I have now got a Debian Xen domU running the strict SE Linux policy that can boot in enforcing mode. I expect that tomorrow I will have it working with full functionality and that I will be able to run another SE Linux Play Machine in the near future. After getting the strict policy working I want to build a Debian kernel with CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL and an audit package so that I can audit system calls that an application makes and also so that the auditd can collect the SE Linux log messages. Other people have talked about packaging audit for Debian, hopefully one of them will do it first and save me the effort, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to do if they don’t. Then I need to investigate some options for training people about SE Linux. As I don’t currently have the bandwidth for serving large files I’m thinking of basing some SE Linux training on Xen images from the jailtime.org repository. My rough plan at the moment is to have people download Xen images, run through them while consulting a web page, and ask questions on an IRC channel. I’m not sure what the demand will be for this but some web pages teaching people about SE Linux will be a useful resource even if the IRC based training doesn’t work out. Another thing I want to do is to get PolyInstantiated Directories working in Debian. The pam_namespace.so module needed for this is written for a more recent version of PAM, so I might just work on merging the Debian patches with the latest upstream PAM instead of back-porting the module to the ancient Debian PAM.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

On Sunday 20 May, I will be riding in the Leukemia Research Weston-super-Mare Bikeathon which "has so far raised in excess of 120,000 for the charity." If you'll sponsor me, please put it in the comments form with an email address, and/or email me directly.

What I learnt this morning while installing Samba so that an out-of-ink Microsoft PC could print on a toner-full laser attached to a GNU/Linux workstation: Firstly, the manual authors seem to prefer to document CUPS. I don't understand why. Surely if one has CUPS installed already, a Microsoft PC can print to it as a network printer without Samba? I installed Samba because I want to print without replacing lpr and breaking things that print from the workstation already. Secondly, if you ytpo smb.conf badly enough, then smbd will sulk. Particularly passwd-related options. To persuade it to give useful error messages, smbd -F -S -i seems the magic combination. If you don't put -i, it decides that you really meant it to daemonise, despite the other options. Thirdly, it doesn't break it if Microsoft Windows puts "unable to connect" or another strange message on its Printers window. I'm not sure what that message really means. Finally and most importantly, if the nobody user is not allowed to print, make sure Samba is sending the print job as a different user that is allowed to print. That's the "guest account" option in the printer config.

Thing I longer wanted to happen is now becoming reality - Gammu is getting new public API. Man reasons for the change are:

• ABI stability. - Till now almost every change in internals of any driver lead to ABI change. If we would correctly increase so name on each ABI change, we would be somewhere near 200, what is not something we could be proud of.
• Centralisation of variables cleanup. - Currently all phone drivers have to do some common things in each function. New API allows to centralise those operations in one place.
• Exposing of internals. - Old API exposed too much of Gammu internals, what could be misused by programmers and could lead to unexpected behaviour when some internals are changed.

The work is not yet still complete, but the API is getting final shapes right now, so you still have chance to change something. While doing such big change, I decided also to complete documentation of all public functions. This is also currently work in progress, but arising API documentation is already available. If you are developer using Gammu library, you will have to change some things in your code. To document these changes, new Porting guide has been created. I suggest you not to start with this right now as the API is really not complete and might change a lot during next days.

A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...

Well, today started out really anxious and is ending pretty reasonably. (Or so I think -- maybe tomorrow is going to be really nuts). First, RoCoCoCamp buzz is just nuts! Lots of people are blogging about it, planning to attend, and having fun talking about it. I count at least Patrick Tanguay, Sekhmet Design, Montreal Tech Watch, Montreal Tech League (no relation), Michel LeBlanc, Fred Ngo, Sylvain Carle, Rhymin' Simon Law, NathanR, Creative Commons Canada (thanks for the shout-out, gang!), Adrien O'Leary, Andreas Gohr (coming all the way from Berlin!). We're flirting with almost 100 people on the participants list, which I think is going to mean about 120-150 people. So I'm no longer worried that not enough people are going to come. Last night I got a quote for someone to provide coffee in the morning and at afternoon break for all three days... for $1800! So this morning I rented three coffee percolators (one for regular, one for decaf, and one for tea) and a bunch of cups and plates from Celebrations up on Jean-Talon. Maj and I shopped for coffee this afternoon. Total cost? $250. That means more money left over for pizza Saturday night! It means some more hassle for me and for the attendees, but I think we can handle it. Tomorrow morning early I have to stop in at St. Viateur and get 10 dozen bagels for the whole gang. I think many people who are attending don't know Montreal bagels, so they'll be in for a treat. Of course, some of the Montrealers will be mad I didn't get rival Fairmount Bagels instead. Tough for them. I know tomorrow is going to be crazy, but tonight I'm feeling pretty mellow. My good friend Zach Copley is on his way into town right now; we're working together on the kei.ki project and it will be great to have him here. Tomorrow Mark and Allegra arrive. So many good folks are going to be at RoCoCo: I think it's going to be a lot of fun. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp stviateur coffee keiki wiki barcamp

Better said, politicians. I am pretty sure most of you will know yet about a Belgian politic party called NEE in which the main candidat is a young girl that appear naked in promoting posters. But in a word joke, she promised 'blowjobs' for people who vote for her. Or perhaps she promised that for real...

Also, here in Spain we had our own naked politician. She is not at posters, but she was the girl on portrait of an important Spanish magazine.

It is interesting to see how politics is changing lately. It is becoming more and more insteresting... Do you trust your candidate? Undress him!

After a long time talking this as a mere potential would-be-nice thing, finally we are putting some action behind our words: One week from now, Sergio Mendoza and I will start a ~2 month long extracurricular course on Debian. The students? We have 12 students of the Facultad de Ciencias at my University. The students are pre- and post-graduate (licenciatura and maestr a), from the Phsyics and Astronomy areas. Sergio got this group as he is a teacher and researcher at Instituto de Astronom a.
While this first iteration is completely extra-curricular, unofficial and by invitation only, we expect this pilot course to be later presented as an official course in the Faculty.
Many people will remember I usually don't like general courses on Unix, Debian or whatever. What made me accept this time - even more, be enthusiastic about it? First of all, the requirements: We assume the students already know their way (at least as users) in a multiuser Unix-like system, so we won't be hand-holding them all the way through. Second, the focus: Sergio (who is among the first Debian users in Mexico and who got us our first full Debian mirror - which is actually a bit sick, but awaiting for prompt hardware upgrade ;-) ) wants them to focus on becoming developers. Not only developing science-oriented applications and libraries, but properly packaging and integrating them in Debian (and, hopefully, some of them will become interested in joining the project). We will also spend a good portion of the course on teaching them good practices on system adminsitration, teaching the principles behind what we do (i.e. I'm looking forward to participating, and in this case as one of the more students, in the sessions where different cryptography-related topics will be explained, starting from their mathematical foundations and going all the way up towards the implementation, where I'm more comfortable at).
It will be a nice experiment. I will be away for at least five of the lessons (Blame Debconf!), but I'm really looking towards the process and the results.
We will be making rough documentation of what we teach. We don't have a planned complete program, as we want to go with the group's real skills and interests, planning not more than three lessons ahead. This will be, however unofficial it is, my first time in front of a group in a university-esque setting (i.e. not short sessions, not capacitation built for a company, but with people eager to learn what we want to teach. I'll post again on this topic :)

Scott complains on how Linux Format #93's articles comparing Ubuntu and other distributions often contradict each other, and blames it on the lack of any editorial direction or basic research.
I... Have to confirm this. But anyway, I can stand a bit on the different writers' side - Each article is written by a different person and, although the magazine must try to be coherent (of course, within certain limits - if the magazine suggests editor's picks in one article, they should not bash them to death in the next one).
I write the Linux column in the Spanish edition of PC Magazine. No, it's by far not a technical column, nor anything far like it. The magazine is end-user oriented, and clearly sponsorship-driven - In fact, my column was not part of the magazine for quite some time, as they gear it towards end-users, and sponsors (I cannot venture which sponsors, but your imagination will probably go to the same company as mine) do not like what I write about. All in all, I get the general topics which each month's edition will cover, and I just have to write an article about one of them. Of course, I don't know most of the other writers. There is no interaction at all.
And I guess that Linux Format is a typical magazine - If they run like PC Magazine, they just won't have the time to put all the articles together checking for inconsistencies. I think it is enough of a task to chase the contributors month after month (BTW, I'm a week late already :-/ But I cannot finish just today, as there's too much work to do, and I spend my time blogging... Hmh, time to finish this post, as coitus interruptus as it may seem).

Apparently they are planning a reality TV show that might be named “Kids Nation” where 40 children are allowed to develop their own society for 40 days. The claims are that there is “no parental supervision”, but of course with many TV cameras watching I’m sure that even the most stupid children can work out that there are reasons to behave relatively well. Also I’m sure that they will remove children from the show if it becomes necessary to avoid injury. It will be interesting to see how well this develops. Maybe it could evolve into a new form of schooling, just leave children alone in a school with lots of security cameras watching them and let them study or not as they wish. It would be cheaper than running a regular high-school, and as there is little scope for providing a worse education than many (most?) high-schools currently provide it should be worth a try. For a long time I have thought that the premise behind The Lord of the Flies was bogus. I believe that a major contributing factor towards much of the violence that is present in schools is the pointlessness of the entire system. There are very few students who are so stupid that they can’t realise that the education system is failing them. Whenever you put a large number of people in a confined space with nothing useful to do the results will be bad. If a group of students from a violent school were placed on an island without any supplies then I’m sure that they would soon realise that they need to cooperate to stay alive.

Apparently they are planning a reality TV show that might be named “Kids Nation” where 40 children are allowed to develop their own society for 40 days. The claims are that there is “no parental supervision”, but of course with many TV cameras watching I’m sure that even the most stupid children can work out that there are reasons to behave relatively well. Also I’m sure that they will remove children from the show if it becomes necessary to avoid injury. It will be interesting to see how well this develops. Maybe it could evolve into a new form of schooling, just leave children alone in a school with lots of security cameras watching them and let them study or not as they wish. It would be cheaper than running a regular high-school, and as there is little scope for providing a worse education than many (most?) high-schools currently provide it should be worth a try. For a long time I have thought that the premise behind The Lord of the Flies was bogus. I believe that a major contributing factor towards much of the violence that is present in schools is the pointlessness of the entire system. There are very few students who are so stupid that they can’t realise that the education system is failing them. Whenever you put a large number of people in a confined space with nothing useful to do the results will be bad. If a group of students from a violent school were placed on an island without any supplies then I’m sure that they would soon realise that they need to cooperate to stay alive. Update:
It seems that the Sudbury Valley school implements some ideas similar to mine. They also have a page of links to some other schools that do similar things.

Tomorrow is the beginning of RoCoCoCamp 2007, a three-day unconference held right here in Montr al. It starts at 9:30 on Friday at the SAT and runs until Sunday evening. It's for all who are interested in wikis, weblogs, and creators interested in collaborating in on-line spaces. RoCoCoCamp is organized with OpenSpace Technology, where we collectively decide on an agenda where everybody has a chance to speak. There's no artifical divide between speakers and audience, so you can lead your own session if you have something to say. Think of RoCoCoCamp as a real-life wiki, where anybody can contribute. A detailed explaination of what RoCoCoCamp is about can be found on this invitation. I'm inviting you because I'm flying out on Saturday and can't make the whole conference, but I really hope you come. There will be discussions on:

• What projects people are doing around the world
• Development of collaborative tools like wikis, free wifi networks, content management systems, etc.
• Techniques for building collaborative communities
• Best practises for inspiring self-managment and self-policing
• Starting up new projects
• Plans for future collaborations

So how can you attend? I thought you'd never ask! See you there!

First, a tip of the day. Thanks to Matthew Garrett for pointing out that GLib 2.14 will have API for creating timers with second granularity (instead of millisecond): g_timeout_add_seconds(). This means that multiple timers scheduled to go off at roughly the same time will be fired at once, resulting in power savings. I'm pleased to see this land in GLib, and can't wait for GLib 2.14 now as it is looking really good: GRegex and GSequence in particular are interesting new additions. In Sound Juicer news, Luca Cavalli has ported the gedit/Epiphany plugin code to SJ. It's definitely work in progress at the moment, but it is coming together nicely. Follow #311688 if you want to keep up with the changes. The first two plugins I'd like to see from both feature and proof of concept angles are more complete CD playback controls (repeat and random), and downloading of album cover art. NP: Delay, Dub Tractor

Modern processors have a variety of low power modes that can be entered while idle. These "C states" are numbered, currently ranging from C0 (a running CPU) to C4 (a deep runtime sleep state). The problem with these states is that the deeper the sleep, the longer it takes the CPU to wake up. In order to avoid excessive reductions in performance, the kernel must keep track of the processor usage pattern and avoid putting the CPU into a deep sleep mode when it's likely that it'll be needed for more work in the near future.

Traditionally, the kernel has had a fixed timer tick - that is, a fixed number of times a second, the timer will generate an interrupt, wake the kernel and allow processes to be rescheduled. This limits the maximum amount of time the CPU can remain idle, as this timer will fire even when the system is otherwise idle. A tick rate of 1000Hz is desirable for reducing latency, but will also result in the maximum sleep period being 1ms. This is less than ideal.

2.6.21 introduced dynamic tick functionality. Now, rather than having a fixed tick interval, if the system is idle the kernel looks at all outstanding timers and schedules a wakeup in time to answer the next timer. This allows much longer periods of sleep without compromising latency. However, for this to be useful it's desirable to have as few timer wakeup events as possible. The longer the CPU is going to be asleep, the deeper the sleep state that can be used.

Intel have recently released Powertop, an application that tracks the causes of wakeups. These wakeups can fall into two categories - kernel and userspace. Pure userspace timers will usually be due to an application having a timer to handle some sort of trivial activity, like blinking a cursor or polling for state. There are a couple of ways to improve this:

• Just remove the timer - does it actually need to exist at all?
• If you're polling for state, consider whether it would be possible to move to an event driven model. For example, right now screensavers poll the X server in order to obtain information about whether the session is idle. The X server has to keep track of this information anyway, so a simple extension could be added to notify applications when the user has been idle for a certain period of time.
• Make sure you're only waking up when you need to. For instance, you might want to periodically check whether any new email has appeared. If there's no route to the internet, don't bother.
• If you must use timers, try to schedule them to go off simultaneously. It's better to wake the kernel up once and do twice as much work than it is to wake it up twice. If you're a glib application, g_timeout_add_seconds() will round to the nearest second, so use it if possible.

Things in the kernel can be trickier. Kernel interrupts may be appearing because of some kernel code specifying a timer, but an alternative is that a userspace application is poking them. Many of the same considerations as userspace apply here:

• If you don't need especially high-precision timing, use round_jiffies(). It'll result in synchronisation of many wakeups, and reduce the overall number.
• If you're being woken up by userspace, figure out why. HAL polls storage devices every couple of seconds, generating several interrupts. This is necessary because most storage devices don't notify the system when media insertion occurs. Conversely, alsa sends notification events whenever the hardware state changes, and so it's not necessary for userspace to poll. If you can provide useful information to interested parties without them having to repeatedly ask, then do it.
• If your hardware is idle, then do what you can to quiesce it. The Appletouch pad can be put into a mode where it doesn't send packets until touched, but once touched will continue sending packets. Watch for a stream of contentless interrupts, and put the hardware back to sleep.
• If the hardware can generate interrupts when something happens, then use them - don't poll unnecessarily

Fixing these issues can range from the trivial (removing unnecessary timers) to the complicated (teaching gstreamer about alsa notifications, teaching the mixer applet to listen to signals from gstreamer). It's all helpful, though. Ideally you want your processor to be averaging at least 20ms in the deepest C state before it's woken up again. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and every fix improves battery life.

grub2-1.95+20070515 should now work, so I tried. It wasn't built for i386 yet, and I had to build it locally. I installed grub-efi, and did the following.I seem to be able to chain-load grub2 from refit. That's one start.grub2 entered rescue mode.In reality, I doubt people will want to chain-load grub2 from rEFIt,so other methods of invoking grub2 is required.I know I can 'bless' from MacOSX, but is there other ways to do that?I think I am missing a few steps here, I'll need to re-check later.

When I moved to Edinburgh and lived in a student flat we decided we needed pets. Gerbils were chosen as they were small, cute, and easy to hide. (Because we weren t actually allowed to keep pets ..) After a few years of gerbils we graduated to rats. The king of the rodent world. Rats rock: They are small, cute, agile, incredibly soft, very non-bity and highly intelligent. Time passed and I moved out to live alone and then started to move up the food-chain with my own pet cat. (Tigger). Badness^tm happened, and Tigger was replaced by Six. I got hit with a year of illness, mostly, and so I decided to do the decent thing and return Six to somewhere where he could be loved and get the attention he deserved. Since then I ve been petless, and basically afraid to commit to looking after a cat/dog for the 10+ years that they would (hopefully) live. I want to have a cat. I would love to own a Dog, and after talking about things in a circular fashion for many weeks with my girlfriend we decided to compromise. So tada .. I have rats again. Two beautiful females. Here is a picture of one of them upon my girl s shoulder. So two rats, Basil for me, and Moptop for Meg. All being well they will live for the next couple of years, and then we might return to the bigger pets.

One of the fun and useful things we've been able to do in Expectnation with the personal scheduler is to use the data to help us as organizers. We recently added in dynamic overlays to the organizer's view of the schedule, enabling us to create heatmaps of the most popular talks.
Screenshot of personal scheduler popularity overlaid on event timetable As well as satisfying natural curiosity, the heatmaps let us identify issues such as possible room overcrowding in advance. We're able also to record actual attendance figures as the conference goes on, and I will try and make an analysis of how attendees' intentions stack up against their actions. 

Everyone seems to be loving the somewhat detail lacking posting about ATI/AMD delivering some open graphics drivers. I'm sure it's great and I look forward to actually seeing them appear, but I'm much happier about the news that Intel have scheduled work on XvMC this year for their recent chipsets, and are thinking about how best to accelerate H.264 as well.