So last night my wife picks up my
Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks book and starts reading it aloud. She started with the Introduction which is about the need for cryptography and history of the Internet and found it fascinating. She like the line about "The Internet was, in fact, not invented by Al Gore." So, although I suspect the rest of the book may not be as interesting to her, kudos to Paul Wouters and Ken Bantoft for writing a good Introduction.

Does this ever happen to anyone else? Everytime a prop plane flys over Van Halen's Panama pops into my head. The same thing happens with AC/DC's Hells Bells and church bells.

MX1000: I've been trying to get horizontal scrolling working on my logitech mx1000 mouse with the tilt wheel. So far no luck. I've used the various howtos to get all the other buttons going but the tilt wheel is still alluding me. If anybody has this working I'd like to know how. Xorg7 of course.


Multiple Monitors: So I've been running with multiple montors for 5 years now at work and at home and I've settled in on standard way of using them. Initially I used xinerama on a Matrox card at work on two 17" screens. I make heavy use of virtual desktops/workspaces (whatever you want to call them) so I didn't like switching both monitors at once too much. At home and my current job I use dual head on NVIDIA cards (not Twinview). I tend to leave the second monitor as things I monitor while switching between email, terminals, browsers and anything else on the first head. At work I also make use of x2x to send input to some server monitors wrapping around my desk. Little X tricks impress the designers.


RIP Syd Barrett.

No honking today; I guess there just isn't a big German population in Montreal. But, y'know, fourth place is pretty damn good, Portugal! Nothing to sneeze at. Still ahead of Brazil, for what it's worth. Tomorrow's the big finale, of course. The Paramount Famous Players on Ste. Catherine downtown is going to have a live showing, free for the first 300 people. I dunno... I guess it could be fun, but it seems a little impersonal. I think I'll be watching from Niko's again. It's easy to walk to Little Italy, or Barouf, from there. tags: montreal world cup germany portugal

Grillr I spent the day putting together household furniture. We stopped by Canadian Tire on Tuesday to buy lawn furniture, and we got a shipment from Ikea on Wednesday. This afternoon cleared out a lot of cardboard boxes from our house. First up was Amita June's big girl bed, which she got as a present for her month birthday. Yeah, Amita turned the big one-oh yesterday (10 months!), and although we've been doing wp:co-sleeping, we want her to start learning to sleep in her own bed. (Most co-sleeping babies want to move out after about 1 year.) She got a toddler bed, which is actually pretty cute, and fits perfectly in her room. Building Ikea furniture isn't really all that fun. First, they optimize for shipping size and storage, not for ease of building (or stability), so you get some really shaky stuff. Second, the instructions have no words -- assumably to avoid translation costs -- so you have to interpret their graphical V lapuk into some kind of reasonable instructions. Fortunately, just about the time I finished building it, Maj and Amita came home from a walk. Amita had just fallen asleep, so we put her in to see how it fit. Looks pretty good to me! After that, I watered my new lawn. The grass seeds I spread on Tuesday are coming up in teensity-tinesity leaves. Huzzah! Then I turned my attention to the wt:Muskoka chairs we got from Canadian Tire. These turned out to be a lot easier, and they were made from cedar wood, so they were pleasant to work with. Maj had invited over some friends for grilling, so she went to the store to buy food while I worked on the Muskokas. The baby hung out with me outside in her playpen. The chairs turned out great, and we had a nice grill. Brenda, Parise and Tony all came over. Brenda and Tony are librarians, and Brenda and Parise grew up together in wt:Moncton. The Muskokas were a hit; here are Brenda and Amita enjoying one. tags: ikea bed amitajune grill muskoka chairs lawn grill

Fireworks I can hear right now the dull thump thump tha-thump-thump of fireworks going off down at La Ronde, the amusement park in the middle of the St. Laurent River. They're the hosts of the International Fireworks Festival, which happens every summer. It's one of the great things about living in Montreal -- fireworks every Wednesday and Saturday from early June until the end of July. The festival is a competition -- national pyrotechnics teams each provide a half-hour long show on one of the nights, and then at some point after the festival they decide on a winner (I think... I've never actually checked who "won"). The fireworks are first-class, and it's just fun to have explosions over the city all the time. Tonight's team is wt:South Africa -- it's the first time there's been an African national team. Go SA! tags: south africa la ronde international fireworks festival pyrotechnics montreal fireworks

Best show ever One of the best music shows I ever went to was a "surprise" event by Camper Van Beethoven at the now-defunct Mint Platter record store on Telegraph Avenue in wt:Berkeley, California around 1990. Probably one of the next best music shows I ever went to was a surprise (for me) when Maj took me to see CVB at the Just pour Rire Theatre in Montreal in 2004, one week after we were married. (The band had recently reformed, and that night their equipment was stolen out of their tour bus in Mtl. Such a shame.) I'm just thinking about it because so many of the shows I love are on the etree section of the Internet Archive. Secret message to every taper I crabbed out because their big boom mike was blocking my view of the stage: sorry. You were right. Thanks. And what reminded me of that? The NPR Live Concert Series, aka All Songs Considered. Man, there's a lot of good music in there. tags: live music archives etree camper van beethoven

One So, has anyone offered Kyle Macdonald of One Red Paperclip a marketing job yet? Guy knows his marketing. tags: one red paperclip kyle macdonald

Bignose strikes again I'll be honest -- most of the time, I totally don't understand fellow piglogger Michael Bakunin's blog. Here's an excerpt from Gasoline: FD: small short position in one US refiner, and thinking about crack spreads. Does that mean something to some species of animal? I dunno. tags: michael bakunin piglog gasoline

nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy_1.0.7182-1_amd64.changes ACCEPTED with diversion fixes and some cleanups from Andrew Vaughan.

The are some test builds of nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy 1.0.7182-1 I'd like people to try here: http://people.debian.org/~rdonald/nvidia/temp/

This is the first work I've used the subversion repository and tools on. After reading various howtos, I've grasped most of it I think. Work by the pkg-nvidia team should start to become active soon now.

So yes, I know about the new NVIDIA legacy drivers. They should be uploaded to Debian by this weekend along with some diversion fixes for a bug in the old version.

Update: by the end of this weekend, which is a long weekend for me.

I'm trying to replace SourceSafe at work with Subversion but it is going slowly. If anybody has any Java Web development using Subversion from Windows experiences they want to share, please toss me an email

Jovita had her first cria yesterday and it's a heathy girl.



It was the first birth on our farm and tended by us. Our other cria were born while agisting so it was an interesting experience for us.

More photos are at http://www.khensu.org/gallery2/v/jovitababy/

The NVIDIA 1.0-8762 drivers were released today. No wishlist bugs please. I am starting the packages now. Hopefully legacy packages will be arriving soon also.

Update:8762 now uploaded

So I've been thinking of assembling an Debian NVIDIA packaging team. This would include the current drivers, legacy drivers, modules, nvidia-settings, nvidia-xconfig, nvclock (essentially most of my packages). Of course, an invititation would also go out to other NVIDIA package maintainers. Hopefully this will produce more heads thinking about issues as well as reducing delay in keeping packages up to date as well as people who can test on different hardware (important for maintaining the legacy packages). I have some people already in mind for this so I'm not asking for volunteers at this time. I also don't know for sure what resources we would use. Alioth may be out given the driver's licensing but I can set up something on my own server if need be. I still have more thinking to do and questions to ask but this feels like the direction I maybe taking the packages in.

So just an update, I've been working on the legacy drivers today and have run into the problem on amd64 that others in the nvnews.net forums have with the 2.6.16 patch compiling. I have upgraded it to work with Xorg7 now though so as soon as I can fix this compilation issue I'll have new drivers to upload. I haven't tried an i386 build yet but I image that might work.


Also I have noticed that the word from some NVIDIA people is that new legacy drivers are on the horizon. I hope it's sooner, rather than later.

So the company where I work at (Push72) is looking for a few (up to 5) good men (or women) to add to our development team. Currently we are heavily involved in online banking applications and need more people who know Java, have done some web application development and are good team players. Our office is in beautiful Parksville, British Columbia on Vancouver Island and relocation is required. This isn't an official job posting by any means (I don't hire, I just work here) but if you are interested, want to apply or want to know more information let me know at randy@push72.com

Raphael Hertzog's post to debian-devel-announce regarding Guidelines for packaging projects on Alioth has got me thinking about trying out the collab-maint project suggestion. It seems a great idea for people who want to help out.

So I finally tried out XGL and compiz using the debs for ubuntu amd64
found here. It is pretty slick but the non-existant multiple monitor support had me return to plain Xorg. I might set it up at work though and wow my fellow coworkers.

...well, the archive. The 1.0.8756 NVIDIA drivers have been uploaded to their usual destinations. Both amd64 and i386 versions now in my repository while i386 was uploaded to ftp-master.

for winning the Debian Project Leader election

Oh great, the software patent debate is back. After a long and disgusting campaign where pro-software-patents lobbyists employed all kinds of semi-legal and undemocratic filthy tricks in order to introduce software patents in the EU behind our backs, the European Parliament decided by a large majority to reject the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions" (a.k.a. software patents) in July 2005. Rightly so. It is beyond my imagination how a certain pro-software-patents commissioner (Charlie McCreevy) dares to restart the whole debate after such a clear defeat. Consultation and "public hearing" He has organized a "Consultation and public hearing on future patent policy in Europe" which pretends to collect your views on the software patent issue (which he's trying to introduce through the "Community Patent" backdoor). Alas, the "questionnaire" is inaccessible (it's only available in 5 languages, instead of all 25 (+2) languages of the EU member states), biased towards software patents, very obfuscated and unreadable for the general public. There's no independent working group which conducts or oversees the consultation, no independent studies and reading materials, no mentions of the negative implications of software patents, no public debate, nothing. Now, who would have expected that? The FSF Europe has published a response to the Patent Consultation Questionnaire, which highlights many of the problems. Similarly, the FFII has questioned the validity of the consultation procedure, and gives a very detailed explanation of all the serious flaws of the process. What can I do?

• First things first: the DEADLINE for answering the questionnaire and expressing your views is April 12, 2006!
• Answer the questionnaire! The FFII has prepared a short How to answer guide which you can use as a basis for your answer (per email, snail mail, or fax).
• Raise your concerns about the validity of the consultation process!
• Write your MEPs! Tell them what you think.
• Spread the word! I'm under the impression most people don't even know about this issue, yet!
• Put up banners. I know you all like pretty banners ;-)

Software patents suck (in case you didn't already know) Let me quote Donald Knuth on this:

I strongly believe that the recent trend in patenting algorithms is of benefit only to a very small number of attorneys and inventors, while it is seriously harmful to the vast majority of people who want to do useful things with computers.

(via MJ Ray)

1.0.8187-3 has just been uploaded to the Debian Archive with the patch to fix building against 2.6.16 kernels. Thanks to Harald Dunkel for the preliminary work.