On Monday I was at a Vanessa Mae concert in arena “Riga” in Riga, Latvia. The concert was almost an hour late due to flight delay. It would have been fine if the organisers would let us into the hall or at least informed the several thousand people about the delay and its reason and not just have us stand in the rather restricted lounge. around half an hour after the planned start time, we were let to our seats and some ten minutes later an announcement was broadcasted explaining the reason for the delay. Vanessa came out with her own band and a local Latvian string orchestra. I wonder if she played with local orchestras in other locations as well. The orchestra preformed perfectly as far as I could tell, which is not much because they were mixed way down and were barely audible most of the time. I am a big fan of Vanessa Mae - I like classical music, I love her interpretation of that music and I appreciate how she made classical music more acceptable for a modern teen to like. That said, the concert was a mix of joy and disappointment for me. The joy came from hearing the music that I know and like and seeing how it is played in real life. It was a great joy and most of the time I was bobbing in my chair as a very happy boy. However, there were moments when I cringed and unfortunately there was more than a handful of those during the two hour concert. The problems could be put into three categories: 1. Vanessa missing a note or even a handful of them badly. I will be an optimist and blame that on the tuning - just the day before she was playing in Seatle in 80% humidity and then came to Riga and 20% humidity. She had to retune her wooden violin after each song because of that. She apologised for that mid-show. 2. Spotlight and camera missing the action. At times Vanessa steps back and one of her band members goes on a solo, but most of the time the person controlling the spotlight and the person controlling the camera were not ‘in’ the action and just stayed on Vanessa. The worst cases were when a couple seconds into the solo the camera would start to pan over to the band member playing the solo part, spend a couple more seconds framing and focusing and then after another second the spotlight did the same and by that time the solo part was over. Two cameras and two spotlight should be used for such cases with people controlling them having a clear idea of what happens next. One camera should always be on a wider angle shot and one for closeups, so that when a switch is coming, you could switch to wide angle a couple of seconds before the switch, give the closeup camera time to change target, re-frame and re-focus and then switch to it. And for the spotlights, one would always track the main person and the other seeking out the next person of interest. 3. Mixing problems. Vanessa was always way too loud and drowned out the other instruments even when that was not desirable. Background orchestra was too low. In general the mixing was very pop-ish - no dynamic range. The worst cases of this were Bolero and Storm. Storm is my favourite melody and I especially love the slow and quiet beginning of the song, but that was skipped entirely in the concert cutting straight to the loud part. Some other songs were also brutalised that way. I know that true artists generate most of their income through concerts and for that reason I recommend every Vannessa Mae fan to buy the tickets to her concerts, but if you are an audiophile .. don’t go there - stay at home with you trustworthy stereo system and FLAC recording of great sound. The concert is there to support the artist and for the atmosphere not for the best sound, unfortunately.

* In my constant carvings about sane email client, I found that claws in lightweight and very well email client. Icedove to claws migration was not so easy, but script did it! And, it was fun to read Planet Claws-mail too! I hope that someday, enigmail will work (againg) with icedove!

So, SpaEurope blog reports, with independent confirmation at Dynamics of Cats, that the CoRoT team is ready to do a press release and conference on the 20th December. Now to go convince my PhD Supervisor to hold off 'til after christmas for the Lit. Review. I suspect he will be devasated to have a hole open in his calendar right in the middle of a week when (undergrad) students are away, and all he has on his Todo list is his own research ... Tags astronomy, exoplanets, corot, thesis

I somehow expected that this will never happen, but todays update contained debian-keyring version 2007.12.04, which includes changes from last two years or so. So finally who-uploads and other tools work reasonably good for mine stuff. Anyway I think with more than 6000 lines in last changelog entry, it is good candidate to be the longest changelog entry ever been in Debian :-).

After more than year and half of blogging with Nanoblogger, I'm still more and more thinking about trying something else. With almost 500 entries I currently have, generating blog takes more and more time. Otherwise there is not anything I'd miss, but something with comments might be also better. I didn't yet find time to investigate currently available blog engines, but from what I remember in past, it was hard to choose something. What is thing which many engines fail to fulfill is ability to use text editor instead of writing text in browser. The other thing I'd like to see is to have more than category (or tag) per post. Maybe ikiwiki would be good candidate for this... However what to do with old content? Should it be migrated to new system? I doubt it will be able to keep old URLs what is something I'd like...

I have seen the "right tool for the job" comment one too many times, and felt like writing something about it. Real tools are pretty simple, really. Things like saws and hammers have been around for thousands of years, and don't require a great deal of thinking to understand. Some people are masters with hand tools and create wonderful works of art with them, but the tools themselves are not complex. My programming language, Hecl, is a pretty simple one in a lot of ways (it has to be, to fit on cell phones), and at last count, the core has 7670 lines in a rough count that includes comments. That entails quite a few "moving parts" compared to even something like an electric drill. Programming languages are complex. Certainly to create, but even to use well; to understand the nooks and crannies and ramifications of the language's design is not something that is accomplished in a few days for most people. Your average programmer really doesn't know all that many languages, and even those who know many probably don't use most of them on a day to day basis. I like learning new languages, yet still wouldn't relish the idea of going through the mental task-switch required to move between too many in one day. What this means, is that when there is a job to be done, most programmers will reach for what they already know, rather than the best possible system, and that makes sense. If you know Python, why not write web software in Python, if you get asked to create something for the web? Or if you know Tcl because you create gui's with Tk, you're still likely to pick it when you need to create a little server. There are reasons why something like Erlang might make for a better server platform than Tcl, but is it that much better to justify dropping everything, learning a new language, committing to a new set of infrastructure requirements, and adding another thing to ask of people joining your organization? Most likely, it is not, unless the server you're writing is for a telephony switch that has to be on all the time, in which case, yes, maybe you do need Erlang. If, as is often the case, it wasn't something that had to be the best in the world, all that extra time to learn a new language would have been mostly "wasted" (ignoring, of course, the fact that for individuals, learning new things is almost always good, but that's not what we're talking about). Even the smart folks who hack away in languages like Haskell are fond of using what it has to offer, rather than jumping ship to something else at the first hint of the "something else" being better at their language of choice for a given task. So both Tcl and Erlang were up to the task of creating a little server. You could have used Ruby or Python as well. Java might prove a bit more verbose, but it's certainly up to the task. Any number of languages would be, of course. So it's not like there is a "right tool" and a "wrong tool". Maybe a better analogy is languages are like toolboxes, or even whole workshops, full of tools. Most of them have most of the common tools like hammers and saws, some sort of web libraries or the means to create tcp/ip servers. Where they differ is in things like the amount of tools available, the specialized tools that you get for free, the craftsmanship and ease of use of the tools in the hands of both experts and beginners... or in some cases (lisp, say), some fancy tools and supplies that make it possible to build yourself some new tools if you need to (that only you know how to use, but that's another topic). Some sets of tools really aren't very good for some jobs - you don't want to build blazing fast 3-d shooter games in PHP, just as you wouldn't want to use a regular set of screwdrivers on a delicate watch. However, even though you'd want to use a toolset that also has some specialized tools for working on the watch, you'd rather own a toolbox that came with the watch tools as well as the regular Phillips screwdrivers, because those are pretty handy around the house, and it wouldn't do to have only the watch tools for fixing common household items. The point being, languages are big investments, so those that do more, even if they're not the absolute greatest or first choice for a given task, are generally going to be more useful to more people, especially those just starting out who want a "safe" choice, a language they know will let them do a variety of things, rather than only one or two things (pound nails, say) really well.

So much for the idea that you can buy anything you like online, whenever you want. My laptop's screen has been acting dicky lately, and research suggests the most likely candidate is the backlight inverter. Luckily, there's online guides that show me (with pictures!) how to get at that and get the FRU number off it. Easy so far. Now I just need to find a new one. $SEARCH_ENGINE to the rescue. Plug in the FRU number and up come pages and pages of results. Oh goody, I should have no trouble here. Except that, when I visit this myriad of sites, there's a lot of similarity in pricing and content (not the look of the sites -- no, they're all completely different -- just the prices and textual descriptions). I've only managed to identify four separate stores, from visiting a good couple of dozen search results:

• One which sells the part I want for $35, but will charge me $79 to get it to Australia;
• One which sells the part I want for $59, but won't ship outside the US;
• One which sells the part I want for $24.70, but will ship outside the US only via some "ship to a US address and we'll resend it for you" service which is certain to (a) cost a fortune, and (b) take aeons to get the part to me;
• One which sells the part I want for $10, but which is otherwise running a completely stock Yahoo store interface (complete with "Site content copyright © Your Company Name Here" in the footer, and "put your shipping terms and conditions here" in the FAQ).

My choices, then, are: extortion, impossibility, slow extortion, or probable scam artist. What a set of choices. So, I've come to the conclusion that e-commerce is a complete and utter joke unless you're in the US. So much for the global market and all that bollocks. Back to shopping the old-fashioned way for me.

And hopefully my last :-)

I've decided I'll stay with awesome and not go back to ion3. True, it doesn't fully support xrandr, but so does ion. And it's on the roadmap for awesome 2.1, so I figured I will probably switch between two screens and only one maybe ten times or so, until the feature is there. And, adding and removing screens is a PITA with ion as well.

The second missing feature is a panel or the ability to run docker, but then, I only use this to run nm-applet. My current workaround is to run xfce4-panel in tab9 and run nm-applet there. Looks a bit ugly, but hey, it's tab9, I don't care (for the time being).

Besides those two issues I'm really happy. It's fast, it's slick, it doesn't get in the way, floating mode rocks, switching between modes rocks, the default keyboard shortcuts make sense and I use the mouse less often. Plus the author is a nice fellow. And by now it even got documentation!

Oh, another issue: The cat is gone. That's totally unacceptable. Therefore I propose to fork awesome and bring back the cat and call the fork TWMFKAA ;-)

A lot of cool posts about n810 can be read on planet maemo these days. I just discover that the device can be bought in France and in England. I just wonder when it will be avaiable also here in Italy. Note: the device can be purchased without the possibility to use the discount code. so I have to ask the same question that my friend maddler asked on his blog: How long must we sing this song…?

New Gammu testing versions is out. This time there are no exciting new features, I still continue in bug fixing mode and cleaning up things. Full list of changes:

• Increased maximal number of entries per contact.
• Fixed various compile time warnings.
• Improved MinGW crosscompilation.
• Localizations update.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/. If no big problems will occur, this is last release before 1.16.0, which should be unleashed next week together with python-gammu and Wammu.

So much for KDE 4 ... after a lengty downgrade and package picking session (Yay! for dependency handling in Debian!) I'm now back to the trusted KDE 3.5.x (mostly x == 8) and will wait until KDE4 hits testing (which would be after lenny, I guess.) KDE 4 sort of worked - but I'd not call this &ldqupbeta%rdquo; at this stage, and apparently the KDE people joined the use-as-much-screen-surface-as-possible-for-funky-stuff crowd, leaving less space for actual application content than before. I hope the final versions can at least be configured to be smaller. I hoped the Live CD would be somewhat more complete than what's currently in experimental, but unfortunately, KDE wouldn't even start for me :-/ (Admittedly, I didn't fool around with it very long, so maybe it might have worked with some magic word.

Six months ago, a political group in Spain made a big fuss and noise when the Government of Venezuela closed down the anti-chavist RCTV TV station, and waved the flag of freedom of speech, called the democratically elected government a regime , and called their president a dictator . On Sunday night, these very same people, following orders from the leaders of the Valencian government or should I say regime , drove up to the top of the Carrasqueta peak in Xixona, in the South of the Valencian Country, and protected by the winter's darkness, proceeded to force open two locks, broke into ACPV's property and unplugged and precincted the equipment which had been broadcasting the signal of TV3 and the rest of the public Catalan TV channels to the South of our land, for the last 21 years. Although this wasn't unexpected it is probably one of the biggest attacks to freedom of speech, choice and plurality since democracy was restored in the state. The political benefit PP is planning to obtain from this attack is clear: pleasing the regional right-wing cavemen who think we have nothing to do with the Catalan culture just 2 months away from some very decisive elections will probably give them a handful of extra votes. There are also economical interests involved, like having right-wing media groups control even more digital TV channels that they already do, but that's really anecdotic now. Two nights ago, it was the South. In a matter of days, the antennas in the Bartolo, in the North of the Valencian territory, will also be unplugged, blackening the screens of thousands of Valencians who think they have the right to watch decent quality TV in their mother tongue. Thank you, fascists.

It seems like my application to become Debian Maintainer has been accepted. This means that in the near future, I will be able to upload myself the updated packages I currently (co-)maintain.
All of them still need to be uploaded by my current sponsors with the DM-Upload-Allowed field. Again, many thanks to Micah Anderson, Christoph Haas and Lo c Minier for their advocacies and, in a more general way, for the help they bring on a day-to-day basis.

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Menezes, Oorschot, Vanstone; 2001) is now available as a free (as in beer) download. It's from 2001, so it wouldn't include all the latest stuff like MD5 being broken and SHA1 being slowly weakened, also estimates on how long a computer takes to break DES will be seriously outdated, but the fundamentals haven't changed. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I guess now's the time to close that gap.

awesome 2.0 just released. Great. Someone on #awesome pointed me to a post of Don Stewart comparing the rise of the new tiled window managers. This is quite encouraging, and I hope awesome will grow more with the next releases!

The main project I'm currently working on for money is a device driver for an actual bit of hardware. Since people working on Windows are slightly more used to the idea that money is exchanged for goods and services, this is the primary target platform. After dealing with all the interesting bits concerning development on this platform, I now have a .sys, a .inf, a .dll and a .xsl to install. The DLL was easy, Windows Installer has special handling for COM DLLs; the XSL file was a bit tricky since it needs to be placed in a "special" directory that will be phased out before Longhorn (the documentation is that old...), and I'm completely lost on the other two as the Installer does not know about the special registration system for drivers at all. At this point, I started entering the rabbit hole.

A day or two ago, I got the feeling that winter has set in. Maybe you know the feeling.

I looked outside the bedroom window. The trees had a bit of white all over. The tall grass in the distance had a sheen of gray on it. The sky was a uniform gray. Small ice pellets hit at our window. As far as the eye could see, not a sign of anything that wasn't frozen.

As I stood in our warm 68-degree house, I was reminded of how little separates us from the frozen outdoors. A few inches of wood and insulation is all. How easy it is to fret about the rapidly rising cost of propane these days, the cost of heating a house. But still, how easy we have it compared to the people that came before in this house.

They had to keep a fire going for warmth, keep a ready supply of firewood for the winter, figure a way to get the warmth throughout the house. All with insulation that wasn't as good as we have, windows that didn't shut as tight as ours, doors that were draftier. As is typical today, our furnace has safety systems designed to detect problems and shut itself down if something weird happens. Back then, indoor heat was a dangerous thing. There's been at least one chimney fire in this house, an event which often claimed the entire house and sometimes the lives of its inhabitants. Ten feet from my desk, there's a rounded out black spot on the floor where, perhaps 70 years ago, someone opened the door to a wood stove, only to be surprised by a burning log falling out to the wood floor.

Today, we can't use wood heat due to Terah's asthma. We had the chimney removed to boost the energy efficiency of the house with modern heat. Out back in the trees north of the house, there is a pile of bricks, saved from our chimney for future use. Each brick has a scorched side, darkened from the chimney fire and decades of use.

As we experienced firsthand in the ice storm of 2005 (see also more stories and pictures), it doesn't take much to be thrown back a hundred years from a convenient modern heat to our non-automated, non-mechized, past. All it takes is a tree to snap too close to the right power line anywhere between our house and the generating station -- which I think is 80 miles away -- to make our house mighty cold. Even though I still have a stack of firewood, it wouldn't do us much good these days.

With that in mind, today I was listening to the radio while driving in to work. How lovely to hear this quote:

"The National Weather Service will issue a Winter Storm Warning effective at noon today, lasting through 6AM tomorrow." We are to expect rain, freezing rain, ice pellets, and ice. A "wintry mix" is the technical term for it, I believe.

Temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than expected this afternoon, so we got mainly rain. What we will get tonight is an open question yet. I'm sure that schoolchildren all over the state are hoping for ice and lots of it. Personally, I feel that it's only been three years since I spent a week carrying a saw in my trunk in order to be able to clear my driveway every time I left home or got back home. I think I'm owed another year or two off. I also wouldn't mind avoiding the giant branch sitting on the ground right in front of the front door, or the 40-degree indoor temperatures, or the lack of running water due to lack of electricity.

But these crisp, cold winter days are a rare thing to enjoy these days. We get a month or two of stifling heat each summer, but only a week or two to enjoy this really cold part of winter. I miss the snowdrifts when we don't get them.

So, mother nature, bring it on. I'll be waiting with my camera and a glass of hot chocolate. Because even without electricity, I can still light a burner on our oven with a match.

After recently intending to drop the Planet Debian search and recieving complaints that it was/is still useful it looks like there is a good solution. The code will be made live and official upon the planet debian in the near future. The DSA team promptly installed the SQLite3 package for me, and I've ported the code to work with it. Once Apache us updated to allow me to execute CGI scripts it'll be moved over, and I'll export the current data to the new database. In other news I'm going to file an ITP bug against asql as I find myself using it more and more...

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.