If you want another example, one from a company who any developer would agree is an outstanding engineering organization, here's one: "Sun has maintained binary compatibility between operating system releases for nearly a decade, enabling existing Solaris applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. This means that Solaris applications developed 10 years ago will run on Solaris 10 unchanged, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features."

Yes, it's true that there is outstanding backward binary compatibility in Solaris. However, if you're going to try use that as an argument in favour of Solaris, try again. Have you ever actually used a Solaris system?

• The ugliness on a Solaris system starts with $PATH, which is all over the place: /usr/ucb/bin for the compiler, /usr/gnu/bin (IIRC) for bash, /usr/bin for sed. The FHS is nonexistent.
• Everyone who writes code for the Berkeley socket API knows that Solaris has to be different:
  

  #ifndef sun
  int yes=1;
  #else
  char yes='1';
  #endif
  

• Even if you do it that way, on Solaris you have to say -lsocket.
• I've heard claims that Solaris, partially because of the backward compatibility, is rather slow; that Linux beats the shit out of Solaris on the hardware (SPARC) that was more or less specifically designed for Solaris (and vice versa). Having used it for a short while once, I cannot think of a counterargument for that one.

If you're going to say that backwards compatibility is good and that we should incorporate backwards compatibility into Linux somehow, then please do not point people towards the two ugliest operating systems on the earth with a lot of garbage baggage for the sake of backwards compatibility...

Ever noticed the following with Skype: Go offline while several of your friends are online. Suspend your computer. A few hours later, resume your computer and go back online with Skype. Notice how it claims all the buddys that were online when you disconnected just came online? And a few seconds later, some of them all go offline? And several minutes later, they even come back? Skype (well, at least version 1.3.0.53, YMMV) obviously caches which users it has seen and just assumes they are still online. When it then has actually connected to the Skype network, it notice that none of its peers has them and decides that they maybe aren't online after all. Then it actually searches them throughout the network, and when it has found them puts them back online again. Thats what I call cheating. Other IM services are much more reliable here. And other IM services - at least ICQ and many Jabber servers, though not Google Talk - also have offline messages. I.e. you can write messages that will reach the receipient once he goes online again. Skype again cheats on these: if you send such a message, it will after some time display the notice that sending it failed. The next time both of you are online, it will actually be delivered. This can result in suprisingly old messages, and makes connecting to people much harder: for putting someone onto your list, you also have to be online at the same time. Assuming that you are using Skype only during work hours and going offline inbetween, this makes communicating with people in different timezones a pain. File transfers with Skype are also a game of chance: If both of you are somewhat firewalled (e.g. behin a DSL-modem-router combo), it often can't transfer directly. Instead it picks a random "super node" with large bandwith for transferring the files. However, the super nodes bandwidth isn't always as good as expected by Skype, so sometimes file transfers with Skype are awfully slow, even when your line isn't busy. MSN for example (though I do NOT suggest using MSN), is using it's own, well-powered servers to handle such file transfers (or maybe all; thats why I don't really suggest using MSN, since I've only seen it transfer my files through microsofts servers...). But usually file transfers via MSN - especially in firewalled situations - are much faster than with Skype. (A drawback of them is the short timeout) So consider using XMPP/Jabber (= Google Talk) instead. They are more reliable, and an open, well-defined, extensible standard.

Ever noticed the following with Skype: Go offline while several of your friends are online. Suspend your computer. A few hours later, resume your computer and go back online with Skype. Notice how it claims all the buddys that were online when you disconnected just came online? And a few seconds later, some of them all go offline? And several minutes later, they even come back? Skype (well, at least version 1.3.0.53, YMMV) obviously caches which users it has seen and just assumes they are still online. When it then has actually connected to the Skype network, it notice that none of its peers has them and decides that they maybe aren't online after all. Then it actually searches them throughout the network, and when it has found them puts them back online again. Thats what I call cheating. Other IM services are much more reliable here. And other IM services - at least ICQ and many Jabber servers, though not Google Talk - also have offline messages. I.e. you can write messages that will reach the receipient once he goes online again. Skype again cheats on these: if you send such a message, it will after some time display the notice that sending it failed. The next time both of you are online, it will actually be delivered. This can result in suprisingly old messages, and makes connecting to people much harder: for putting someone onto your list, you also have to be online at the same time. Assuming that you are using Skype only during work hours and going offline inbetween, this makes communicating with people in different timezones a pain. File transfers with Skype are also a game of chance: If both of you are somewhat firewalled (e.g. behin a DSL-modem-router combo), it often can't transfer directly. Instead it picks a random "super node" with large bandwith for transferring the files. However, the super nodes bandwidth isn't always as good as expected by Skype, so sometimes file transfers with Skype are awfully slow, even when your line isn't busy. MSN for example (though I do NOT suggest using MSN), is using it's own, well-powered servers to handle such file transfers (or maybe all; thats why I don't really suggest using MSN, since I've only seen it transfer my files through microsofts servers...). But usually file transfers via MSN - especially in firewalled situations - are much faster than with Skype. (A drawback of them is the short timeout) So consider using XMPP/Jabber (= Google Talk) instead. They are more reliable, and an open, well-defined, extensible standard.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

I left home a bit late and rushed to the train stop, but the journey was easy after that. There was quite a good turnout at the meeting: Chris (chair), Alex (clerk), Paul (treasurer), Brian (secretary), Malcolm, Paul, Andrew and myself IIRC. Continuing: A promo leaflet is on hold until after funding is sorted out; No mutuals responded to a funding request letter; The reply to the BASIS grant bid is expected some time in January; The database update is waiting on Plymco as far as I could tell. Financial: the clerking contract went about 700 quid over budget last year and has been reduced to a skeleton service until funds are sorted out again. Donations from the Coop Group and Midcounties were forecast but aren't in the bank yet. AGM: the aim is to return to more of an event next year. Holding it in October should hopefully avoid the transport and weather problems of the 2006 event. Fund-raising: Chris to draft a bid for the cooperation fund to try to secure enough money for a support worker. The priorities would be clerking and event organisation, with possibly marketing, communication and news-production tasks. Numbers to come from the support tracker that Alex has been using. Need some sort of corporation to apply. Alex, Brian and myself to assist. 12 February deadline. Reply expected in March. Future work: newsletter deferred to mid-March. News items to Alex. Paul (I think) mentioned that some Healthy Eating Partnerships seem to be promoting their box schemes as 'Food Coops' when they are not cooperatives at all. We need to contact partnerships and find out which is doing what. Alex handed out a few Principle Six speed-networking packs. Interesting idea. Paul mentioned Cornwall Switch which will find the best green energy supplier for you (even if you're not in Cornwall). Next meeting 16 April 2007.

This is a never ending story for me. The first time I’ve had problems with Linux’s handling of serial UART dates back to 2005 (see my previous blog post on buffer overruns). At that time I could improve the situation by applying two patches (kernel-preempt and low latency). One year later, I have a situation where the buffer overruns are again easily reproducible at slower baudrate (54 kbauds), arguably there’s more than a serial application running this time, and it looks like the load generated by other processes (mainly watching digital I/O) renders the system less reliable with respect to its handling of serial ports. This time I follow the advice to try out the 2.6 kernel because many “real-time improvements” (coming from the -rt branch, check its wiki) and “embedded improvements” (coming from linux-tiny) have been merged. So I tried the stock kernel with very bad result. Results are better than the stock 2.4 but they are worse than the patched 2.4. So I decide to try the -rt patch on 2.6, but this patch doesn’t work on my CPU card and my bugreport didn’t lead to any fix (nobody responded even though I tried hard to include the necessary information and I was ready to do whatever I would have been asked to try). At the same time I explain my problem on the linux-kernel mailing list. The discussion doesn’t answer my questions but still brings two ideas to try out. In the end, with two simple tweaks to the stock 2.6 kernel (mainly configuring the UART to send the interrupt as soon as the first character arrives, instead of waiting for 8 chars to accumulate in the FIFO) I have been able to get something better than the patched 2.4. And it turns out my first choices for the 2.6 kernel configuration have not been very wise so the comparison between stock 2.4 and stock 2.6 above doesn’t mean much. Unfortunately, even if better than the patched Linux 2.4, it still doesn’t give good results in some conditions. So my primary question remains: is there a way to patch my kernel so that it will handle the serial related tasks (servicing interrupts from the UART mainly) as its primary job ? I don’t mind if such a change impact negatively the speed of the system if I can make sure that my serial exchanges are reliable. And by reliable I mean of course no buffer overruns, but there’s a second similar problem that has been discovered: when using software handshake, the system can send out between 10 and 25 characters after the partner has sent its XOFF. Sending up to 6 characters after the XOFF is ok, more is asking for troubles because the UART on the other side will probably encounter a buffer overrun… If you have any idea on how to resolve my problems, by any means, let me know.

More Knowledge@Wharton: “Following the model that made Microsoft’s Windows so successful, Microsoft licensed PlaysForSure to multiple hardware vendors of digital music players. ‘We thought that was a brilliant strategy — [develop] an open ecosystem, get a lot of people [to support it].’ What happened? As Ballmer puts it, ‘In this particular case, the whole was not bigger than the sum of the parts.’” As I said the other day, an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts it s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Microsoft was decidedly on the wrong side of the equation this time. Yes, Microsoft did what it had to do to compete effectively. Question is, will this make it harder for Microsoft to build the next ecosystem? And did the tactics Microsoft used to benefit from the last one play a role in the outcome this time? (Via Mary Jo Foley.)

I’ve got my first real rails application working correctly - a simple online bookmark system, which is scuttle-lookalike. (This is part of my master-plan to remove PHP utterly from the few remaining places where it exists upon my server(s), so it isn’t as pointless a project as it appears to be!) It is pretty neat, and it handles most of the things you’d expect. Fetch it from CVS and install it with the following recipe:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvsrepository.org:/home/cvs login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvsrepository.org:/home/cvs co bookmarks
cd bookmarks/
mysql --user=root -p -e "CREATE DATABASE Books_development"
rake db:migrate
ruby script/server

Once that is done point a browser at http://localhost:3000/ - and you should see something like this. (If there is no admin user setup it will display a “signup” link, once there is an admin defined this will go away. When you’re an admin you can view/edit/modify all the bookmarks which are set to “private”.) I’m new to rails, and ruby for that matter, so if this is packaged badly, or is missing something to make it work please do let me know. Updated: Changed from download to the CVS repository. I also have a collection of tools for exporting from Insipid & Scuttle if they are useful let me know.

... is far from trivial: you are not on the senders side, and not every protocol (in fact very few) allow rate limiting. Not to speak of limiting the total of multiple connections. Basically you'll have to accept that the sender is sending the data at it's own pace. However, the TCP part of "TCP/IP" is designed in a way that it does a fairly good job at detecting bottlenecks. The basic principle is this: when a packet is received at the destination, a confirmation will be sent back. By adjusting the rate of packets going out to match the rate of incoming "received" message (and to minimize the number of lost packets that need to be resent), TCP/IP connection can adopt to the slowest link in the chain. This is how incoming traffic shaping works: incoming packets are held back (or even dropped; however holding back packets might also lead to dropped packets somewhere up the stream), which in turn will limit the speed "ACKs" go out, and thus (hopefully) the speed data is pushed down to us. It's not perfectly reliable, and by design won't work well with short-lived connections and non-TCP-traffic. But it can still come in handy. We have a shared internet connection with 2 mBit. That usually is fine, but our router isn't very smart. When I'm using up all bandwidth for a longer timeframe (say, apt-get upgrade with new openoffice and tetex), the other users will suffer from a serious performance impact. One of them is often playing games online, and eventually gets kicked out of a game server because of his bad roundtrip times. By limiting my incoming traffic rate, I can hopefully keep the connection useful enough for him. In my tests, it worked pretty good at keeping my bandwidth useage down. The remaining unused bandwidth should allow his game data to pass through without larger extra delays. Here's the short script I'm using:

tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI handle ffff: ingress
tc filter replace dev ethWIFI parent ffff: protocol ip prio 50 \
  u32 match ip src 0.0.0.0/0 police rate 1500kbit \
  burst 10k drop flowid :1
tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI root tbf \
  rate 1500kbit latency 25ms burst 10k

Don't forget to adopt it to your needs, you probably havn't renamed your interface to ethWIFI and might want a different valye than 1500kbit.

... is far from trivial: you are not on the senders side, and not every protocol (in fact very few) allow rate limiting. Not to speak of limiting the total of multiple connections. Basically you'll have to accept that the sender is sending the data at it's own pace. However, the TCP part of "TCP/IP" is designed in a way that it does a fairly good job at detecting bottlenecks. The basic principle is this: when a packet is received at the destination, a confirmation will be sent back. By adjusting the rate of packets going out to match the rate of incoming "received" message (and to minimize the number of lost packets that need to be resent), TCP/IP connection can adopt to the slowest link in the chain. This is how incoming traffic shaping works: incoming packets are held back (or even dropped; however holding back packets might also lead to dropped packets somewhere up the stream), which in turn will limit the speed "ACKs" go out, and thus (hopefully) the speed data is pushed down to us. It's not perfectly reliable, and by design won't work well with short-lived connections and non-TCP-traffic. But it can still come in handy. We have a shared internet connection with 2 mBit. That usually is fine, but our router isn't very smart. When I'm using up all bandwidth for a longer timeframe (say, apt-get upgrade with new openoffice and tetex), the other users will suffer from a serious performance impact. One of them is often playing games online, and eventually gets kicked out of a game server because of his bad roundtrip times. By limiting my incoming traffic rate, I can hopefully keep the connection useful enough for him. In my tests, it worked pretty good at keeping my bandwidth useage down. The remaining unused bandwidth should allow his game data to pass through without larger extra delays. Here's the short script I'm using:

tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI handle ffff: ingress
tc filter replace dev ethWIFI parent ffff: protocol ip prio 50 \
  u32 match ip src 0.0.0.0/0 police rate 1500kbit \
  burst 10k drop flowid :1
tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI root tbf \
  rate 1500kbit latency 25ms burst 10k

Don't forget to adopt it to your needs, you probably havn't renamed your interface to ethWIFI and might want a different valye than 1500kbit.

If any planners want to see the impact of your short-sighted regulations, please visit Bowthorpe

"planning regs mean you only have to provide one space per home. Hence families with two cars, or couples who work in opposite directions and need two cars, often have to block their roads without meaning to do so."

Surely short-sighted would be to cater for today's car parking requirements? Thanks to climate change, oil decline and other reasons, it looks like there won't be as many cars tomorrow. Two-car households may be a temporary problem. If people are parking inconsiderately, bring in a one-car-per-house permit system with edge-of-zone car parks (and let two-car houses buy permits from car-free houses). If you build roads big enough for today's peak use, then in the future, there will be oversize roads for the traffic levels when that land could have been better used for housing. Ah, criticising the barking policies of Antony Little... blogging like it's 1999.

So I installed Eclipse to do some web development in Java, and this dialog box appeared: I didn’t know what it was, and that was already reported twice (one, two), so I just clicked on Ok , and Eclipse worked correctly. But the next time I started Eclipse, the same box appeared: This time I pressed Cancel to see what happened. Eclipse did not load. So I ran Eclipse again and… well, I’ll spare you the dialog box. Needless to say, I was less than impressed. Now I’m hoping it will eventually get bored of always saying the same thing when starting Eclipse, and graduate to small talk: If not, it could at least take advantage of the fact that it’s being run on a Debian developer’s computer and show this:

Yet another Unmaintained Free Software update: Thanks to Matthias (again), we now have a wonderful new main page in the wiki, which looks a lot better than the old one which I had created a long time ago... The nice icons were created by David Vignoni for the Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x. They're available under terms of the GNU LGPL. Many other things in the wiki are currently undergoing a long-overdue update and fixing phase. I plan to upgrade the MediaWiki installation we're using, and some new MediaWiki extensions will be added, too. Oh, and I created and installed a nice favicon for the site, based on the project logo. If you ever wondered how those things are created, here's one possibility:

1. Create two PNG images, one 16x16, one 32x32 pixels.
2. apt-get install icoutils
3. icotool -c foo16x16.png foo32x32.png > favicon.ico
4. Place the resulting favicon.ico file in your DocumentRoot. Done.

I'm sure there are other and better ways to do it, but this was the first I came up with after a quick apt-cache search favicon.

There were a lot of good comments on my post about the importance of backward compatibility the other day (both here and in the blogosphere), and a lot more of them were positive than I was expecting, which I find encouraging. A fair number of people called me out for using such a bad example—come on, changing the OS to fix a buggy application? Fair enough. Perhaps I diminished the point I was trying to make by referencing that extreme example, but it’s a worthwhile example for one reason: At Microsoft, the user experience comes first, notbefore developer sensibilities. Fortunately, as others (rightly) point out, it’s hard to imagine a situation where such extremes would be necessary in the Linux world—for one thing, we don’t have the sheer number of legacy binary applications to deal with, nor do we have the same volume or average user profile as Windows. But the point stands. User experience should always win. If you want another example, one from a company who any developer would agree is an outstanding engineering organization, here’s one: “Sun has maintained binary compatibility between operating system releases for nearly a decade, enabling existing Solaris applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. This means that Solaris applications developed ten years ago will run on Solaris 10 unchanged, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features.”

I'll be turning twenty-seven this week. A classic occasion for celebration. If you read this, and can find out where it will take place, you're invited: this Friday from 21.00 at OS/9. You can join earlier for dinner if you wish, in that case, let me know.

(17.1.2007) I haven't written a blog in aeons. I have been busy with life, as many of you know. For one, i have a girlfriend (her name is Lucy)... And, no matter what i have thought not so long ago, things are better than ever before. She's probably all that i have been looking for. We spend most of the weekends together (she lives and studies in western Slovakia, while i'm in the west-neighbouring Czech Republic (Moravia) -- somewhat surprizingly, this doesn't seem to be a problem so far). Anyway, that's probably boring for those of you that aren't me (ha), so to move on to other things. Work and school is busy these days (exam tomorrow (aaagh)), so i don't have much more free time than that i spend with Lucy. Despite that, i have done some cleaning-up on libept and adept codebases after importing them (with tailor) into darcs. Will blog about that separately i suppose, when i have more time and more stuff to report on. The exam tomorrow is on graph algorithms, and i should be actually studying instead of writing this, but i never change, do i? (19.1.2007) So the results of the exams will be available following monday. No idea whether i'm going to pass or not though. Anyway, i am sitting in a train to Slovakia, alone in a compartment, the window open wide, wind in hair. Sun is obscured by clouds at times, air is somewhat colder than it used to be. Maybe winter will finally arrive? Another exam is monday (same day as i get the results from yesterday's one)... Algorithms for NP hard problems. I'm still somewhat undermotivated to learn, and apart from that i should be hacking dmeventd (work stuff), working on my bachelor's thesis, learning to play a (soprano) recorder, learning russian and probably a ton of other things. Ah and adept, libept and friends need some attention too. I suppose i am a lost existence, given my total laziness. The train is speeding towards Breclav, last (and the only one apart from Brno on my route) station in Czech Republic. As usual, i intended to blog a ton of things, but can't recall of one them... That's life, i will hopefully get to blog a bit more again.

Today it happen, what I know it would happen some day. My grandfather is not in this world anymore.
I don’t know, if there is anything other, where he could be now and unfortunatly it seems we aren’t experience it until we are in the same situation.
It’s hard for me to write whats going on in my head… If it was okay for my grandfather to leave us, it’s also for me, but I will miss him. It makes me distraught that I’m so far away since 5 years now and wasn’t able to visit my family more often. See you again, where ever you are! planet, real life^Wsuck

Taiwanese phone manufacturer FIC, recently announced the timeline for the release of the FIC Neo1973 smart phone. It’s shaping up to be a very cool device. The phone is nice to look at, has a completely open software stack via the OpenMoko project and at US$350 it’s actually relatively cheap! Feature wise the Neo1973 is relatively similar to the iPhone, right down to using a touchscreen for the user interface. It will be interesting to see how many of the people who have been complaining about the restrictive and walled-garden iPhone model migrate over to the OpenMoko platform. The Neo1973 will work with any GSM cellular network in the world (as opposed to only Cingular in the states, and other apple partners elsewhere) and will allow you to run essentially any application that you want on the phone itself. The contrast in approach between Apple and FIC is stark, and I hope that FIC wins out in the end, although it will no doubt be an uphill battle for them to get anywhere near the mindshare that Apple receives. The one feature that really drew my eye to the Neo1973 is the built-in GPS chipset. For a while now I’ve been looking for a device that would allow me to reveal my current location (possibly obfuscated to a certain radius) to selected family and friends. Once the source code is released in a week or two I imagine that it won’t be long before someone (maybe me…) whips up an application to make this possible. Here’s hoping that the phone lives up to the expectations set for it and that I can come up with a suitable excuse to purchase one when they become available in early March! Update: Found a linuxdevices.com post with some good technical detail on the hardware

We had some wonderful weather yesterday. I've always said that I like snow. It can completely change the landscape in an instant. And it looks so beautiful.

Yesterday we had a nice snowstorm all day. Large, wet flakes. It was the most snow we've had at once in a few years right around here. It was beautiful just like always. It started early in the morning before we got up and continued until almost midnight. This morning, I went out into a big open area and measured the snow -- 7.5".

There are two problems with snow. One is that it's difficult to get anywhere. The other is that it blows into everything.

And guess what -- yesterday was our moving day.

Fortunately, on Friday evening, most of the furniture that needed to go in a pickup did. But we still had to wrap some things in plastic on Saturday. We didn't get everything moved that we wanted to. Between icy ground outside, travel at less than half the usual speed on the roads, and snow blowing everywhere, things were slow. But that's fine; we'll get the rest later.

This was the scene during the move:



Not long after that picture was taken, it was announced that church was canceled today. We kept moving things though.

Although we didn't get everything moved that we had hoped to, we got enough moved to consider ourselves moved in. We have one fully-functional bathroom. Jacob's bedroom and our bedroom are done. The kitchen will get its floor Monday and we'll get appliances Thursday. The only big thing left is guttering, plus there are still a few doorknobs and light fixtures pending. But it was enough that the three of us spent our first night here last night!

We're very appreciative of the help we got from family & friends, who helped us move and brought us food (since we don't have a fridge for the next few days).

Jacob doesn't like change very much (he cried when he noticed that some clutter in our apartment living room was gone). But he likes to learn about his environment. So today, he woke up at 6AM (and got us up at 6AM), spent an hour happily looking around, then promptly started fussing. That's how the day has been for him -- interest and crying.

At about 7:30AM, we were shocked to see a road maintainer plowing our road. Why shocked? Well, nobody else lives on this road for a couple of miles. It's not exactly a popular spot. And it hadn't been in all that great of shape before winter.

Later in the day, I went out to take some pictures. Here's one of our driveway:



Doesn't it look fun?

I decided to see if we could get out. The short answer is yes. The long answer is "yes, if you have patience." After rocking the car back and forth to get it turned around in the yard, I was able to keep up enough speed to get to the road and back. So Terah and I had lunch with my parents, then went into town to get another carload of stuff. There were children out playing everywhere, and well-worn sledding paths down hillsides. Too bad Jacob isn't old enough to enjoy this!

It was last April when we first started thinking about this. By June we had bought the property out here, and in October we moved to the apartment. It's been a long time feeling like we were living somewhere temporarily.

And, right now, it is great to be home.