I’ve long wondered what the point of the “Work Offline” option in Firefox is (it’s in the “File” menu). All it really seems to do is take you to a helpful (cough) error screen when you’re working offline that tells you you can’t view the page you’re trying to view till you’re online again. If the page is in the cache, it’ll display it, but that seems to happen only rarely. I jacked my cache up to 4GB, but much to my surprise, that doesn’t appear to result in a noticeably higher cache hit rate. IE has a similar option, but it actually does something. In fact, it’s quite slick. When you add a page as a favorite, you’re given a “Make available offline” option. Once that option is selected, you can click “Customize…”, which launches a wizard that allows you to mark other pages the favorite links to as available offline as well (useful for sites like Slashdot that primarily link to other sites). You can also specify when the page(s) should be synchronized (manually or on a predefined schedule, such as every day at 5am). The Blackberry browser has a similar option too, though I haven’t used it much (most of my offline time tends to be on airplanes, and I’d much rather view the web on my laptop). The Blackberry does have a neat feature IE doesn’t have though, which is if you try to load a page that isn’t available offline, it’ll offer to queue up the request and download it once you’re online again. As with everything on the Blackberry, the page will show up in the universal inbox along with email, SMS, missed calls, etc. No more trying to remember what pages you wanted to load when you were offline or resorting to tricks only a hacker could love. Imagining a feature like this integrated with a Gmail/Google Reader combo that supports offline operation makes my mouth water. As I said in the opening paragraph, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I’ve never actually gotten around to writing about it. What inspired me to do that today? Scrybe, an amazing online productivity suite that has a variety of unique and killer features, including excellent use of AJAX to preserve context as you move around within the application, a novel approach to scheduling across timezones, full integration between the calendar and to-do lists (why don’t more calendar applications do this?), and more. Watch the video for yourself. The most interesting feature from my point of view, though, is the offline support: Simply select “Work Offline”, and everything works, well, offline, no browser extension required. It even appears that changes will be synchronized when you’re online again (i.e., it’s not just a read only copy). The beta isn’t publicly available yet, but I can’t wait to see how they did this. My prediction: If this works as well as it looks, all web applications will eventually work this way. And it’s good to see that some companies are thinking about the offline problem, rather than just assuming ubiquitous Internet connectivity makes the problem go away in the very near future.

I keep my Debian-TODO list on my Debian wiki page. Today I didn t go to work, because I am sick. Very sick.

I started looking at at my TODO list there, and I can report that:

• The Xlibs Transition is finally over. Kudos to all those who helped there!



• There s only 3 bugs left to finish the /usr/doc transition, although I still need to look at some of the Lintian findings, but most of those packages are not going to be released with Etch, so they are not so important to me.



• The cdebconf transition is still in pretty bad shape, so I will start addressing it now.

These are easy bugs. If you want to help the release and the RC bugs are too hard for you, send patches for these easy issues and Cc: me. We ll make them disappear. This is the way I became a member of the MIA team, by looking at old bugs, that sometimes rot in neglected packages.

I've written a little lately on the Dunc-Tank (a project to pay some key debian post-holders) and it's drawn some comments about running a business. I've owned businesses for years and there's a lot I don't know, but I've been frankly shocked by some of the comments. Here's two more. I wrote:

Double-taxation seems like something a good accountant should help to avoid - not heard of it being a significant problem often;

Today, I read a comment from Joe Buck:

"Self-employed people or contractors have to pay double Social Security taxes in the US. That's because, for salaried workers, the worker pays half and the employer pays half." "This is one factor contributing to why anyone considering leaving regular work and setting up shop as a contractor in the US needs to bill 2x their regularly hourly salary to wind up with the same standard of living. In addition to higher taxes, there's time between contracts, no paid time off, etc."

That's not double taxes. That's one tax split between two parties. Half plus half is one, not double. If the two parties (employer and employee) are the same (as in self-employment), you're still only paying the one tax. If the business is run half-decent, that tax will be figured into the cost of the worker, even if it's not in their posted gross salary. If the employer part is not widely known, that sounds like government slyness to me. Double-taxation is paying the same tax twice, not paying one tax split between employer and employee. By the way, I'm slightly surprised US contractors need to bill 2*gross. When taking on new contract staff at a UK university, I think the cost was estimated at 1.6*gross, and I think I've already mentioned that the cost for a UK SME seems to be about 1.5*gross. We're told that the US taxes less, so maybe work is much rarer there, or something. Which brings me to when I wrote:

I think running a business is a choice, not something anyone ever "had to" do.

to which Scott Robinson replied:

"That is certainly an odd perspective wrt. the choice of becoming an entrepreneur. Have you only lived in places where employment is guaranteed?"

As far as I know, I've never lived in a place with no jobs at all. Sometimes the jobs are crap and sometimes the terms for joining an existing business are crap (so in my opinion, they might as well not exist), but if you didn't want to run a business, you could avoid it. These are all things you weigh up when making your choice whether or not to run a business. Is there anywhere which forces workers to run businesses?

zakame – [noun]:

A human transformer (Robot in disguise) ‘How will you be defined in the dictionary?’ at QuizGalaxy.com I suppose I was fuzzy while Transforming… (From the nice folks at Planet Debian…)

Well, Oh, Eh…

sukria – [adjective]:

Sexually stunning ‘How will you be defined in the dictionary?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

The BarCamp Zurich 2006 is over. On the way there I thought about what I would do during time slots with no interesting talks. But when I tried to make up my personal schedule, I noticed that I rather would have the opposite problem: Too many interesting talks at the same time… Well, to many interesting talks at all, although I only went to tech talks and left out the biz talks. I first went to the Podcasting & Co. talk by Timo Hetzel, since I never heard or made a podcast, but was curious about podcasts in general. Besides statistics and rankings he spoke about where people listen to podcast (most listeners seem to do that during commuting), what people like in podcasts, why companies podcast, etc. And that a very big share of all podcast listeners use iTunes as podcast client and except juice (never heard of it before) all other podcast clients seem to be irrelevant. My conclusion: I haven’t missed anything not having listened to or made podcasts neither do I need to listen or make podcasts in the future. They’re irrelevant. To me. :-) Then I had to choose between the talks AJAX@localhost (PDF) by Harry Fuecks and Realtime Collaborative Text Editing and SubEthaEdit by the Coding Monkeys. I heard about realtime collaborative editing once know that it’s a challenging task for the developer. I also know what AJAX is (and that I would only use or recommend it for bells and whistles, but not for content in general), but “AJAX@localhost” sounded like writing normal applications using AJAX. It sounded interesting and evil at the same time. I had to go there! ;-) Others had similar expectations after reading the talk’s title, so I was quite surprised that it was about something completely different, namely about debugging AJAX on the localhost but under conditions usually only appearing if you’re running AJAX application not from localhost but from somewhere on the net: You may have different lags with every request, so some requests may reach the server before others, which may screw up the whole AJAX application, if the developers didn’t think about it and only tested it on localhost. (Hence the talk’s title…) My conlusion: I will use and recommend AJAX even more seldom, since there seem to be even more design misconceptions than I thought before. But I’ll once have a look at the Webtuesday meeting, he mentioned. For the third time-slot, I didn’t need long to decide where to go: I already knew a little bit about Microformats and I wanted to know more. Tag Trade also sounded interesting, but the second part of the talk’s title, Paid Learning sounded like business and so I had no scruples to cold-shoulder that talk. I probably didn’t learn anything really new in the microformats talk, but my knowledge about microformats is now more concrete, and after talking with Cédric Hüsler later during a break, I would even trust myself to start and define a new microformat. Then I went to the HG Caféteria together with Gürkan and two German guys. While waiting in the queue, we were talking about our jobs and our favourite Linux distributions. I got some rhubarb pie and a rum truffles, assuming that the Caféteria uses no alcohol in their products like all other SV restaurant I know. But this one seemed to have quite a lot of alcohol, since it felt like my breath was burning… Well, this resulted in my second SV feedback form submission… Next I went to Alex Schröder’s talk about multilingual websites, Oddmuse and the Emacs Wiki, although also the talk A-Life about simulating evolution sounded promising. Alex asked the listeners about their experiences with multilingual websites and showed what Oddmuse offers as partial solution to the general multilingualism problems. But regarding the comments from the auditorium, there probably won’t be a perfect solution until computers can translate perfectly… The next talk I visited was Gabor’s talk about his master thesis Organizing E-Mail which resulted in a soon to be released Mozilla Thunderbird extension called BuzzTrack. From the other concepts he showed, I found Microsoft’s SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) and IBM’s Thread Arcs most interesting as well as the fact that there is no e-mail client seems to have a majority at all. Directly after Gabor I had my own talk about Understanding Shell Quoting, so I also couldn’t go to Adrian Heydecker’s talk about Learning with Hypertext and Search Engines. I had only about three and a half listeners of whom several to my surprise where here because they didn’t know what “shell quoting” is. I really didn’t expect that. But that seems to be one of the differences between a BarCamp and a Linux Conferences: People come here to see something new, something they haven’t heard about before. On Linux events most people come, because they already heard about some special topic and want to know more or learn something about it. On Linux event my shell talks usually were attracting many visitors while at a BarCamp, talks presenting an idea, a concept or a tool seem to much more interesting for the attendees. So for the next BarCamp I perhaps exhume my Website Meta Language talk which never seemed to hit the nerve of Linux event attendees, since it tried to “sell” a different concept of generating website than most were used to. At least one listener excepted the talk to be named “shell escaping”, but IMHO escaping is only one quoting technic and it’s not only used for quoting. But perhaps I should take the word “escaping” in the title though for the next time. Happily most of the listeners seem to have learned something new from the talk and Silvan Gebhardt was really happy about his new knowledge about ssh ~ escapes, although I mainly talked about how to quote them than how to use them. :-) During the last slot I visited the session about the upcoming BarCamp Alsace 2 and the yet to be planned BarCamp Rhine, a BarCamp to be held on a ship traveling from Basel in Switzerland down the Rhine, stopping in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Rhein-Main-Area and perhaps even Cologne and Amsterdam. Contrary to my initial thoughts, the day was over very fast and I had no single boring minute during the BarCamp. Wow! After we’ve been kicked out of the building by ETH janitors, we joined again at the Bar N-68. On the way there I met Urban M ller who attended BarCamp Zurich, too. We talked quite a lot and it was very interesting to see behind the scenes of e.g. map.search.ch. Later I joined the French speaking table, talking with Gregoire Japiot from WineCamp France and Alex Schröder. Around 9pm I left the N-68 as one of the last BarCampers, tired but with new knowledge, new ideas, new acquaintances and a new hobby: BarCamping. What a luck that BarCamps aren’t that often, otherwise I couldn’t afford this new hobby. ;-) As a relaxing end I met with Alex Schröder and Christophe Ducamp on Sunday morning for brunch in the restaurant Gloria in the Industriequartier. When we were leaving the Gloria I noticed their book board with a lots of BookCrossing books and I took “The Da Vinci Code” with me, since I saw the movie and people were telling me that the book is much better. I’ll see…

Since my new laptop features shiny Intel graphics (and not the proprietary stuff from ATI or Nvidia), I can comfortably run compiz on it. None of my ATI or Nvidia machines did. Face it: compiz is a window manager. It does that job okay. I somewhat still like openbox better, but compiz has it's bright sides, too. I'll probably add devilspie again, though. Too bad they removed the XML syntax and went to a lispy thing. Openbox had a nice XML syntax and had all the window matching functions I needed. Now most people expect compiz to just magically add some 3D effects to their desktop. That's not entirely accurate. 3ddesktop worked like that, years ago. It worked with most window managers, by taking screenshots of your desktops. Maybe some of it's layouts could be added to compiz. Compiz however functions different, and thats why it IS a window manager in itself (which has "outsourced" window decoration to e.g. gtk-window-decorator to achieve a metacity-like look). From my understanding, it basically has all windows placed off-screen and uses GL to draw them on the real screen. This will result in some speedups, actually, whereas 3ddesktop came only with slowdowns. Anyway, so much for the theory. Here are my firsthand experiences:

• Performance is excellent on my i945 integrated graphics
• 3D drawing errors are minimal (playing with the cube settings and increasing the number of desktops to 8 caused some that eventually went away)
• Effects are much less annoying than I though. Some are actually quite pleasant, I find the "fading" visual bell useful. Cube switching at 8 desktops is more of a slide, and with a faster speed it's also nice, at least for adjacent desktops. I'd like to have a similar smooth transition for arbitrary desktops; no need to flash me the interim desktops.
• Expose-like overview is of course great. Except I use desktops to avoid any window overlap anyway.
• Wobbly windows still rather annoy me. I tried tuning them down to a faster and lighter setting, but failed. Any other parameters just made things worse, I found it hard to pick good parameters.
• the bad: every now and then, a window isn't drawn properly. Most often these are dialog boxes; there is no obvious pattern to when it works and when not. Today, the gnome-screensaver password prompt is invisible. Other dialogs are empty until minimizing them with the "show desktop" button and restoring them.

On overall, compiz doesn't distract from work that much; I had feared I would spend a lot of time just playing with the effects, but it's okay. (Try setting visual bell to shiver, start vim and press arrow up some time, and watch your window violently shake. Reduces stress when not finding a bug.) So it likely is less harmful for the Debian etch release than Frozen Bubble 2.0 (which has a new 6-player mode, and is feared to have a similar impact as tetrinet...) Whoever released frozen bubble 2.0 just now must have some evil plan of delaying the etch release. [Yes, I'm aware of this compiz fork; but I'm sticking to Debian packaged software, so my system will upgrade itself. I don't think it's packaged yet?]

Dear old Mutt, ... My MUA of choice is Mutt. I've been using it for something like 8 years now and I like it: it's quick, powerful and well integrated with the Unix way of handling mail (e.g. procmail). But we all know that. My feeling today is that sooner or later I will be forced to abandon it. The main reason is that it seems to be a dead product, upstream development is not dead but I fail to see an overall plan for my beloved MUA. Other text based application have understood that they should be integrated in some way with the desktop and/or windowing environment in which they are run: Vim for example is able to deal with the mouse wheel event when run in an xterm or even has developed a GUI which is well integrated with the Gnome session mechanism. Why Mutt is not? Such feelings of today has been originated by Tomboy, a wonderful note taking tool with Wiki-like capabilities, integrated with Gnome. It has a plugin for drag and dropping Evolution mails on notes automatically providing links from the notes to your mailbox: that's ... wow, great! I'm already using Evolution as my organizer and I already have Gaim integrated with it for contacts. I fear the moment I will try it for mails because I'm pretty sure it also has an UI which can be easily used with keyboard without the need of the mouse. Since I'm using all this on my laptop which is always with me (and this means that the argument "Mutt can be used remotely using a 9600 GSM connection" is bogus), it seems I'm running out of arguments for sticking to Mutt. Oh, right, there is the procmail stuff, my last feeble chance of keep on using Mutt ...

Today I saw the movie God On My Side by Andrew Denton. It's an interesting movie about the televangelist industry in the US. I expected it to be about the shonky frauds who harm people, there was one scene in the start of a televangelist claiming to cure diabeties (a very dangerous claim that often results in serious injury to the victims of such frauds), but mostly it was about serious evangelists and not about the frauds.

What was scary was the level of advocacy of Armageddon. These people seemed very determined to have a great war between the US and Russia (haven't they realised that the USSR doesn't exist any more?). They advocated taking all possible measures to defend Israel (not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons) and didn't want any compromise with Palestine (no land for peace - after all peace gets in the way of Armageddon).

One insightful comment by an evangelist pointed out that many Christians have gone wrong in their advocacy in being based on what they are against rather than what they are for. It's a sad trend that most Christians are not able to express any positive things that they are for and only focus on things that they oppose. On most occasions when they say they are for something it is really a disguise for being against something else, EG supporting Family Values means oppressing homosexuals, preventing freedom of speech (bad language), and banning abortions (even for rape victims).

I am looking forward to the DVD release of this. I'm sure that the out-takes and some further footage post release will be interesting.

Above is the day 21 beard picture.

I don't normally do these meme things as I'm on various planets, but this made me laugh:

Maulkin -- [noun]: A person of questionable sanity who starts their own cult 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I don't often post about work, but it's always with some trepidation that I switch my main computers to the new distro.

While I moved from the Distro team to leading the Support team last October, I still retain my Ubuntu core-dev status, and keep current by looking at toolchain issues occasionally and hacking on our SCC ports, ia64 and hppa. This means that not only do I keep my programming sk1llz from getting rusty through disuse, but I also have reason to keep in touch with other members of the distro team who are both work colleagues and friends.

As one of the people who cares the most about glibc in Ubuntu, I try to make sure that I'm running it wherever possible and making sure that I'm likely to find at least the obvious bugs before others.

So last night I pointed my sources.list to feisty.

This morning there were already two updates: base-files, and debootstrap. linux-libc-dev (the kernel headers) will come along shortly after the new kernel doesn't FTBFS. At the beginning of next week, there will be binutils, libc*, and gcc-4.1. And after that, the merge.

This will be the fourth release in a row that I've ridden from the first files uploaded. At times it's been exciting (leaving for a management meeting in Spain with a non-working X or wireless, not to mention broken cell phone and airplane. All of which were solved by the time I got to Mallorca.)

Wouter Verhelst kindly replied to my comments on his calculation of Steve's net pay :

"The point wasn't getting a "correct" number; only Steve could produce those, if he wanted to. The point was proving that if you get 6000 for one month of work as a business, then those 6000 aren't what you can spend on your personal life. Whether the exact number is 2400 or 3400 is, thus, totally besides the point." "But, yeah, thanks for the clarification :-)"

I agree that 6000 gross works out as a lower net figure. So what? That's obvious to anyone who works and has noticed their gross pay isn't what they actually get to use, even if these "people have never had to run a business". (And I think running a business is a choice, not something anyone ever "had to" do.) If whether it's 2400 or 3400 net wasn't the point, why use inflated figures to advocate paying 6000 gross? My main point was: Dunc-Tank is not buying in a free market, so how can we tell what the fair rate is? Brian M. Carlson explained the lack of VAT:

"States in the US have either an income tax, a sales tax, or both. In the general case, non-profit corporations are exempt from taxation, as long as they have the proper paperwork. Also, certain essentials, such as necessary foods (cheese, but not soda) are exempt from sales tax where it exists." "Since Steve is almost certainly not a non-profit, he will have to pay income tax to both the state and federal governments; the rate depends on his annual income. He will have to pay FICA (social security) taxes, which are approximately 7% of the income. Any amount over $90,000 is not taxable under FICA."

Thanks for the explanation. I hope it'll help other non-US people. Of course, the actual payment rate is minor to me, compared to the problems of dunc-tank being designed as a market for lemons and being driven through by brinkmanship.

Right. Ubuntu 6.10 has been out for sometime now. Go dist-upgrade! Or get the DVD image, as I’m doing now via rsync diff-update. It appears that CD images aren’t available at cdimage.ubuntu.com yet, but it doesn’t matter since I had the previous Beta DVD image on hand and I can just do the rsync dance. But I really should take my own advice and dist-upgrade; I haven’t done so since I’ve been pretty much content with Kubuntu Dapper running smoothly between hibernates. I know I will have to dist-upgrade though, since the Ubuntu-PH LoCoTeam will have a Release Party in a couple of weeks, just in time for the arrival of Edgy pressed CDs, and we definitely would want to show off a fresh ,Ed,K,X ubuntu Edgy by then I just need a venue, a time, and a couple of drinks; suggestions, anyone?

I woke up this morning and found the following scene outside the window: It’s first snow and I think it is on time. First snow rarely lasts, though; it is likely this snow will have melted away by midweek, if not earlier. Permanent (well, one that lasts until spring) snow generally comes a month later. Last year permanent snow came just before Christmas.

Perhaps this one could help: This is a contentless resolution. Voting will not have any effect
whatsoever. For this reason, the ballot only has a single option, and
ranking it as first will have the same effect as not ranking it
explicitly and thus placing it below the nonexistant other options. As such, you have now gained two hours that you would have otherwise
spent reading the proposal and the various amendmends. Grab a beer. === Please do not delete anything between these lines ===
[ ] Whatever
=== Please do not delete anything between these lines ===

I've been looking at this for a while now:

Subject: Proposal for general resolution.
From: wouter@debian.org
To: debian-vote@lists.debian.org
I propose a vote on the following general resolution as a position
statement on an issue of the day, as described under  4.1.5 of the
Debian constitution.
=============Begin resolution text============
Debian has gone insane.
=============End resolution text==============
I am looking for seconds.

Eventually I decided that it wouldn't help, so I didn't send it. But the constant bickering has gone past mere annoyance, past being just "bothersome", past even "silly". It's pure insanity. It'd only be fair if we'd admit it.

This is the first in a planned series of weekly posts on what's happening in Debian, which I plan to do to help fill the gap left by Martin Schulze no longer writing DWN. I will post these on Fridays with a dwn tag, and while I don't plan to cover everything that's happening in Debian, like I tried to do when I edited DWN, my hope is that if some other people also do this, we'll cover enough to be useful. On to the news items.. mplayer in sid. The mplayer package has had the longest tenure in NEW of any package ever to be uploaded to Debian. But it's finally been accepted into the archive. Depending on the videos you need to play, you may still need non-free codecs from outside Debian, such as Christian Marillat's repository. Congratulations to mplayer's maintainers and to the ftpmasters for resolving the licencing issues that kept mplayer out of Debian for so long. d-i string freeze and release plans. In preparation for the first release candidate of d-i for etch, a string freeze has been going on for the last two weeks, and changes to the installer are limited to bug fixing. Frans Pop posted details and a timeline for RC1. Note that preparations for RC1 have already broken most beta 3 d-i images. alioth move. Alioth has just moved to a new server. Amoung other changes, svn.debian.org moved to the same host as alioth, eliminating some issues caused by splitting them before. archive.progeny.com decomissioned. This significant Debian mirror was turned off on October 22nd, and anyone still using it should switch to a different mirror.

Dude, I could not agree with you more.

However, you seem unwilling to take Ubuntu to task over it's decision to use the trademarks. It's not clear to me under what circumstances you can even use the icon, since the copyright file doesn't list what the copying conditions are, in fact it doesn't mention the logo graphic copyrights at all. I think this is a big loss for distributions everywhere. While this would appear to be expedient and make users happy, but it creates more work for the derivers of Ubuntu and it also makes it harder for Ubuntu to derive from Debian. It also sends the message that this sort of thing is alright, that we should just accept upstreams doing this.

It is currently rumored that, despite great efforts from the release managers and the dunc-tank board, the etch release will not make it on time. Some say this is because of Developers being upset by some random and obscure experiment. Some others think this is because there are too many RC bugs and that we won't be able to fix them on time. Some might say this is because of a surrealist conflict with the Mozilla corporation. Guys. You're all wrong. The main reason for the delay will be the same as that of the woody release. Developers will be too busy testing the brand new Frozen-bubble 2.0.0 release extensively. Instead of hacking, they will spend their nights fighting with each other in up to five players LAN and internet games, enjoying the shining new graphics. Debian unstable packages are available in incoming and tonight on your favorite mirror.