Honya budo is the martial arts skill of visiting a bookstore without buying a book. It is an arcane art, practiced by secret masters in obscure parts of the world for several centuries. During the 20th century, when literacy went up in the western world, and people from every social strata started frequenting shops selling books, this venerable art has begun to rise in popularity. The first level of honya budo is the "Way of the In-Out". It consists of going into a bookstore, looking around to see that they do indeed have many books for sale, inhaling the intoxicating smell of new books, and then immediately leaving the premises. This way, a novice learns to use the door and gains the right to use a plain white bookmark. The second level of honya budo is the "The Feeling of the Touch". This consists of the novice doing the "Way of the In-Out", but before leaving, actually taking a book off a shelf, opening it, caressing it with gentle hands, feeling the texture of the spine, and enjoying the exquisite sensual smoothness of the paper. When the novice can do this, and put the book back on the shelf and leave the store without buying anything, the novice has achieved enlightenment of the second level and becomes an apprentice, and gains the right to use a colored paper bookmark. The third level of honya budo is the "Path of the Randomly Hopping Rabbit". The apprentice enters the book selling establishment, visits every department therein, and looks for a book they have previously shown a special desire to have, which may not have been published. When they can't find it, they then speak to a salesperson, inquiring about the book. When the apprentice can do this and leave the establishment, without making the salesperson annoyed, and without buying anything, they have achieved enlightment of the third level and become an adept, and gain the right to use a leather bookmark. The fourth level of honya budo is the "Stretched Leg of the Giraffe". The adept visits a bookstore with another adept, and spends an afternoon there, wandering from book case to book case, taking out books and discussing them with each other, commenting on their good and bad points, and recommending especially good books to each other. When an adept can recommend a book that the other will happily buy, but they themselves do not buy anything, then they achieve enlightenment of the fourth level and become a master, and gain the right to use a bookmark signed by the author of a book. The fifth level of honya budo is the "Flight of the Serpent". When the master can visit a bookstore, and get given books for free, they have achieved enlightenment of the fifth level and become a supreme grand master, and can use any kind of bookmark they wish.

The recent goal for Haskell' has been to actually start committing modifications to the Haskell98 report. Well, as mentioned on the mailing list, we've started making changes relating to Pattern Guards. The current draft of the Haskell' report will be auto-generated whenever someone submits a patch. Thanks for setting up the build system, Malcolm! Haskell' ("Haskell Prime") is the working name of the next Haskell language standard. Haskell is the best programming language in the world.

I will take part in a round table on Women and Technology at the Free Software World Conference 3.0, on the 9th of February, at Badajoz. If you intend to attend, register now!


I will then attend FOSDEM at the end of February and will then take a week off in the biggest port in northern Germany, I think that s Hamburg, to get away from the stress of Madrid and to hopefully get a taste of a decent winter Schei wetter.

In April, I will attend DudesConf (formerly known as Debconf-es) in A Coru a.



And in June... Debconf7 in Edinburgh! That s the most important event in the whole year for me. I will get there on the 8th of June and leave on the 24th.

I expect some resistance at work, yes, this job I am both so paranoid about loosing and at the same time not worried about anymore, but it would not be the first time I am fired because of attending a Free Software event that meant a lot to me, Debconf4 in Porto Alegre, to be more specific, and I am not scared. I will survive. I have lost jobs before, and I have had much better and much worse jobs. A job is a job is a job is a job.

At this moment of my life, mentally troubled and physically ill, I am still painfully aware of my priorities, specially (the small amount of) stuff that I am doing to at least try to change a world that disgusts me in so many ways. Happily trying to change this world, for the ones to come, including the kids of the people that have fired me (or will ever fire me) because of it.

And, for a change, I feel my family backing me up, fully supporting me in my quijotada, which makes me the strongest and most determined person you have ever met.
Be very, very afraid ;)

Prompted by a friend who finds a dialup internet connection about as appetising as being food for mosquitoes, I thought I'd share some tips for using the current internet on dialup. It's easy to say that dialup is dead, but I've transitioned from dialup to broadband and back something like 4 times so far, and since I don't want to rule out spending time in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica, or at McMurdo, or in an RV, or in a Bigelo orbital hotel, amoung other dream destinations, I don't let availability of bandwidth deter me. Here's some habits you can learn to lessen the pain: work local This is the most important thing. ssh is great, but latency sucks. If you need to edit a file on a remote system, edit it locally, and copy it across. Since I keep most of my files in subversion, I edit it locally, commit it, and update on the remote machine. If ssh isn't appropriate, use rsync or something. Editing files is just one example; I try to avoid doing anything on a remote machine if I can do it locally. For example, even though an irc client in screen on a remote machine is a nice setup, it's to be avoided on dialup. Another example is using offlineimap to download your mail, so you can read it locally. Yet another example: I have all my projects scripted so I can make a complete release with just single locally ran command, that goes off and automatically triggers everything that needs to happen on the server. Same for blogging, and for making changes to my wikis. cache everything This is an obvious one, but worth mentioning. The most important cache is probably actually a caching dns server. Dns lookups are an easily missed slowdown (true even for many cable/dsl connections). Other useful caches include a squid web cache, and a shared apt cache. Also get in the habit of squirelling files away, instead of deleting them, to avoid re-downloads. know your traffic Look at everything that causes internet traffic, and turn off the fluff. Even the small fluff will make a difference on dialup. This includes turning off VPNs, not keeping chat programs running in the background. If you're not currently using irc, close it. Use a remote irc proxy server to cache messages while you're away, to avoid missing anything. Avoid sitting on web pages that refresh or stream content. Keep iftop running all the time, and know what all the sources of traffic on it are. You can easily waste 25% of a dialup pipe with fluff if you don't keep it under control. downloads are batch jobs Learn to treat downloads (and uploads) as batch jobs that go on in the background or overnight. Don't let your work be blocked waiting on a download if at all possible; don't sit staring at the screen every time a five minute download pops up; go do something else instead. When possible, try to anticipate what you'll need and download it the night before. Set up a remote download queue, of things you want to download at some point, sorted by priority, and rsync from it as a batch job overnight or when you don't need bandwidth for anything else. If you upload a lot of stuff, set up an upload queue too. don't try to do everything on dialup Some things are just not appropriate for dialup. There's no point in trying to download CD images, or much music, or apt-get dist-upgrade, or watch the latest videos on YouTube, or whatever. Even things like Google Maps are just not designed for dialup; the one square you want to see is always the one that will fail to download while the other 8 squares slooowly download in parallell. And AJAX sucks. So avoid this stuff on dialup, don't frustrate yourself. Schedule pit stops where there's high bandwidth to do this kind of thing. Find alternatives you can use while on dialup -- use old fashioned mapping services, and instead of pursuing the latest and greatest videos, download an e-book -- a whole book downloaded in just 5 minutes -- who said this dialup was slow?

Firstly for smooth running of the presentations it would be ideal if laptops were provided for displaying all presentations (obviously this wouldn't work for live software demos but it would work well for the slide-show
presentations). Such laptops need to be tested with the presentation files that will be used for the talks (or pre-release versions that are produced in the same formats). It's a common problem that the laptops owned by the speakers will have problems connecting to the projectors used at the conference which can waste time and give a low quality display. Another common problem is that laptops owned by the conference often have different versions of the software used for the slides which renders them differently, the classic example of this is OpenOffice 1.x and 2.x which render presentations differently such that using the wrong one results in some text being off-screen.

The easy solution to this is for the conference organizers to provide laptops that have multiple boot options for different distributions. Any laptop manufactured in the last 8 years will have enough disk space for the
latest release of Debian and the last few Fedora releases. As such machines won't be on a public network there's no need to apply security updates and therefore a machine can be used at conferences in successive years, a 400MHz laptop with 384M of RAM is quite adequate for this purpose while also being so small that it will sell cheaply.

A slightly better solution would be to have laptops running Xen. It's not difficult to set up Xephyr in fullscreen mode to connect to a Xen image, you could have several Xen instances running with NFS file sharing so that the speaker could quickly test out several distributions to determine which one gives the best display of their notes. This would also allow speakers to bring their own Xen images.

This is especially important if you want to run lightning talks, when there is only 5 minutes allocated for a talk you can't afford to waste 2 minutes in setting up a presentation!

In other news Dean Wilson gave my talk yesterday a positive review.

I have several servers around the Internet, and one of my need is to have VPN between them to access various data and services, like SNMP or NFS. I used to build VPN with OpenVPN between some of them. My main problem was that I had to set up IP interfaces at each end, build multiple tunnels or make some routing, and... that was not what I wanted, too complicated. I took a deeper look in OpenVPN and found a solution: I created a FLAN No, not a cake, a Faked LAN! This is so easy and powerful that I beat myself to not have though about that before. I did it with 3 servers for now, this is how it works: on each server I create an interface named if-remote hostname which is a tap (Ethernet) interfaces connected to the remote host. On server1, I have two interfaces, if-server2 and if-server3 which are like direct wired connection to the remote host, and I can do Ethernet on them. When each server has its link up, I create an Ethernet bridge. In this bridge, I put the two interfaces connected to the remote servers. This finally build something like that for each server:

server1 -- eth0
  \ 
 if-bridge 192.168.4.88
    \  \_ if-server2 -- VPN -- if-server1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.89 -- server2
     \_ if-server3 -- VPN -- if-server-1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.90 -- server3

Obviously, you will have a loop in your faked Ethernet LAN, so you'll have to active STP in order to have a working LAN. And it works. The main advantage with this solution is that each server has only one IP on this virtual network, and there's no connection problem if one of your host is down: STP will rebuild the network in a transparent way. The main problem is that you may have to set up a lot of link if you want a full redundancy. I think I'll setup only two links between each server, because it maybe too painfull otherwise. You can also do some optimization if you need, because the current bridge implementation in Linux is so powerful that you can put cost on interfaces for your bridge, or define which bridge should be the root of your tree. Have fun!

I have returned from my travels (see yesterday s post, in Germany only, sorry) and will continue to work at the Kofi Annan Center this week before I return to Germany on the weekend. I must have made a relatively good impression here, as now the director, Dorothy Gordon, is looking for another interested geek that would be interested to come to Ghana for 6 to 12 month and help with the development of Free Software here. Not much is fixed yet, so you can propose your own project ideas, if you have one. Also, the issue of funding is open, as the centre s resources are limited. If any corporate sponsors would be willing to help, please stand up If you are interested, please send me an e-mail and I will give you the director s contact to discuss the idea.

It's all about motivation and at the moment I'm not really motivated to seriously blog about my time at LCA, I'm simply too exhausted.

My talks about the debian-edu and live-package yesterday went well, it's just a pity the microphone died during the live-package talk, so that there won't be a video from it, as video without audio is quite useless :)

The only useful thing I could think of today, was to start to collect the slides of all talks I have been given (and will be giving) in a central location on my server, so you can easily find them. Currently only the LCA and FOMS slides are there, I will add the rest, when I'm ready ;-) That's also when I'll finish my report about the FOMS conference :-/

I guess I need a nap.

Lately I keep seeing people talking about a "crisis" in the ruby community due to the fact that rubinius, jruby, and YARV are all being written. There seems to be some subtle hand-wringing under the covers about divergence between these implementations. The ruby language is in pretty solid form, with a few little problems that should be cleaned up for the 2.0 release, so I don't think it's very likely that any divergence will be particularly damaging.

More importantly though, I think it's a sign that ruby is alive and well, given that there's three different projects that are working to provide an improved implementation for a language that was largely ignored until two or three years ago. Plus the benchmarks for YARV (which was just merged to the ruby trunk) look pretty hot.

Unfortunately for the doomsayers, most of what I've heard and read from the actual ruby community about all three of these projects has been a giant ball of excitement. I think it's really sweet that we'll have ruby running on the JVM, on a sexy Smalltalk style VM, and also a significantly sped up classic interpreter. Now all I want for Christmas is more time to actually write the rails site that's been pounding away inside my head like Athena.

Some latex-beamer tips Using with source-highlight source-highlight's latexcolor output uses colors that are not available in latex-beamer. Normally one would have to include them with \usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames] color , but under latex-beamer it does not work. One solution is to include the relevant colours from /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/graphics/dvipsnam.def:

%% For source-highlight's output
% This unfortunately does not work
%\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames] color 
% Therefore, I will copy them from /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/graphics/dvipsnam.def
\DefineNamedColor named Blue            cmyk 1,1,0,0 
\DefineNamedColor named BrickRed        cmyk 0,0.89,0.94,0.28 
\DefineNamedColor named Brown           cmyk 0,0.81,1,0.60 
\DefineNamedColor named ForestGreen     cmyk 0.91,0,0.88,0.12 
\DefineNamedColor named Purple          cmyk 0.45,0.86,0,0 
\DefineNamedColor named Red             cmyk 0,1,1,0 
\DefineNamedColor named Black           cmyk 0,0,0,1 
\DefineNamedColor named RoyalBlue       cmyk 1,0.50,0,0 

After this is done, including a source is just a matter of:

# In the shell
$ source-highlight -f latexcolor filename.ext
# In the latex-beamer frame
\input filename.ext.tex 

Proportional columns In the latex-beamer documentation I have only seen columns with fixed sizes. \textwidth luckily works:

\begin frame 
  \frametitle Correzione dei compiti 
  \framesubtitle Il programmino da Fortran. 
  \begin columns 
  \column .5\textwidth 
   \tiny
  \input fortran/01-inizio.f77.tex 
   
  \column .5\textwidth 
   \tiny
  \input fortran/02-inizio.py.tex 
   
  \end columns 
\end frame 

When I was home for christmas there was also a class reunion. As it is with such occasions I had to give out my email address a number of times. Now, when I chose my domain I decided to use my online nick (alphascorpii) since it was adequately unique to be still available and could easily be associated with me. However, my nick is almost only used in writing and thus mostly copy-pasted or entered using tab-completion. Those who do use it in real life too know how it's spelled (or at least pronounced). At the reunion though I had to spell it out for a few people and the 'ph' and even more the 'ii' often caused confusion. As a result of this, alphascorpii.net can now also be reached via a10i.net! I hope this will simplify things for those who are not familiar with Alpha Scorpii.

Gordon Haff: “Imagine, if you will, that it s the late Nineties. A certain software company based in Redmond, Washington has recently released Visual Studio 97 thereby bundling together many of its development tools for the first time. Now imagine that the company decided to release those tools for free. What do you think the general reaction would have been? Applause for Microsoft s generosity? Or widespread condemnation for using its market power to make such a transparently anti-competitive attack on other makers of development tools?” Thought provoking observations. Note, however, that “open source as competitive weapon” isn’t limited to large vendors—it works equally well (and, in many ways, better) for the upstarts (see Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc.). In fact, it works so well for the upstarts that even the upstarts have upstarts (see, e.g., Canonical). Can something that levels the playing field so dramatically be called predatory? Predatory has one-sided, unfair advantage connotations. In open source, it goes both ways. With Eclipse, it was IBM doing the disrupting; but with MySQL and JBoss, IBM is on the other end of it. At the end of the day, the real winner is all of us—after all, who can argue that the state of IDEs and middleware isn’t better today than it’s ever been?

This afternoon I gave a talk at the Debian mini-conf of LCA on security improvements that are needed in Debian, the notes are online here.

The talk didn't go quite as well as I had desired, I ended up covering most of the material in about half the allotted time and I could tell that the talk was too technical for many audience members (perhaps 1/4 of the audience lost interest). But the people who were interested asked good questions (and used the remainder of the time). Some of the people who are involved in serious Debian coding were interested (and I'll file a bug report based on information from one of them after making this post).

I believe that I was quite successful in my main aim of giving Debian developers ideas for improving the security of Debian. My second aim of educating the users about options that are available now (with some inconvenience) and will be available shortly in a more convenient form was partially successful.

The main content of my talk was based on the lightning talk I gave for OSDC, but was more detailed.

After my talk I spoke to Crispin Cowan from Novell about some of these issues. He agrees with me about the need for more capabilities which I take as a very positive sign.

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.XTech 2007, of which I'm chair, is progressing well. We've had a large number of submissions and the review process is proceeding apace. Speakers will be notified on February 2nd, and we hope to publish the schedule very soon after. Now's the time to think about joining us in Paris, May 15-18th.
The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, aka ETech 2007, for which I'm a member of the program committee, is now open for registration. Be in San Diego this March to connect with the brightest cultivators of tomorrow's tech.Also from O'Reilly, the 2007 Open Source Convention is now open for proposals. OSCON needs no introduction from me, I'm sure. I've been on the program committee for some years now, brooding over Linux, XML and other topics. Deadline for proposal submission is February 5th.

iPhone news So, looking around at what's happening in the media we seem to be getting a fair few non-overly impressive insights in to the iPhone (not least of all the fact that Apple haven't secured the name, and that Linksys have had the iPhone name for a while now - see http://www.linksys.com/iphone/ for the real iPhone, the one that does exist, the one that's already in the market place...) So, back to Apple, people (being people, and therefore incredibably fallable ;) have created iPhone themes for current mobiles, and they're being hunted down by Apple's lawyers, that can't be good publicity, surely? I thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery... tut, bad evil corporate giant! According to Matthew Lynn on Bloomberg's opinion pages, """To its many fans, Apple is more of a religious cult than a company. An iToaster that downloads music while toasting bread would probably get the same kind of worldwide attention.""", which seems about true to me - the rest of the article is worth reading, gives more insite in to why he thinks it will fail, and is quite an interesting article. Health There's a story in the Guardian about Low cholesterol levels linked with higher risk of Parkinson's disease - so we'll continue the Monday trip to the Cafe then, and have us a nice lunch of bacon and eggs, in the name of health, obviously. From NewScientist, we get the news that being bilingual delays the onset of dementia, so maybe it's time I got round to learning a language that isn't English... I wonder if knowing a reasonable number of programming languages and their syntax works... Someone should do a study in to that. Random Tech And just for more fun, lets just have a bunch of interesting links Miniature jet engines could power cellphones, Silicon 'Lego bricks' used to build 3D chips, Gravity gets a quantum boost. And that's that... So, we'll end that there, tonight is, as with every Monday, the pub quiz over in the Hop Poles in Brighton. Should be very silly, and fun.

I’ve been experimenting with usplash for some weeks, and it seems quite powerful. I decided to try with the latest version of the program (0.4), from Ubuntu’s repositories, which doesn’t seem to be backwards-compatible with the one that is currently in Debian (that is, 0.3e). The main idea of a theme in usplash seems to be embedding all the needed information into a shared object, including the images and the fonts, and coding the themes in plain C. This, which might seem terribly scary for non-coders, gives a lot of freedom for creating new effects in a certain theme, which is something I want to experiment. The low-level graphical fuctions use bogl (Ben’s Own Graphics Library) and svgalib for showing, and the rest of the code is built above them. Even though I like the overall design of the project, it doesn’t really suits my needs for what I want to try. I need to implement more low-level functions for certain effects, and I’m also considering doing some changes to optimize memory used. Right now I’m doing the graphical effects in a pixmap and, right at the end, dumping that pixmap onto the real screen, which makes me adapt what I want to the canonical code of usplash, but I guess at some point I might need to make deeper changes in the code, and I might need to change the insides of usplash.
I don’t know if something useful can come out of this, or if the results will be only aesthetic, but I’ll put my code available somewhere as soon as it is ready for inspection, so I can get some comments on it. As always, ideas are welcome.

Every project has its story. Every war has its winner, and its casualties. They were 20 millions men, fighting for their freedom. And you'll never know their story. Because during last week, I was looking why my Web server was so heavily loaded. And I discovered that my blog was attacked by spammers trying to post comments. They were stopped by a great plug-in named spamplemousse, which use spam keywords and DNSBL to drop spam comments.
However, this plug-in is written in PHP, like the rest of my blog, so it loads Apache and MySQL in a way that is no more acceptable: the page have still to be rendered for this !@#$ spammers. Consequently, I decided to write a Apache 2.x module which will just drop a 403 Forbidden error page in the spammers' head using DNSBL servers. Here it is, and it is called mod_defensible. I'm using it since 3 days now, and I got some pretty interesting result and less load on my Web server, so c'est tout bon^[1].

Stefano Zacchiroli said:

To balance this, according to my first read of Ruby’s threading capability, it’s my impression that not only at most one thread can execute Ruby code at a time (limitation shared by OCaml, due to the non-distributed nature of mark and sweep garbage collectors), but also a thread blocked on a syscall will block all other threads to run. Dumb Ruby threads (but I still hope I’m wrong …)

This is not totally true:

• Yes, Ruby threads are user-level: you won’t get speedup from dual-cores or dual-processors system. In python, this presentation claims (slide 39) that python threads are mapped to native threads, but that a giant lock always prevents the execution of more than one thread at a time (so library writers don’t have to write thread-safe code).
• The ruby interpreter tries very hard to map blocking syscalls to their non-blocking counterparts (for example, all I/Os are passed to a select() call). This gets really dirty when you mix I/O and other syscalls. For example, see the strace output the following Ruby code:

  require ‘thread’
  th1 = Thread::new do
    pid = fork   sleep 2  
    Process::waitpid(pid)
    puts “Finished.”
  end
  th2 = Thread::new do
    f = STDIN.read
    puts “Finished2.”
  end
  th1.join
  

  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 349 )        = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 478832 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG)     = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 479013 , NULL) = 0
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 479053 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 59959 )      = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 538971 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 41 )         = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543017 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG)     = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543200 , NULL) = 0
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543240 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 59959 )      = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 602842 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 357 )        = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 606842 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)

Sometime this month, debootstrap turns six years old. I was thinking about this last night as I tweaked a new xen instance that the hosting provider had installed Debian on using debootstrap, while in the other window using a debootstraped system to investigate a weird apt premissions problem. All very standard, and between this kind of thing, installing Debian with d-i, and building packages with pbuilder, a lot of us would be lost without debootstrap now. The story of exactly how it came about is interesting, though it's blurred by time in my memory. Maybe AJ will correct me, but I think it went something like this:

• Aeons ago, every Debian system was bootstrapped using a root filesystem tarball, which was built using the basedisks.sh script in the boot-floppies source. That ugly thing hardcoded a bootstrap sequence that managed to work most of the time, and had a lot of code to work around issues in various packages in bae. IIRC it needed a local mirror, and lots of babysitting to keep it working.
• When I suggested that boot-floppies be rewritten, and modularised, I'm fairly sure that I pointed to basedisks.sh as one thing that would make a useful standlone module, but I can't find proof of that.
• In late 2000, AJ posted to a thread about one of the first d-i demo systems with something he was calling "base-deb", that is a recognisable prototype of debootstrap. It downloaded debs from a mirror and built a chroot on the fly.
• After some back and forth over the next couple weeks regarding how it would work with d-i, AJ released the first version of debootstrap on January 30th.
• It's sorta hard to believe now, but there was a lot of push-back on the idea of bootstrapping Debian on the fly, rather than using the old tarball. Much of it was inertia; some of it was legitimate concerns about whether it would work robustly. IIRC these concerns kept coming up right through the release of woody in 2002, the first version of Debian to install using debootstrap. In fact, woody still included a basedebs.tar, although it was built using debootstrap.
• While various rough edges were filed off over the years, there were no really big changes after that to debootstrap until 2005 then debootstrap finally got smart enough to resolve dependencies, rather than using the hardcoded lists of what packages to install in what order, that it had inherited from the boot-floppies.

Debootstrap is one of my favorite examples of a tool that ends up being much more general purpose than was first envisioned (at least by me; AJ may have known all along). The collection of stuff that has grown up around it and the way it's changed how both Debian developers and users work is pretty impressive.

After two weeks of being operational, Stuff To Do has been a big success at work, because it lets people keep track of what they're doing with a minimum of hassle. Truth be told, I've never been that wild about "productivity" software, but I'm pretty happy with the system I've created. I really have attempted to make something that stays out of your way as much as possible. That has involved making some choices - for instance, instead of buttons to start or stop time tracking for a given task, Stuff To Do [aside: it would be much faster to write 'STD', but I think that might not be such a good idea in terms of marketing] uses some javascript to see if you've moused over (or blurred, or typed, or done anything, basically) to the window where it lives in the last 15 minutes. This will certainly reduce the accuracy a little bit, and if you get 'in the zone' and don't hit the browser for a while, it won't count your time, but all things considered, this is better than having to hit a stupid button every time you do anything, because you will invariably forget to hit the button, and leave it going overnight, and then have to go back and manually edit everything, and.... yuck. I also have some ideas about how to further improve the javascript in order to make it even easier to track whether you're active or not (with your consent, of course!). In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

• You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
• The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

• Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
• "Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

In the process, I also happened upon Active Merchant, which is some cool code by the fine folks at jadedpixel.com, which was quite handy for integrating Paypal. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I found a few things that I wanted to do just slightly differently, and sent in a patch.