Sadly, that day wasn't one of those days. Lots of debugging, a disrupted schedule and some tough choices to make. It was a compromise between performance, stability and locking out a user who might be harmed if they can't access the site. It's a site on a sensitive topic and users might not want to contact us about it. One down side of not being able to contact a web user is that you can't check they're OK when you have to block them. All you can do is flash a message on their screen when you do. At least it was a more thought-provoking problem than spending three hours dealing with a failed power supply and mechanical failures, which happened recently.

I believe there are very few occasions where using frames is appropriate. One is for a reference manual or dictionary, where having a table of contents in a side bar can be useful. You can almost do the same with CSS now, but frames are still more useable in most browsers (unless you do something really dumb, such as noresize a long text list). Another is where you want to display many documents along side each other. Every day, I check the same web sites for news. I tried having a "Daily Sites" folder in my bookmarks and using iceweasel's "Open in Tabs" feature, but that only works if I'm using my own browser and anyway: browser tabs suck because they put user interface controls in no-man's-land, half way down the window, and the titles quickly get too small to read. So, I posted this page of news site frames which will probably stress-test your browser and network too. I use it with images and scripts switched off. I strongly suggest that you maximise your browser window first. To start with, in approximate order of display, the grid contained tv listings for Slovenia, England, France and Germany; football news; blogs from indymedia, debian and alug; software news, slashdot, newsnow, dilbert and sinfest. Happy reading. If you post your news mix, I'd be interested to see it. Email me.

Not really a shock that the kernel as a whole won't be changing (tracking down all the v2-only contributors would be tricky) but an interesting Linus quote that echoes something I've raised before:

"I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code."

- Linus Torvalds, GPL V3 and Linux, 25 Jan 2006 <p class="silly">I wonder if he'll consider GPLv4 instead?</p>

Want to better your blog? It seems that new year 2006 is the time to do it. I've seen a few lists recently that I'd I recommend:

1. First, from a few months ago, but very good: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 17, 2005: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes - I sometimes deliberately use mistake 4 (mystery links) for effect, I've only recently addressed mistake 5 (classic hits) and I'm still working on mistakes 7 (irregular frequency) and 8 (mixed topics)
2. Find those too hard to start with? Try Performancing's Quick and Easy Blog Improvements (via Dave Briggs) - I feel I've only one of that list left to do.
3. Lastly, a very new one: How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) by Steve Pavlina - if you just got your confidence back with the "quick and easy" changes, this one is a noble but ambitious list to stretch you again!

Remember my remarks about comment images and moving blogs too, please. Happy hacking!

In 2006 as in past years, satellite TV channel SFinfo at 13e will be broadcasting some sessions of the World Economic Forum, with both German and Original (often English) soundtracks (I think Left/Right split). If you have a satellite set, you can see what the barons of big business are saying: sometimes depressingly hilariously irresponsible.

At 16:00 UTC tomorrow (Friday 27 Jan), the session WEF Digital 2.0: Powering a Creative Economy is televised. Now, the only one of that panel who doesn't alarm me is the first one and that's probably only because I don't know who he is. Gather round, one and all, get ready to chuck the rotten fruit at the TV.

25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won't criticise the actual decision too much, because it's typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you're buying Chinese products just because they're cheaper, you're part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them - corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don't like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google? Conclusion If you believe that privacy matters, that bugs should be fixed (or at least answered) or that WEF is wrong, say no to google. Boycotting it will help to make the point.

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World Economic Forum coverage

In 2006 as in past years, satellite TV channel SFinfo at 13e will be broadcasting some sessions of the World Economic Forum, with both German and Original (often English) soundtracks (I think Left/Right split). If you have a satellite set, you can see what the barons of big business are saying: sometimes depressingly hilariously irresponsible.

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Other notes Amusingly, a Yahoo! search for google problems returned this google answer about a urination problem high up in the list (fifth result or so). Now that really is taking the proverbial...

TdF Blog mentioned the announcement that the 2007 Grand Depart will be in London, England (official announcement at Red Ken's site, official London site, VeloNews coverage) . I've been watching cycle racing for years, most recently via satellite, and it will be interesting to see whether another visit to England and the new itv 4 means that there will be better coverage in the UK. The last few years, I think there's been a one-hour highlights show on itv2 repeated late night on most itv1s and live coverage of weekend stages. Not great, but even that beat the half-hour we used to get. Sadly, no other cycle races get much coverage, not even the Tour of Britain. Frustrating.

Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com - it has one of those annoying "type the letters from the distorted image" screens (which don't work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can't get the letters accepted. I don't know if it's a problem with the site or my eyes, but it's really annoying. Please, if your blog uses these images:

1. Make sure they work
2. Offer an email address or email form too
3. Get a blooming clue about accessibility (and maybe hire me to teach you...)

Links explaining why the FDL isn't a free software licence:

• Richard Stallman's statement that it is a goal for FDL to prevent modification, to not be free software
• Richard Stallman again: "I am not sure if the GFDL is a free software license, but I don't think the question matters."
• Rick Moen on the reuse limitation problem at TLDP
• Barak Pearlmutter explanation including Wikipedia problem links
• My comment on "death by dictionary" of a GR - a bit frustrated after dozens of emails
• My licences index

In 2006 as in past years, satellite TV channel SFinfo at 13e will be broadcasting some sessions of the World Economic Forum, with both German and Original (often English) soundtracks (I think Left/Right split). If you have a satellite set, you can see what the barons of big business are saying: sometimes depressingly hilariously irresponsible.

Wouter Verhelst has posted a retaliation idea on his site:

start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool

I think it would need doing very carefully, so that you don't put too much cost on your ISP - ultimately, you pay for your ISP's costs - or get yourself booted for sending tons of spam. If you do it, check your AUP, watch your network stats and good luck!

"While the Terminator needed 7 years for a first reappearance, and another 12 for its second, the Terminator of European Economy (Mr Charlie McCreevy) only needed months to bring software patents back on the agenda."

You can't keep a bad idea down. Nice to see him get it up again while people are still hot. Maybe he's the EC's Mr Viagra?

"the first Terminator went down after a long and desperate struggle involving all sorts of fireworks"

Are we still dealing with the first one, damaged but not dead yet?

"even though the second Terminator was so much quicker, stronger and more well-prepared, we all remember the end of the second movie."

Where's a truck of liquid nitro and a steelworks when you need one? (quotes from Georg Greve's Freedom Bits).

Update: Lo c Corbasson speculates that the default mix of native abbreviations and US ordering is to help scripts that use awk, cut and so on. Thanks, Lo c!

Instead of crippling Debian, why not work gradually to improve the state of documentation?

Many have. If it's going too slowly for you, please help out.

We could try to educate a wider audience on the problems of the GFDL - you do realize that most of the outside free software community views us as wacky license nazis, right?

That question supposes a falsehood. When are you going to stop beating little children? As to educating a wider audience: that's why you should vote YES to releasing a position statement on the FDL issue. Voting yes or further discussion won't overrule the RMs either way. Voting yes will help put the explanation out to a wider audience. ...

The EC is running a Consultation on future patent policy in Europe. Closing date 31 March 2006. French and German publication 23 January. Any advice?

It's been over a day and still all the livejournal users are spamming planet debian.

1. Livejournal: you are nuts. Is it really so difficult to leave feeds and non-login-required content on the old addresses until it expires? Breaking links is really annoying. You're even changing the guid contents instead of setting isPermalink='false' on older entries, which rather defeats the purpose of guid. That's so braindead that you deserve a fork in the head! (and RSS 2.0 is silly anyway - let's use RDF Site Summary instead...)
2. Planets: Why is it taking so long to get over this? Are livejournal moving users over slowly?
3. Livejournal users: going to move to a stabler system yet? At least if you screw up wordpress or a blosxom-like system, you do it one user at a time.

NP: Carpenters

Here's my view on it, briefly:

1. Off-topic announcement by Rapha l Hertzog;
2. Direct action by Andrew Suffield. Satire, nodding to the debian/lesbian merchandise which has been sold for years by shops and shows. Wrong, but understandable if you remember the OP killfiled Andrew Suffield;
3. Roger Leigh uses last August on -private to advocate Andrew Suffield's expulsion (FWIW, I reread it and I don't believe Andrew was "detrimental to the project" - if so, a lot of the repliers should be in the expulsion queue first.);
4. Andrew Suffield describes his actions (biased but accurate IMO);
5. Joey announces the punishment.

What happens next? I don't remember being asked about my religious views during NM (and I think death is a religious topic, as do many others), so I'm surprised that the August 2005 incident is still being used to justify hatred. I disliked the death notice but I was quiet at the time, for various reasons (jet-lag and more). If what to do about death is still such a hot topic, I think debian should address it before any DDs grieve again.

I just updated my British localisation projects link page. Lost a few minor links. More importantly, the only surviving Cornish link now 404s - anyone know any replacements or additions?

Update: Brett solved it: GNU date only uses the locale if you run "date +%c" instead of just "date". I knew that once, but had forgotten it. Thanks, Brett!

Update: Martyn succeeds in getting away from Orange...