A few things happen to remind us that we'll be parents soon...

* Angie just suggested that perhaps we could take the gin and vodka that we haven't been drinking out of the freezer to make space.

* We put together a crib yesterday. Anything else could've been random Ikea furniture. But y'know, there's just no other use for a crib. (Or a child sized one, anyway...)

* Angie turning around in what usually would've been plenty of space, and sending a glass flying with the end of her belly.

* The steady stream of (welcome) conflicting advice from people who are already parents.

There's less than 3 weeks to go to the official due date, less than 5 to the maximum date permitted (In Qu bec, they induce if we get 2 weeks past the due date). Midwife visits are now weekly. Birth bags are packed. We just need to finish assembling the phone and email lists and ...

... wait. =)

Probably time for more Angie pictures, though. I'll try to take some later.

My brain is drawing a blank on this:

Let's say I have a class Group and a class Person, where there's an n:m relationship between these. It's simple to say that Group could have an attribute "members" which is a collection of Persons, or Person could have an attribute "groups" which is a collection of Groups.

The problem then is that there's no relationship properties there. I can't easily describe for how long the person has been a member of the group, when that membership expires, etc. It seems to me that these type of properties ought to be describable in an elegant way. Perhaps as a characteristic of the array? I want to do this ideally in a way that for items that have no meaningful characteristics I can just use a standard Array class of some sort, but that when properties come up, I want to be able to add them silently so that existing code can continue to just work.

* The GE Soft White electric 60 bulbs are CFLs that are much more pleasant than the other's we've tried. Sometimes it's surprising that name-brand can be better. =) We've now got 6 of them in the house. We'll have more as soon as I find a brand that works in a dimmer. I've read that they exist, and this brand doesn't say "not for use in dimmers" like the other ones do. We'll see. =)

The weather in Montr al is supposed to be a high of 16 C on Saturday. In January. C'mon people, it's time to do more than we have been. I don't care if you don't believe using less electricity, less gas, eating less meat, etc. will help fix global warming. Doing nothing certainly *won't* help and until you have a better plan, put down your cheese burger, get out of your SUV and bloody well go for a walk to buy some CFLs.

* auzure_skies is 33 weeks pregnant today! =)

* PHP 5 sucks far less than I thought it would. The object model seems to actually match what I expect for umpteen years of other programming. Further, the Eclipse PHP editor has already helped me catch some mistakes. I did wind up installing IBM's JDK for PPC in order to get the speed to where I needed it to be, though. Java 7 should rock. =) I've been hacking on a project for the church called 'ConnectUU', and the code had crufted pretty badly over a handful of maintainers and upgrades from what looks like early php3. One file in particular was special:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 jbailey users 623863 Dec 17 02:37 events.php

And that's been split nicely now into 37 classes.

* Various friends, family etc have asked to be notified when the child is born. The best I can say is 'well, alright'. If seeing it here on the LJ isn't good enough, let me know and I'll add you to the super-secret-mailing-list. But don't expect anything exciting. Probably something along the lines of 'Showtime, Synergy'.

* Oh: Happy New Year! For this year I've made no resolutions. I can't predict my future more than about 6 weeks out, and I'd be totally fooling myself if I claimed otherwise. But hey. =)

* We've totally finished moving now. Pictures are coming soon, but I'm trying to get ones without boxes and mess in the background. I've put a few up so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbailey/tags/4537/

Yay! We finally have snow! I took a picture, but need to charge the batteries in order to get it off of the camera. And for that, I need to find the charger in one of these boxes...

It's an odd feeling, realising that this is the last Christmas that Angie and I get calmly to ourselves. Sprout will be ~9 months old next Christmas, certainly old enough to enjoy shiny light s and music and such, even if (s)he* will be unaware of what's actually happening. We've been making the most of being lazy: Sleeping in, reading books, hacking hppa on Feisty... The types of things that a person can enjoy on a lazy day. =)

Moving has been going really well. While we still have a fair bit to unpack, it's past the overwhelming stage. We spent a bit of time this weekend clearing space for things like cooking and walking. We even managed to get a tree up, although the decorations are quite minimal this year.

We have the last of our moving to do today. A last round of a few plants, and a couple breakables that we didn't want handled by the movers. The new subletters show up tomorrow and then we're basically done with the old place.

Everything so far feels like a great close to 2006.

Yay! We've now moved. It was a crazy rollercoast of up late Friday night with workmates, up early Saturday morning for the cable guy to install the new Internet connection, rushing to get the washing machine repaired so that it wasn't full of water. That done, we decided "hey, let's see if we can find movers". We found a set for Sunday morning, so stayed up late Saturday (well, Angie stayed up late. I passed out and got up early) packing. The movers showed up Sunday morning and refused to do the work, even after we agreed to their price change. We managed to find other moving to take our stuff Sunday afternoon, and spent the evening shuffling things around enough so that we could sleep.

By that point I was caughing, sneezing, headachy, and such, and generally feeling run over. Apparently multiple days of physical activity and low sleep is now enough to totally take me out. Suck. I'm still sniffling, but I'm generally thinking straight now.

But yay, we're moved! The cats even seem to have forgiven us already.

Yay! The Internet is moved! We almost live in the new place. ;)

I can't really guess at how many social networking sites I've signed up to over the years. I was thinking about this a bit as I noticed some more LinkedIn mail. It's a site that seemed interesting, until I realised that I don't need to pay another company for the privilege of asking friends to introduce me to their friends. But I was thinking through the bits of electronic interaction that I have, and thinking back to my days at Hollinger where we actively spent time thinking about what content we could provide that would keep the user moving from one of our sites to another of our sites, always looking at our ads.

With this lens on, I was thinking about where I would take Google next if I were in a similar position there. I think that Google's future probably relies primarily on their crappiest product: Orkut. What places like MySpace do well is provide what I think of as the old CompuServe experience. You go, and in one spot you have different forums, chat, and downloads.

But what if Google were to make Orkut not suck? They've already started integrating Talk into it (although it still doesn't work with Apps for Your Domain), and I can only imagine that we'll soon see your account only a short while from where your Orkut page shows your public blog entries, as well as allows you to post to your own blog, or a community one. The relationships there are rich enough with Friends Groups and a gradient of friendship that the community FOAF bits could be represented easily. Picassa and their page builder things would allow people to setup myspace-like places for themselves without ever leaving the familiar framework of Orkut. Business could use all of these tools for internal corporate things, marking certain items as publish while the integrated checkout functionality let them to business quickly and efficiently.

But what other interactions then? Could we book a doctor's appointment by looking at their Calendar through their corporate page? Easily book venues for the band with the same? Use the presence notification in Talk figure out if there's someone I can deal with right now to finalise the plans for the upcoming gig?

And the cool part is that from what Google's done so far, they'll cheerfully let you integrate your own product into theirs through some sort of open standard.

In the news:

* Gates approved as new defence head

How's that for frightening? But, no, it's not Bill Gates. =)

* Victoria's Secret catalogue no longer in pulp friction

At Opus a few years ago, there were some folks doing a letter writing campaign to get Victoria's Secret to stop using Caribou habitat wood in their catalogues. It seems that it's now been successful.

In other news, TD Meloche Monnex can't provide a definition of when we will be living in the new place in order for them to insure it. I've done the rounds with two people now to try and sort out whether they'd be willing to insure or not. They can't decide whether us living in the new place is when we're eating and sleeping there or when every last box has moved. They're pretty happy to tell me that it's a grey area. I hear that as a pretty clear "you're screwed if you need to make a claim". Next!

That said, I took some pictures of the place this evening while we were moving some boxes over. We're trying to make this place not look cluttered. Will post them soon.

Also, note to self: Stairs are slippery. Luckily I was near the bottom step when I discovered this. Walking is a bit sore, but still okay. *sigh*

On our third attempt to finally get everything signed, we got all the paperwork done for buying a place today! It's silly how much everyone seemed to expect that we knew the whole process and would get impatient with us not having something ready that we hadn't a clue was even required.

I've updated our address in Orkut. I'll do the Debian database and other things when I can remember just how those get done. =)

This evening, we decided that we needed to go over and spend some time in the place, so we had Brad, Jody, me, Angie, Simon, Alison, and Damien over for chips, drinks, pizza and cookies.

Now the moving fun begins, and we still get to try and find a tenant. Whee!

... although I still wish it were called that fallacious ferret. =)

As an Ubuntu core-dev (although not on the Canonical Distro team, more like a community member who happens to work for Canonical on other things), I feel like I should run the latest distro on my machines. I tend to think this is doubly true since I hack on things like glibc. And if it's not good enough for me to run...

Usually, though, it's a bit of a rough slog. Even when I ran Debian unstable on my boxes, there usually wasn't transition after transition landing every day. Even the Gnome folks started to stage things in experimental and make sure they worked before doing the upload to unstable.

So it's a bit surprising that so far with feisty, I've had really good luck and am finding the experience nice and smooth: suspend even works on my laptop now. Further, I'm upgrading my belle's machine so that she can get the integrated sudoku into gnome-games and I'll probably also try out gnash for her.

Angie and I are now actually getting ready to move and still haven't got subletters yet. If you're looking for a place in a wonderful part of the city, 1.5 blocks from M tro Mont-Royal, skylight, clawfoot bathtub then look here: http://www.raspberryginger.com/4680/

The place is suitable for a single, a couple, or two roommates who don't want anything shared aside from the kitchen. Available immediately! =)

Update: We're moving because we've bought a place, not because we don't like this one. We like the area so much that we decided to buy. =)

I've been playing with Google for your Domain over the past couple of weeks for Angie and my's email. A few observations so far:

1) Still a bit worried that Google now has a pile of my data. I don't know that there's a way to resolve this. I'm wondering if there's a way of doing GPG overlays onto gmail? For the most part I don't really care, but it would be nice to preserve the option of doing a local decryption.

2) It's nice to use my email address for my Jabber account finally. No more having to remember to check the gmail account from time to time to see if someone decided sending an email there would be a good idea. I should probably do the same with my hotmail account.

3) Google talk and Orkut don't play along with GfyD.

4) Google's incremental improvements are cool. In the past week they added customised start pages, which means that I can see my mail and calendar from a start page. The start page isn't as fully featured as the original start page (historical searches, various customer applets, etc. don't work), but looks alot like it did awhile ago.

5) gmail doesn't have a way of filtering on mailing lists. This annoyed me at first, but now is more of a reminder that I should unsubscribe from lists that I don't actually read anyway. The volume on the rest is low enough that I can continue to filter by hand.

Update: It seems that gmail *can* filter on mailing lists, it's just not documented. I've just setup a filter for listid:bug-gnulist.gnu.org and it seems to work. Use it in the "Has the words" section of the filter. Bug #83778177 filed with gmail for an update to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190

I'm pleased to see that the McGill Student Union is now refusing to allow blood drives until anti-homosexual discriminatory questions on the questionnaire can be dropped. The problem is one of stupid questions combined with discrimination. My friend Katy put it best about when she went to fill out the questionnaire: "No, I can't guarantee that I know my partner's sexual history. But I'm willing to bet my life on it."

According to an article on a recent Public Health Agency of Canada report:

The PHAC report reveals that 51 per cent of those infected with HIV continue to be men who engage in homosexual activity.

(Note that the lifesite.net is a Christian, pro-life, anti-gay website. I don't have time at the moment to dig out either a better source or the original report.)

Perhaps I'm doing my math wrong, but at the point when 49% are those who don't identify as homosexual (and 40% of those are women), then you've probably got a third to half a chance that someone in that line isn't a man who's had sex with a man and could be HIV infected.

I hope that the McGill protest puts enough pressure on Health Canada to review this policy and drop the discrimination completely.

History
For the sarge release official kernel-images from the newly formed Debian kernel team came together with initrd-tools. initrd-tools Maintainer was jbailey. It saw some care from tbm, vorlon and me before the actual release. Remembering the flow of bugs and installation-reports it accounted for a huge number of install failures plus lacked many features the Red Hat mkinitrd had. Ubuntu got hit more directly as hoary released with a newer kernel than 2.6.8 and due to the initrd-tools devfs requirement.
initramfs-tools originated out of the need of a direct replacement. Inspired by an initramfs OLS talk jbailey had the goals of boot-time hardware detection using the nice and neat features the Linux 2.5 branch incorporated: The sysfs support of the Linux drivers allows an neat userspace daemon aka udev to coldplug them. udev is the replacement of a maze of slow shell scripts called hotplug package. The second big feature is the new initramfs format (the curious may want to read Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt of any current linux-2.6 source). For a boot loader initramfs or initrd is the same fish. The smaller and more efficient in kernel code makes the difference. The initramfs gets loaded much earlier, due to being only an cpio archive and not an fs allowing it to completely rule the rootfs search and mount. One initial assigned spec had the name "easy NFS root". The LTSP guys joined in and showed interest in incorporating their work.
Technology
initramfs-tools got default in Debian together when the first common linux-2.6 (2.6.15) package reached etch, powered all the Ubuntu releases from Breezy on and is used by the grml live-cd. Since archive inclusion almost a year ago it got much better support of all the various linux boot parameters (see man initramfs-tools or the "official" Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt), keeps an backup initrd around and has better block-based bootloader support (lilo, ..). klibc has been ported to _all_ the Debian release archs where it is in use and compiles fine on m68k and sh.
The initramfs-tools early userspace is very flexible based on it's hooks for initramfs build and boot. Thanks to alphix for the help on shaping the building blocks. There are initramfs hooks in cryptsetup, evms, dmraid, firmware-qlogic, lvm2 multipath, mdadm, usplash, .. Reviewers, uploaders and sponsors included fs, jbailey and Sesse. Most of the time it is sufficient and easy to test changes in qemu images (See slides workshop early userspace). The best wish of an early userspace is not to be remarked - aka happy booting. Nevertheless thanks a lot for the public support: Achieving Xen Disk encryption support in Etch, Popping my initramfs cherry, ..
Future
The latest initramfs-tools release seems almost ready for the upcoming etch release. The bug reports coming over from installation-reports are happily rare. Although the uuid based fstab generation solution is not yet integrated in the debian-installer. There are one or two known nitpicks left-over in the bts plus one bugger: udevsettle may exit to early, when not all the discs are ready for use. For grub there is a fail-over net, but which does not account for a to early md or lvm2 boot hook. Future initramfs-tools development will focus on an optional small klibc based Modules=dep hand walking /sys initramfs generation allowing better embedded support. grub2 will present run-time assembly challenges for the initramfs.

And here's the photos...

Royal Victoria Hospital - Department of OBSTETRICS - Ultrasound Report Anatomie / Anatomy

Head	NORMAL	Spine	NORMAL SPINE	Heart	4 chambers seen	Thorax	normal	CordInsert	normal
Abdomen	normal abdomen	Stomach	NORMAL	Kidneys	normal	Bladder	normal	Limbs	4 present

Milieu Interne / Internal Milieu

Fetus: Single Live	Presentation: Cephalic	Sex:
Placenta:	Location: Posterior	Grade:0	Position: high
	Amniotic F1: Normal		Amniotic F1 Index:

Age by Dates: 23+6
Age by US: 24+0
Best EDC: 2007-02-21
Pictures should be scanned tonight. Angie's busy showing them off at work. =)

It looks like the condo purchase has actually gone through, subject to the usual final signing in front of the notary and handing over of a silly sum of money!

It also means that now we have to get rid of our place for December to avoid paying rent and mortgage at the same time. So hey, Montr alers, want to move to the plateau? We've got a lovely 5 1/2, front and back balcony, 3rd floor (2i me tage), washer and dryer hookups, clothes line, decent neighbours, 1 1/2 blocks from m tro Mont-Royal, and 1 1/2 blocks from m tro Laurier. The place has a decent cable hookup (my Vid otron connection just got the binutils source package in 14 seconds, 906k/sec), iron clawfoot bathtub with a skylight and a decent amount of storage.

Any takers? =)

I don't often post about work, but it's always with some trepidation that I switch my main computers to the new distro.

While I moved from the Distro team to leading the Support team last October, I still retain my Ubuntu core-dev status, and keep current by looking at toolchain issues occasionally and hacking on our SCC ports, ia64 and hppa. This means that not only do I keep my programming sk1llz from getting rusty through disuse, but I also have reason to keep in touch with other members of the distro team who are both work colleagues and friends.

As one of the people who cares the most about glibc in Ubuntu, I try to make sure that I'm running it wherever possible and making sure that I'm likely to find at least the obvious bugs before others.

So last night I pointed my sources.list to feisty.

This morning there were already two updates: base-files, and debootstrap. linux-libc-dev (the kernel headers) will come along shortly after the new kernel doesn't FTBFS. At the beginning of next week, there will be binutils, libc*, and gcc-4.1. And after that, the merge.

This will be the fourth release in a row that I've ridden from the first files uploaded. At times it's been exciting (leaving for a management meeting in Spain with a non-working X or wireless, not to mention broken cell phone and airplane. All of which were solved by the time I got to Mallorca.)

I spent the weekend cleaning up my vanity site, CSSizing it and such. Since I moved a few documents around, I wanted to make sure that they were still findable. Most of the site wasn't PHP before (it is now for common navigation / footer includes, etc.) so I had the challenge of how to send people to the new pages.

It's most common to find "refresh" pages, ones that you go and they redirect you to another location with a 0 timeout (and often a cute little notice that says if your browser doesn't DTRT, you should click the link). There doesn't seem to be another meta tag that could do the redirect trivially.

This is another case where PHP wound up being useful. Since I moved my weblog from my homesite to LiveJournal a while ago to let comment spam be Someone Else's Problem, I had that and a whole directory of stuff underneath it that was no longer there.

jbailey@titanium:~/web$ cat weblog.php
<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 301 Document Moved");
header("Location: http://jbailey.livejournal.com/");
exit();
?>

Now works for http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/weblog and any of the directories underneath it. Another side trick to this is that if I had a file foo.html, I can create a foo.html.php file with the same sort of thing in it. Apache's automatic extension tracking will find the .php file and sort it out automatically.

One thing I did discover is that if I have "weblog.tar.gz" and "weblog.php" sitting side by side, apache will prefer the .tar.gz file. *sigh*