issued such notices for unauthorised copies of my own work in the past). The problem in this case is that the words in question are extremely common, not only might they be used as the names for other people (authors or characters) but Asimov in particular is a well known term when describing the potential development of intelligent computers that operate robots (see the Three Laws of Robotics [4]), the term “not Asimov Compliant” has been used by Alastair Reynolds in Century Rain to refer to a class of military robots that have no compunction about killing humans. Among the fall-out of the SFWA actions was the removal of a free novel by Cory Doctorow [4]. Incidentally my favourite free to download Cory Doctorow book is Eastern Standard Tribe [5]. craphound.com has Cory’s blog as well as links to other free Sci-Fi that he’s written. Reading the links from Ted’s post took me to a blog entry by the current SFWA vice-president [6] which describes authors such as Cory Doctorow as “webscabs“. This offends me greatly. My work and that of my friends in writing free software could be described in the same way (and in fact is described in a similar way by some software monopolists). Every blogger could have their work described in a similar way by paid journalists. The fact that the SFWA VP is not representing SFWA when writing such comments does little to allay concern about this. It seems to me that people with such ideas are intent on attacking my community, and that it would be wrong of me to give any of them $0.50 by buying one of their books. I resolve to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read. After that I will prioritise my book purchases with a significant factor being how well the author gets the concepts of copyright etc. If nothing else an author who can’t understand how copyright (something that is essential to their own livelyhood) interacts with current computer systems will have significant difficulties in predicting how technology and society will develop over the next hundred or thousand years. My problem in reading Sci-Fi books is not in discovering books that are enjoyable and which contain interesting concepts, but in finding time to read them. Thanks to SFWA for giving me an extra criteria to cull the list of books to read.

• [1] http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2007/09/15/whack-the-gopher/


• [2] http://www.sfwa.org/


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca


• [4] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-writ-1.html


• [5] http://craphound.com/est/


• [6] http://community.livejournal.com/sfwa/10039.html

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Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Wed 19.09.2007

09:00-09:30 and 16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 20.09.2007

15:00-15:45 and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 21.09.2007

16:15-17:30 CET

Sat 22.09.2007

16:00-17:45 CET

Sun 23.09.2007

17:15-18:00 CET

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007 to Sun 23.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

Enjoy the finale!