Search Results: "tar"

9 November 2006

Andreas Barth: Spreading the news

Today started with drafting a release update (did anybody tell so far how much time it costs to write such mails? - of course it is time well spent, but still lots of time). Two review rounds, and a couple of smaller issues made most of my morning. In the afternoon, I worked on my mail backlog, and answered e.g. a longish mail from an journalist about release management in Debian. Not something that directly improves the release, but I believe it is also time well spent - if we get our point of view distributed better. Amazingly again how much time one can spend with writing stuff.

8 November 2006

Ian Murdock

CNET News.com: “Google is targeting the neo-network computer, not Microsoft, with all the Web-based applications it is releasing, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Summit here Tuesday.”

Roland Mas: Adding some non-blog pages

This blog/website is (currently) powered by Ikiwiki. That means I can rather easily add non-blog pages for content that's not quite "news", yet deserves a location more visible than some ~/public_html/tmp/ directory. I'm therefore starting the /static/ section of the site. Its first (and, so far, only) page is one giving some details about my digital camera setup. I may add some more pages as time passes. Not sure yet whether I'll make an index or let people find the pages through a search engine or the links.

Joachim Breitner: graphing your gaim chat history

I m a fan of statistics, so I created a small perl script that reads your gaim message history and, for the top 10 contacts, creates graphs: One for the total bytes chatted, one for the bytes chatted on each day, and two with weighted averages, over one week and one month timespan. You need the perl modules in libgd-graph-perl and libxml-xpath-perl, and my script. Run it and it will output the four png s in the current directory.I don t have examples, as the output is far too private to put up here, and I m too lazy to create interesting test data. There is a lot you can discover in these graphs: When you got to know someone (or when he started IMing), when you were not good terms with someone etc.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.2.5

The new version 0.3.14 of QuantLib was released yesterday (and I prepared Debian packages for QuantLib itself, the QuantLib-SWIG Python and Ruby wrappers, the QuantLib Reference Manual (pdf format) and the QuantLib Reference Manual (html format) last night). On the same release day, Dominick and I also updated the RQuantLib package. As a result, a new version 0.2.5 has now been uploaded to both R's master CRAN host and Debian. Only minor API updates were needed. It may take a day or two for the Debian packages to start to migrate over the mirror network. The shared library package once again introduces what is technically a new package (as the release version is encoded in the name) and we have to wait for it to be approved by the ftp masters. In the meantime, the sources are of course also here.

Erich Schubert: Kiss or diss launched.

Kiss or Diss logo Kiss or diss, a rather spontaneous project of a few friends of mine and I, has officially launched. It basically works like famous Hot or Not, except we're doing video, have a much better user interface and are also trendier. Hot or not is so... web 1.0 :-) You get to see girls and boys (choice is up to you) trying to impress you (or more likely making fool of themselves). To continue to the next video, vote on them. Really simple, but quite addictive because of the contents. There are lots of videos with people dancing. There are some pretty good singers inbetween. If you don't filter out males, you'll occassionally get some nice guitar playing... There is a certain amount of Ajax in it already, more web 2.0 goodness to come. Tags and such. Ajax is quite useful here, because you can comment or share a video without the page reloading - and thus the flash movie restarting. Definitely a plus in user experience. And since you need flash, your browser should have javascript anyway. There is no way we'll do a Lynx version with aalib, sorry. :-) P.S. Not all of these videos are "safe for work". Youtube does delete quite some videos, so they all should be okay (though still maybe "inappropriate"), but YMMV. Don't blame us if you get into trouble for watching videos at work. Do it in your lunch break or so. :-) P.P.S. And don't blame us for wasted hours watching stupid videos, either!

7 November 2006

Andreas Barth: Second day: Release planing

Today started with finishing the list of open issues for Etch, and trying to add time expectations to the list. This sounds like an easy task at first glance, but actually it involves asking many people, and getting time expectations updated etc. As result of that list, and some further discussions, I started drafting the next release update mail. One also is hinted to many issue which escaped attention so far, so it involved also a round of bug severity changing. Also, I finished working on "how does apt behave with more than one signature" for now: There is http://testmirror.turmzimmer.net/debian which has an additional signature on the sarge Release-file (thanks to Netcologne for hosting) - please feel free to just use it for any sarge system, and report errors back. I'll revisit the experiences in two weeks time. The rest of day involved smaller issues, e.g. fixing the sort-by-bugnumber-mode on bts.turmzimmer.net (which I broke with yesterdays changes for "related" bugs), and a couple of other things. I also started to update the etch-release-page, but that needs to be continued tomorrow it seems. After I saw some more people not too happy with apache2.2 configuration changes (or rather, some modules are no longer there automatically), I decided to dedicate this Thursday to Apache.

Ian Murdock: del.icio.us, fully integrated with browser bookmarks

Yahoo quietly released the del.icio.us Bookmarks Firefox extension the other day, which does something I’ve been wanting del.icio.us to do for a very long time, namely fully integrate with Firefox bookmarks. Like a lot of people, I gave up long ago on using bookmarks to keep track of interesting sites (del.icio.us fills that role quite nicely for me now). Still, the process of bookmarking something in del.icio.us had always been a bit tedious. The old del.icio.us extension helped a little (it would prefill the Notes field with whatever text was currently selected), but it was still missing some pretty important functionality (the popup didn’t display your existing bookmarks like the bookmarklet did). And even with del.icio.us, I still used browser bookmarks for quick access to the sites I frequent most via the bookmarks toolbar. The new extension integrates with browser bookmarks almost perfectly—with a few big exceptions. It’s easy to import your existing bookmarks (the extension even offers to give them a special tag and mark them “private” so as not to clutter your existing bookmarks, as well as mines existing tags to try to categorize what’s imported automatically). The tag button is much more functional now and offers to show your existing tags, my big complaint about the previous extension. And the new extension nicely replaces the bookmarks toolbar and allows you to specify and even order your favorite tags, effectively replacing the last useful vestiges of browser bookmarks with a del.icio.us backed equivalent that also allows you to give other tags to those bookmarks. That said, there are some pretty significant problems with the new extension, the biggest in my view being that there’s no way to change the sort order of the bookmarks within your favorite tags. Essentially, this makes the bookmarks toolbar far less useful—selecting “apps”, which used to contain a manually sorted list of web applications I frequently use, now contains a list of bookmarks in seemingly random order (it’s actually reverse chronological, but that’s not particularly useful for the bookmarks toolbar). The tags submenu under bookmarks doesn’t have any hierarchy to it—all tags are at the top level, making getting to a tag later in the alphabet quite tedious (I’d rather see a “tags starting with a”, “tags starting with b”, etc. structure). And, at least in my early experimentation, synchronization doesn’t always work as expected—changes to my local bookmarks seem to propagate back to del.icio.us, but the reverse doesn’t always seem to be true. Still, it’s a promising start, and I’m going to keep using it. If they don’t fix the sort problem soon, though, I’ll likely revert to Google Browser Sync. (Interestingly, Google Browser Sync is listed as incompatible and is disabled on installation of the del.icio.us extension, even though it technically does other things, like synchronize cookies and passwords. This would seem to be a smart move on Yahoo’s part—challenge Google’s foothold in the browser and create a foothold of its own.) A few parting thoughts: I’ve only installed this extension on my laptop thus far, and it’ll be interesting to see how well synchronization of my bookmarks works across machines (will it synchronize my favorite tags etc., allowing me to maintain a consistent browser toolbar? etc.). Finally, I’d like to see the “tag” function better integrated with the browser, perhaps the way Flock does it (a Google like star next to the address bar that reflects the current site’s del.icio.us state).

Erich Schubert: The power of userContent.css

All mozilla-based browsers have a feature called "userContent.css". It was designed to allow you to override page CSS with your own, e.g. for accessibility reasons. It has mostly been used by people to remove ads, and I'll share two examples with you. Create ~/.gnome2/epiphany/mozilla/epiphany/chrome/userContent.css (you'll probably need to create the chrome directory, too; other browsers use similar path names) and put these two rules in there: 
a[href$=".pdf"]:after  font-size: 10px; color: red; content: " [PDF]"; 
iframe[src*="devart.adbureau.net"]  display:none !important; height: 0;  
@-moz-document domain("mail.google.com")   button#ac_tr   color: red !important;   button#ac_dl   color: red !important;
The first one will postfix a red [pdf] to any link going to a PDF file. This is very valueable especially with Google scholar. The second rule is an example on how to hide elements. This example hides some ads on deviantart. You can easily pick a wider term or grab some of the existing rulesets. The third rule will color the ">deviantart. You can easily pick a wider term or grab some of the existing rulesets. The third rule will color the ">deviantart. You can easily pick a wider term or grab some of the existing rulesets. The third rule will color the "delete" button in Gmail red, so you find it easier. Since it moves around (UI hazard; "delete forever" replaces "archive" button in spam and trash folders.) this is quite nice to have. But if you want to go for default ads filtering, I'd suggest to use some of the adblock extensions. These userContent tricks are mostly useful for adding rules that the extension didn't catch.

Stefano Zacchiroli: editing latex the vim way

Editing LaTeX, the Vim way Uwe presented latexmk as its way of previewing LaTeX output while editing in Vim. While I don't know latexmk myself, I'm using quite a lot LaTeX recently (my Ph.D. thesis is getting huuuge) and I'm co-maintaining vim-latexsuite in Debian. With vim-latexsuite what he wants can be achieved quite easily too. I keep on editing in Vim and can exploit the following shortcuts (where <Leader> is usually mapped to backslash):
  1. <Leader>ll compile the current LaTeX source, the generated format depends on the value of g:Tex_DefaultTargetFormat (I use dvi, for a reason explained below);
  2. <Leader>lv fire up a viewer for the compiled format, in my case this runs xdvi;
  3. <Leader>ls move the DVI viewer to the point the cursor is currently at in Vim, highlighting (in xdvi) with a rectangle the current paragraph (believe me, this is amazing);
  4. CTRL+Mouse Click (this in xdvi) do the opposite of (3), i.e. move Vim to the point in the LaTeX source file corresponding to where we clicked in xdvi.
I don't really understand why Uwe want to see working previews in PDF format, to me PDF is just the final output. DVI is much better (especially for (3) and (4) above, but also because it takes less time to be generated). Oh, and of course vim-latexsuite is able to do a lot more, like deciding whether LaTeX needs to be run again to fix dangling references, use the quickfix window to jump to compilation error, and so on ... End of the SPAM :-) PS these are my latex-specific vim settings from my ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim 
setlocal tw=80
setlocal ts=8
setlocal sts=1
setlocal sw=1
setlocal iskeyword+=\\
setlocal makeprg=make
setlocal keywordprg=:help
"setlocal formatoptions+=a
setlocal spell
vmap ,b "zdi\textbf <C-R>z <ESC>
vmap ,e "zdi\emph <C-R>z <ESC>
vmap ,t "zdi\texttt <C-R>z <ESC>
  " Latex-Suite
let g:Tex_CompileRule_dvi = 'latex -interaction=nonstopmode -src-specials $*'
if v:servername != ""
 let g:Tex_ViewRule_dvi = 'xdvi -editor "vim --servername ' . v:servername . ' --remote +\%l \%f"'
endif

6 November 2006

Andreas Barth: First day of experiment

Today, I started with the well-known experiment by making sure I'm not dropped out from social security for taking part there. After that was started, I invested some time on a long-standing wishlist bug on bts.turmzimmer.net, so that one can see even the RC-bugs related to a (source) package which would be ignored otherwise if at least one bug would be shown. This required some more code cleanup first. Now everything should work. I started the afternoon with creating a list of open tasks that are not marked as RC bugs, and dependencies between those. During that, I learned that the security teams thinks that we lost the security sparc autobuilder - not something that makes me happy, and something that needs to be fixed independent of Etch. Actually, it seems the autobuilder is just recovering, but I'll continue looking at it. apt-keys One item open on the list of open tasks is the final usage of apt-keys (which involves me in more than one way), so I started a testbed for having the Release-file signed by more than one key, and check whether apt is still happy. Adding another signature turned out to be quite easy with just adding it to the Release.gpg-file. If there is more than one signature on the release-file, but not all keys are know to apt, apt warns, but doesn't stop: 
W: There are no public key available for the following key IDs:
010908312D230C5F
If however there is a bad signature, apt fails, even if there is also a good signature. (And please note, if the key is unknown, the signature is not bad but unknown - this gives the interesting behaviour that removing a trusted key by apt-key my remove the need to explicitly confirm to go on with the upgrade.) Summary on apt-keys Current behaviour is ok, we just need to sign one file extra with each stable (point) release, and this can be done with: gpg --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring srm-secring.gpg -b --armor etch/Release >> etch/Release.gpg (or rather, sign off-line, and append on ftp-master). The behaviour with multiple keys might look a bit strange, but IMHO we can live with it. I'm currently preparing to use real keys, and publish the result on some place where anybody could test it (for the latest sarge point release), and I hope we can put it on for the next point release on ftp-master.

Barry Hawkins: The missing ingredient in commercial desktop OS options; a package management system

Having spent the better part of two days provisioning my new MacBook Pro’s OS X, Debian, and Windows XP instances, I am keenly aware of how much the Debian distribution’s package management system and its volume of packages have spoiled me. In that two days, the amount of time required to provision Debian was negligible, even though it is configured to completely match my Lifebook’s Debian Sid instance. In fact, the sum total of time to set up Debian, including every application I use, was about 45 minutes of my involvement. Those who know Debian (and Ubuntu, Linspire, Xandros, Mepis, or any other Debian derivative) are coolly nodding their heads, while others are probably thinking I am a lying, biased Linux zealot. It’s no lie; here are the steps I had to take: Compare that to what it takes with either Mac OS X or Windows XP to get all of your applications installed and configured. Even if you don’t know a thing about Linux or even the more technical side of those operating systems, you can tell from the brevity of that set of steps that the Debian setup is remarkably simple. Now, some will already be keying in their comment posts with exclamations of “Hey! There’s DarwinPorts/Fink/Cygwin!” Yeah, each of those is a nice start; however, they pale in comparison. Fink at least has the robust apt/dpkg foundation, but even it has a relatively meager package selection. I am sure I’ll be writing more on life with Fink and DarwinPorts in the near future. I still don’t have half the stuff installed on XP that I plan to use. I get tired just thinking about the installs. 8^)

Martin F. Krafft: Fascists in the air and on the ground

The EU has published the new guidelines for hand luggage on flights, following the foiled, alleged "terrorist" attacks at Heathrow airport in August of this year. Let's all raise our hands and cheer to the great authorities with their far-sighted wisdom for making flying so much safer. As of today, you're not allowed to transport any liquids in your regular hand luggage, because, as we all know, it's trivial to blow up a plane with liquid explosives. Previously, only the UK, as the little brother of the Excited States of America, bought this obvious security enhancing measure; today all of the EU followed. I am not claiming they had to or were forced, I think our "leaders" in Brussels are stupid enough to make the move themselves. From now on, liquid containers have to be transported in zip-lock bags, which you're expected to bring yourself. Every container holding less than 100ml has to be placed into that bag; if the bag is full, that's it, you can only take one (I wonder how long it'll be until you can buy zip-lock bags big enough to hold, say, 20 litres...). And of course, the bags have to be scanned separately, at participating airports only, of course. Just like some airports don't care about your laptops while others make you switch the thing on, I am sure those bags will be scrutinised differently depending on where you are. Containers of more than 100ml are simply not allowed anymore, including drinking liquids, unless purchased at the overpriced airport stores (which account for roughly 30% of an airports revenue), of course. Our ladies will be able to bring lip stick in their pockets, but the "softer" chap sticks (Labello etc.) are considered dangerous and thus must go into the bag. Confusing? Expect even longer delays! Ample time to think about it all! All this is obviously only being done for our safety, and to shield us from the mean "terrorists". Thank you, you smart decision makers. If it weren't for you, we might all live freely and die happily. NP: Amplifier / The Astronaut Dismantles HAL Update: Kevin Fullerton points out that at least in the UK, the bags are limited in capacity to one litre, and that "verified" prescription medicine and baby food are exempt. I shall now go to my doctor and get a recipe for a two litre water bottle. I doubt I'll pass as baby any longer. In spirit maybe, but I don't think they'll care. Update: Andreas Schuldei points out that a friend of his with a Ph.D. in chemistry tells the opposite from what Perry Metzger claims in the article linked above. I'd be interested to hear more about that. But I agree with you: you don't need liquid explosives or bombs at all to wreak some havoc in the skies. All this security theatre hardly improves security there will always be a hole, and someone will find it. On the other hand, with the publicity around "heightened security" (and related fairy tales), the average passenger is more likely to feel safe when s/he is not. Similar to the story of the boy who cried wolf, I wonder whether the authorities are not making it easier for the "terrorists". Note that I am playing their game, the game in which our authorities are trying to win, the battle long lost before it even started. I don't think the threat is airplanes crashing into football stadiums, important landmarks, or buildins with many people; I think the real threat is terror, and I am not the only one to claim that on this front, the terrorists have long won. Our politicians either don't get it, or they do and are now furiously attempting to piggy-back intelligence measures for greater "internal control", while using the public excitement as a platform for their policitical campaigns. For a leader to be able to push his/her own agenda, s/he can do a whole lot of talking and fail, or instill fear among the people and boldly forge ahead, for them to follow. I don't recall who said that which I freely quoted. Update: Wouter van Heyst pointed me to this film, which is a three part documentary. screened by the BBC in January 2005 (see Wikipedia). IMDb user ratings of 9.2/10 with 675 votes... just means I'll have to get that film. You can download it for free from archive.org, see it at Google Video, or just read the argument summary.

Amaya Rodrigo: Everyday Sexism


Everyday Sexism
Originally uploaded by Amayita.


Things like this make us women feel VERY welcome in IT.

This time it's EagleSoft. But I am fearing SIMO in Madrid this week. It is just a CBIT-kind of computing fair, where there are more semi-naked women that semi-naked hardware to look at.

I did not want to attend this year, but I will. Just to take pictures of how male-targetted this market is. Naked women are used to sell anything, including computers.

I am nauseated and want to run really far away, where I can no longer take part in this consumerism-sexism whirlpool, and life a simple, materialism-free life, kind of Amish-like, but with access to my email :).

Excuse the rant.


Update: As requested by Madduck, I am happy to quote Erinn: The expression "nice rack" is used as a way to compliment a woman's breasts, as she was kind enough to explain on IRC for non-native speakers.
Please also note the expression on the guy's face.
Also, there are links to more sexism in IT adverts in this entry's comments. Feel free to add your own pointers. As consumers^Wcustomers we can make the educated choice.

Alexander Schmehl: man xpdf

Uwe explains how he uses latexmk and xpdf when creating documents in LaTeX. I would like to add a small correction: You don't need to go back and forth one page to make xpdf reload the document. Just pressing the r key (like reload) does the same. Haven't looked at latexmk, yet, but perhaps you can tweak it, so it calls xpdf -remote -reload (or something like that) whenever you change your tex source? PS: Before we start a discussion about the death penalty, habe you seen 12 Angry Men? PPS: Does anyone know a pdf viewer, which has a loop option?

Andreas Schuldei: Explosivs

Martin, please dont quote this anymore on plausibility of bombs with liquid explosivs. I know a guy who *finished* his Ph.D. in chemistry and works in the military devision developing detectors for explosivs (while the author of that pice of fiction just *starts* studing chemistry). The guy i know told me pretty much the opposite of what the article says and sounds much more convincing and knowledgable. Of course, dont take my word for it but educate yourself.

That said, I dont know why people worry about liquid explosives so much as long as you are allowed to bring notebooks (and notbook batteries) into the plane. Those can be abused much easier, I hear.

5 November 2006

Erich Schubert: News backlog

I was too busy to read my favourite tech news the last few weeks. This sunday I finally started working on the backlog. Parts of it - I'm not going to try to catch up with Slashdot... And most of the time, I'm only reading the headlines, too. Most of the stuff here will be in German; since I'm also interested in the politics surrounding technology here in germany, a local ticker such as Heise is most useful for me.
  • the Novell and Microsoft deal: I wonder if it's mostly to show an act of good will, to calm Europe in preparation of the Vista release. This and the new API for third party security software may get them to launch Vista on time in Europe, too.
  • Contact information on web pages. May now be reachable with two clicks from the first page, if the wording is obvious. Germany used to require contact information to be reachable with a single click for commercial web pages.
  • Flash 9 for Linux. Beta. Closed source, and it frequently locks up my browser. Probably has a lot of security issues, too; so better use it only with flashblock, and load flash only from somewhat trusted sites. But it works, and it finally allowed me to see that I don't care about MySpace videos and similar crap.
  • New Ubuntu release. Congrats, but I havn't tested it yet. I considered going Ubuntu for some of my computers, but ended up with Debian on all of them. I just feel more at home here, and there is not much that Ubuntu has in extras for me that I really need.
  • My new laptop has harddrive encryption, and encrypted swap. Suspend works, thanks to David Härdemann for helping me with that.
  • I missed the Debian bug squashin party, which was kindly hosted by the LiMux team, responsible for the Debian Linux installation at the city of Munich. This deployment may become one of the most prominent examples of good Debian use: customized, to offer the best end user experience.
  • Debian renames firefox and thunderbird. Welcome iceweasel and icefox. The official mozilla stuff is somewhat written for Windows, and needs modifications for proper Linux integration. This violates Mozilla trademark policy. In fact, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions would have to do this renaming, too!
  • BenQ Mobile crash in Germany. IMHO this was planned by both Siemens and BenQ to get rid of "liabilities". Reminds me of the famous un-word "Kollateralschaden"...
  • Firefox 2.0 - does this mean it has more features I do not need? I'm using epiphany; it has almost all the features I need, but a much nicer, less cluttered UI. Some say it's also faster, and it's Gnome integration definitely is better. The only thing I sometimes use firefox for is the web developer extension, which is a really nice tool when you have to fight HTML and CSS.
  • Java to become OpenSource. Well, I hope they use a sane license... but at least that should finally clear up the licensing issues many people still see with current Debian Java packages. But I fear it might already be too late - Mono support has been better than Java for some time now.

    • Ben Armstrong: Mythgame player to run native Linux games

    I recently started to be aware of a problem in our family. Ever since we configured Mythgame to run Xmame games, we started to ignore native Linux games. This is a shame, because often the quality of such games is much higher, and besides, they are open source, which I strongly believe in. I looked around for help configuring Mythgame to run Linux games, and was unable to find a way to make a game player that would play any Linux game. So I devised the following solution: Step 1: Set up directories for pseudo-roms, command switches and snapshots 
    
mkdir /usr/share/games/roms
mkdir /usr/share/games/switches
mkdir /usr/share/games/snaps
    Step 2: Define a player in Mythgame 
    
Player name: Linux
Type: OTHER
Command: %s  cat \ dirname %s\ /../switches/\ basename %s\ 
Rom Path: /usr/share/games/roms
ScreenShots: /usr/share/games/snaps
    Step 3: Populate the directories with data 
    
cd /usr/share/games/roms
ln -s /usr/games/oolite
ln -s /usr/games/starvoyager
cd /usr/share/games/snaps
cp ~synrg/snaps/oolite.png .
cp ~synrg/snaps/starvoyager.png .
cd /usr/share/games/switches
touch oolite
echo "-f" >starvoyager
    Step 4: In Mythgame, “Scan for Games” Step 5: Play!

    Brett Parker: Woo! I have a working PyLucene! (Err, and some other stuff about full text indexing).

    I've been after a python library to mess with lucene indexes for a bit, we use/write a fair few things that use lucene at the backend at work, and just occasionally it would be very useful to be able to fiddle in them (read: search from the command line) without having to do the "write java, compile, test, recompile because you got something wrong, retest, and again" type loop for simple things. Using X11 Forwarding over ssh over a shared with the rest of the office 2M line to use Luke on the indexes is just not fun at all! So, now that I've got pylucene compiled and know the right options (ish), and it compiles on Debian Sarge (both i386 and amd64 variants), I might just build me a package for installing on our servers so that there's an "easy" option for us sysadmin types that just need stuff that we can use, quickly, without messing about! Semi-planning writing a luke-alike using PyLucene and the ncurses library to make it easier to diagnose/look in to the indexes on remote servers, but that's not going to happen this week! Quite impressed with the speed though - looks *fast* - but then, I suppose if you compile the Java using gcj to get native code, then you can expect it to be a *bit* quicker than running in the vm, right? At least, that's what I'm attributing it to at the moment, well, that and python startup time is likely to be a little bit quicker than java startup time. Also, in my travels, I found Divmod Xapwrap, which is a python library round Xapian which seems to be another (interesting) full text indexing engine. Haven't played with that yet - but could be worth a look in the future. Core library written in C++ so should be reasonably quick. The bit that I like the looks of though is """Xapian can search across several databases as easily as searching across a single one. Simply call Xapian::Database::add_database() for each database that you wish to search through.""" which sounds very useful if you start thinking about distributing indexes across a number of machines. I've not read enough Lucene documentation to know wether you can do a similar thing there. Right - enough of that - time to put things back together in the office and go home (again!). Hopefully tomorrow morning I won't be rudely awoken at 5.30am by someone asking a question that could have been better asked via e-mail (where "better asked" means "wouldn't have woken me up and annoyed the hell out of me because I couldn't get back to sleep", though - I did then play with some things and watched American Pie: The Wedding before heading in to the office the first time round...).

    Paul Wise: 4 Nov 2006

    [RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] We arrived in Kupang (West Timor), will be heading off on Tues 7th to motor through Indonesia and towards Thailand, hopefully visiting Roti, Flores, Sumbawa and or other islands in the area along the way. We've seen the ever-changing iridescent colours of a dying mahi-mahi, tuna blood, misty hills of a strange new land looming on the horizon, the unfamiliarly shaped Indonesian fishing and other boats, dead-calm seas in the early morning, a bossy French warship, customs planes flying overhead and calling us every day, the eerie blue of the deep ocean with floating jellies at a swim stop, taking down the mainsail in the channel, shitter crabs, oil platforms in the distance, flocks of flying fish getting out of our way during a calm sunset, bird-stowaways, the amazing crystal goo of phosphorescence off the bow, zillions of mini-buses (taxis) in Kupang and many other things. The open-sea sailing has been mostly relaxing, although we motored a lot of the way from Thursday Island. I'm hoping there will be some more wind, but it looks like we'll be motoring to Thailand (to arrive after Christmas), maybe against the wind since the season has changed. I'm looking forward to finally doing some diving and snorkeling during the next leg of the journey. If there are any Indonesian Debian or Indymedia folk that would like to meet up with me for a keysigning and or bintang, please send me an email and I'll try to let you know if an opportunity arises.

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