Enrico, you forgot your own advanced ways of wasting time (and have some fun). ;) Here are the summaries of the candidate DPL platforms, in one sentence each: 93sam

Once we don’t Select a friendly community where the packages towards a lot of software, community are most noticeable use to show their packages towards a problem good job.

aigarius

While I were elected DPL, I have to time leave Debian Developers Corner Site, map Search about it should not have not be Even if he has, the NM; process is before.

ajt

Ideally, I’d expect that we ought to make It work together in Linux and a DPL review of the community and October firmware resolutions recall vote maybe That’s been some of stuff I’ve been a server near you United States.

hertzog

The sponsorship, principle.

sho

I believe admit volunteers to scratch our bug tracking system I do what I would like LowThresholdNmu to happen again; Admit it has rhymes with a few of it Debian; is to be really like to automatically see them.

sjr

To the web site, map Search Not Published Yet Back to the Debian Project Select a server near you United States; the web Site, map Search Not Published Yet Back to the debian For other contact information, See the Debian Project Select a server near you United States.

stratus

It is today in the web team, the users: and waited supergroups i will that any Debian support: this change our major Desktop, with Lenny development website, we’ve now almost our official status and how a statistics page.

svenl

To the ban.

wouter

I am of a native Dutch is not an area where possible.

These summaries have been generated by the following script:

for i in 93sam aigarius ajt hertzog sho sjr stratus svenl wouter; do
  echo $i
  lynx -dump -nolist http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/$i dadadodo -c 1 - 2> /dev/null
done
It is somehow subobtimal, as aigarius and sjr’s summaries show: the headers and footers of the page have some influence, but well… it was fun anyways.

So, in light of Sven's Platform, I think I'll just not bother reading his platform when he does get off his arse and publish it (must get round to finishing off NM, must find time from somewhere). On the offchance that you're reading this after he actually publishes it, here's what it said (single line): "As protest against my unfair banning from debian mailing lists, i will not publish any platform until the weekend after the end of the ban." Isn't he clever? Isn't that a fantastic way to process - don't publish your platform (that might actually help your case, if you've got any actually reasonable ideas), just whine (again) about your "unfair" banning. *sigh*. Somedays I do just wonder about humanity.

Enrico: if you extract the platforms using lynx -dump -nolist (or w3m -dump ), you’ll only extract the text, with no HTML, and the keywords will vary slightly:

• 93sam: jobs, deal, dds, nms, asking
• aigarius: applications, choose, trademarks, apps, formats
• ajt: effective, neat, hoping, success, interview
• hertzog: broadly, serve, represent, pushed, chosen
• sho: deadline, icons, helps, excellence, freaks
• sjr: published, yet, inc, feb, wed
• stratus: stable, websites, feature, submitter, involving
• svenl: weekend, publish, banning, unfair, protest
• wouter: controversy, seem, background, delegates, therefore

I just had a total Mr & Mrs. Smith moment. You know the bit where they're standing in the elevator, listening to the elevator music. Waiting for the door to open.

That would be the waiting time between the water breaking, causing us to page the midwife and her phoning us back. =)

The advice: Sleep now, relax.

And so shall it be. =)

(Update: 9am)
Contractions are 6 minutes apart, but still the kind she can sleep through, so she is. Spoke to the midwife, and she advises more rest. Next update with her, assuming nothing eventful, is around 1pm.

(Update: 2pm)
Contractions have slowed to every 12 minutes, but have increased in intensity. Just spoke to the midwife, who gave some tips about moving things along. She just got into the birthing centre after 3 hours of being on the road. It's usually a 30 minute trip, and she lives near us. She thinks that it will be fine, though, given that she was mostly stuck behind snow plows. Next phone call in 2 hours.

(Update: 4:30pm)
Contractions up to 5 minutes apart, lasting about 45 seconds each. We're enjoying a relaxing afternoon watching X-files. She's convinced that she's talking fine through her contractions, but her sister did a great impression:

Well, as I was saying, I ...

(she crouches over)

Oh there's one. Yup.. I'm having a contraction..

(pause)

Yup. Well. I can still talk through them.

Mhm, yup. Sure you can. =)

The midwife called us to check in. Angie described herself as "impatient". Otherwise everything seems to be going as normal. The midwife will call us again in an hour or so to sort out plans for the evening, probably including a visit to us at home since we're close enough to where she lives.

(Update: 6pm)
We've hit the magical number of contractions: every 4 minutes for 45 seconds. Apparently we're supposed to phone after two hours of this, but we phoned after one. My bad, but this is when we had planned to talk anyway. She answered the phone when we paged the midwife, and was sufficiently unable to talk that she handed to phone over to me. The midwife will be here for an in-person visit in about an hour (subject to speed of traffic)

(Update: 7:30pm)
At 7, I went out to shovel a space for the midwife to park. It turns out she drives a cute little VW bug. so at 7:15, I dig her out of the snowbank she got wedged into because I hadn't dug enough of a spot. 7:30, we're now both inside. =) Temperature is being taken, contraction charts being reviewed, etc.

(Update: 8:15pm)
The midwife just left. Right now Angie's 2cm dilated. Apparently there are multiple membranes, and they haven't all broken. This is a good thing because it continues to protect the child and give it manuverability. Charlotte will be back in 2 hours to see how we're doing.

---

I'll update this entry with random little updates, and post a new one when we head out.

I do believe we may have just had a small earthquake. Sarah and I certainly both felt something. Hopefully this page will show something in a bit to confirm. Update Yup. Wow.

Last Tuesday I finished my paper about Space Efficient Algorithms and Histograms that will comprise most of the grade of my last remaining Master course, Advanced Algorithms. While I’ve been mostly enjoying writing this paper, I am glad it is finished for several reasons, one of them being able to do other things than just working on it and another is that it allows me to focus fully on my Master Project which is starting to progress nicely. (More about this later.) FOSDEM 2007 Due to the amount of time I needed to work on the paper, the need to save money (I really would like to go to Debconf7) and that the scheduled talks didn’t seem to interest me that much, I decided to break with tradition and not to go to FOSDEM this year. Just before FOSDEM, however, it seemed that lots of the people I would have liked to meet did go. While that was a pity, I hope to meet them in three months at Debconf7.

The S Class Mercedes has some really interesting safety features, see this 6.8M PDF file for details. If you are interested in technology then you want to read it just to learn about all the cool features - it's got more technology than a Prius!

The S class includes the following features to protect the occupants in the event of a crash:

• Tire pressure monitors
• Electronic Stability Program (ESP) to selectively apply the brakes to reduce the risk of skidding
• Active suspension
• Pre-Safe is a management feature that recognises a potential collision by the steering and braking patterns of the driver and prepares the vehicle for an impact. This can involve adjusting the sun-roof, the seat-belts, and the driver's seat position to prepare for impact, closing the side windows, and inflating air chambers in the sides of the seats.
• Head rests that automatically adjust in the event of a rear impact

The following features reduce the risk and/or severity of a crash:

• Night view (infra-red) display gives a display of potential obstacles ahead without dazzling oncoming traffic
• Distronic Plus is a brake assistance package that includes automatic braking based on radar surveillance of the traffic ahead
• 4Matic is a new feature that combines AWD with the traction-control feature that has become common on all expensive cars. This means that when any combination of wheels starts to spin on water or ice the brakes will be applied to them so that the wheels that have good grip can still be used for acceleration.

After a crash there are more safety features that can help you:

• The engine can be automatically turned off after an impact and if necessary the fuel supply can also be cut
• The hazard lights and emergency interior lights can be automatically activated
• The side windows can be partially lowered, if your car lands in water deep enough to submerge it then you MUST open the windows as soon as possible - otherwise water pressure may make it impossible to open the doors - people forget this so it's good to have an automatic feature
• Automatic door unlocking after an impact (good for rescuing unconscious occupants)
• Cutting points marked on the windscreen and rear window for the benefit of emergency workers who need to cut the roof off with the "jaws of life"

These features are documented as being available in the latest S Class, I haven't investigated what is available in the cheaper models and I'm not even sure where to find information on the safety features available in older models (a second-hand E class is more in my price range). But if I won the lottery a S class Merc would be high on my list of things to buy!

If you know of other cars that have a similar set of safety features to the S class and cost less then please let me know.

I will probably write a blog post about the BMW safety features in the near future. I couldn't do so immediately because the BMW web site sucks. They have a form for me to fill in contact details so that they can post me a brochure (I want to read it NOW ONLINE). The form doesn't like my postcode and refuses to proceed (it should at least have an option for them to contact me via email or phone).

I just uploaded a minor update of Pyroman to unstable and the pyroman download page on alioth. I added support for a complete interface wildcard, and added example configuration files for a single-host setup. Pyroman is a firewall configuration tool I wrote for managing the firewall of a small network consisting of four zones and servers with a dozen different tasks. It plays very well in setups with DMZ, wireless networks, intranet etc. and all kinds of different services. Key benefits are the very simple syntax, safeguards (extensive syntax checks, rollback on failure, safety timeout option for remote administration), scriptability in python and high performance, since it does not run dozens of iptables commands, but generates a script file for iptables-restore. For more benefits, see the pyroman homepage. The next version will probably feature an XML syntax additionally; while the current Python syntax is very powerful and readable, it's pretty much impossible to write a GUI for editing the policy when written this way. That's why I'd like to add an XML syntax (that can be intermixed with Python statements, but only the XML-defined parts will be editable in the GUI) that supports the key parts of configuration (if you want the rules to be generated on the fly from some database or whatever, you'll still be able to do that in Python!): making it easier to write a GUI for it.

Was Sam a joke-candidate or not ?
I hope that his platform will make the last people think that he is serious. I am not able to vote - but if someone wants to sponsor a ballot for me, I can provide one. I wish good luck to all the candidates - I might start commenting on all the candidates soonish.

* I Did ITP for ldtp-doc yesterday. And the great thing is that nags changed its licence from GFDL to LGPL, making things easy for Debian packaging for me (& world). Thanks nags for that. I have not seen such co-operative upstream yet!! LDTP-doc will contain html documentation for LDTP (Linux Desktop Testing Project) package.

On 21 Feb. 2007, I had met with Bdale, Junichi Uekawa, and some Debian users. It was really good experience. He seemed good guy, good father, and good president of SPI. I talked about many things like Debian, SPI, social issue related on IT, education, and so on. Especially, his children are very interesting for me. His daughter seems to have good computer knowledge. And I saw photo of his son he had made many small rockets. Then I said to him, "Your family looks like Kim Possible". Maybe his daughter will save the universe.

Why you won't be voting for me for DPL this year. Or, my plans for Debian stuff over the next year (or three). Most of these plans embody larger themes and directions that I feel Debian should take. I am a strong beliver that working code and getting stuff done is the best way to work toward larger goals, so I won't bother to try to explain the larger goals. constantly usable testing This is so important that it has its own page. This is my first public posting of that proposal, and it should not be considered finished. I plan to finish it, and get to work on it. website www.debian.org is deprecated, but this is not obvious to either users or developers. That's because it's not formally deprecated, we just treat it like it is: We don't use it for anything new. Instead we have wikis, planet, times.debian.net, etc, etc, etc, etc. Unfortunatly that has created a bit of a mess for users, who are still often stuck trying to use www.debian.org, or who can't find new stuff that is on other sites. A solution could be creating an alternate starting point for users, to help them learn about Debian, install it, and point them to docs and all the other useful sites once they're more involved and using Debian. I hope to find time to work on and promote such a thing. I plan to continue moving stuff that needs to be maintained actively and grow off of www.debian.org to the wiki (as I've done with some of d-i stuff, for example), and encourage others to do so as well. Anything under /devel/ on www.debian.org is an especially good candidate for the wiki. double the archive sync frequency again Now that we've switched to updating the archive twice a day, and dealt with the (minor) issues caused by it, it should be easier to increase it to a frequency that is more likely to cause noticible turnaround time improvements and thus speed up some development. As it is, many people sleep through one or the other archive update. So I support doubling it to four times a day, or more (six seems better). automated whole system testing Automated whole system testing is important because Debian needs to keep working in so many obscure and annoying to test situations. Does d-i work on m68k? Does the desktop task install properly and work? Does debootstrap install a usable system on every architecture? If we rely on user reports, things can fall through the cracks entirely or not be noticed for too long. I've been running a d-i lab for a few years, which tries to automatically test installs on 6 architectures. However, between the current kernel not supporting several of my test machines due to hardware and software bugs, and the general time sync of keeping a rack of aging and obscure test boxes working, this has not been very useful lately. I feel that the solution is emulation: It should be possible to run Debian under emulation for most architectures. I hope to get an absurdly powerful server donated, and switch my test lab over to running in emulation on it. developer (virtual) machines The other benefit of emulation is that everything needed for testing stuff under emulation can be easily distributed to others. Getting developer accessible machines for certian architectures has been a problem in Debian. Emulated systems can sidestep this problem. All that's needed is a collection of documents and/or bootable images that developers can use to set up virtual machines for as many architectures as possible. We have steps in this direction. Hercules contains documentation for how to install in it using d-i. There is a kernel flavor and d-i boot images for mips on qemu. Having to ssh out to a DSA adminned box to deal with a buld failure on $ARCH, and having to wait for build deps to be installed should begin to feel antequated and quaint. It is. find the next nslu2 Debian's support for the nslu2 is an excellent development. It opens up using Debian for a whole new set of tasks, that need low-powered, semi-embedded, commodity hardware, that before were the province of special-purpose embedded distros. It also blew the popcon numbers for arm through the roof. We need to find the next nslu2-like target and get to work on it. I'm hoping that it will be a wireless router, because that's the only thing I'm not running Debian on now. :-) But it could also be a cell phone, or PDA..

Dear Ladies, if you'd like your husband / boyfriend to go shopping with you, get your shop to be at least a bit friendly to him. There is nothing wrong, if you need two hours to buy a new blouse. (Actually, I heard some men need some time for shopping, too, so that doesn't even count as "typical feemale".) There is nothing wrong, when your man has nothing to do... beside trying to find your clothes in an other size... or trying to figure out, if that color is apricot or peach, and if it would look good to something of the color pumpkin. What makes such trips horrible is that boutiques are often overheated (Well, that might be a must; they must not be too cold for a women to take her clothes of), narrow (How many clothes stands can you squeeze into a 10m² shop?) and loud. If you want us to go shopping with you, go to a boutique, where a men can at least have a seat. Possibly with a water cooler nearby. That would make it a lot easier for us. A positive example is Eierund. They have some kind of "men and children area". Children will find comics and can watch movies, and men can read car and computer magazines (or steal the comics from the children). They even have sweet apples and a really comfortable couch. That's how you make your man enjoy going shopping with you! PS: Having a nice girlfriend, who doesn't take that long shopping helps a lot, too.

The countdown is running… On 3rd and 4th of March 2007 the Chemnitzer Linux Days will take place. We’ll present grml (Linux Live-CD for sysadmins / texttool-users / geeks) at a booth there! If everything works as intented we will have a demo system as well as CDs of a special grml release named “Dioptrienotto @ clt07″: Several grml developers will be there and I’m looking forward to meet formorer for the first time in RL. Hope to see you there!

We take a very simple class:

class Foobar  
var $myvar = 1;
function Foobar()  
 
function printit()  
    echo "var is " . $this->myvar . "\n";
 
function incr()  
    $this->myvar += 1;
 
 
$f = new Foobar();
$a = $f;
$b = $f;
$a->printit();
$a->incr();
$b->printit();

And run it with PHP4 and PHP5:

davidw@byron:/tmp$ php4 foobar.php 
var is 1
var is 1
davidw@byron:/tmp$ php5 foobar.php 
var is 1
var is 2

Apparently it's possible to use the clone function to do what we want with PHP5, but... that means we have to track down every single place in the code where there is something like $foo = $bar. And hope that we got them all, because otherwise subtle bad things might happen. The codebase I've inherited isn't great to begin with, and hunting down every object copy is bound to be torture. Ouch. Update It's been pointed out that my description of exactly what's happening internally isn't correct. However, from my point of view, the end result is the same: a massive search and replace operation in order to obtain the "old" behavior by using clone. Most likely, this means that we won't be able to upgrade soon, which means that we won't be able to take advantage of some of the nice new PHP5 features, which will slow down other works in progress. For want of a nail...

It sucks even more when you have lost it. I have no fricking idea where my iPod (with shiny, brand new Rockbox) is at the moment, and have had no idea for the last 10 days, so I guess I will start looking for a replacement. iPod is a good idea, so I will take a look at the 80GB masterpiece. I also need a new phone, since mine dropped two times while doing some work at home and now it sometimes goes off or reboots without noticing. Let’s see what Nokia has to offer…

Python: "There's Only One Way To Do It"

import array
import numarray
import numeric
import numpy

They're all almost the same, but not quite. When google gives you an online piece of documentation, it's hard to say what it refers to. And different scientific modules use one or the other, more or less unpredictably. Maybe in the future numpy will replace them all. In the meantime, if I hear someone saying "There's Only One Way To Do It", I will spank their cheeks with a wet fish.

With each new GNOME versions, the icon themes from gnome-themes-extras are becoming less useful. The desktop and applications needs evolve, and the default theme is growing, providing more and more icons the icon themes can't provide. Because of that, the desktop is looking less consistent when using those icon themes. With GNOME 2.16 and the move to the Tango naming scheme, it is even worse as most icons got renamed. As upstream isn't touching this package anymore, I have decided to rework it entirely, and to migrate it to the new naming scheme. It was a very tedious task, but the result is much better than what I expected. To my surprise, I found the freedesktop.org icon naming specification to be a very good document that brings much simplicity to icon themes. Especially, the MIME types specification makes it much simpler to provide only a few icons, and the default theme contains much fewer icons than before. The result is in the pkg-gnome alioth repository, and uploaded to experimental. As Clearlooks is good but not great, I appreciate much the grand retour of Gorilla and Nuvola, the best themes ever, on my desktop. They are now more tightly integrated to the desktop than ever before. What now? First, I'd like people to test the themes. There are 6 of them and I don't use all of them. Please report inconsistencies, obviously missing icons, or wrongly named ones. You can also help by making new icons. Just grab inkscape, open icons, and make the changes. It's much easier than you could expect, especially if you start by combining existing icons. The icon naming specification will show you which icons can be useful additions. Some translations are also completely wrong, please don't hesitate to send me updates.

Thanks in no small part to the advocacy of Simon Willison, I've just OpenID-enabled the XTech web site. Users can now create their accounts using an OpenID, or associate an OpenID with an existing account. A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year. While we've gone to the trouble of making retrieving a password easy, there's still the mental burden on the user of setting up the account and noting it down somewhere. As a measure of the impact of this on me personally: I habitually save registration confirmation emails in a certain mail folder. Since 1997 I have collected no fewer than 572 of these, and I'm sure some have been missed! One other cool thing about OpenID is that finally I can get the identity I wish to have. No longer do I have to be a compulsive early adopter of every service just to get the name edd. (Well, as long as said service integrates OpenID of course!) Personal branding is an important attractive aspect of OpenID.ImplementationImplementing OpenID using the Ruby ruby-openid gem was quite straightforward, as was the logical integration into our user models. I've not been the only one following this path recently, as illustrated by this post on Rails OpenID integration from Dan Webb.The harder problem of deploying OpenID lies in making the user interface work well: ultimately that will have a huge influence over its uptake. We've made a decent first go of it in Expectnation, but I'm sure we'll evolve and improve it over time. The main puzzling thing is how obvious to make the OpenID facility, given its relatively small take-up right now. We don't want to confuse normal users too much by using it. Microformats When I did my behind-the-scenes piece on the building of the XTech schedule last week, one feature I didn't discuss was the support for microformats we have in the schedule and on the session pages. If you use a tool such as Operator, you can easily save talk times to your calendar while reading the schedule.
I'm personally a little late to the microformats party. Being a fan of pragmatic RDF, I didn't see much need for microformats right away. However, with tools like Operator I can honestly say that the use of microformats does enhance the XTech schedule.My impressions of microformats (in particular hCalendar and hCard) from using them are mixed. One the plus side, it was very easy to do. On the negative side, I found them restrictive in the sense that for the metadata to be present in the hCalendar object, it needs to be part of the HTML presentation.So, while microformats are meant to be about making human readable data useful for computers, they can have a tail-wagging effect on the human markup. Let me elaborate. In the conference schedule there is a grid overview. For readability here we want to keep the details down to a minimum in each box. There is definitely no need to repeat the date of each presentation when you can see there's a grid per day.But also we want to have microformats available in the page so users can use the grid to pick off talks to add to their calendar. The only details you currently get from the microformat are those you physically include inside the div marked as vevent. This means we can't embed the full details, such as the talk description. It also means I indulge in some dubious markup practices (an empty abbr element) in order to get the date and time into each hCalendar object.It seems to me that this could be ameliorated by more intelligent user agent behaviour. Each of my hCalendar events is given a URL. At the end of that URL is a full description of the event, using microformats. So, as long as I reference the URL in a summary page, the user agent can beetle off and pull down the full information, in much the same sort of way that FOAF uses the rdfs:seeAlso property.So, remove the expectation that microformats provide complete data, and I'm sold.Other schedule features: iCal, Upcoming.org
Of course, we have iCalendar support in the XTech schedule, so you can subscribe conventionally using iCal, Evolution or a similar program. Aaron Straup Cope took the iCalendar, and uploaded each event into Upcoming.org. If you look at the upcoming events tagged xtech07, you see the results of his work.This foreshadows some of the social elements we plan to add to Expectnation itself: indicating your intent to attend a talk, and adding comments to it. As a program chair I'm finding this quite fascinating to watch.