Holger’s reminder of the Towel Day made me remember an excellent quote from The Simpsons:

“You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel” Homer, while speaking on the phone

Heh

In the last two weeks, life has been jam packed, full of movement and travel and a bit of sensory overload. I went to San Francisco to visit friends from the past but also took a trip to NYC to help set things up for the future. Logistically, it certainly was not enjoyable to travel from Edmonton to SF to NYC and back to SF before heading back to Edmonton, which was only made worse by the fact that I was sick flying back from NYC to SF. But taken from an aesthetic point of view, there was something that made sense about going back and forth between cities that in reality connect my past with my future. For it was my time in SF when I did my research that more or less made possible my future life in NYC. I had not been back to SF since I had left in the summer of 2003. My mom’s illness kept me away from the west, pulled instead toward the east. In fact, right before I left SF was also the time when my mother’s condition took a turn for the worse and I started to travel only for work or to visit my mom PR (or Debconf, which is, well, somewhere in between work and play). Because of my relatively long absence and the many memories of the area, my return hit vividly. You may leave a place, but when you return you are reminded of how much a place always leaves some imprint in your body and soul, which resurface upon your return. Feelings and memories of the past flickered to consciousness when my eyes first absorbed the stunningly beautiful (but also vulnerable) geography of the Bay Area: the pale blue sky, the colorful bridges and houses, the ridiculously steep hills, the wispy and thick fog. San Francisco is a city, it seems to me, that has made a Faustian pact with nature. Nature and the geography have not been completely conquered. They seep right into the man-made environment, which is why it is so beautiful here. But it comes at a price measured in ways small and large. Daily battle with the hills is a small reminder and the larger reminders come in the form of terrifying earthquakes. It was really great to see many friends, many of whom I have stayed in constant touch with on IRC, but of course, from time to time, a little flesh and blood goes a lot further than the bits and bytes. While SF does not have a high retention rate (apparently 30% of the population changes every 2 years), many of my techie friends have faithfully remained and other techie friends have since made their way to Bay Area. As much as I find this city amazing, I was reminded of how much I find San Francisco’s weather completely objectionable, disliking it even more than the cold Canadian north (really).The damp cold and constant wind are impossible to escape, only made worse by lousy indoor heating like the cozy heater I already blogged about (and apparently, this is how you can fix it). I am staying in the outer Mission district, which is where I lived for a while, and I do love the slightly warmer temperatures, flatness of the streets, and very colorful murals. While Valencia street has moved up a few notches on the gentrification scale, it does not seem out of control. And of course, the city is brimming with a particular mixture of youth and tech. In the many coffee shops, youthful faces are illuminated by Shiny New Laptops and it seems like at least every third person you meet works in the technology industry. I had not planned on heading out to the east coast but since I was given the option of seeing a couple of apartments courtesy of NYU housing, I decided it was well worth my while to make the cross country trip, given that it may be my future home for many years. Spring in NYC is one of its more flattering incarnations for there is a slight touch of nature that drapes the city, a touch that is absent during the height of the summer when the hot concrete jungle overtakes the flowers and trees. Heading to NYC briefly also reminded me that moving to NYC feels like a really BIG move. And not because the distance between Edmonton and NYC is 3900 KM but because of what it represents. It sort of dawned on me recently that becoming an assistant professor is not unlike the grueling period real doctors go through once they graduate medical school: residency. Even though by the time you start your job, you have been bequeathed with the title of a doctor, and are prepared to teach, advise, etc., in reality you are only half-baked and there is more cooking for you to go under. You need to go through a few more years of somewhat intense training to seal the deal and that is what is awaiting me starting this fall.

Outflows have been discovered from a Brown Dwarf star, 2MASS1207-3932, the lightest yet. Found by Emma Whelan and Tom Ray of DIAS and others , using the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), this is the first time that Jets have been seen from an astronomical object as small as this. The Brown Dwarf is 2MASS1207-3932, a 24-Jupiter mass 'near star'. Jets of material are a common feature in astrophysics, seen from Galaxies and young stars, but this is the first time they have been seen in something this small. It opens the possibility of similar outflows from smaller objects, such as giant planets. The brown dwarf 2MASS1207-3932 is full of surprises. Its companion, a 5 Jupiter-mass giant, was the first confirmed exoplanet for which astronomers could obtain an image, thereby opening a new field of research - the direct detection of alien worlds. It was then later found that the brown dwarf has a disc surrounding it, not unlike very young stars. Tags astronomy, brown-dwarfs, exoplanets

I keep having what I've started to think of as the "calendar conversation" with various people. I start by outlining what I think are some fairly reasonable requirements. I'd like to have multiple calenders viewable by different sets of people. So Simon would be able to view my work calendar, while Katherine could see my personal calender (and possibly small bits of work calender where I was going to be away from home). I also want to be able to view my calenders from a variety of devices. My desktop, my phone and my laptop, for example. A web interface might be nice too, though less important to me. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask. My general hope is that whoever I'm boring about this will then say "Oh, you need to look at foo and maybe bar". After all, that's the case with most software related things I need - it's already been done, and there's a good solution available. What actually happens is the person I'm talking to nods in agreement and says they'd like the same sort of things but don't know of anything that manages it. I think the problem comes down to syncing. Sharing my calendars with other people is effectively allowing them to sync their calendar(s) with mine, with some sort of filtering so we each see only what the other wants to see. Likewise, multiple devices is all about syncing. Changes made via one method need to be visible on all of them (ideally as soon as possible). Decent syncing also brings another advantage; client independence. If I can reliably sync my information to a variety of devices/clients then I can try a different client with little risk. We have this already for mail - anything that can talk POP3, IMAP and/or mbox is easy to try out and if you don't like it then you can just change back to what you had before or try something else. Calendaring doesn't seem to have that. I don't think that the interface a client exposes needs to be complex. At a basic level what you need is a way to find out what the client thinks has been added, removed or changed. You also need to present this information in a standard format. Unfortunately iCal (RFC2445) appears to be what we've got here. I think it's a bit overly inclusive, which seems to lead to incomplete implementations. Is there a complete iCal parser library out there? The best hope for syncing that I'm aware of is OpenSync. And I haven't been that impressed; while I managed to get it to move the contacts from my SonyEricsson v600i to my Nokia E70 some of the details got mangled on the way. And lack of things like recurring event support in some of the plugins (eg the Google Calendar syncing adaptor) or warnings about data loss in the Sunbird plugin aren't encouraging. Speaking of Sunbird, I'm not impressed. Last time I looked (and it doesn't appear to have moved very far since then) it didn't make any attempt to support syncing. I'm sorry, WebDAV isn't a syncing system. It's a way of storing files remotely. Sure, I found the interface ok, but I need to make my calendaring data accessible for it to be useful. The Windows approach to all of this seems to be ActiveSync and the use of Outlook. I don't believe that it really handles more than the desktop client and a remote device though? And group calendar sharing requires an Exchange server? Not exactly the flexible solution I'm looking for. I think a key point is that all of this needs to be reliable. I didn't spend time debugging my OpenSync contact syncing issues partly because I didn't notice straight away that there was a problem (it was with additional details like email addresses rather than names/numbers IIRC), but also because it was a lot of work to delve into the code and find out just what on earth was going on. A while back I started looking at writing some calendar syncing code (called Pony) and hit a problem with complete inconsistency in handling time zones between clients that put me right off. If it's not reliable it's not useful. If it's not useful people won't test it and fix it. I think a starting point is a reliable iCal implementation that can handle everything in the spec. From there you can write plugins that will take whatever bastardised variant your device/client supports and translate to and from it. The syncing tool will need to keep a master copy of all the data, because there's no guarantee anything else will be able to support all the fields. A local complete copy should enable appropriate frobbing of data to/from any device/client without losing the information if a new device/client that can handle the data is added. Of course almost all the above applies to contacts as well; I have work contacts, personal contacts, boring house contacts (plumber, garage etc). vCard is the appropriate interchange format for that (why did vCalendar become iCalendar, but vCard not change?), but contacts feature similar issues to calendars I believe. Does this seem reasonable? Please tell me someone has already done it. Point me at Debian packages that will let me sync my phone, my Google Calendar and a local client and make me very happy. I have visions of a suite of tools all chatting over DBus; a little client that looks for my phone to appear over bluetooth and then syncs when it does, a little client that monitors Google Calendar for changes. Sunbird reporting when something changes (and accepting notification of changes). Some other client ([Dates http://www.pimlico-project.org/dates.html]?) doing the same. Another sending the data over WebDAV or SFTP so that my laptop can pick up the info when I'm on the move. I don't think I'm the only person looking for this sort of stuff. Where is it?

liz radford commented:

"Thanks for the advice, your comments on the route match those of a couple of others so I think we will go ahead and make those changes but keep the hill of pain! I will ride the revised route this weekend to give it a go."

While you're out there... I heard some comments that Windwhistle Lane on the short route wasn't very easy to follow, but I suspect that's more a problem with the council's (lack of) signs than a bad route. I didn't find the black-and-white bikeathon signs easy to spot on the faster/busier stretches. The pink and the yellow(?) ones were usually easily noticeable. I wonder whether the first black-and-white signs were at Worle Moor Gate - I went so wrong there that I rode up to the marshals at Summer Lane/Diamond Batch from behind!

"On the photo web site, you can get access to a total of about 700 pictures but it's not immediately obvious how. Mind you I can't criticise - the http://www.lrf.org.uk site is even less user friendly. We have photos on it of local people getting out there and doing great things to raise money but you try and find them its like wandering the catacombs. We need our own simple West-country site! Have a look and comment if you want, an experts critic is well overdue."

Well, the LRF site isn't bad - it needs to sort out its colours and contrast, and the text alternatives to images seem to be nonsense like asterisks, but I think I can actually access all of the pages without trouble. If you'd like a westcountry site, contact me at work and I'll offer a deal.

"Anyway back to photos. Get onto the one page of photos it will let you see and then click "refine search." This will take you to the menu as follows... Start Childrens Race Bleadon Hill Finish 1 Finish 2 Finish 3 Finish 4"

I can see more photos that way, but still only the first 8 from each category. Thanks once more for organising a great event Liz! I've noticed that my page is attracting some search results for bikeathon - is anyone else who rode this event reading? Care to comment on it? (If you're reading this at swik.net or a similar irresponsible republisher, click "Read more" to get the real comments form.)

It took a while, but Nokia finally relicensed eds-sync under the GPL. Hooray! eds-sync is one of the many components that you don't see on the Nokia N800, but is essential to the integrated chat/voip interface. It's role is basically to do full two-way synchronisation between any number of remote rosters (generally Jabber/XMPP rosters on the N800) and the Evolution Data Server addressbook. It also downloads avatars, so that they are available on disk for display in applications. NP: Live at the Jazz Café, Fink

* I tried to get “tag cloud” of my blog, it works! Kartik Mistry@localized-gujarati-geek!:/# cloud

about after again all almost also amazing another any are around article back bad before better blog book books both brother build bus but came can can’t cds com come coming cool day days debian did don’t done due during end etch even festival file finally firefox first foss found free from fun gave get gnome gnu gnunify going good got great gujarati had happy has have help here his home hope how http iiimf india install installer irc its just kde know l10n language last late like linux list live long look looking lots made make many may meet met mom mono more movie mozilla much mumbai near need net new news next nice night nirav not now office old one only openoffice org other our out package packages palanpur people place post problem python read really released right rinit sat saturday see session should since site some soon start started still stuffs sunday system take talk talked team thanks there they thing things till time today too took tried two ubuntu use user using utkarsh very waiting was way week well went were what when where which while who will work working works write www year yesterday yet

Eh!

My “webloyalty is a scam” blog entry from 2004 continues to get thousands of hits per month, despite the fact that it appears to have dropped off the top Google search results. It should hit 100,000 unique visitors any day now, and 2,000 comments. Every once in a while someone comments to defend the service. E.g., this, today, from “Jim”:

THIS IS THE OFFER WEBLOYALTY GIVES. yOU ARE ALL REALLY STUPID PEOPLE. MOST OF YOU OBVIOUSLY ARE UNEDUCATED BECAUSE YOU CAN’T READ. YOU ARE ALL A BUNCH OF STUPID FUCKIN PEOPLE. I FEEL SORRY FOR ALL OF YOU. YOU MAY ALL BE RETARDED, SORRY FOR THAT. THIS KIND OF THING MAY HAPPEN TO YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES BECAUSE YOU DON’T READ WHAT YOU ARE AGREEING TO. HONESTLY WEBLOYALTY IS DOING NOTHING ILLEGAL, AND YOU WILL NEVER PUT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS OR WIN ANY KIND OF JUDGEMENT OR MONEY IN A LAWSUIT. GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND LEARN HOW TO READ,THAT IS MY ADVICE TO ALL OF YOU MORONS.

And then, a few minutes later, from the same IP address, from “Brian P.”:

I actually agree with Jim 2 posts ago. People who say these things really did not read what they were signing up for and that is all of your own faults.

I used to get more of these kinds of comments from people actually posting from their workplace, where their workplace IP address resolved to Webloyalty. Someone must have told Webloyalty employees to stop doing that, as the comments above come from an AOL IP address.

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I am currently writing a general purpose shared library for acpi (more on that soon).
I was interested in having a function call graph especially to see if the interface looks somehow clean and to include it in the documentation of the library. Of course I wanted to do it with open source tools. There are several tools for static call graphs but if you want dynamic call graphs you have to use additional features of your compiler to generate a graph based on code during runtime.

The first variant I tried was using egypt a small perl script to generate a dot file. Dot (today included into graphviz? is a tool originally developed at AT&T to generate hierarchical or layered drawings of directed graphs.

So what is needed?
First install software (here on a Debian systen, egypt is not included in Debian):
$ aptitude install graphviz graphicsmagick (+ download egypt from the homepage)

Compile your software using gcc with the option -dr to dump an RTL file of the source.
Most of gcc's work is done in an intermediate representation of your code, called register transfer language (RTL). This pretty much describes the instructions in plain text and is inspired by LISP lists.
Ok, here we go:
$ gcc -dr list.c libacpi.c test.c
This generates three RTL files, for every source file one. Depending on the gcc version the names may vary, here the names are libacpi.c.00.expand list.c.00.expand and test.c.00.expand.

Now use egypt to create a dot file (I don't want one for test.c now):
$ egypt libacpi.c.00.expand list.c.00.expand dot -Gsize=100,100 -Grankdir=LR -Tps -o graph.ps
Egypt will create dot-output and by piping it to dot with -Tps -o graph.ps you get the resulting graph as a ps file. -Grankdir is used to generate a graph which runs from the left to the right, default is up-down which looks a bit strange.

Now convert the ps file into a png:
$ gm convert graph.ps graph.png
The result looks like this (looks cool huh? ):



The second variant I tested is a bit different and in my opinion the resulting graph looks a bit better.
The gcc commandline switch -finstrument-functions allows easy creations of call-graphs for C/C++ (script languages used but I haven't tried).
You need to compile every file with the -finstrument-functions switch. Then gcc places a call to the functions __cyg_profile_func_enter upon entering a function and __cyg_profile_func_exit on leaving a function.

Compile your sources with -g and -finstrumental-functions:
$ gcc -g -finstrumental-functions list.c libacpi.c test.c -o test
Now you need to get some source code by Sebastian Krahmer (SuSE):
$ wget http://www.suse.de/~krahmer/instrumental/instrumental.tgz && tar xvfz instrumental.tgz && cd instrumental
Compile a shared object file:
$ cc -fPIC -c instrumental.c && ld -Bshareable instrumental.o -o inst.so
This generates a shared object file you can preload with LD_PRELOAD
$ LD_PRELOAD=./inst.so test
.....

Now you will find a log.inst.dot.<pid> and log.inst.ascii.<pid> in /tmp (path can be modified in instrumental.c).
The first file is a dot file you can now create a ps and a png file with but you need to attach a closing bracket at the end of the file since the package is not
able to intercept exit() or aborts. echo ' ' >> log.inst.dot.<pid>
$ dot -Gsize=15,20 -Grankdir=LR -Tps -o graph.ps log.inst.dot.<pid> && gm convert graph.ps graph.png
The result looks like:


PDF file which scales a bit better

The other file represents the call graph in ascii:
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- main (0x8049ea4)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- check_acpi_support (0x8048984)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- get_acpi_version (0x8048782)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- get_acpi_content (0x80486b4)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- scan_acpi_value (0x8048837)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- init_acpi_batt (0x80489d6)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- dir_list (0x804a447)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- new_list (0x804a23c)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- append_node (0x804a309)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- append_node (0x804a309)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- read_acpi_battinfo (0x80497d3)
~ [1000 1000 1000] -- get_acpi_content (0x80486b4)
....

So both methods work but the first seems to be more useful if you want a graph for a specific file, not a specific program since you get an RTL file for each source file and you don't need all to create the dot file. The second method however looks better but has the limitation that you actually need to run the program (but that's dynamic and not static) and you can't (correct me if I miss something) create graphs for single files.

Have fun creating graphs for your favorite software and have a look into Sebastian Krahmers paper http://www.suse.de/~krahmer/instrumental/instrumental.pdf and http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graphvis/. He also created a graph for openssh http://www.suse.de/~krahmer/ossh4.6.pdf.

Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress. It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief. Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

• monospace font
• remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style. That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much? It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document. But wait ... how can I solve my problem now? I see only two awful ways:

1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text
2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

Quoting from the Release Notes for the firmware v1.54.2 for the Thomson ST2030 VoIP telephone, in the “Relevant known limitations” section:

3.1 The display doesn’t show the name of the incoming call when received display name starts with the letter “O” (uppercase).

This raised quite a few eyebrows here, and raised quite a few concerns too. I refuse to even imagine how this kind of bug can happen. And for those who will have a hard time believing this, we did the test, and, indeed, the CallerID name doesn’t appear on the phone when it starts with an “O”. Shrug.

Thijs, my post was more like "Hey Mozilla, I know you are busy and all, but, it would be nice to fix some bugs and maybe add some features from time to time.... come on, 7 years to start fixing[*] a bug is waaaaaaay(maybe enough to make your users go away) to much. That's why you suck!".

BTW Thijs, have you read at least the Reply-To-List thread in their bugzilla? Or the huge pile (now 126 open issues) of "keyboard shortcut" problems they have? I am saying that there is a lot of endless discussion around the subject until someone really tackles it. As an example, the real solution for (probably) most of those 126 keyboard issues would be to allow keyboard shortcut redefinition.

So this was mostly about response time, be it bug or feature, although the title was not so well chosen.

[*] note that the patch is from a first time contributor

Yesterday we had one of our first full-evening rains of this Summer. It started raining around 15:00, and didn't really stop until past 22:00. Most of the time, it was a low intensity rain. Also yesterday, Sergio and I started with the Debian course I recently talked about - Fun!
Now... This course is scheduled at Instituto de Astronom a, which is halfway between my work and my home. 19:00 to 21:00.
I decided to leave early, so we could check some pending details - At 18:00. I biked to Astronom a, about 1.5km. When I arrived, I was as wet as you usually get at a regular rain: I still had some dry spots under my arms and legs. Nothing terrible, although a bit coldish - Anyway, that's a top-down approach for hydrodinamics, the approach most people are used to.
When we finished this session, I had to go out in a rush, as I had a meeting at 20:00 at Balderas (downtown Mexico City, ~25min away by metro). Of course, I was one hour late already, and adding the time it would take me to get home, leave the bike and run to the metro, I could not just sit and wait for the rain to get any easier on me. So I pedalled.
Contrary to what I originally expected, I didn't get soaked wet in the usual pattern. Stronger rain leads to more rain flowing down the road. Yes, almost immediately I felt a cold shudder on my legs and back: The water sprayed from below by my wheels. Of course, the front wheel was even more fun, as it sprayed my face from below - My helmet has a small protuberance at the front to make some shadow, and tilting a bit my head forward prevented the rain from hitting my eyes - but the dirty water, with small bits of wood and whatnot, from the ground found an easy way to my face. My only defense was to close the eyes as much as I could without losing visibility. A strange excercise to do :) Anyway, that's the bottom-up approach for hydrodinamics.
Anyway, by the time I got home, after an extra ~1.5km, my pants were basically a soup. My shirt was not exactly dry, but it still kept me a bit warm. I just ushered inside, grabbed a jacket, and went on for my second meeting.

This is a very overdue and probably the last release of contact-lookup-applet. Tarballs are available in the usual place. A few bug fixes in this release:

• Display more than one street address in a combo (#375433, Travis Reitter).
• Support secondary phone numbers (#359816, Timo Aaltonen).
• Remove ellipsis from the About menu item (#340450, Brian Pepple).

I'm also looking for a co-maintainer, or even better someone to take over maintainership. I don't use this anymore, but many distributions still ship it (and Ubuntu even has it in the stock install). The codebase is pretty small and simple, so is anyone interested? NP: Peel Session, cLOUDDEAD

* LDTP (aka Linux Desktop Testing Project) has published nice tutorial in PDF format. You can get it here till my ldtp-doc package is in NEW (Package has odt format only). Currently, package can be found on usual mentors repository.

Christopher Hitchens goes to war against religion–on a recent episode of Radio Open Source: “Religion does not say that there is a mystery. Religion says there is an answer to a mystery.” It’s an interesting observation, but, I think, wrong. For a hyper-rationalist, Hitchens resorts to a lot of irrational attacks. If nothing else, his caustic approach is probably not winning many converts. Although he refuses to admit it, I think his problem is really with fundamentalists, not with religion. By taking such a polemical approach, though, he is probably selling more books. Check out his appearance on the show, as well as the follow-up on a later show (and comments). Radio Open Source is a rare example of a successful melding of old and new media. Often traditional media efforts to create a web-based “community” around an existing show fall flat. Open Source was started as a multimedia show, though, and maybe that’s why it works.

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A number of recent events reminded me of how much time has passed since I started using Linux. Among these, the retirement of several 32-bit CPU architectures from the list of supported platforms on Debian and Ubuntu. The first architecture to fall was m68k. Release Managers at Debian proposed to drop support for m68k after Sarge, which indeed happened: Etch was released earlier this month and, for the very first time in Debian history, without m68k support. Granted, a number of dedicated developers are working on porting the GNU toolchain to Coldfire (an embedded platform that supports about 80% of the m68k instruction set) and good chances are that they will succeed but, let's not fool ourselves: m68k is gone. Around the same time, Ubuntu dropped support for PowerPC, just before releasing Feisty. Granted, there is still some PPC64 hardware being manufactured, but this is on the server side and thus getting farther away from the desktop market that constitutes Ubuntu's core business. Of course, given the plethora of 32-bit PPC hardware in circulation, in the form of second-hand Power Macs, the platform still has some lifespan left but, again, let's not fool ourselves: PowerPC is gone too. And now, a message sent to Debian mailing lists suggested that, as of Linux kernel 2.6.21, support for 32-bit SPARC was broken and, due to an insufficient developer interest for maintaining the GNU toolchain, 32-bit SPARC was likely to be dropped for the Lenny release. Yup, we really cannot fool ourselves: support for 32-bit architectures really is gone. Not surprisingly, my own computer collection has followed a similar trend: this morning, my beloved PA-RISC host left for the home of a happy computer hobbyist who had won the online auction on it. My Atari TT030 is likely to follow a similar route fairly soon. Ditto for the exotic Atari Stacy sitting besides it ...and let's not mention the huge stack of Pentium II and K6 desktop hardware sitting in the corner. Looking back, I'm glad to have shared so many brilliant years with 32-bit hardware. The variety of CPU architectures and hardware designs was quite a learning experience. This being said, life goes on and my current needs are fully covered by my Linutop and by my aging ThinkPad. Thank you for all those years, 32-bit computers. Enjoy a well-deserved rest in bit heaven.

I’ve been struggling for a tagline for Webconverger. The previous tagline “Webconverger is a free, up-to-date Web browser kiosk live system”, was a bit of a mouth full. Now, I’ve decided that a “Web operating system” best describes Webconverger. Webconverger isn’t just a “kiosk”... The reason why I didn’t call Webconverger a Web operating system initially, was because I didn’t want to confuse anyone. You see I’ve read blogs which talk about Web desktops or rather Web applications that emulate desktops, “operating systems”. I think for such Web applications, I’ll call them Web desktops, to be called an operating system is just abuse. Calling Web desktops “operating systems” tarnishes the good name of operating systems, when silly Web applications emulate broken dead WIMP win32 environments. I can’t be the only one that hates Windows. I’m not talking about Microsoft Windows. I am talking about overlapping Windows windows. :) So I have a little fight on my hands with Wikipedia and the entry on Web operating systems. Hopefully someone agrees with me that Webconverger is a Web OS. Sidenote: I’m in the process of releasing the Debian-live etch based Webconverger 2.15 (download) which features a new textless progress bar and reset feature.

I just finished reading Ben Yoskowitz's Top 10 reasons to join a startup, and I feel like I have to say something. As an experienced programmer, I think of a startup as an abusive relationship. Most technology startups I've been in have been run by charismatic sociopaths with no actual management or technology experience. They make wild, ignorant, unfounded promises to employees, investors and potential customers, then get increasingly anxious and unpleasant as their unsupportable predictions of schedule and market share don't come through. Employees end up working 80-hour weeks, typically for low or no pay and worthless stock options that never pay out. Guilty that living the "startup lifestyle" (work from home, come in late, have fun) has caused schedule or feature slips, they push themselves too hard at work, to the detriment of their health and home life. It doesn't help you much get another job later. Most startups don't succeed, which means that you end up with 1, 2 or 3 years of space on your r sum consumed by a made-up company name that no one has ever heard of and whose phone line has been disconnected. If people have heard of the name, they'll associate it with failure ("Oh, yeah, wasn't that the company that spent all that money and went nowhere?"). On top of all that, the tech experience of working in a startup is usually pretty bad. The engineers are typically unexperienced -- just out of school, or close to it -- and they waste a lot of time and effort trying to reinvent the wheel. The idea that you're changing the world encourages this kind of bad engineering. You end up cutting a lot of corners and developing a lot of bad habits that you have to unlearn later on. Schedule pressures make you drop important engineering steps like analysis, design, unit tests, documentation. That is, if you even knew you were supposed to do them in the first place. It takes a lot of experience in this kind of pressure-cooker environment to come out of a startup sane, healthy, and wealthy. The vast majority of people end up with broken relationships, poor mental and physical health, and not much in the way of money to show for their efforts. tags: startup benyoskovitz work

Wikiclock in the news So, Niko, Hugh, Mike and Leoben Richardson all blogged about the Wikiclock. As far as I know, no MSM coverage yet, but it should be coming down the pipe any day. I talked to Niko tonight, and he said that he saw Hugh at La ka, and Hugh was updating the wikiclock. They traded off updating all afternoon. Sigh. It's actually quite addictive. tags: wikiclock niko hughmacguire leonardrichardson mikelinksvayer

Transit strike We've got a transit strike on in Montreal (see the CBC for deetz). It's a pretty heinous problem -- the maintenance workers are asking for X% pay increases over Y years with blah blah blah pension and fie fo fum and... Whatever. The city is refusing to budge, which makes our mayor, G rald Tremblay, officially a hypocritical idiot. Tremblay has been wagging fingers at provincial, federal and international figures for years about sticking to the Kyoto protocol, but when the hard decisions had to be made, he was willing to shut down Montr al's transit system... in summer... after one of the warmest winters in history. You can blame both sides on this issue, but when it comes down to it the union's job is to get the best deal it can for its workers, and Tremblay's job is to keep the Montreal M tro running. Someone's not doing his job. The city spends millions trying to get commuters out of their cars and into the public transit system. And all that work's out the window, now. Despite the public call for more people to rollerblade to work (riiiiiiiight), traffic is way up and auto use is way up. That means air quality is going to go down, and our city can go from being an environmental leader to an environmental mistake. I'm glad to hear that the Quebec government is stepping in to break up the fight, but I hope it doesn't take too long. tags: montreal quebec metro strike

Calling graphic designers: Universal edit button One of the interesting movements to come out of RoCoCoCamp this weekend is the idea of a universal wiki edit button. This would be an icon similar to the RSS radio-wave icon that's become ubiquitous for indicating an RSS feed. The UWEB would symbolize that the current page can be edited. Folks at AboutUs.org have taken the lead on this effort, which could be really interesting. Getting a universally-understood sign for "edit this page" would greatly help with acceptance of the wiki way by the general public. I don't think it'd have to be limited to wikis; any page that could be edited (e.g., on a CMS) could also have the UWEB. I highly encourage skilled graphic designers who want to take a crack at designing the Next Big Icon to look at the UWEB effort and give it a try. tags: graphicdesign universalwikieditbutton wiki rocococamp aboutus.org icon