On the gripping hand, Matthew, notice that patches written by someone utterly unfamiliar with the code in question aren't always welcome. While some people don't mind spending several days on something that may or may not be accepted to begin with, it's important to realize that talking about wishlist items before even thinking about possibly writing a patch is more likely to result in the desired behaviour than writing and submitting patches in a fire-and-forget manner. In that light, there are cases where 'please send a patch' can be quite demotivating, and it makes sense as a developer to engage in a discussion about a wishlist item, even if you're not immediately interested in implementing said feature yourself. Such a discussion could lead to either you implementing it, or someone else implementing it, or the other person finally understanding that your vision for the software in question doesn't match theirs, and that they should just find something else to spend their time on. I guess the moral of the story is: as a user with a wishlist item, you should talk to developers, let them know what you think is important, and be prepared to write a patch yourself if needs be and you have the skill. As a developer, you shouldn't interpret every wishlist request as a question to 'please please please implement my pet feature', but as an opportunity to reconsider your views, and possibly implement some nice new feature that you hadn't thought about originally but which you think might be nice, too. If people reply with 'please provide a patch' to each and every wishlist request, they're stupid; even more so than users who think they have anything to demand.

I guess it won't be very many people reading this blog to know the name, even though he was without any doubt one of the biggest entertainers. Lots of movies, his own TV show, and an enormous amount of albums made him well known far outside the borders of Austria, his home country. Last saturday he died in the age of 84, yesterday was his funeral. This is a special dedication to him. Peter, you will be missed.

• Die s esten Fr chte (1952): He was still rather young at that time but it already shows his great talent, both in acting and in singing.
• Mamma di Mandolin (1956): Another great excerpt from a movie in which he starred.
• Dankesch n: Thank you.

Servus.

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About month ago, we've announced contest for new default theme in phpMyAdmin 3.4. The submission period is over and now it's time to decide which theme will be the winning one. You can choose from five themes (all of them are listed on our wiki). Every opinion counts, so please visit our survey and choose the one you like most: http://survey.phpmyadmin.net/index.php?sid=72977 Besides the Original and Darkblue_orange themes, there are following to choose: Toba: Graphite: pmahomme:

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

It's time to upgrade my xen servers to squeeze. I've already put this off too long and now I've to task to go from etch to squeeze in one long step. In order to avoid problems I just did a first upgrade etch -> lenny and then to squeeze. However, since so much has changed in the meantime, and so much twicking of essential components is needed (such as Xen !), I guess I could have gone directly from etch to squeeze in one go, and fix everthing in the process... Anyway, to late for this kind of considerations.

The xen debian wiki is full of invaluable information. Kudos to the xen team for their hard work. To get you started on squeeze you need to install the xen hypervisor. Everything is provided by one package: This will pull the latest linux kernel and xen-hypervisor to run on dom0 . By default the hypervisor is probably not going to be the default kernel. If you want to change this, you should edit the grub default values : to make sure that the default kernel on dom0 is the xen-hypervisor. This is tricky, because grub let you define a default w.r.t the list of available kernels. so if you install a new kernel, you have to change the default accordingly with the list of kernels in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. It would be nice if I could define the default kernel with a label instead of a number... ( ref #505517 ) Alternatively, as suggested in the wiki, you can just move the xen kernel out of the way ... When installing xen related tools, aptitude will also probably install by default rinse and xenwatch. The first one is to boostrap redhat machines and maybe you don't need it. The second one is a GUI and will pull in a lot of X-related dependencies. If we have similar needs, you can just remove what is not needed... Something that is new, is the new schema for virtual devices. Now all vms will see /dev/xdva1 instead of /dev/sda1 as before. This needs to be changed in the domU as well as in the xen config files (/etc/xen/vm.cfg). One fantastic news is that xen 4 now uses pyGrub. It is not mandatory (so if you want, you can stick with the old configuration file). But if you use pygrub, on the domU you can install whatever kernel you want. Finally, your users will have complete freedom to pick and choose their kernels ! There was a small detail I didn't notice on the debian wiki, that is, if you try to use grub2 in squeeze, it will fail when probing the device#601974 . The workaround described in the wiki is to use xvd a,b,c,... as device names (and not xvd 1,2,3,... ) to make grub happy. Once you have changed then naming schema, grub will be able to see the disks and install the bootloader. Another solution is to install the os-prober from unstable / experimental. It seems a patch is on the works. On newly created images, you can also pass the --scsi parameter to xen-create-image to ignore this problem altogeher... I'm not sure if this will have other implications...

The console name is also changes from tty to xhv0 . To get back the console you should add this line in the inittab of all you VMs. A last note is about the merge upstream of the xen patch !! \o/ yeiiii !!

There s a frequent pattern in the Debian community where someone would suggest an improvement to some package or service, and the person responsible for it would reply with please send a patch . Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.
But often, it would be much more efficient for the person responsible for the service to take 5 or 10 minutes to make the change, than for the demander to spend half an hour learning how to contribute to this service, writing an untestable patch, and sending it back to the person responsible for the service for integration. It is important to see this problem as the issue of maximizing the usefulness of the resources we have. Often, we are in a situation where we could either:

• spend 30 minutes on a service we don t know, just to push one change
• spend 30 minutes making three or more changes that others would like to see in a service we know

It would be much better if, instead of saying Please send a patch , people would say Are you interested in contributing a patch, or should I make the change myself? . Remember that each time you ask someone to take some time to contribute a patch in an area where he is not an efficient contributor, you take some time away from him that could be used to contribute something in an area where he is efficient.

Hrmh... I am listening to a local news radio station. Of course, what I am about to write lacks information and insight but it follows a conversation I have had with several groups of friends. Our de-facto president has decreed that the tuition for private schools will be deducted from the Impuesto sobre la renta (revenue/profit tax) up to a given tuition level (IIRC up to MX$2000 a month per child per school). The interviewed subsecretary said they expect this deduction will reach MX$13,000 million, around US$1,000 million. This is, about a third of what is assigned to the National University (UNAM). At a first sight, this sounds good. However, I just thought about a discussion I have had with many friends. This money the government will hand back to the taxpayers has to be cut from somewhere (after all, we are not in a country with huge superavit or anything like that). Why does this sound unfair ot me? Because it benefits the few in perjudice of the many. I did a quick search, and found this work based on numbers published by INEGI ten years ago: According to the last table, the money spent on private education was between 5% and 10% of that spent on public education Of course, it is almost impossible to infer the number of students from this alone. I know I could find authoritative data on this regard by searching a bit more, but after all I don't want to spend all (work!) evening on a blog post unless it creates some discussion. Lets say, just for the sake of the exercise, that this means that ~3% of the country's students learn in a private school. In Mexico, the quality of the basic public education (primary/secondary, ages 6 to 18) has fallen hugely in the last decades. Even when I was to school (but not when my parents), the first subjective sign that a family had broken the low-income barrier is that they were finally able to send their children to private schools. Because, no matter how bad they are, public schools are perceived to be worse. Of course, I was among the "lucky" ones to be in a private school. Higher education (universitary level) is still way better ranged. Anyway... I want to get this post over with. Why do I oppose this subsidies/tax devolution? Because it will lead to widen the difference between private and public education. And because it will be benefical only for medium-high and high classes People who are formaly employed (as I am) do not present a tax declaration, so we won't get any deductions. Between and of the country's economically active population work informally (from selling in the street to covering up huge transactions in large locals). Most of the population don't (directly) pay "impuesto sobre la renta", and will not get the benefit of this subsidy. This money has to be taken from other sources in order to be given to private education. If the government wants to improve the education for everybody, why not assign it to the public sector? To specific areas in the public sector, if they don't want to hand it over to the (yes, very, incredibly) corrupt SNTE (National Union of Education Workers)?

Not only that it took 4 years to fix #403246 (sbuild dependancy resolution fails when b-dep on A B ; A uninstallable), but our lovely Debian buildds still don't accept packages which use such a dependency due to running too old sbuild versions. Time to get rid of this annoying bug finally!

Reading job listings for any sort of IT job is depressing. It s been quite some time since I ve had to do that, but how many times have you seen something like this:

• 5 years of Java experience required.
• 3 years of Java experience with modules X, Y, Z required.
• 6 years of experience administering Linux machines running RHEL 4 on a Windows 2000 domain with 1500 clients in an educational setting preferred.

I could go on and on. As a job seeker, that sort of thing is fundamentally devaluing to someone who has strengths in being adaptable and quickly learning new tools, languages, or even entire environments. As an employer, it sends a message that you re not interested in more than a surface look at someone s strengths, and probably don t care to hire the best and the brightest. After all, would you turn away a rockstar programmer simply because he or she had been writing filesystem code in C the last 3 years instead of the latest whizbang Java web widget that will probably be obsolete in a year and unsupported in two? I am quite certain that there are plenty of managers that do. Even if you are a company large enough to have an entire team of people that do nothing but work on that whizbang app, don t you still want the best you can find, realizing that some of the best people to work on that app may not have even heard of it yet? (And that when the app goes obsolete in 5 years, you d rather not have to lay off a large team of single-skill people) Some of you may know that I work in IT at a manufacturing company. We have a small IT team here, about seven people, and are a heavy Debian shop. And we have a vacancy open up in our development/Linux admin group. I m the manager of that group, which is why I m thinking about this right now. We re too small for single-subject specialists to make sense, yet we re big enough to appreciate skill, experience, flexibility, and rigor. Consequently, when the occasion arises for me to look for new employees, I don t prepare a laundry list of things we use in-house and would like experience with. The list of almost-required things generally begins with Linux and ends with experienced , and has nothing else in between. In other words, I d like it if I don t have to explain to you what a symlink or a hardlink is, but I d be willing to do so if I think you d internalize it quickly. On the experienced side, it would be nice if you already have a well-developed sense of fear at running rm when you re root, or have designed a storage infrastructure for a network before, or are paranoid about security. But again, if people can pick up those traits on the job, we are usually still interested. If learning how to package up software for Debian, fix bugs in software you ve never seen in a language you ve never heard of, raise good questions about things you may not have lots of experience with, and write documentation for it all on a wiki sounds like fun, then that s probably the kind of person I want, even if you ve never used our particular tools before. If I were to judge based on the stuff I normally see in job postings, I guess you might conclude I m nuts. I don t think I am, but then again I m also the only person I know that formats his own resume in hand-crafted LaTeX. What do you all think? The next question is: how should one evaluate candidates given this sort of philosophy? I m not a fan of canned tests, or even whiteboard tests that tend to be some sort of canned topic that may test the applicant s specific knowledge base more than overall skill and flexibility. Similarly, as an applicant in years past, I ve struggled with how to present the I ve never used $LANGUAGE, but I know I could pick it up quickly and do it very well vibe. To certain people, that might sound like BS. To the more geeky managers, perhaps it sounds like what they want. We ve built a fairly diverse team on the back of this approach, and it s worked out well for us so far. I m interested to hear your thoughts. Oh, and if you d like to work for us, you should probably be sending me an email. No, I m not going to list the address here on this blog post. If you can t figure it out, I don t want to hear from you <grin>

A few weeks ago, I ve had to look into getting a QLogic QLE7342 InfiniBand adapter working on a Debian Squeeze system, with OFED 1.5.2. This post will probably save quite some time to anyone trying to do the same; it applies to all the QLogic adapters supported by the ib_qib kernel module. Note: on the ibverbs side of things, the adapters are supported by the ipath plugin, just like older QLogic adapters (that use the ib_ipath kernel module). First of all: grab a recent version of the ofa-kernel package. The ib_qib module in ofa-kernel from OFED 1.5.2 did not work at all for me. I used the ofa-kernel snapshot from 20110203. There are two things to know about the QLogic adapters:

• they don t autodetect the fabric speed by default, a dedicated utility has to be used to set the speed(s)
• the driver exports a sysfs-like pseudo-filesystem, ipathfs, that needs to be mounted

QLogic offers a complete IB stack based on OFED and dubbed QLogic OFED+ . The complete package weighs in at over 500 MB and contains the QLogic-blessed drivers, OFED stack, libraries and, of utmost importance to us, the QLogic-specific utilities. Unfortunately, as simple as the QLogic utilities are, they don t come with source. The package also only exists for RedHat 4 and 5. So, go to the QLogic support website, select your hardware and download the QLogic OFED+ Host Software for RHEL 5 package. In the tarball, one directory contains the OFED stack and another contains all the utilities (QLogic-Tools.*). For setting the adapter speed, you ll want the iba_portconfig utility along with the initscript (shipped as iba_portconfig.sh). The desired adapter speed is set in the initscript by choosing the proper arguments to iba_portconfig (-s 1 for SDR, -s 2 for DDR, -s 4 for QDR or any combination thereof). The iba_portconfig initscript must run after the drivers have been loaded. Which brings us to loading the driver and mounting the ipathfs. This is all handled by the openibd initscript provided in ofa-kernel (under ofed_scripts/) and its companion script dedicated to QLogic adapters, truescale.cmds. This initscript will load the OFED stack and drivers; if a QLogic adapter is present, it ll mount the ipathfs in the right place. Voila, once this is done, the adapter should happily report itself ACTIVE/LinkUp.

Building the kernel for the Nexus S is straightforward the kernel is public as one would expect so it s simply a matter of building it using the standard Linux build system (the machine is called herring in the code). There is one gotcha, though the driver for the BCM4329 WiFi controller is a loadable kernel module rather than being built into the image. This means you need to copy it onto the device filesystem separately to flashing the kernel itself if you re only updating the kernel. The procedure I use for this is below it s straightforward but I m posting it here to make it a bit more discoverable. First we make the system partition writable:

adb root
adb remount

Then copy the BCM4329 driver over (the path to the driver here is running from the root of the kernel tree:

adb push drivers/net/wireless/bcm4329/bcm4329.ko /system/modules

Finally, reboot into the bootloader and flash the actual kernel:

adb reboot bootloader
fastboot flash zimage arch/arm/boot/zImage
fastboot reboot

Note that some of these commands may return before the operation they ve started has completed so you may need to wait for the phone at various points. As with updating the main system firmware the above requires an unlocked device which voids your warranty.

I mentioned last night that Dad was on his way out, and that we were all hoping it would end soon for him. Well, thankfully it did. He was clearly waiting for my stepmum to come back in to see him this morning; he left us at 11:35 today, at peace and in no pain. Thanks to everybody for your messages of support, they're very appreciated. It's hard to lose somebody close, and it helps to know that your friends are thinking of you.

This is a wonderful beginning of the week. I ve lost my n900. Most likely, case was not properly mounted on my belt today, and fell down at some point. Chance to get device back is near-zero. It does not respond to calls to itself ( off or out of network coverage ) so likely somebody found it, and turned it off and/or replaced SIM, etc. I ve used it for more than a year. It had lots of customizations, large chat logs, and lots of other data. And it was tightly integrated into my day-to-day life.
Some backups are available but not very recent. And not sure that these backups could be used to recover things into other device and, given all those recent news about Nokia, it is definitely unwise to buy a new n900, as well as any other Nokia device. This blog will unlikely get any more n900-related posts. I m quite frustrated, and can t do anything useful already for several hours .

Last week, we learned how to get rid of obsolete packages. This time, we re going to learn how to bring back your computer to a state close to a pure Ubuntu/Debian installation. Thanks to the power of APT, it s easy to add new external repositories and install supplementary software. Unfortunately some of those are not very well maintained. They might contain crappy packages or they might simply not be updated. An external package which was initially working well, can become a burden on system maintenance because it will be interfering with regular updates (for example by requiring a package that should be removed in newer versions of the system). So my goal for today is to teach you how to identify the packages on your system that are not coming from Debian or Ubuntu. So that you can go through them from time to time and keep only those that you really need. Obsolete packages are a subset of those, but I ll leave them alone. We took care of them last week. Each (well-formed) APT repository comes with a Release file describing it (example). They provide some values that can be used by APT to identify packages contained in the repository. All official Debian repositories are documented with Origin=Debian (and Origin=Ubuntu for Ubuntu). You can verify the origin value associated to each repository (if any) in the output of apt-cache policy:

[...]
 500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny/main i386 Packages
     release v=5.0.8,o=Debian,a=stable,n=lenny,l=Debian,c=main
     origin ftp.debian.org
[...]

From there on, we can simply ask aptitude to compute a list of packages which are both installed and not available in an official Debian repository:

$ aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, !?origin(Debian))!?obsolete'
or
$ aptitude search '~S ~i !~ODebian !~o'

You can replace search with purge or remove if you want to get rid of all the packages listed. But you re more likely to want to remove only a subset of carefully chosen packages you re probably still using some of the software that you installed from external repositories. With synaptic, you can also browse the content of each repository. Click on the Origin button and you have a list of repositories. You can go through the non-Debian repositories and look which packages are installed and up-to-date. But you can do better, you can create a custom view. Click on the menu entry Settings > Filter . Click on New to create a new filter and name it External packages . Unselect everything in the Status tab and keep only Installed . Go in the Properties tab and here add a new entry Origin Excludes ftp.debian.org . In fact you must replace ftp.debian.org with the hostname of your Debian/Ubuntu mirror. The one that appears on the origin line in the output of apt-cache policy (see the excerpt quoted above in this article). Note that the term Origin is used to refer to two different things, a field in the release file but also the name of the host for an APT repository. It s a bit confusing if you don t pay attention. Close the filters window with OK. You now have a new listing of External packages under the Custom Filters screen. You can see which packages are installed and up-to-date and decide whether you really want to keep it. If the package is also provided by Debian/Ubuntu and you want to go back to the version provided by your distribution, you can use the Package > Force version menu entry.

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Those of you that watch my twitter know that we got dumped on with snow recently. The final estimate reported by local papers is 17 to 19 inches. That s my car. You might understand why I went home at 1PM Tuesday and worked from home the rest of the afternoon. The county didn t get the roads opened until 5:30PM Wednesday, so we were stuck. Terah s dad kindly opened the driveway for us though. Without that, we wouldn t have even known where it was. Jacob and Oliver loved playing in the snow. It was a HUGE hit for them. Both of them hated to go back inside when it was time. Oliver had trouble walking, or even standing up, but that didn t stop him from begging for more every chance he got. On Saturday, I took Jacob outside to play. We had in mind building a snow tunnel. We went to one of the big piles of snow left by the tractor after our driveway was cleared, and I dug out a space underneath it that Jacob could crawl through. He got a little scoop (he insisted on calling it my shovel ) and helped dig too. He had a great time with it. He was very anxious to go inside, and it probably didn t help his eagerness that the cats could freely walk through it long before he could. They were around and taking a great interest in the proceedings. One of then stretched out on my back while I was stretched out pulling snow out from the pile. Finally Jacob got to go through. He had a little trouble because it wasn t tall enough for him to crawl like he usually does (though still plenty big for him to get through with lots of room to spare), but he came out beaming. I then went and got the camera and got some photos of his second trip through. You d think that this might be the highlight of a 4-year-old s snow excursion. And given his excitement, you might be very convinced of that. But you d be wrong. What Jacob really wanted was a snow train. So I drew some train track-sized lines in the snow with my shovel. Then I was supposed to draw a train engine. He had been planning this for hours before we even went outside, and I knew very well what was supposed to go on the engine: a snowball for a headlight. We then added passenger cars and a coal car, because apparently that s what you do with snow trains. And the result: When we went inside, Terah asked Jacob about his snow experience. Jacob was very happy, until she asked him if his snow train was a real train or a drawing of a train. Then he became very sad when he said it was a drawing of a train, and decided it was not what he wanted AT ALL. So today we went out again. This time I built a snow train that stands up, complete with snowballs for wheels. I asked him if it was right, and he kept saying, No, I want a REAL train. Finally I asked him what the difference between a real snow train and this one was. Apparently a real train would be on tracks, move around, make noise, and take us places. Fortunately he didn t dwell too long when I explained I couldn t build one of those. And then today s highlight was writing JACOB in the snow. He had started by drawing larger and larger J letters with his arm, and finally asked me to make one. I made footprints in the shape of a very large J, which he loved. He had me make another one, and then the rest of the letters in his name.

As part of the KDE3/QT3 cleanup after the Squeeze release, Debian is about to remove the kkbswitch package from it s archives (unstable, testing). I got a request to keep the package available as it solves some complicated situations when having more than two keyboard layouts. As a response to that request I m staring to look for someone who is willing to port kkbswitch to QT4. I d be more than happy to continue maintaining the package if such a port is done.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Free software applications

A few years ago, I mentioned my dad's fight with cancer. He survived that, and has carried on for several more years since. He had a replacement hip fitted last year to improve his mobility, and was looking set to enjoy a good long retirement. Until... Just before Christmas symptoms suggested that the cancer had returned, and with a vengeance. Tests confirmed it. We were hoping that Dad would fight on and win through again this time, and I was looking forwards to him being at my wedding this September. But there have been a lot of unexpected complications this time and it's just not going to happen. I spoke to him last on Tuesday this week, but he was delirious at the time. He hasn't really been conscious in any meaningful way since. I'm composing this message in the hospital in Southport where I'm now waiting for my dad to die. We've been told by his doctors that it's not going to be long now, but they said that on Wednesday too. My dad has always been stubborn, always a fighter; we know that this is a fight he can't win, but that isn't stopping him from trying his hardest. At least he's being kept comfortable for his last few days, with plenty of strong painkillers on hand when needed. Please let it end soon.

As much for my own reference as anything else... I quite often use vmplayer on my work desktop, and occasionally on my laptop. Other options might work better for other people, but the company have already settled on using vmware on their Linux machines to give users access to Outbreak, Office etc. I try to avoid them as much as possible, but about the only effective option for calendaring at work is Outbreak. *spit*. And on my laptop, I just have a vmplayer setup containing a trivial Windows XP installation for things like Nokia firmware updates. It's more hassle than I can be arsed with to move to something else - the only thing worse than using Windows is installing it, in my experience. In most respects, vmplayer is working OK for me. But: it has one intermittent and really annoying bug. Every now and again, as I switch away from the vmplayer session to another desktop using Ctrl-Alt, then Ctrl-Alt-Cursor, vmplayer eats the state of the X keyboard modifier keys. This makes things interesting after that point: my normal use of emacs, firefox, xterms, mutt (etc.) is fairly heavily dependent on being able to use the Shift and Ctrl keys. This looks like it has been documented as a bug in a number of places over the past few months/years (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) but there doesn't seem to be a fix coming. However, what I have found out is that there is a workaround: setxkbmap will reset the modifier key state when things have broken. If only I'd been able to find that earlier - I've ended up restarting X or rebooting in the past... :-(

I spent most of the week-end working in the pkg-fonts team SVN repository and uploading font packages. The main goal was implementing "Build-Depends:fontforge-nox fontforge" to make the build of fonts easier and faster when they're built from FontForge source files. While doing this, I updated a few of these fonts. I also completely revamped the linux-libertine package which was left pending for quite some time in our SVN (after initial work by Rog rio Brito). I also definitely adopted the ttf-sinhala-lklug font package (the only fonts we have for Sinhala language, so far). Finally, I started going through the list of packages that still depend on defoma. I prodded maintainers for several of these, the most outdated ones....to propose adopting the package under the team's umbrella. We'll see what happens. Quite productive week-end, indeed (and I even managed to watch the three 6 nations rugby games, plus running around 30 kilometers...doh).

Some (long) time ago, I wrote an article how to setup a Mustek PowerMust 1000 USB on Debian Sarge. Since then Etch, Lenny and now Squeeze were released and the machine the UPS was attached to was replaced.Yesterday I have upgraded this machine from Lenny to Squeeze and of course nut has kicked me in the nuts, telling me it can t connect to the UPS.When I replaced the old machine, I had to connect the UPS via USB instead of serial, as the new machine has only one serial port and that one is needed for the serial console to my Sun Netra T1. On Lenny, I was using the megatec_usb driver which seems borked on Squeeze and is superseeded by the blazer_usb one. So here is my nut setup on Squeeze:nut.conf:

MODE=standalone
UPSD_OPTIONS=""
UPSMON_OPTIONS=""

ups.conf:

[powermust]
    driver = blazer_usb
    port = schrank
    vendorid = 0665
    productid = 5161
    desc = "Mustek PowerMust 1000"

Yes, port has to be set, but can be any random string.upsd.conf:

ACL all 0.0.0.0/0
ACL localhost 127.0.0.1/32
ACCEPT localhost
REJECT all

upsmon.conf:

RUN_AS_USER nut
MONITOR powermust@localhost 1 nut nut master
MINSUPPLIES 1
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"
POLLFREQ 5
POLLFREQALERT 5
HOSTSYNC 15
DEADTIME 15
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
RBWARNTIME 43200
NOCOMMWARNTIME 300
FINALDELAY 5

upssched.conf:

CMDSCRIPT /upssched-cmd

I hope this helps someone ;)

(The requisite "I have no time any more, it's 10 days late") It certainly feels like 3 months has passed since I last reflected on her development. It feels like forever. As usual, we've managed to do a fair bit in 3 months. She's doing very well. Growing nicely. Still around the 25th percentile for weight, but now up to the 50th percentile for height. We just had to upgrade her from an infant car seat to a "big kid" car seat, because she was maxing it out on height, not weight. She seems to have handled the transition okay, but we haven't done any long car trips since making the change. She's now sitting really well, and pulling herself up into a standing position. She's cruising around on furniture a bit (and sporting various bruises to show for it). She started crawling at six and a half months, and now there's no stopping her. She's into everything. No more teeth have appeared yet. Her top teeth have been looking like they want to do something for ages. I think, given a recent uptick in fussiness, their appearance may be imminent. On the food front, she's eating all sorts of things. We've got a few infant/toddler cookbooks, so we still are predominantly feeding her either a combination of pureed fruits and vegetables, or a few pureed dishes that I've prepared (mainly vegetable stews or risotto). She also enjoys bread, toast and has taken to Vegemite on toast, like a good little Aussie. The other night we ate out at our local Italian restaurant, and she had some garlic bread and some penne pasta with marinara sauce. She's definitely enjoying finger food. We went back to Australia for a couple of weeks recently, and she handled the flights extremely well, and had an absolute ball back in Australia. She'd just started sleeping through the night a few times before we left for the trip, and didn't sleep as well while we were in Australia, but got back into the swing of things in under a week of getting back to the US. She's so much fun at this age. She laughs, she plays. She gets so excited when I get home from work in the evenings. I love her and being a Dad so much.