(Playing Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call.) Warning: This is a long-wound complaint post. The only reason this is going to the Planet is because I have no method yet of disabling individual posts for syndication. Please skip, with my apologees for the noise, if you don’t want to listen to complaining. May contain nuts. May drive you nuts. Drove me nuts. Mmm, pistachio. When I was around 11, I got my first cellphone. I was very proud. This was back when being 11 and having a cellphone was a real novelty; pagers were still being sold, and the NMT network was still running. Like many things I appreciate, I found it in a dumpster. It was ancient, even then: a Motorola MicroTAC brick, missing its antenna. I borrowed one of my grandmother’s hairpins, and voila, working phone - as long as you didn’t leave Oslo. It had a certain cyberpunk look to it, even then: I loved it. I remember that I first bought a NetCom pay-as-you-go card; I don’t quite remember the number, but it had “283″ in it at the end, if you want to wardial. For some reason, Dad needed a SIM card so I gave him mine. So I bought myself a new one, a Telenor card, pay-as-you-go, number 91 85 95 08. I must have been around 12 at the time. And that number served me very well. Fast-forward 6 years, to late March, 2006. I had just turned 18, and one of the first things I wanted to do was get a massively cheaper, proper subscription. I’d been procrastinating it for a bit - as I am wont to - but when a nice gentleman at the subway station told me about a nice new company called SEA Norway and their wonderful prices, I accepted. Big mistake. Here begins the saga of woe… For a good while, I was very happy with their service - even though GPRS data never worked, I never used it anyway. Their name changed to Vitel somewhere along the way. I received a phone call from an enthusiastic salesman who told me how much cheaper Vitel’s power subscription is. It seemed very reasonable, so I went for it. One of the arguments he gave me was that I could collect all those utilities into one bill. I told him that I couldn’t have this: Since I’m a live-alone student, my power bill is covered entirely by the city council, so I need a proper bill to hand over every month. “Sure, that’s no problem”. I check and double-check that, and I stress it. Sure, no problem. OK, deal. Big, big mistake. They draw 2700 Kroner from my account, using the automated pay system (AvtaleGiro) that I had set up for the phone bill. 2700 Kroner (530 US Dollars) is a lot of money, especially when your monthly income, 5000 Kroner (1000 US Dollars) barely covers the necessities. So I cancel the autopay system. (I still have not received that money!) 23rd of January, my subscription is cut, since I hadn’t paid the bill. They hadn’t mailed it to me, and I’d told them I’d cut the AvtaleGiro, but I simply did not receive the bill. So I call them up in February some time and try to figure out a solution. “You didn’t pay the bill, so the subscription is closed.” -”So if I pay the bill, will you reopen it?” -”No, sorry. It is closed now.” -”So then I’ll have to transfer the number to another provider?” -”No, you can’t do that; it’s closed now.” -”You can’t refuse to transfer the number, that’s simply not legal.” -”Sure it is, the subscription’s been closed.” Urgh. So some time in the middle of March, before The Gathering, I call NetCom up: I want to transfer my number to them, please. Sure, no problem. No, this number is registered as active in our system. All is well. We’ll make the switchover on March 28th, and you will get your SIM card in the mail: It should be in your box by then. Fantastic! The 28th of March came and went with no great ceremony, not even a SIM card. No switchover occurred. I give them the benefit of the doubt for more than a fortnight. Some time in April, then, I get sufficiently annoyed to call them up and ask what had happened. “Oh, no, it seems Vitel is using the old transferral system”. -”OK?” -”Yes, you will have to send us a form with your signature by fax to carry this transfer out.” -”Sigh, alright. Where can I get this form?” -”I’ll email it to you.” Great. So I get the form. May was very busy, so I didn’t get an opportunity to fill the form out, and by now I was getting fairly tired of the whole thing anyway! The thing that finally got me, however, was a bill from Vitel - on the “closed” subscription - for not only the monthly fee, but also several kroner of SMS “content services” (Read: ring tones) and GPRS data (Which never even worked even when the subscription did!) So last Tuesday, June 3rd, I send them the damned fax. Wednesday, June 4th, I call NetCom up and ask what the status is of my subscription. “Oh, yes, this is now active with us.” -”Really?!” (I was happy in the way that only someone who’s gone 5 months without a working phone could be.) -”Sure, we’ve sent the SIM card to Bekkeveien (something).” -”…Bekkeveien? But I’ve never lived at any Bekkeveien. My last name is Bekkedal, but..” -”Alright, then that’s probably a mistake. What you can do, though, is go to a NetCom dealer and pick up a new SIM card.” -”Perfect! I’ll do that, then.” (I stress “pick up” for a reason which will later become apparent.) Goodie. I’ll get a working phone! I was very happy as I took the tram down to Aker Brygge and looked everywhere for the damned NetCom dealer. Having finally found it, I happily stride inside and ask for a SIM card for my subscription. “Sure. That’ll be 200 Kroner.” Argh! I hadn’t brought enough money! She did say pick up. Oh well. Aker Brygge is a center of business, I’m sure there are other shops. So I ask to use one of their phones to call NetCom. Sorry, no phones you can use. Sigh. Fine. Do you know of any phone booths around? They didn’t, but I found one anyway, finally. I deposit the necessary $1 for a local call (See, this is the problem with having a cellphone company run the phone booths!) and dial NetCom customer service. They take my number and - Sorry, that number isn’t yet active, it’s still registered to Vitel. ARGH! Fine. So what’s standing in the way? Well, Vitel can’t refuse it - (thanks, I know that already) - but the form that I was sent wasn’t the right form. The form I need to send is from Vitel to Vitel, authorizing the transfer.While I’m trying to hold a conversation with the customer support guy, some drunk guy is accusing me of stealing phones, and begins reading out loud the sponsor company names on the back of my DebConf T-shirt. But Vitel has already told me that I cannot transfer this number, under any circumstance! They consider it closed! “Yes, but you have to talk to Vitel.” -”I have!” -”Well, we can’t really do anything…” Alright. So I hang up and I try to call Vitel. But that doesn’t work: They closed at 3 PM!. So finally tired of Netcom failing to port my number for a while, I call Telenor. I talk to a very cheerful and helpful lady who admits to not knowing about the particulars of that situation. Fantastic! At least she isn’t going to fib it! She says that she has a vacation Thursday, but she can call me back on Friday after discussing the matter with the number transfers department. Wow! She’s actually going to confer with the relevant expertise! This is too good to be true! So she said she’d call me back Friday at 1PM with a status update. As I am writing, it is Friday at 11:01, I am anxiously awaiting the telephone call. But now I get a funny SMS message:

From: NetCom Message from NetCom: Your number has been ordered by another operator. We would like to remind you that violation of the commitment period will be billed to the order of 1500 kroner. For questions, call 05050.

My subscription with Vitel was made in 2006, more than the 12 months I and knowledgeable friends believe to be the maximum legal commitment period (I doubt I would have agreed to more anyway!). Besides, the text message keeps saying that it’s from NetCom. So my deduction is: It’s from NetCom, who I have registered an active subscription and are now complaining that I’ve moved the subscription I’ve opened with them (but which they have not successfully moved from Vitel), over to Telenor. I don’t think this is an unfair conclusion. So I call NetCom customer service - which to NetComs infinite credit is a number you always can call, almost like 112 (technically it’s accomplished completely differently, but you get my point. The number is never blocked in a blocked subscription.) And they say it’s not from NetCom, even though it says it’s from NetCom. So I’ll keep both of my readers posted on the developing situation. At least the text message indicates that something is happening with my subscription. I just want the dialtone!

Regular readers of this blog (ed: oxymoron alert) may recall tales of woe with our beloved (ha!) cable internet provider such as this; then there are of course minor tales like this or this or this or the other stories on on this page but I am probably forgetting others. Anyway, yesterday's highlight was initiated with a mail, seemingly sent to all customers, informing me that

ACTION REQUIRED: Comcast has determined that your computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email ("spam"), which is generally an indicator of a virus. For your own protection and that of other Comcast customers, we have taken steps to prevent further transmission of spam from your computer(s).

and the email went on to recommend some Windows anti-spam measures, including a reference to a page I could only open with IE at work and one URL to a page that doesn't exist. Nice. Not. Needless to say, there are now Windows computers sending mail (via Comcast) here (as the lone windows box, my wife's work laptop goes straight to her university webmail). And obviously, they blocked port 25, so no more mail sending from home. So I grumpily logged a compaint having been on hold and in telephony menu hell for fifteen or twenty minutes. I was promised to hear back in 72 hours. Hasn't happened yet, naturally, but we're only half way through... Anyway, to make a long story short and this post constructive: Here is what you do on a Debian or Ubuntu system running exim as your mail transport:

• sudo editor /etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost and add a line port = submission in the remote_smtp_smarthost block (assumming you have the split configuration chosen for the exim4-config package). Setting port to 'submission' switches from plain old STMP to the authenticated version running on port 587; submission is mapped to 587 in /etc/services.
• sudo editor /etc/exim4/passwd.client and add your user and password id as e.g. for comcast web-login
• sudo update-exim4.conf to update the configuration
• sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart to restart exim

And it may pay to check /var/log/exim4/mainlog for any irregularities. Barring those, you should now be sending mail to you smarthost using authenticated transfer over port 587. In the meantime, it looks like they unblocked port 25 at some point today...

Catching up: some OCaml in Debian news Hei, it looks like I stopped giving updates about OCaml news in Debian, time to catch up. 2 hot news basically:

1. OCaml 3.10.2 transition is ongoing. Release managers did not forget about our old request of transitioning OCaml to 3.10.2 in time for Lenny, and as soon as the last Perl transition was other they pinged us about the transition. Together with Luk we are now working on it. After some initial issues on arm which was unable to run docbook2html on our poor little policy document without segfaulting(!), it now looks like is not going too bad ... get ready for OCaml 3.10.2 in Debian Lenny!
2. the "core" OCaml library by Jane St Capital (which I consider a really good replacement for the legacy standard library FWIW) has entered testing a few days ago. It will be released with Debian Lenny, no matter if with 3.10.1 or 3.10.2

Stay tuned!

Last week I noticed, that Kabel Deutschland, a cable provider in germany, returns for any non existing hosts “204.9.89.60″. It seems, thats it is rolled out since last fall. Even for DNSSEC enabled infrastructure it breaks it totally:

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> +dnssec web.pixaco.se @83.169.184.161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; ANSWER SECTION:
web.pixaco.se. 0 IN A 204.9.89.60 Beside that, this behavour breaks the whole DNS, since many mechanism rely on a negative answer. The most visible effect for the users is, that when having a typo on surfing, he will forwarded to http://suche.kabeldeutschland.de/de.kde.assist/?domain=<domainyoutypedinyourprompt>. Since 204.9.88.0/21 is located at our transatlantic friends from US, there might be some problem with leaking privacy informations. I don’t feel happy, if I had a typo in my URL and getting listed for it on any terror list or providing the newest porno links to my american friends inside the organisations with the tree capitals. All that for getting some extra money, but racing pricedumping for connectivity, this sucks a lot.
If you are a customer and feel pissed, you can send a friendly note to them:

Kabel Deutschland Vertrieb und Service GmbH & Co. KG
Beschwerdestelle
99116 Erfurt
kundenservice@kabeldeutschland.de
Fax: 01805299925

A quick and dirty workaround for dnsmasq maybe to add “bogus-nxdomain=204.9.89.60″ to your config file. This doesn’t fix the DNSSEC problem.
The problem also pops up at dns-operations and there are traces at google too.

It’s not every day that your work is ignored by a founder of Mozilla Europe. From El Pa s:

En Espa a un 23,5% de visitas se dan en Firefox, un ndice que es superior al de EE UU, pero que no llega a los ndices de Polonia donde el 40% del tr fico se da en el navegador de Mozilla. A pesar de estos aceptables datos [Tristan] Nitot ha recordado y pr cticamente hecho un llamamiento para crear una versi n del navegador en gallego: “Hay una versi n en catal n de Firefox construidas por voluntarios que les importa su idioma, al igual que la hay de euskera. Pero a n no hay una versi n en Galicia, muchas veces me lo preguntan y mi respuesta es que si nadie de Galicia se presenta no habr una versi n en gallego, estamos dispuestos a que la gente trabaje con nosotros".

Loosely translated:

“There’s a Catalan version of Firefox built by volunteers who care about their language, and there’s another one in Basque. But there’s no Galician version yet, I get asked this very often, and my answer is that if nobody from Galicia steps up there will be no Galician version. We would like people to work with us".

So, apparently, there’s no Galician translation of Mozilla. I guess that my more than three years’ worth of work were wasted (Dec 2001 - Jul 2004 and Jan 2006 - Aug 2006), that Xis and Galego21 did nothing back in the nineties and noughties, and that what mancomun.org is hosting is an empty XPI file. To not speak of the paralysed/paralysing bureaucracy of the Mozilla Foundation when several groups of volunteers, one after the other, tried to reinstate the official Galician l10n team. I would be pissed off if I cared about Galician. Because, you know, from reading my blog it’s obvious I don’t.

After shutdown of the old L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET the IP address formerly associated with it, the IP continued to answere requests. More informations can be found at the ICANN Blog
UPDATE: Before bothering around, if you read the ICANN Blog, you realize that the issue was fixed very shortly. The whole problem is, that the file of the root DNS servers have to be keeped up to date. This issue should be fixed by operator of resolving nameservers (usually your ISP). A goody will be, to have this fixed by the next point release of debian, but it is NOT security critical.
Thanks Thijs for make me sensible that my article may misslead people who are not reading the referenced document.
UPDATE 2: A more technical description can also be found at Renesys Blog and a disussion how it is related to debian.

GNOME has reacted and removed all blacklisted SSH keys from their authorized_keys, which is the minimum you should do to ensure safety.For all I know, sourceforge.net has not yet done so (I didn't check if I could have logged in with my old key, though - maybe they installed the blacklist in the SSH server, not touching the users' keys; there is no blacklist in /etc/ssh though). authorized_keys files are world-readable, so I can login at sourceforge and read other users' authorized_keys. With this approach I believe you could hack dozens of SSH accounts on Sourceforge within a few hours, without having to employ brute-force.These keys could then be used in turn to inject backdoors and/or trojans into other OpenSource projects (where at least one developer with write access did use a vulnerable key).If you were affected by the Debian OpenSSL bug, please replace your SourceForge key as soon as possible. Please verify any commits made on SourceForge until they've taken appropriate measures to block bad keys.SourceForge and other operators of such platforms should install blacklists NOW, and remove any vulnerable keys from their databases.

Hey! I have my 3-month update with my surgeon on Tuesday. We'll be hopefully reviewing my movement restrictions and getting the final all-clear to return to work at the beginning of next month. I don't expect that I'll be able to lift Leif, but even if I can twist and bend a little bit and reach out with both my arms at once it would be a huge improvement for me.

Do any of you have any questions? I'm going to ask for some clarification on the photo that I posted before (and hopefully will get another one). But if there's anything that other people want to know, I'll ask as much as I can.

Yesterday my wife's (Angie) father's (Ernie) wife's (Janet) mother (Lydia) died from a heart attack. I've only met her a few times, so I'm not really shaken by it, but she was a really nice lady. Something I think about is that with Janet marrying into the family after Angie and her siblings had all moved out means that there's a large chunk of Leif's family now that Angie and I can't really teach him about. So, I worry about Henry, and I'm thinking a lot about Janet. Since we're going up to Vancouver at the end of the week, we should hopefully be in town for any memorial service.

It's crazy to think back over the past 3 months. Various family members health problems; Leif learning to walk, and getting his first words; Leif moving to his own room and his own bed; Going from where I needed a walker and a trip to the mailbox was far, to where a ~1km to a park pushing a stroller makes me tired, but I can do the trip back easily enough; Going through the work to change to a new work visa; almost completing one of my master's courses; and importantly: I've got 30 of the songs finished on "Hard" in Guitar Hero 2.

It'll be fun to get back to work and regular life, though. =)

Free software finally gets significant coverage on BBC TV's Click show this week, but I think it's very much Linux rather than GNU/Linux and free cost rather than freedom. They mentioned free security software and even raised the possibility of trojans, but didn't mention how free (as in freedom) software allows any random end-user to check or have it checked. Quite a missed opportunity! However, Click has a regular letters section, so watch it (times below), email click@bbc.co.uk and see if we can get the free software view across. The letters section this week seemed to be flaming proprietary SaaS social network site facebook for their pathetic default-permit approach to security of user details. I really think there's a role for something like noserub in free software social networking. Click-UK is shown on BBC News Channel Saturday 1130, Sunday 0430 and 1130, Monday 0030 and Sunday 0430 on BBC-1 (times BST) Click-World is shown Thursday 19:30 GMT, Repeated Friday 09:30 and 12:30 (Asia Pacific only), Saturdays 06:30, Mondays 15:30, Tuesdays 01:30 (not Asia Pacific, Middle East or South Asia) and 07:30 GMT Anyone else see this?

“… Today is the first day in office for President Barack Obama … In other news, Hillary Clinton is still on the campaign trail and is not giving up …” - best ever joke about the current US election. I think it was from The Daily Show, but I cannot be certain.

This is a cool little application, and a helpful tutorial for people trying Hecl for the first time. Since I know the system so intimately, people doing these kinds of pages are always a helpful reality check, pointing out where people new to the language hit stumbling blocks, and providing a guide for people who haven't "been there and done that": http://lauri.ojansivu.googlepages.com/heclcommandlineapp Thanks Lauri!

A little off-topic exercise conducted in the "eye of the storm", when Ilenia and Helen were still in the hospital: A post on Seth Robert's blog brings up the idea that many Chinese restaurants were opened as a way to go into business without competing with native male workers. The post made the rounds of several other online journals. That was the push I needed to get up and go collect a few statistics of my own, regarding an idea I've been kicking around for a while. My theory is that the number of restaurants of a given type, divided by the number of immigrants from that country might be an interesting way of guaging the popularity of the cuisine in question. In order to simplify things just a bit, I actually used data from Italy, for the following reasons:

• Most immigration to Italy is pretty recent, so it's not necessary to account for the length of time different immigrant groups have been present, and the effects that may have had on the diffusion of a given cuisine.
• Immigration statistics were readily available: http://demo.istat.it/str2006/index.html
• Italian the language almost completely corresponds to Italy the country (outside of a chunk of Switzerland, San Marino, and the Vatican), something that makes things that much easier.
• I speak Italian, so it was easy to find out all the information I needed

Unfortunately, finding out the number of restaurants of various types is far from an exact measurement, and since this is a quick fun project, I just went for Yahoo search (they deserve credit for keeping their search API open when Google's was closed) results on terms like "Ristorante Turco" (Turkish), "Ristorante Messicano" (Mexican), and so on. This was the most expedient means of gathering information quickly, but this approach does present a number of obvious problems, listed here in the hope that someone without diapers to change and a business to run might come up with some good answers:

• Some hits likely come from people talking about a restaurant that happens to be in a country, like "ristorante americano". "Nel tipico ristorante americano, ...." or in other words, "In a typical American restaurant", rather than an American-style restaurant in Italy, which is what we were looking for in the first place. This is probably also true of countries close to Italy, where people go on vacation and thus have occasion to write about their experiences in a "ristorante tedesco" (German), rather than going to eat in a German restaurant in Italy. Perhaps the search query could be improved in an attempt to eliminate this sort of false positive.
• Some restaurants probably are not known as, nor brand themselves with a country name, but instead utilize titles like "Middle Eastern", "Arab", "South American", "African", or others that do not correspond with any one country in particular. It would be possible to group countries together with other adjectives, and get statistics for these clusters as well.
• Measuring hits is measuring what people are talking about, rather than simply restaurants that exist, so if restaurants from a certain country are more talked about than others, that would muddy the statistics a bit. However, it seems reasonable that people would mostly talk about restaurants in proportion to their popularity, and I don't see a particular reason why there would be more talk of Vietnamese restaurants, say, than Thai restaurants, compared to the actual numbers.

That said, for a quick project, this approach seemed to work out ok, and the results appear credible. Obviously, the results also reflect people discussing certain cuisines, rather than an actual number of restaurants, but since it does reflect interest, we'll use the number in any case. Since the number of restaurants/interest in a type of restaurant was clearly not correlated directly with the number of immigrants, other factors must come into play. For instance, "ristorante giapponese" turns up 125,000 hits, but the stats say only 6873 Japanese nationals live in Italy. As above, hits don't mean actual restaurants, but clearly Japanese cuisine is not being popularized through immigration. Here's my guess: these statistics show, to some degree, what people in the host country actually like to eat. Food that tastes good means more restaurants. Things that aren't that popular mean few restaurants, even if there are many immigrants. To pick on one country, there are many Philippino immigrants in Italy, but very few search hits - and anecdotally, I've never seen a Philippino restaurant in Italy either, whereas even smaller towns like Padova have Chinese, Mexican (well, it's called that, even if it's a shadow of the real thing), Japanese, various Arab and middle eastern restaurants, and even a few less common things like Eritrean. And I know that many native and foreign restaurants employ Philippino cooks. Below is the chart I whipped up showing the number of Yahoo hits per immigrant. The Italian names shouldn't be too hard to figure out. A few tricky ones: Giordano-Jordanian, Giamaicano-Jamaican, Spagnolo-Spanish. If you're interested in numbers or source code, contact me.

My previous entry was somewhat misleading in one respect - the discussion of the power consumption of a downclocked processor. The problem is that nowadays, halving your CPU frequency doesn't halve the power consumption (see the figures in Arjan's slides from OSCON last year, for instance). I'm assuming that this is due to the cache size on modern hardware being sufficiently large that it dominates the power consumption of the processor. Dropping the frequency doesn't reduce the amount of power required to keep the contents of the cache alive, so the saving is less than you'd expect. Deeper C states disable the cache and save much more power.

So, if halving your speed means everything takes twice as long but doesn't even halve your power consumption, what's the point in having P states at all? There's a certain amount of latency and power involved in moving between C states, and if the choice is between rapidly cycling between full speed and C4 or just sticking at low speed and maybe dropping into C1 or C2, then executing code at the lower performance state may be beneficial. The ondemand governor takes this into account by looking at the amount of load on the processor over time, so if this doesn't hit a threshold value it'll assume that you're better off staying at the lower performance level.

Physio:
I got to do cardio last Friday! Yay! For the first time it feels like I'm doing *real* exercise. 5 minutes on the elliptical and 10 on the bike. I've also gone from the yellow theraband to the red one on all my exercises. I've got another month at three times a week, and still every visit I'm coming away so much improved. The physio also mentioned that she's been going easy on me because until 8 weeks past the surgery, things aren't healed up enough to do real work. Well, we just passed 8 weeks, so I think tomorrow we'll be doing some actual weight training. We'll see how we go.

Techy stuff:
I'm hunting for something interesting to hack on. I've been digging a bit through the SoC lists, and I think I'm either going to just do a bunch of grunt janitor work on gcc, some hacking on eglibc to see if I can help make it small enough to seriously compete with uclibc, or I also emailed one of the Python folks who said that they were looking for an XMPP server written in Python 3.0. I got a cryptic reply of "Keep pinging me, I'll get some time eventually". So that might be a doomed project with people who don't actually care about the result. Too bad, I thought it might be a fun way to learn what's new in Py3k.

Other:
I've started going through and pruning back my friends list on Facebook. At first I friended pretty much anyone I'd ever met. I've come to use it to see how the people I care about in life are doing through their status updates, so I'm getting rid of people who's statuses I just don't care about. It seems kindof mean, but oh well. I'd really like the list to be made of people who, if they posted "I'm having a crappy day", I'd phone them up to chat with them and hear how things are going.

Leif's still cute. Angie's still sexy. Home life in that sense is pretty much the same as usual. We don't have people visiting us every weekend, but I'm well enough and we've gotten used to the shifted work loads that we're generally managing now. What we desperately need is a Roomba that will shampoo the carpets for around Leif's highchair. Ugh.

The local used bookstore actually has French kids books. Apparently the Barnes&Noble in Palo Alto also has a French section. So, we'll hopefully be able to teach Leif at least a little bit of French while we're on the opposite side of the continent. Yay!

Jane St. (OCaml) Core in Debian As recently announced, core has landed. It is an alternative/extended OCaml standard library developed by Jane Street Capital. At first sight it looks like ground breaking: a well-engineered standard library fixing several shortcomings of OCaml legacy standard library, both in terms of missing functionalities and syntactic sugar (e.g. the monadic operators which everybody was basically re-defining from scratch in their own code). After a day-n-half of work I'm proud to announce that core is now available in Debian. It took me a while as we were missing several of core dependencies. Overall, the resulting new 5 source packages are bin-prot, ocaml-res, janest-core, type-conv, sexplib310. All of them as been uploaded to experimental; beside sexplib (which went through NEW in just a few hours!!), the other 4 are sitting in NEW. In the meantime you can take the packages from my people.d.o space. I haven't yet uploaded them to unstable because some more audit is required for dependencies (e.g. I haven't build them in cowbuilder due to some annoyance related to the current Perl 5.10 transition). The only annoying aspect of the whole business is that bin-prot is ATM supported only little endian architectures, and this is inherited by core ...

It has been a long time since i posted an entry. Many things have happened. Many things have changed. Let’s summarize them. I no longer live in Finland. I moved out on January the 29th, almost exactly by the day 8 and half years after I moved there. Right now I am in Dublin, Ireland, but you never know for how long. In any case I am enjoying quite much. Not as dark as Finland in winter, not as rainy as people think it is. Yeah, it rains, but it was rainy in Finland too. And here in not as cold. I no longer work for Nokia. My employer has changed and I am enjoying every single bit of it. I have not resigned from Debian, although I have not been active for the last months. If you add the new job (hiring process), moving and settling down, you could understand the lack of time. At least I can. Now things are getting stable (I got my ADSL connected only last weekend, and my server at home with all the mail redirected only yesterday) so I am ready to restart with my commitments. Also my employer will allow me to do some Debian work, so I only need my GPG key to be reinstated in the keyring (there is a ticket for it, so I just have to wait). And finally, if you want to follow where I have been spending some of my time, follow my flickr photostream.

I’m off for vacation for just a week without any internet access (Oh my good, I will hate my inbox). This break will give me some time for my wife and my daughter before my second daughter will arrive in this world which is scheduled for mid june.
If there anything strange happen with my packages, just feel free for a 0day NMU.
Just after this week, I will attend to RIPE 56 where my latency will just a bit lower than normal.

Cause the subject, I did build a new package which can be installed on etch, lenny and of course sid. You can fetch it from http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/bpo/wordpress/2.5.1-1~bpo40+1/ or get via

deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian etch-backports main non-free contrib Selfnote: Dump the wordpress user into separate domU

Today is the second International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. The call is for the publication of professional-quality fiction freely on the web. I’m not a pro, and I am not qualified to judge the quality of my own work, so this quite isn’t properly a IPSTD contribution, but it is offered in the day’s spirit. Enjoy.

---

A MOMENT IN THE LIFE OF A FINNISH MAN
by
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
I am lucky we don’t have the death penalty in Finland. She tells me she’s glad of that, too. * * * I am a Finnish man. As a Finn, I am irritated by that they let all sorts of, hm, dark-skinned beasts that masquerade as human enter this country. They just come, you know, take our money, use it to buy apartments, cars. I know one, hm, dark-skin, who lives a billion times billion times better than I, without working! I get to toil for my meager living, and the kids and the wife hoard it as if it were due to them — (more…)