AJ, if some blogs would support comments, I would leave my opinion there and not add noise to the planet. 1) Censorship does not stop being censorship just because the people doing the censoring don’t have the absolute power to censor the information everywhere and only block the information or opinion from the channels they can control. It can be called otherwise - editorial control, policy of political correctness, libel liability protection policy, Children-Safe Talk Initiative or Women Friendly Environment Collective. But at its heart it is still censorship of all official Debian-related channels of communication as the aim is to remove the objectionable content from all such channels. 2 and 3) Discriminating against jerks is also a discrimination against people or groups. Please do not get all DFSG-bendy on me here. DFSG is about use and distribution license of the software and not about the communication channels used to facilitate this process. I could actually counter you with a quote from the Social Contract that says that we will not hide problems. The discussion as such admits that some people consider sexism to be a problem in Debian (for example). Excluding sexist comments from Debian official channels will not make sexism magically disappear, it will be just hidden, swiped under the rag and said to sit quiet. The only problem is that the community that is tired of such hushing is much larger then anticipated. There are people that think that men and women are different. We checked. I can’t see anything bad in the example quoted on the planet so far. Yes, the depth of the discussion is weak - we can’t be genius all the time, but I really fail to see who is insulted in there. Lesbians? Don’t think so, they are compared to a threesome quite favorably. That is not a technical discussion about interrupt timings, but that’s why it is in offtopic. Doh! Relaxed chit-chat like this is typical in all healthy and tight-knit communities. Is it offensive to women to talk about sex??? Grow up and have a good 3 hour chit-chat with some real women. Women talk about sex even more than men. Especially on-line. Can someone really show what is the “OFFENDING BEHAVIOR” so obscene and dangerous that people want to censor out of Debian and explain what exactly they see as being so horribly bad to Debian that they see total censorship of all Debian communication channels as an acceptable countermeasure?

Since 3 weeks, half of my worktime (but i don't have worked that much, due to another real life occupation) has been dedicated to setting up a meeting for the OCaml community in Paris. This is the first public meeting about OCaml in France. It will be located at ENST (Telecom Paris) on January, the 26th 2008. This should be an occasion for the european OCaml community to meet in the real life and to discuss the hottest current topics of OCaml. I hope that this meeting will help people to begin creating a more consistent community around OCaml. In fact, the community already exists -- but it will be a time to meet several members that has never meet before... More information and subscribtion

When you quote Voltaire in a discussion about censorship, the likelihood that people will listen to you approaches zero while the likelihood that people will roll their eyes approaches infinity.

I've been quietly coveting the Zonbu for a number of months now. I finally caved in and ordered one when we got back from Australia, with the intention of using it to replace minotaur, the computer that exports my RAID10 via ATA over Ethernet to my MythTV box. minotaur is the old daedalus, which I bought back around 2000. It's a VA Linux Pentium III. It's old, noisy, and has no idea what power management is. The Zonbu has more grunt than it (in terms of BogoMIPS), and it's a fraction of the size. Our linen cupboard is now significantly quieter (and hopefully cooler). Heck, hopefully the power bill will be lower as well. Anyway, I put the order in when we returned from Australia, with the expectation that it'd turn up some time while Sarah was in hospital, or shortly afterwards, and I could use the rest of the month that I was off work to play with it. Well, I got an email on the 31st of December, telling me they were out of stock, and unless I wanted to pay $29 more for one with built-in WiFi, I'd have to wait until mid-January. As I just couldn't see the point of having WiFi (or spending more money) and not needing the thing in a hurry anyway, because I had more important things to worry about in the meantime, I opted to wait. This morning, I emailed them to enquire about whether or not more stock had arrived, and they emailed back to say that they were still waiting, but they'd found one they could sell to me anyway. The company happens to be close by in Menlo Park, so I picked it up today in our travels. Let me just say that it is a very cool little computer, just if you use it for its intended purpose. It's running a customised Gentoo Linux, with a 2.6.22 kernel. I'm a bit surprised about their choice of Gentoo. I think they'd be better off partnering with Canonical, given that Mark Shuttleworth is trying to make a Linux distribution easy enough for his grandmother to use. That'd take the work of engineering the operating system out of the equation, then they could just focus on the hardware and a bit of integration with Amazon's S3. The thing I have to give them mad props for is documenting how to hack the tripe out of the box. They tell you how to enable root. They tell you how to enable PXE booting. So once I figured out that the front USB port seems to get treated slightly differently for a USB keyboard than the back ones, it was very easy to PXE boot it and install Debian. I initially started with trying to install Etch, but I kept getting missed interrupts on the CompactFlash device, which resulted in the filesystems panicking. So I gave up and went with Lenny, and presumably because it also uses 2.6.22, everything seemed to go fine. The box comes with a 4Gb CompactFlash card, which is ample for my needs. It's running the 686-optimised kernel, which is probably not ideal, but works. We'll see how things go. Interestingly, I blew another hard drive power supply, exactly like last time. I've no idea if it's the act of plugging everything back in again that's causing the problem, or they're generally flaky, and they don't fail until they're powered off and back on again. Maybe that IEC Y-cable wasn't such a good idea after all. I've now run out of spare power supplies, so I'm going to have to get some more for when these two inevitably fry themselves. Overall, I'm very pleased with this purchase, but it's a bit early to see how it's going to perform. I can't imagine it's going to perform worse than the computer it's replacing, but it was probably never intended for what I'm using it for either... Oh, and I discovered vblade-persist, which seems to be a very nice framework for managing ATA over Ethernet exports. Now I just need to get my hands on a big tub of Lego to build a nice chassis for the whole thing.

Well, this is being written on my broken HP laptop and from within GNOME at that. The problems that I anticipated last time are truly ugly : trying to manage a system that uses repositories from Mepis, Ubuntu and Debian are as horrendous as most Debianites would expect. Debian-based is not an easy balance and this is something that I will revisit within Emdebian. It would be easier if I didn't insist on Debian being added to the mix.
There are problems with cyclic upgrades where apt gets confused and repeatedly upgrades the same packages at the same version.
There are problems doing any building on the box - none of the -dev packages will install without massive work on apt-cache policy $foo and apt-get install $foo=$debian_version, due to dependency problems from having mixed distros. The end result of these was that all of KDE had to be removed - presumably due to upgrading libc6 but didn't worry about trying to put it back.
The wireless connection is still down - but it didn't work with plain Mepis either. The graphics are really weird - the proprietary NVidia kernel driver only copes with 1024x768 and I had expected more, plus scrolling behaviour is distracting.
So yes, even the this horrible setup can work in a basic and quite limited way but I'll need a full Debian install quite soon. It's stable, it's usable for limited tasks and at least I've been able to get GNOME onto it.
I'm going to leave it for now and revisit it later with a fresh Debian amd64 install - I've got to get back to some Emdebian stuff.
(Oh and yes, I did replace firefox with iceweasel).

As we all know, the Express are a load of xenophobic racist ignorant misleading cocks. Thanks to Iain who pointed me at this glorious post entitled something I won't repeat for fear of offending the children, I discovered what is probably the best example of selective quoting in the Express. They said:

The Government's equality chief Trevor Phillips recently said the fear that migrants are jumping council queues for homes is fuelling tensions.

Well if the government are scared that migrants magically jump up the council house queue, then it must be true. Or is it. The Guardian has the full quote:

Mr Phillips [chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights] said tensions were driven by a widespread perception that newcomers often received unfair advantages. "Specifically, that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly-arrived migrants," he told the [Local Government Association]. "I have never seen any reliable evidence to back up this claim. And there can be no doubt that much of the public feeling is driven by the careless media and racist parties."

If you ever wonder how low the Express and co. will go to get a quote or statistic, this is a good example. In a quote where the essence of the message is that the scum-class tabloids and racist parties are fueling anti-immigration views, they managed to get a quote to support a story against immigration. Well done, Tom Whitehead, you really do deserve a special place in hell. NP: Skreamizm Volume 4, Skream

I've just rolled up release 0.1.0 of r (pronounced littler). A few changes made it into this release:

• A new option -l (with long form --packages) to load packages into the R session. This is useful when you have data-processing one-liners as it does away with the explicit library(foo) inside your actual R expression. For added bonus, library() is wrapped in a suppressMessage() call.
• The --no-restore option is now passed to the embedded R session.
• Argument handling was improved / corrected for a corner case.
• Output shown by --help was improved.
• The manual page and README were updated accordingly.
• The datasets package will now be autoloaded.
• Two minor fixes went into bootstrap, the wrapper around autotools and friends.
• The cache-clearing part of the R package updater example update.r was improved.
• We added some comparisons to Rscript in the timing tests.

As usual, our code in our svn archive, on my r page, and in the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue, and Jeff's littler page at Vanderbilt should reflect the new release soon too.

A new version of shadow packages (login, passwd, useradd and all other low-level user management utilities) hit unstable this week-end. That release is quite a major update as this is the first release where Nicolas Fran ois introduced numerous changes meant to make the versions of shadow used in various distros reconverge. So that version now really says "hey, Debian took shadow over". He thus incorporated lots of patches from Gentoo and Fedora as well as a few Debian ones (Debian packages were apparently closer to upstream code than others). He also added support for SHA256 and SHA512 encryption methods. Careful users will read /usr/share/doc/login/NEWS.gz to get an idea of these changes. After a small hiccup with 4.1.0-1 (The "Bleu d'Auvergne" release) which was hitting our German-speaking users (login is now providing a German version of su(1) which is also provided by manpages-de, therefore making the package uninstallable), 4.1.0-2 (the "Bleu des Causses" release) is there sitting in unstable waiting for testing. Nicolas is already working on 4.1.1, now focusing on code cleaning. That version should be out pretty soon. Also note that we'll soon be short of "Appellation d'Origine Contr l e" cheeses names for the releases and we more and more have to make our imagination work. General de Gaulle was wrong: there are not 50 million cheeses in France.

What a disaster!
HP and NVidia making laptops unusable
I've been considering a new laptop for weeks - mainly to get more RAM, more space but without adding to the actual size of the machine (or weight). I know, I should have taken more time over the selection, I should have found out more about the hardware, etc.etc.
I've ended up with an HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea) for the 2Gb RAM, 15inch screen, 250Gb hard drive to replace my ageing iBook 12inch with 128Mb RAM and 30Gb hard drive - all for barely an inch extra depth and very similar weight (and it was cheaper than the original price of the iBook). I thought I'd made a good choice. Yes, it was "NVidia Graphics" according to the sticker and yes, I could have spent more time (and money) finding a pre-installed lappy but I was hasty. (Much the same way as you should never go food shopping whilst hungry). I've managed with NVidia graphics before without using the horrid proprietary rubbish and I was prepared to put up with less-than-perfect graphics (I never use 3D anyway) because the free driver is at least stable with the graphics that I actually need.
What I wasn't expecting was that the dv6615ea has a lot more NVidia stuff than just the graphics card - including the network card! This really trashes a normal install because eth0 simply does not exist. OK, I can work around that for a while but there's more - the graphics don't work with standard Debian kernels and the standard Debian 'nv' driver. Ubuntu managed some graphics with the restricted NV support but only in VESA-safe-mode. Next stop was Mepis.
Don't buy a HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea)!
Just to see if the graphics would work at all, I tried it. Aha - the non-free changes to the Mepis kernel solved both problems so at least I now have a working ethernet card and a working graphics card. That at least allows me to finish the rest of the setup to find a better way of getting the graphics to work without the non-free kernel.
I'm not happy though - I'm annoyed with myself that I got suckered into a non-free-only lappy. I'm annoyed with NVidia for being stupid about Linux support. I'm annoyed that this new lappy is just going to end up MORE unstable than my existing one because of all the proprietary crap. (I'll still need some firmware for the bcm43xx wireless card - and it is that firmware that made my previously ultra-reliable iBook into a flaky, power hungry psycho-beast.)
Currently, I'm still migrating this horrid little piece of rubbish from Mepis to Ubuntu (Hardy from Breezy) then from Hardy to Debian unstable.
GNOME doesn't yet work because of the proprietary crap but the Mepis GNOME packages are also v.old so I'm hoping that a genuine Sid installation of GNOME can actually start up but I suspect that the Mepis patches are KDE-specific and I hate KDE.
I've just wasted 500 and that's why I'm really annoyed.
I've wasted a day and a half too, making things worse.
I'm probably going to have to leave this new lappy behind and take my existing iBook to Fosdem in a few weeks and that makes me even more annoyed. Even worse, this is an amd64 machine but I'm stuck with a 32bit installation because of the proprietary crap. I doubt I'll be able to trust any packages built on this laptop - or even be able to report bugs from this machine without first replicating the bug on a genuine Debian box. There is just SO much proprietary pollution in this piece of crap. I didn't think companies were still producing crap of this pitiful standard - HP: you stink.
I'm not a happy bunny. Not even slightly.

On a lighter note - it just goes to show how I've been isolated from all this stuff until now. My other machines are fine and have no need for any non-free stuff. Nice that I don't have to deal with this every day but such a shock to the system when I'm confronted with such horrors.

For the last four years, I have left my life and home to return to my mother’s far more precarious and fragile life in Puerto Rico. I do so to visit. But I also do so to give her caretaker, Milagro, a much needed break. I returned on December 18th and found my mother nearly in the same state as she was in October. Far worse than a year ago, but she still struck me as my mother, if nothing else because she knew I was her daughter. Over the course of a week, all of that changed. After a series of howling fits, by the end of my first week there, she no longer knew she was my mother. While I knew this would eventually happen, I was still caught off guard. You see, prior to my arrival, and since my last visit in late October, she asked me on the phone, and my sister and Milagro in PR, *nearly everyday,* when I was coming back. So even though she asked when her daughter, who she knew lived and worked in the city of New York, was coming back over and over again for 8 weeks, this seemingly hard-wired thought quickly vaporized thanks to what is a disease of the brain, but what strikes experientially as a cruel disease of the soul and personality. So while 2007 was overall a pretty good year, it is also the year when in certain respects my mother died, at least for me in so far she has morphed into someone remarkably different from the person I once knew. Now she only remembers small scraps of her life. She knows she is from Russia, she knows that she lives in the Casa de Vera (which she thinks is her bed), she knows she loves the dog, she knows that she had parents (and she would like to return to them but does not know where they are), she knows she has a good friend who is a painter (I think she had a massive crush on him if she still remembers him and not me but otherwise, everything is so twisted, so jumbled or so gone, it is beyond stunning. She certainly knew I was around and helping for she got upset when she knew I was leaving, often bursting in tears, asking me to take her to New York. But she just knew me as Gabriella from Nueva York who brought her novio bueno to PR and not as anyone else. It is certainly not easy to see this, to experience it day in and out but it is what it is and there is no running from it. Logistically it is also beyond hard to take care of my mom. To get her to eat, to calm down after one of her morning fits (she always, always, always had a raging fit in the morning, the afternoon and evenings being far more calm periods), to convince her to wear her dentures (which is the only remedy to stop her from spitting all over the place), to dress her, to deal with her in the middle of the night, often twice, are all extraordinarily challenging. Very quickly, your waking hours fill up with seemingly endless tasks and this I guess is, in some respects, a hidden blessing; there is just a lot less time to ruminate over how all of this, frankly, sucks. It is only later, late at night, early in the morning, or on the plane ride home where the darkness of her life would set deeply into my own. It may be obvious why this state and experience is tough but there are two parts that I find particularly rough. If my mother’s state is one of near total chaos and entropy, there is one thing that is utterly clear. She knows she is suffering and she wants out. On particularly bad days, she would mutter or sometimes yell loudly that she wants to die and would ask for the medicine that would accomplish this. She would even sometimes call me mala for not giving her this medicine. It is certainly not the case that everyone with Alzheimers goes through what my mother does. Apparently, some experience the illness quietly and peacefully. This is so not the case for my mother, who lived a particularly hard yet vibrant life. Donning a difficult personality, she lived lived as fully as she could and it is clear that as life leaves her, she would rather not be around to experience what is a cruel exorcism of self. Thankfully, she is not constantly or not even mostly in a suicidal state. I think she at times forgets how lousy she feels and rather enjoys the rather limited life she has. And at this point, I just hope that she continues to have calm or even happy moments. The second surprise concerns my own memories. My mother has had this rare form of Alzheimers, Posterior Cortical Atrophy, for at least 6, possible 7 years now, though we only received the official diagnosis 2003, which is the year when when I first started to write the occasional post about my experiences with her. In 2003 and 2004, she was pretty functionally in tact and it has only been the last 2.5 years when the persistent decline has set in, whittling her capacities and memories to what seems to be a bare minimum. But because her presence and reality is nothing short of totally enveloping and drowning, I am starting to lose my own memory of my mother prior to her illness. If Alzheimers robs people of their memories, I have come to realize, that if you are not careful, it is a thief that can also rob your own memories. I think it is for this reason that I have become so attached to my mother’s stuff her furniture, her paintings some of which I have taken back with me. They are material vehicles that transport me back to the past when my mother was in a different state and place. Now it is clear that if the challenge is to deal with the emotional toll this illness causes, it as much summoning the will and performing the labor to retain and recall my older memories of her.

Those who keep track, will know that I started writing support for NBD in debian-installer last weekend. But that's not what this post is about. I've been setting up a laptop for my brother. He talked about "something about as fast as our parents' computer", which is a 600Mhz PIII. After looking a while on ebay, I found a Dell Latitude L400, a 12" 700Mhz PIII-based laptop, for a fairly low price, which seems to fit that description, so I placed a bid. Only to figure out later that I should've read the description a slight bit more, because this was an incomplete machine: no RAM, no power adapter, no battery, no hard disk, which was being sold "for parts". Darn. Got me some fitting RAM and a power adapter on replacedirect (which is a shop I can really recommend, BTW -- new batteries for almost all conceivable laptop models, including those that have been out of production for years), put the RAM in, connected the power adapter, and crossed my fingers. Luckily the machine appears to work; it's not that they took it apart because it had broken down, or some such. I also still have a 2" hard disk to put in the machine, but apparently Dell has this conversion thing that I need to put between the disk and the rest of the machine, and that's missing; I guess I'll have to be a bit creative there. So, for the time being, I configured the machine to enable PXE booting, and set something up on the network to boot from. Since the installer support to install to the network is not (yet ;-) finished, I needed to do some stuff manually, however. After making sure I could boot the machine (long live debootstrap), I set out to install additional packages. After downloading and installing a number of packages, however, the machine suddenly died. Unfortunately rebooting didn't fix anything; the machine would die somewhat halfway through the boot. Since it was quite, eh, "early" in the morning by then, I left it at that and went to bed. Today, I easily figured out what the problem was: network-manager expects to take the network down, and then to run some scripts... which obviously breaks just about everything. I guess that if I want to make partman-nbd work, I'll have to do some work there, too...

Here's what I found in the recent APT upload as changes to PO files:

 #: apt-pkg/cdrom.cc:678
 #, c-format
 msgid ""
-"Found %u package indexes, %u source indexes, %u translation indexes and %u "
-"signatures\n"
+"Found %zu package indexes, %zu source indexes, %zu translation indexes and %"
+"zu signatures\n"

The consequence of such changes is fuzzying translated strings, thus forcing translators to re-update their files and the translation coordinator to commit them. In short, valuable time wasted. One could object that translators shouldn't try to keep up 100% all time long. However, those who do not do so just end up with huge updates to do...which is sometimes demotivating. So many of us prefers keeping up with small updates. However, when one sees such updates that appear to be cosmetic, it's very hard to refrain hating developers (I even ranted about this in dpkg commit logs, which bringed some argument with Guillem Jover.... I certainly shouldn't have ranted in commit logs but that probably gives a good idea how upset I was). Please think about this next time you change a translatable string, particularly when you *know* that someone is taking care to coordinate *your* software translation work with translators. Side comment: bzr choke up on my local APT copy and I can't even cope with updates for APT. That will not really help me to love those DVCS. Update: many explained me that such changes are not useless which I'm ready to accept given my level of knowledge in programming. So, apologies to programmers who made these changes. I just hope this will however better give the translator's POV wrt such matters. We all know that translators *and* maintainers work really hard to give the best results and both always need to have a better knowledge of other's constraints....and limits! I've also been very wisely teached about possible ways to jiggle with VCS to work on defuzzification by reverting changes, unfuzzy, re-apply changes. Sure. At the expense of a lot of invested time to check how to do this properly with all these neat modern DVCS, I could. Yay, I so much love fiddling with VCS....and spending hours doing this is something that makes my days.

Here is something I wrote some while ago, hope this will be useful for some World of Warcraft p(l)ayers. Has no other relation to Linux or Debian, except it works on it flawlessly. Also note that 2.3.2 patch went live last week. It is not a secret anymore that mages of all talent specs will be getting a present when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms - the Ice Block will be available from any friendly mage trainer for a nominal fee. Currently this spell requires a whopping 21 point investment into the Frost talent tree. With patch 2.3.2 Ice Block will become trainable to all mages, Ice Barrier will take it’s place in the talent tree and a new awesome talent - Icy Veins will take the place of the Ice Barrier, so that even frost mages have a new toy to gain in this 2.3.2 mage winterly fiesta. While there is a significant proportion of mages that are frost for PVP or grinding survival purposes, a large proportion of mage population have never used Ice Block or haven’t used it for a while. For that reason, the rest of this article (after the break) will explore all the great uses of Ice Block, that all of you can look forward when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms (or sooner, if this article convinces you to re-spec frost :)). So, what does the Ice Block do? When you cast the Ice Block, it purges you from all debuffs and releases you from all snares, you get frozen solid into a large block of ice (same look as hunter’s ice trap) and for 10 seconds you are immune to all damage, but unable to do anything - no moving, casting anything, no bandages, nothing. Getting rid of: Ice Block is a buff, so you can get out of the Ice Block by right-clicking it off at any time. Another way for keyboard-addicted mages is to press Ice Block keybinding button again (after the global cooldown is done). Enemy shamans can purge it off you and priests can mass dispel your Ice Block in PVP. Cooldown: the Ice Block is on 5 minute cooldown, which can be ended early using the Cold Snap talent from the mage frost tree. To prevent mages casting two ice blocks back to back by using the Cold Snap, Blizzard added the Hypothermia debuff (in 2.1) that prevents you from casting the Ice Block 30 seconds after the last cast. The main use of Ice Block is to survive pulling aggro in groups. While we all know that “good mages don’t draw aggro”, experienced players can easily show situations when drawing aggro is not mages fault and surviving that can be the difference between a wipe and a win. When Ice Block is used, your threat is NOT reduced, so you need to stay inside the Ice Block at least until you are under 130% of the tanks threat. After you Ice Block, the mob will run to the next person on the threat list. If your tank is dead, Ice Block will send the mob to another DPS or healer giving you a couple seconds to nuke it when it will be running back to you again. I have seen a few bosses loose their last 2-3% of health running between mages with Ice Block and hunters with Feign Death after a unfortunate death of the main tank. Ice Block is a great way to get rid of almost all debuffs that exist in the game: warlock DoTs, stuns, snares, polymorph, mind control … Even boss debuffs go away in a snap - Garrote from Moroes, Demonic Chains from Illhoof and many more deadly debuffs are no threat to a mage with an Ice Block ready. Ice Block can be used as an alternative to Slow Fall if you’re out of Light Feathers. Just do not cast it too high in the air - if the 10 seconds tick by and you haven’t hit the land yet .. you could as well kiss 10% of your durability goodbye. When solo grinding there is noone to draw aggro from you, so the mobs will continue to beat on your personal icy sculpture, however during that time your Water Elemental or other battle pets could be dishing some damage, your cooldowns will tick down and also you will also regenerate some mana inside the Ice Block. The Ice Block could thus make the difference between your death and Frost Nova+Blink+Blizzard and their death. Have you had some fun experience with Ice Block? Leave a comment so that others could repeat it too!

If you follow online discussions of programming languages, you'll occasionally see articles about language X "dying". It is, however, a bad metaphor, because the "life cycle" of a programming language is different from single biological units, of which you can definitely say at some point "He's not pining ... this is an ex-parrot!". Once a programming language is widely deployed, it simply won't up and disappear from one day to the next. Too many people and companies depend on it, and replacing it is difficult enough, that the "switching costs" will keep it in place for many years. The obvious example is Cobol. This effect works in favor of languages that are not "the new thing", and means they will probably not truly cease to be used for many, many years. On the other hand, it's also pretty easy to tell which way the wind is blowing and get an idea of what's hot and what's not. Java got hyped a lot in the past, now it's Ruby. Scala is beginning to get hyped some, so is Erlang. Careful observers can spot the rise of languages as they hit the early stages of the technology adoption lifecycle. By paying attention to what's going on in the wider world, it's also possible to see when languages are used less and less for new projects, and solely kept on for the legacy systems. I think this is what most people mean by "dying", but of course it creates confusion, because it's clear that the language is still utilized. In some cases, I think it may be possible that a language continues to be more widely adopted, yet still seems to lag behind, simply because other languages are being adopted at a significantly higher rate. So what it's really about is two factors: how widely deployed is the language in any given moment, and, perhaps more importantly, the rate of adoption - is it accelerating or slowing down? Are more people jumping on the bandwagon, or is the language being used less by innovators, early adopters, and new projects? You need both those coordinates to understand where a language is at - it may be huge but declining, small but on its way up, or a niche language that never achieved widespread usage that isn't catching on any more. The last one is the one you'd probably want to be wary of. The first two will probably be ok as long as you understand what you're getting, and the type of user or organization you are matches where the language is at in its lifecycle. I think that perhaps those interested in discussing these things seriously ought to find some good terms to use. "Forth's rate of adoption is declining" doesn't sound as exciting as "Java is dying!" though. "Fortran's diffusion is decelerating" doesn't have much of a ring to it. Any other ideas?

At 9pm Thursday my heart went into overdrive. At the emergency room I was diagnosed with acute atrial fibrillation and was scheduled for electric cardioversion but the problem went away on its own (as it sometimes does) so I was discharged in late afternoon yesterday, after a 16 hours long hospitalisation with no food or drink (cardioversion requires anesthesia). A noninvasive echocardiogram detected no faults in my heart, and no reason for the attack was identified. I am told this is a good thing and means I have a very good prognosis (it is likely that the problem will never recur). I feel fine now. The hospital visit was educational. I learned stuff about hospital procedures and some things about the equipment they use there, and met various people. I’m glad I had to make the call (if you have to go to the ER, it’s best if it’s for something nontrivial so they don’t feel you’re wasting their time but still something relatively dangerless). A bit more detailed report in Finnish is available.

I have just stayed at the Victoria Hotel Melbourne. I booked it through www.WotIf.com and paid ~$110 per night instead of the list price of $186 per night. The location is great (little Collins St near Swanston St). It’s a short walk from most things that are in the central city area and the nearest tram stop has a tram that goes directly to Melbourne University which will be good for people attending LCA (although it’s close enough that you might want to walk and save a few dollars). The price is pretty good too (you don’t get much cheaper than that in the central city area). But there are some down-sides. The hotel is old and has an old design. It has small windows and air-conditioners are retro-fitted into the window (as opposed to the modern design of having huge windows and A/C in the ceiling). The air-conditioning is barely adequate and once the hotel walls heat up the room will be warm all night. The window-based air-conditioning also greatly diminishes the possibility of looking out the window, and for people who are tall enough to see over it they will probably find that the bed is too short for them (I stayed in a twin room, maybe a double bed would be longer - of course if I was alone in a double bed then I could probably sleep diagonally). The room lights are all halogen spotlights, that includes the reading lights over the beds. This is 90’s architectural fashion and not a functional design. If you want to lie on your bed to read a book or watch TV then you will be able to see at least three halogen lights from the corner of your eye. Seeing such a small intense light source in your peripheral vision is really unpleasant. The pool is about 5M*5M in size and approximately 1.1M deep (it seems deeper than a 1.0M pool I recently swam in but shallower than a 1.2M pool). In conclusion I think that the Oaks on Market [1] apartments are better value for money, altough Market street is less convenient. Update: I forgot to mention one last failing. For curtains my room had nothing other than a Venetian blind. As such a blind does not cover the entire window space I was woken by the sun rise. It’s bad enough seeing a sunrise after a hard night coding, I definitely don’t want to see one when I had planned to sleep in. Curtains that properly cover the window is not an expensive feature to add.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/07/oaks-on-market/

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When talking in Spanish these days, particularly on IRC, but increasingly more in e-mail and even speech, I like being free to draw words from English, either because there isn’t or I can’t think of a Spanish word or expression to mean the same, or (many times) just because I find the result aesthetically more pleasing (!). Some people, of course, find this practice horrendous and something to be ashamed of, but alas, so do some others about other practices in my life, so, there. Last night with friends, I used the form refraineado, which would be the Spanish participle for the English verb refrain. One of these friends, who did not know the English verb at all, said: “ITYM refrenado?” As it happens, both verbs obviously (?) share the same roots, and they mean the same. This one time, though, I didn’t know the (relatively rare?) Spanish one, so that makes up for a bit of an excuse, but reality is that I cannot promise I will use refrenado and not refraineado the next time I need to use it. Oh well.

2.6.24-rc7 is available on 5 architectures (amd64, i386, powerpc, s390, sparc). Please add the following line to your Lenny or Sid box sources.list and report back:

deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel trunk main

This is not yet the real Etch + 1/2 kernel, but comes pretty close. According to our initial testing and user feedback 2.6.24 promises to be a great release. It will help Etch to have proper hardware support for newer hardware, has better power efficiency due to tickless kernel, enhanced wireless card support, the CFS scheduler and much more... It is a Debian novelty to provide an supported optional Linux kernel upgrade for a stable release. This is not the final as due to incompatible user interface the Etch build will have the old firewire stack. Once aboves land in Sid and got broader coverage will announce the Etch snapshots. So please give it a shot on your Testing/Unstable boxes.

Sarah and I went to see I am legend with Shona today. How many more post-apocalyptic, zombies-created-by-a-virus movies can Hollywood possibly churn out? That said, it was a good watch. Will Smith did a really excellent job, and there were plenty of edge-of-the-seat suspense moments.

Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with 300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night before the fourth and last day of the 24C3 were I slept in the gym :-) Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the 10th anymore...

Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting (and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once I added a sign explaining it :-)

Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth! And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...



The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...

On the third day of the congress we had an OLPC.de meeting, which was quite productive and resulted in us founding OLPC Germany this monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea of having an OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM in Brussels in February, which by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay! So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and global", for more detail please read our vision. (And keep in mind this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC "mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.

Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the freifunk community, who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop, which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.

Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch, lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:



When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.