I haven't blogged since last year :-D so a "Happy New Year!" is required.

So what happened meanwhile? Quite a few things, both good and bad.

• 15th-16th of December: severe teeth pain, and since it was weekend, I couldn't see a dentist
• 17th of December: I got a dentist appointment and got rid of the pain; more sessions planned
• 18th of December
• around 17 o'clock: I start feeling back pains;
  
• around 19 o'clock: takes me 20 minutes to walk from the office to the subway station, 15 minutes more than it usually takes; I postpone the second dentist appointment because of the back pains;
• later that evening: I end up calling the emergency service because the back pain became unbearable; they arrived about 2 hours later; after some basic treatment I was able to sleep
• 19th of December:
  
• I had the rescheduled dentist appointment scheduled at 9 o'clock; the back pain became so bad that I couldn't sit on the dentist chair; I had to postpone again the appointment
  
• later that day: I had to call in sick, the back pain was back; I spent all day indoors and just tried to rest
  
• 20th of December:
  
• my father and my fiancee came and took me home;
• while on the road the people from emag called me to tell me the laptop is fixed - sadly, about two hours too late
  
• I went to the doctors' and got the papers for the sick leave; until the end of that week I was to feel better, but not great.
• Christmas' Eve and Christmas:
• although planned to be spent at my sister's, we had to stay home since I wasn't feeling well enough for a 50km drive
• nice gifts were exchanged; even the hardest ones to please were pleased
• my sister, my brother in law, my nephew and my niece came to Caracal; it was nice to see Andu (my nephew) literally jump in my arms out of sheer joy (in spite of the back pain, I was glad); Denisa was so cute telling "Tica, Tica"[1] to Santa, especially since, at her stage of verbal development, using verbs seems to be optional :-)
  
• New Year's Eve and 1st of January:
• spent (finally, as planned) in Craiova, with my sister, my brother in law and some of their friends
• was nice to see again my nephew and my niece
• on the 1st: drove back to Caracal on a really bad road due to the heavy snow fall during the morning of that day;
  
• 2nd of January:
• heavy snow falls; a layer of snow of approximately 50cm covers everything
• the area where a neighbour shoveled the snow the previous evening seems to be leveled with the rest

Maybe at a future point in time I'll post a picture or two with my nephews.

To all the people, thanks for the support and, once again, Happy New Year!

[1] a simple poem for kids

... looking at your computer clock which reads "Jan 1" you think the clock has been mistakenly reset, or the battery is gone.

* ST:TNG Season 5 Episode 5 "Disaster" was just awesome. One day we'll even catch up on modern shows. Probably about the time when Angie's favourite game stops being Nethack, though.

* Leif is now 73cm tall.

* I should update my profile photo.

* I love how a last minute flight during high season from Vancouver to San Francisco is less than $300CAD.

* I'm sorry I haven't replied to emails and LJ comments from folks. I've been trying to actually stay *off* the computer over the winter break.

I've been asked by a few people how we're celebrating NYE now that we have a baby. Angie put it best:

"Leif's asleep! Quick! Let's... Sleep!"

I've had a blessed 2007. So far 2008 is looking pretty good. =) I do resolutions in July rather than January. I don't think anyone should try to start something new in the coldest part of the year. That's the time for sitting inside and eating cookies. Not that it's anything resembling cold here...

Hugs, my friends.

Thursday evening, I joined the inhabitants of the twin town of Valga-Valka, sitting smack on the Estonian-Latvian border, to celebrate their entry into the Schengen treaty. Ever since I first crossed the border there on a roadtrip from Tallinn to Fallingbostel, in year 2001, I knew I would have to return and, sure enough, I briefly passed through during last summer with an Estonian friend, on our way to an acquaintance's birthday party. Still, that told me nothing of the town's life and left me wanting for more. Upon hearing that year 2004 EU accession countries would join Schengen in December 2007, I immediately promised myself to show up and join the crowd. As it turns out, I missed Aleks Tapin of the All About Latvia blog by very little, having I caught his last-minute e-mail the next afternoon. Aleks blogged a great article depicting the Latvian side of life and providing some background info on the town, if you're curious. I arrived late-evening on Thursday via the Tallinn-Viljandi-Valga bus and checked into my hotel, then proceeded to checkpoint Valga II around 23:30, with the intention of grabbing a drink on the Latvian side and returning just before midnight for the celebrations. Hardly anyone was in sight, except for Latvian officer abana who was completing the inspection of a Russian car with three noisy passengers. Upon presenting her with my passport, officer abana cheerfully lead me to the office and slid my passport through a slot to officer Bukss, who was visibly surprised to have any tourist show up on the last day of his job to get their passport stamped. Upon explaining to him the reasons for my presence, he pointed me to a nearby bar where I could have a drink, visibly amused by the situation. I spent the next few minutes in a local casino in the company of three hilarious Latvian truck drivers, Zintars and Aivars, two Latvians with limited English language skills and Yuri, an ethnic Russian living in Ireland who was born stateless on the Latvian side of the town and who later acquired Estonian citizenship by claiming ancestral land on the Estonian side. Upon returning to the border, just minutes before midnight, I found myself in the middle of a huge crowd of villagers, police officers, border guards and politicians from both countries - barely getting noticed by anyone. I handed my passport to an Estonian border guard who emotionally commented to a civilian friend of his nearby that, "Wow! That was the last one!", handing me my passport back just as the midnight bells rang and the mayor of the Estonian side started his speech amidst pyrotechnics lining the road. I then had a chance to chat with the Estonian mayor, who promptly handed me a bilingual certificate, signed by the mayors of both towns, attesting that I was the first to cross the open border, while introducing me to his two young daughters with whom he was about to take a stroll on the Latvian side. The next morning, an even bigger and more symbolic event took place: the demolition of the fence that had been cutting the S prus/Rai a street in half. You can see a picture of what the street looked like before on Aleks' blog article [edit: or on Jens-Olaf's blog article]. After the fence was removed, it instead looked like this: The crowd then proceeded to checkpoint Valga III, where a stage had been setup for the politicians to make their speeches. An interesting fact is that, because of the way the border was drawn, along a creek leading to Pedeli river, an Estonian main road was technically on the Latvian border and thus aptly named "Raja" (border) street. The Estonian mayor commented in his speech that the the brand new supermarket standing behind us was also technically on borderland and could not have possibly been built earlier, weren't it for the Schengen treaty matter-of-factedly eliminating borders between participating EU countries. The speeches were closed by a youth group whose choreography featured six break-dancing boys, dressed as Estonian and Latvian border guards and as border posts. The choreography ended with the teenage border guards carrying away the human posts on their shoulders, just as a choir of young girls replaced them with songs in either languages. Before catching my bus back to Tallinn, I dropped by the Valga tourist info, only to face a nervous-looking Kapo officer in plain clothes. Upon mumbling something about the tourist info and wanting to grab maps, I noticed that a press conference was taking place behind. As he finally let me pass to the tourist info side of the building, a familiar voice said to me, "Hey! Weren't you at our place last summer with Martin Ranna?" Yup, the wife of the acquaintance whose birthday party I had attended last summer is working there and greeted with me refreshments and munchies she had cooked in prevision for the presidential visit! As was my luck, she had one of the commemorative plaques that had been given to the politicians at Valga III on hand: I was glad to see the town becoming one again, even though it is ethnically divided. There are already signs of people on both sides learning one another's languages and shopping on either side of town, not to mention plans of merging the municipal bus operations of the Estonian and Latvian halves of the town, so I'm sure that they'll get there in due course. For me, Schengen brought a much more practical and quite welcome change: the end of messy border crossing stamps that were rapidly filling my almost new passport, every time I visited the head office of our company in Tallinn. While Estonian border guards mostly stamp passports in an orderly fashion, being careful to fit exactly 8 stamps in a single page and to put entry and exit stamps side-by-side, Finnish border guards apparently are incapable of doing so, instead systematically wasting pages by either stamping sloppily in a way that makes it impossible for more than 4 stamps to appear on a given page or by flipping to a brand new page, every time I had to cross the border. In case anyone ever wondered why I'm currently representing Estonian interests abroad, despite living in Finland, this example is one of the many reasons: Finnish authorities routinely display arrogant carelessness towards the population and doubly so towards immigrants. It amounts to an accumulation of idiocy that has costly consequences on people's lives. For some, it's about being denied the public institutions' support when they need it the most and their life forever going downhill thereafter. For me, it has been about countless missed opportunities (jobs, love affairs, travel plans), plus very costly passport and residence permit renewals. Given this, I simply don't see myself ever representing Finnish interests ever again. Faith no more. Besides, the Estonians are fun and easy-going people. Siski ma m tlen, kas ma peaksen n d Eestisse kolima v i?

On January 15th, I'm going to be giving a talk on a panel at the Computing in the Cloud conference held by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference description says:

Computing in the cloud is one name for services that run in a Web browser and store information in a provider s data center ranging from adaptations of familiar tools such as email and personal finance to new offerings such as virtual worlds and social networks. This workshop will bring together experts from computer science, law, politics and industry to explore the social and policy implications of this trend.

I'm going to talk about the AGPL 3.0, why it's important that we put effort into figuring out what freedom for different technologies means, and what the components of freedom for web services might be. Registration is free and bags you a name-tag and lunch. Worth noting perhaps, the conference is sponsored by Microsoft.

I decided that my christmas gift will be a new notebook and as I'm always complaining of the weight of my HP dv6000 then my new notebook will be a ThinkPad x61 with a 8cell battery and extended battery life! :-) That gives up to 12 hours of use!! BTW, this version includes a weird antenna in the right side of the screen, I don't know if it's really useful but seems like if were from some movie and is outside of the borders but anyway, still little and light. Now only rests to wait until it gets to my hand since all the custom houses of Venezuela decided to not admit more packages from outside of the country because they're full, so I will have to wait until january probably because of the inefficiency of my country custom officials. But at least I'm gonna have it :-)!

We've got a CodeFest 2008 coming up in Montreal on 5-6 Jan 2008 in a few weeks. Should be a lot of fun: the main theme is going to be microformats implementation. Our previous codefest, on OpenID, was a big success, so I'm looking forward to this one. tags: codefest codefest2008 montreal microformats

Microsoftmats Best part about the announcement of the CodeFest was this set of tags: codefest, facil, microsoftmats, cms, groupware, mediawiki, tikiwiki, xo, .... Microsoftmats seems to be a typo, and a quick Google search for microsoftmats seems to show only typos, so I don't think this is a common nickname, but... ooh, it could be sooo snarky if used well. Especially given Tantek elik's former job. Too bad I like microformats so much. tags: microformats microsoftmats

We're heading back for the annual trip home. This time it's not really a holiday, it's just three weeks of running around like a headless chicken, catching up with friends and family. We're killing time at SFO at the moment waiting for our flight to board. There's much to be said for arriving at the airport ludicrously early. We had the shortest check in line I've ever seen for an international flight. Security was also ridiculously quick. It all adds up to a stress-free travelling experience. I'm working from the Sydney office for a week, and then taking two week's vacation. Sarah's sorting out her E-3D renewal while we're in Sydney, as she was unable to travel when I renewed mine in Dublin earlier in the year. After that I'm taking all of January off as unpaid time off, so I can look after Sarah after her heart surgery in January and just generally decompress. We got a good deal with Qantas. The package gives us three domestic flights within Australia, which works out perfectly to allow us to visit Canberra and Brisbane. I'm looking forward to seeing my family, as I haven't seen them since we lost Joshua, and I'm sure it's been as hard from them as it has been for me being so far apart from each other. It'll be good to have a cry together.

Yesterday, after a lot of time thinking on it, I uploaded all my perl packages to the pkg-perl's SVN, now I can dedicate a lot more of time to xscreensaver, gkrellm and libtorrent/rtorrent :-). I'm pretty sure that in january I will be able (with enough time) to work in some packages of the pkg-perl group.

My domains DNS is still hosted with the company I registered it at. I'm planning to move it to a different company early next year. So when a friend asked me for secondary nameserver exchange, I already set up the new DNS.So my current setup is like this:Primary and secondary nameserver are at my old provider, serving their copy of the DNS zone (which obviously lists their nameservers as NS)The A and MX records point to my server, which will sometime also be the new master NS. This host has an own copy of the zone file, which agrees on the 'regular' entries, but lists my server as well as the friends two servers as NS. This is the only link from the domain to the friends servers. Let me emphasize this: neither my server nor my friends servers are currently listed in the .tld database. Their NS entries still point to the old providers server. I'm planning to change that in January.Now my friend told me, that he had about 10 email delivery attempts to my domain in his logs, obviously coming from some spammers.WTF? In order to link my domain to his server, you'd need to

• find the official NS for my domain
• lookup my A or MX record (not the NS record!)
• use this record as new NS
• lookup an NS record, using my new NS
• use this NS record as MX

What is the reason to jump through all those hoops? Do many admins configure a secondary NS to be an unlisted, unprotected relay for incoming email?Is it common for secondary NS to receive random emails from spammers?

Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago Santiago Ruano Rinc n did surprisingly turn up as my AM. We started fast, but I got stuck at P&P part 1 with the License comparisons, cause actually I’m so busy at work and with my family, that I can’t concentrate enough late at night, when trying to work on the papers. For example the graphviz license is completely overwhelming me. My hope in the last time was some bigger timeslots at the weekends, but they got smashed by my family and/or work issues. I hope Santiago is not getting annoyed by me and I can find hopefully some free time on holidays or in the first weeks next year. Anyways … Christian Perrier started a review and translation process of ipplans debconf templates by the debian-i18n contributors. The templates was in really bad conditions, most of it was copied over from gallery2 and I did know that they wasn’t so good. Thanks for all your work, when the process is over I’m proud to include your really nice work. Two other packages got updates. php-suhosin got new upstream release after months which fixes the broken perdir/.htaccess support. Unfortunatly I missed the release (cause there is no announcement list and there was no watch file) unless Raphael Geissert did leave a note. I integrated the new VCS and homepage stuff also and formorer did fix some minor issues. So we can hopefully upload now (when it arrives testing) the first package to backport.org and sleep little bit better, when using PHP on stable.
nagios-plugins also got updated. Since Seanius seems really busy (like allways), nobody did really took care of the package. In October it got two CVE which was solved via NMU by the testing-security team, also two new upstream releases where available. So I droped the obsolete patches, integrated new once, did make the new shiny lintian a bit more happy, some minor fixes and queued the package to Seanius. ;)
You can expect both packages on backport.org soon. My other (comaintained) packages will get updated to latest policy and VCS/homepage guidelines in the near future. Actually I’ve to prioritize what to do with the left time slots. :/

… or something like that… I planned to write a short note about how to start with using git-svn so I can provide a pointer to some of my colleagues. It turned out that git has too many nice features that you should be aware of. Hopefully my notes (now being a reference for myself as well, thx to gebi for all the help and feedback) are useful anyway. If you think something (more or less essential, or at least something most of us should be aware of) is missing: please feel free to mention that in the comment section of my blog entry, thanks. Disclaimer: I’m still happy with mercurial for what I - and we at grml in general - use it: linear, but anyway distributed development. git on the other hand provides some really nice features. Rebasing and branching with git is really great - so non-linear development just works. As usual: use the right tool for the right job. git is a bit complicate to use. Not only but especially in the beginning. On the other hand I’m not such a big friend of subversion. If you wanthave to use subversion (Graz University of Technology for example provides a svn service to their students and employees) but prefer to work with git instead you should be aware of git-svn. git-svn gives you bidirectional operation between subversion and git. First of all make sure you have all you might need when working with git. Make sure to use a current version of git (I’m refering to version >=1.5.3). Just execute the following command line on your Debian system to install all relevant packages:

aptitude install \
git-buildpackage git-core git-cvs git-daemon-run \
git-doc git-email git-gui git-load-dirs git-svn \
gitk gitweb qgit

Now let’s start with some general and basic configuration:

# Remove directories from the SVN tree if there
# are no files left behind, configure it globaly:
git config --global svn.rmdir=true
# Want some more global, personal git configuration?
for line in  
  user.name=Michael Prokop 
  user.email=foo@example.invalid 
  color.diff=auto 
  color.diff.new=cyan 
  color.diff.old=magenta 
  color.diff.frag=yellow 
  color.diff.meta=green 
  color.diff.commit=normal 
do
  git config --global $line
done

Check out man git-config for much more details about configuration options. First tip: set ‘g’ as an alias for git so you don’t have to type that much. I’ll write the long version in the following examples so copy/paste works for everyone. Make sure to use the short options of git itself as well: use ‘git co’ for example instead of ‘git checkout’. You can define your own aliases inside git as well - either manually in ~/.gitconfig or running something like:

git config --global alias.st status

Enough pre-configuration for now. It’s time to checkout the SVN repository:

# Check out the SVN repository and set 'svn/' as
# prefix for the branches:
git svn clone -s --prefix=svn/ \
https://svn.tugraz.at/svn/$project foobar && 
cd foobar
# Adjust svn:ignore settings within git:
git svn show-ignore >> .git/info/exclude
# List all branches:
git branch -a
# List all remote branches:
git branch -r
# Rebase your local changes against the
# latest changes in SVN (kind of 'svn up'):
git svn rebase
# Checkout a specific branch:
git checkout $branch

Ok so far? But what do we have to do if we want to work on the upstream source and are allowed to commit/push directly to the repository? Let’s see how to work on that without using branches:

# Hack:
$EDITOR foobar
# Check status
git st[atus]
# List diff:
git diff [foobar]
# Commit it with a commit message using $EDITOR:
git commit -a
# Now commit your changes (that were committed
# previously using git) to SVN, as well as
# automatically updating your working HEAD:
git svn dcommit

But what should we do if we do not have commit rights? Let’s create our own branch and send a patch via mail to upstream:

# Make a new branch:
git checkout -b mikas_demo_patch
# and hack...
$EDITOR
# Commit all changes:
git ci -a -m 'Best patch but worst commit msg ever'
# ... and prepare patch[es]:
git format-patch -s -p -n master
# Now send mail(s) either use git-send-email:
git send-email --to foo@example.invalid *.patch
# ... or if you prefer mutt instead (short zsh syntax):
for f in *.patch ; mutt -H $f

You got a mail from someone else and would like to incorporate changes from the attached patch in your repository? Just store the mail in a seperate mailbox (use save-message in mutt for example, keybinding ’s’ by default), then execute:

# Apply a [series of] patch[es] from a mailbox
git am /path/to/mailbox

Want to work on a seperate branch and rebase your work with upstream?

# First of all make sure to use recent sources...
# So pull when using plain git:
git pull -u
# .. or when using git-svn use:
git svn rebase
# Then create a new branch:
git checkout -b mika
# Hack:
$EDITOR
# Commit:
git ci -a -m 'Best patch but worst commit msg ever'
# Switch to master branch:
git checkout master
# Pull again when using plain git:
git pull -u
# .. or when using git-svn use:
git svn rebase
# Finally switch back
git checkout mika
# Now rebase it with plain git using:
git rebase origin/master
# ... or when using git-svn:
git svn rebase
# Now check out the last 5 commits:
git log -n5

Another branch-session might look like:

git co -b foo
$EDITOR
git ci -a -m 'foo changes'
git co master
git co -b bar
$EDITOR
git ci -a -m 'bar changes''
git co foo
git rebase bar
git log -n5
git st
git branch

Pfuhhh? Right. Now it’s time to check out another cool feature: git stash, which is just great when pulling into a dirty tree or when suffering from interrupted workflow. Demo:

git stash
git pull / fetch+rebase
$EDITOR # fix conflicts
git commit -a -m "Fix in a hurry"
git stash apply
git stash clear # unless you want to keep the stash

git reset rocks as well:

# List all recent actions:
git reflog
# Now undo the last action:
git reset --hard HEAD@ 0 

How to get rid of branches?

# Delete a branch. The branch must be fully merged:
git branch -d remove_me_branch
# Delete a branch irrespective of its index status:
git branch -D remove_me_branch
# Delete a remote branch:
git push reponame :branch

Repack a git repository to minimize its disk usage:

git pack-refs --prune
git reflog expire --all
git repack -a -d -f -l
git prune
git rerere gc

Use git cherry to find commits not merged upstream. Another really cool feature is the interactive rebasing: git rebase –interactive Make sure you are aware of gitk: … and don’t forget to set readable fonts for gitk, like:

[ -r ~/.gitk ]   cat > ~/.gitk << EOF
set mainfont  Arial 10 
set textfont   Courier 10 
set uifont  Arial 10 bold 
EOF

If you prefer a Qt based interface check out qgit. Useful ressources:

• Google Tech Talk about Git by Randal Schwartz
• Linus Torvalds’ talk about git (there’s a Transcript of the talk available as well)
• Public Git Hosting at repo.or.cz
• Git Cheat Sheet
• git workshop at metalab by maximilian attems (PDF) [local copy]
• git talk by Bart Trojanowski (PDF)
• An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters
• Git - SVN Crash Course
• A tour of git: the basics
• Everyday GIT With 20 Commands Or So
• A tutorial introduction to git
• Git User’s Manual
• Git Guide - SourceMage Wiki
• Git Quick Reference
• Kernel Hackers’ Guide to git
• GitFAQ
• madduck’s ‘Packaging with Git’ (Git for Debian packaging)
• git docs online (manual pages)
• #git on irc.freenode.net, #git irc logs
• archive of git mailing list
• GitWiki

As last Wednesday was the second anniversary of me joining Google, I thought it an opportune time to reflect on how I've found learning Python. It's no big secret that Google is a Python shop. I'd been meaning to learn it a for a while prior to joining Google, but never found enough reason to other than because it seemed to be the cool new language. If I had a task that required me to write a script, I could do it in Perl in 30 minutes, or spend a day trying to wrap my head around how to do it Python. I think I'd known and been writing Perl in some form or other for about 9 years. I've hardly written any in the last two, which is a bit sad. I even bought Perl Best Practices shortly after moving over here, and haven't gotten around to reading it. The only Perl I write these days is for personal tasks to try and stop myself from going totally rusty. Anyway, I thought I'd write down some of my observations of Python, from a "veteran" Perl programmer's perspective. Not that I consider myself to be a shit-hot Perl coder by any stretch of the imagination... No punctuation I really like the lack of punctuation. It makes the code look a lot cleaner. I go back to Perl and my eyes bleed after trying to dereference a reference to a scalar, or something like that. It's just ugly in Perl. No curly braces/indentation for blocks The indentation thing isn't so bad. If you're using vi, you really need something along the lines of

set shiftwidth=2
set smarttab
set autoindent
set expandtab

in your ~/.vimrc What I do miss is being able to bounce on the % key to find the beginning and ending of a block. I've heard rumours of a way to configure vi to do something similar for Python code, but I haven't gotten around to finding out. There seems to a general opinion that if you're writing a block that is so big you can't find the beginning and end of it, you're probably doing something wrong. String concatenation It's always struck me as bizarre how the most obvious way to concatenate a string in Python is also one of the least efficient. In fact, there's whole studies been done into different methods of string concatenation and their efficiencies. Prototyping is easy Now I may just be ignorant of some Perl shell here, but the number of times I've written a quick Perl script in /tmp to do some proof-of-concept thing is immeasurable. The fact that you can just fire up a Python interpreter and try something quick and dirty to see if it's syntactically sane, or does what you expect is fantastic time saver. ipython makes it an even more pleasant an experience. No CPAN I was initially a bit disappointed that there wasn't something like CPAN for Python modules. In practice, using Debian, I haven't found this to be that big a problem though. List joining is wacky I still find it weird that you don't join a list by a method of the list, you do it by a method of the string you want to use to join the list together with, that is, I think it should be mylist.join(" ") when it's really " ".join(mylist). That's just always struck me as unintuitive. urllib2 doesn't hold a candle to libwww-perl I think even last time I checked with Python 2.5, it's impossible to make a HEAD request. The mind boggles. No setuid support I can't complain too much, I think I heard somewhere it's going away in Perl as well, but it was certainly very convenient to be able to write setuid Perl scripts. I miss that convenience in Python. Not that one has to write setuid scripts all that often. Regular expression handling is painful It's about on a par with Java. You just can't beat Perl's =~ operator. "There's more than one way to do it" versus only one way to do it Perl's always had the adage of there being more than one way to do things. I think that has been its downfall in terms of readability. Heck, I've written some monstrosities that I've looked back on in a month's time and wondered what on earth I was thinking at the time. I think it's far easier to write readable Python than it is to write readable Perl. I think that's about everything. I never did any real object-oriented programming in Perl, and so I tend to take a procedural approach to things in Python as well. I haven't written any massive bodies of code in Python (although I did help maintain one for about 18 months). I like Python. It's become my first choice for writing random scripts now. Now I look at Ruby like I used to look at Python when I knew Perl quite well. Ruby has some nice things (like Perlish regular expression handling), but it brings back all that punctuation noise again. I'm not in a huge rush to learn it, even though there's a lot of hype around Ruby on Rails. I think I'd rather investigate Django or Pylons

We got home from our week in Arizona late last night. We decided to drive non-stop yesterday, and get home in a day, rather than split it over two days like we did getting there. It ended up taking around 15 hours (we had an unexpected delay at Lost Hills because we found a stray dog (we initially thought it to be injured to boot) and Sarah was trying to get hold of some local animal control people to do something about it), otherwise it'd have taken closer to 14 hours. The drive to Phoenix was pretty uneventful. We took our time leaving Mountain View on Sunday (we had an early Thanksgiving dinner with all of our neighbours on Saturday night), and decided to call it a night at Cabazon. For about the same price that we stayed in a crappy motel last time we went this way, we stayed at the Morongo Casino, which was really nice. We were in a "Canyon View" room, and, well this is what the view looked like... We arrived at Craig and Sarah's place at about 5pm on Monday afternoon. Their new place is really nice. It's huge, with a huge yard, and a nice view of the hills. I've found suburban Phoenix (well Peoria to be precise) to be the closest looking thing to what I consider "normal Australian suburbia" that I've seen so far in the US. Granted, Peoria's a bit upmarket (at least the part that Craig and Sarah live in). So we spent a day and a half vegging out at Craig and Sarah's place, then on Wednesday afternoon, we headed off to Woods Canyon Lake, in the Sitgreaves National Forests. I rode most of the way with Craig in their new motor home, and then swapped to drive our car after we got close to our destination. It turns out that the headlights in RVs are universally crap, so it was better for the Prius to be out front lighting the way on the gravel road. I'd always associated Arizona with cacti and sand, but as it turns out, the majority of the state is forest. We arrived at the campsite after nightfall, and set up shop. We met some of Craig and Sarah's friends that night, who were all very friendly towards us. It was ridiculously cold that night. We went to bed rather under-dressed for the temperature, and absolutely froze. The next day (Thursday), we all drove from the campsite (Craig towed their Jeep behind the RV) to Woods Canyon Lake itself, and went fishing. Arizona fishing licences for non-Arizona residents were a bit on the expensive side, so Sarah and I just hung out on the rocks and chatted to people and took photos. The collective haul of trout from about 5 hours fishing was pretty impressive. I'm not quite sure why, but Friday was the group Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone pitched in, and cooked up a storm. They deep-fried three turkeys (which came out very nice and looking much less like KFC than I expected), and we had way more food than we needed. We all ate outdoors at around 3:30pm, and it was about 33°F (0.55°C). The only downside of this (aside from it being bloody cold) was the leftovers went cold almost instantly, so going back for seconds was a bit of a disappointment. Everyone gravitated back to the fire pretty quickly afterwards. It got pretty cold that night. I think it was down around -4°C when we went to bed that night. We left a bit before 8am the next morning, and the car thought it was -7°C outside. One of the other campers told Sarah his thermometer was reading something closer to -14°C. I'm not sure how cold it was when we were in New York in January, but I didn't think it was that cold. It was a good week away. The mix of camping and not camping was about just right. Now it's back to work for two weeks before we head off to Australia. Photos from the trip are here.

It's quite some time since I didn't blog about D-I i18n and the number of new languages we'll support in the next Debian version, lalala... A few works are on their way, indeed:

• Splitting the huge number of strings in D-I (1686) by priority, to avoid requesting translators a 100% complete file to get their language activated, while some of the strings are really obscure stuff for exotic architectures and not often used installation methods. That work is on its way, slowly and I expect something in the next weeks.
• Keeping the existing languages up-to-date. I'm not very annoying with the fellow translators these days. We have about 20 complete languages and many just need a quite small work to be complete again. Indeed, the quite slow pace of D-I development these days 'helps' (but that slow pace is indeed quite worrying: I'll probably get back on this in the near future)
• New languages under work:
  • Kannada (language from India): still waiting for the first commit...:-(
  • Telugu (also from india): ditto
  • Malay: though vey close from Indonesian, not much activity. The translator currently has other priorities. The file is filled with strings taken from Indonesian and basically needs review
  • Xhosa: hosed. The translations were taken from a very old Ubuntu installer, as result of a translation work funded in the past by Mark Shuttleworth (Xhosa is one of the official languages from South Africa) and nothing happened since then.
  • Marathi (language from India). Work happened and 780 strings need review, but it is hosed right now. I expect talking with the translator at foss.in
  • Irish. The translator, Kevin Scannell, is very active in Irish l10n but currently focuses more on end-user apps. The work might resume at some time
  • Welsh. Waiting for my friend Daffydd Harries to come back on it.
  • Kazakh. Has been quite active but hosed right now. Not much news from the translator
  • Northern Sami. Desperately needs a translator. Debian-Edu want it (the language is used in some schools in Norway)
  • Malagasy. The translator (who studies in France) no longer works on it
  • Persian. Moray Alan recently got contacts in Iran with people who might be interested in resuming the early work of Arash Bijanzadeh
  • Icelandic. The translator is still active from time to time. Most Icelandic people do not seem very interested in getting software localized in their language because they consider that enough ppl in Iceland are comfortable enough with English. That's obviously a big mistake (how can software be adopted by local authorities if it is not localized) but I never succeeded convincing more than 1 person.
  • Urdu (official language for Pakistan). Got some contacts and we completed the New Language Process...but the person then vanished.
  • Amharic. The translator is really active but busy with his job (he's a sailor on commercial ships!). I expect him to complete his translation and he will certainly benefit from prioritization.
  • Armenian. Very recent contacts. I expect the first commit soon
  • Lao. Basically lost contact with the translator
  • Serbian. I'm still waiting for the very active community in Ubuntu to get in touch with /me and work on a common translation. However, someone recently contacted me to work directly on Debian. Maybe expect some good news for one of the very last missing European languages
  • Occitan (regional language from France). Same than Serbian.
  • Kashmiri (language from India). Very recent contact. The translator seems really motivated. I'll probably meet him at foss.in
  • Konkani (language from India). Got a contact today..:-)
  As one sees, the activity is sometimes disappointing: I get contacts, we work on the new language process, then people disappear...but I guess that's to be expected with very little l10n communities. I still have some hope to add at least a few languages for lenny.

Tollef Fog Heen asks:

Also, why does bloglines link to the completely wrong place on dburrow’s posts? It links to http://planet.debian.org/tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-$blah rather than the real URL.

I think I know why. I don’t know which Planet feed Tollef is reading, but a look at the Planet Debian RSS 2.0 feed is illuminating. Looking up Daniel’s entry, we can find the following sub-element:

<guid>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12729767.post-4989856010680867140</guid>

Looking at the RSS 2.0 specification, we can find the following note:

If the guid element has an attribute named “isPermaLink” with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the element. An example: <guid isPermaLink=”true”>http://inessential.com/2002/09/01.php#a2</guid> isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

Thus the Planet RSS 2.0 feed claims that tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12729767.post-4989856010680867140 is a valid URL. There is no basis for this claim in Daniel’s Atom feed, as that string only occurs inside an id element, and RFC 4287 specifies that the string cannot be assumed to be dereferencable.

I recently mentioned that I would visiting some friends at mi2 in Zagreb and would be traveling around the Balkans a bit to give some talks and workshops. Here's what the current plan includes:

• Novi Sad (November 20, at 20:00): I'll be participating in a discussion of hacker culture at CK13.

• Novi Sad (November 21-22 16:00-21:00): There will be a System.hack() exhibition which I helped prepare some of the text for and which I'll be on-hand for. It will include a narrated history of hacking through six objects. The exhibition will be held in an room of the Mediteraneo Hotel in Novi Sad.

• Belgrade (November 23 20:00): Another discussion on hacker culture, this time at Rex.

• Belgrade (November 23-24 17:00-20:00): System.hack() will be exhibited again in a room of the Kasina Hotel.

• Ljubljana (November 26, Time TBD): I'll be giving a talk on free software project management at Kiberpipa/Cyberpipe

• Zagreb (November 29-December 1): I'll be participating the Open Translation Tools workshop organized by Aspiration.

• Zagreb (December 3): I'll giving a talk in the giving a talk in the g33koscope lecture series. The topic and time are still undecided.

If you're in Novi Sad, Belgrade, Ljubljana, or Zagreb and would like to meet up, please consider coming to the events and exhibitions. If you can, and especially if you can not but would like to meet up anyway, feel free to drop me an email and let's try to organize a meeting. Thanks go to Tomislav Medak and Marcell Mars who organized System.hack(), this whole tour, and who helped do the work to bring me over. I'm looking forward to the next couple weeks.

This presentation makes me insanely happy. Artificial lifeforms designed by genetic algorithm, brought to beautiful walking life on the beach, with skeletons and legs made of plastic tubes, wind vanes, 2 liter bottles for storing energy, and simple hydralic brains and sense organs.

What’s up with myself? I ask me this question myself after many of you asked me about what’s going on with me. I have a quite difficult time right now - ok - more precisely: Already for about a month or so. Several people who were very important for me let me hang. I have a lot of personal troubles at my workplace, different troubles in my circle of friends and also have worries about my girlfriend who considers to move to Germany in January. I do even miss my personal energy and motivation. I look forward to solve my situation at work, look forward to the QA meeting in ~2 weeks and hope to have some real holidays in december to relax a little bit. In that case… Regards,