niq commented:

"FWIW, in the real westcountry (West Devon, near the cornish border) we've missed the storms. A bit of wind in the morning, and some drizzle, but nothing substantial."

Yes, seeing what happened further north - roofs ripped up in Manchester - and east - house collapse in King's Lynn (pic 9) - then it seems we got off lightly this time. I hear that Germany declared it a hurricane, but I haven't confirmed that online. Euronews coverage. As far as I can see, there's snapped aerials and all the windows look like someone has sneezed over them, but damage mostly stopped after the fences were ripped to bits. I heard that the sea overtopped the wall in Weston, but I can't find pictures. I'll see myself what town is like later today. Update: niq, you didn't get an email notice because your mailserver is cocked-up:

"550 Error: 23Your subject line looks like spam"

Damnit, it's your phrase in the subject line!

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig

It appears that some people don't understand what right-wing means in terms of politics, apart from using it as a general term of abuse.

I recommend visiting the site http://www.politicalcompass.org/ to see your own political beliefs (as determined by a short questionnaire) graphed against some famous people. The unique aspect of the Political Compass is that they separate economic and authoritarian values. Stalinism is listed as extreme authoritarian-left and Thatcherism as medium authoritarian-right. Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are listed as liberal-left.

I score -6.5 on the economic left/right index and -6.46 on the social libertarian/authoritarian index, this means that I am fairly strongly liberal-left. Previously the Political Compass site would graph resulta against famous people but they have since removed the combined graph feature and the scale from the separate graphs. Thus I can't determine whether their analysis of the politics of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama indicate that one of those men has beliefs that more closely match mine than the other. I guess that this is because the famous politicians did not take part in the survey and an analysis of their published material was used to assess their beliefs, this would lead to less accuracy.

The Wikipedia page on Right-Wing Politics provides some useful background information. Apparently before the French revolution in the Estates General the nobility sat on the right of the president's chair. The tradition of politically conservative representatives sitting on the right of the chamber started there, I believe that such seating order is still used in France while in the rest of the world the terms left and right are used independently of seating order.

Right-wing political views need not be associated with intolerance. If other Debian developers decide to publish their political score as determined by the Political Compass quiz then I'm sure that we'll find that most political beliefs are represented, and I'm sure that most people will discover that someone who they like has political ideas that differ significantly from their own.

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
   • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
   • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
   • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
     So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

So, the Apple iPhone has been launched, it was brought to my attention as actually being announced by the MD at work, who appears to have become a complete apple freak (poor bastard... or is that rich bastard to be able to afford apple's mediocre offerings and be happy about it?). Anyways - from reading the story from BBC News and the official website, here's my conclusions. First off, when marketing a phone, how about you actually mention it's phone capabilities as the number one priority? I'd like to know about the sound capabilities, the battery life, the overall user feel for it as a phone... maybe I'm odd, but a phone has a purpose, it should make and receive calls, and it should do that job *well*, with good quality voice, a decent (filtering) microphone (it's a mobile, you'll be walking whilst speaking on it, reducing the background noise is a selling point), but apple appear to have mostly avoided talking about this. Instead, the first thing that you're told about from the news story is the unique user interface - great, so we have a touchscreen "whoop, de, do!". Worse still, from the official site, the first thing that springs out is that it's a "Wide Screen iPod" - it's a phone, if I wanted an iPod I'd buy a damned iPod - as it stands, for my music needs I have an iAudio M3 which suits my portable music experience really rather well. I choose that on the basis that it provided ogg support out of the box, didn't require any magical software (I run linux on my machines, it presenting itself as nothing more than a USB hard disk was fantastic, and means that I can use it for other things when needs arise). For a phone I want something that actually behaves like a phone, looking at the iPhone it's primary purpose appears to actually be a media player - that's not good. With the iPhone only having a touch screen interface, and from everything that I've read there's no stylus and the "finger is the ultimate pointing device", I'm just expecting that within the first 2 weeks you're going to have a scratched or smudged screen from usage alone, add in the fact that it's a mobile phone, and therefore generally treated with contempt (neccessity rather than luxery), and that most people carry mobiles in their pockets without any form of protection (easy and fast access) and you've got a recipe for disaster! The touch screen is going to be hit (wether you like it or not) whilst the phone is in your pocket, it will wear - there's no question in my mind about it. Touchscreens aren't designed to be smacked around 24/7, they're touchscreens - they respond to touch! So, assuming that you're shiny new iPhone is sitting in your pocket a lot of the time that's a lot of usage of the touchscreen - they're not designed for constant pressure (think about what happens to pockets in trousers when you sit down...), so I don't think that, overall, the sensitivity of the screen is going to last very long. It's only got a fairly narrow screen too, so what about those of us with not entirely slender fingers? When composing SMS messages on it with the on screen qwerty keyboard, do you really think that you're going to get the right keys every time? Small, on screen, buttons and pubs do not mix - and I'd hasten a bet there's a fair number of SMS messages sent from, or on the way back from, the pub, with a predictive text system at least you can almost work out what the heck the person was trying to say - this is a whole new ball game. The iPhone also makes the phone functionality only available after you've hit the part of the screen that says "Phone", now, I don't know about other people, but if I'm being given a number, I tend to just start hitting the right buttons on the phone, I can store the number later (via the call register or whatever) and hit call, now there's an extra step to getting in touch with people. From the official site we have the words """ iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. """" - now, err, just when did a phone require you to use anything other than your fingers? Please tell me, I'm dying to know - I've never yet needed to use my feet to operate my phone, have you? This is marketing gone insane - and what worries me is that people actually believe this bullshit. Apple may have "revolutionised" the computer industry with "Mac OS X" (this is actually not something that I believe, and OS X actually makes me more frustrated than being sat infront of a windows desktop - and believe me, that's difficult), but this is a phone, how about they try making it about the phone first, and the next generation tart audio player second? I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I definately won't be going out of my way to aquire an iPhone just because the marketing spiel looks good.

..or he's not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone -- and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.

However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones. C Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now -- the Gartner study was released in October. Let's give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.

Let's look at the math another way. Cingular has 58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.

These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don't think Steve is that crazy. I'm betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.

Justification. Currently there is a huge mess of files and folders that start with a “.” in any users home folder. There is no structure or policy on how applications should choose file and folder names for data that needs to be stored in users home directory. Additionally there is no established consistency between Gnome, KDE and most other applications. Gnome application have part of their configuration information in gconf folder and other part in a gnome subfolder. KDE applications have a complex structure under .kde/. And most other applications either have one file directly in users home folder or have their own dot-folder there. Problems. There are two major problems with current ad-hoc approach:

1. Namespace pollution of users home space. In any desktop system “ls -al” in the home folder would be a very lengthy affair. Moreeven this namespace is folded - KDE and Gnome apps live in their own subfolders.
2. Lack of structure in folders makes it much harder to properly understand their purpose. For example, if a user has misconfigured an application and would like to reset it to default settings, it currently could be hard to figure out how to do that. Especially without losing his data in that application.

Proposal. I propose to implement a policy on where an application can store data and configuration information in users home folder. Such specification would be proposed as an extension for FHS, first implemented in Debian and then promoted for inclusion upstream and in other distributions. Structure. I propose a following structure for a users home folder:

• data/appname/ - each application, that stores user data in application-specific format, will have to store this data into this folder. Only configuration information that is essential to load this data would be permitted into this folder (in hidden dot files). For example, Evolution could store emails and email access information here.
• .conf/appname/ - each application that stores any configuration information whould have to store all of it in this folder. GConf will have to also store applications configuration info here. If this folder would be deleted, application must revert to default configuration, but still be able to fully access user data in data/appname/ or other, generic folders (below). For example, if .conf/evolution/ is erased, then on next start-up Evoution should still be able to access all email that is stored in data/evolution/ without any configuration wizards.
• .tmp/appname/ - each application that would need to create temporary files that survive reboot, would put them here. These folders can be safely deleted at any time with no data or configuration loss. For example, Firefox cache information and Nautilus thumbnail cache would have to be here.
• Desktop/ - the desktop folder, just like it is now
• Media folders - (Documents/, Photos/, Videos/, Music/, …) a suggestion of basic document structure for user to use or ignore. Applications dealing with particular media types would default to use files from such folders, but should also cope with working with any other folders on users choice. For example, a screensaver with slideshow function would by default use photos from Photos/, but will have to have a configuration option for user to change that setting.
• Additionally I would propose having a .mounts/ folder where applications could mount user specific media and other mounts, such as FUSE. For example, FUSE could be used for automatic archive introspection.

Benefits The main benefit for such system for me is twofold:

• SBackup can be configured to exclude .tmp/ and .mounts/ by default thus saving significant space in backups.
• A tool can be made to restore settings and/or data for specific applications in an uniform fashion.

So, any suggestions on the idea and on where this should be best discussed?

Querying Lbdb from Vim In spite of my attempts for replacing Mutt with Evolution I gave up for several reasons, mainly in my experience Evolution isn't stable enough with huge mailboxes: it crashes often and is painfully slow. Now I'm back at using Mutt, but at least I've learned to use the Evolution address book which is nice, integrated with other Gnome apps (gaim for example), and strictly more powerful than the Mutt address book. I'm using lbdb to query the Evolution address book from Mutt via the external address queries mechanism. But that sucks in various ways:

1. names should be expanded one by one hitting CTRL-T, changing the headers in Mutt one by one (first To:, then Cc:, then ...)
2. I like to edit headers while composing the mail in Vim, but names written there in the various recipient lines (To:, Cc:, ...) are not handled properly. For example if I fill the To: line with To: name surname when exiting Vim mutt will collapse it in a header To: namesurname which can no longer be passed successfully to lbdb

My solution is lbdbq.vim a plugin for Vim which enables expansion of contact names directly withing Vim (normal/insert/visual modes). It supports multiple matches asking interactively the user to choose among them and can be used to replace all contacts in one or more recipient lines at once. It's new, so it's probably bugged. If you sit like me at the intersection Mutt/Vim/Evo-address-book please test it and give me some feedback. As a side note, this is the first time I program in vimscript after the release of Vim 7.0. I have to admit that is really becoming more pleasant than what it used to be. Lists and Dictionaries really (try to) bridge the gap between pre-7.0 vimscript and programming Vim with external languages (python/perl/...). Update #1: lbdbq.vim 0.2 released with an important bug fix for RFC822 fields continuation line and other minor improvements. Update #2: Vimscript #388 provides similar features to lbdbq.vim and is older. Still lbdbq.vim is more feature-complete, have a look at the Discussion page fore more info.

Amita June is reaching a point in her life where it's time for us to start weaning her from breastfeeding. Most parents do this much earlier, if they breastfeed at all, but we've been devotees of attachment parenting for a while, and we wanted to give her as much time nursing as possible. But at 15 months, she's ready to start doing things like sleep through the night on her own, drink only cow's milk, and be a little more independent. So, this month we're starting to do some night weaning. What does this mean? First of all, Maj is no longer nursing the baby to bed. She now is doing the main pre-sleep prep work (a bath), does a short nursing period, and then hands the baby off to me for some reading, songs, and walking down to sleep. This will gradually move into fewer, shorter nursings before sleep, and ultimately to none. Once that connection has been broken, I think the main point of nursing will be occasional comfort nursing during the day. Gradually, that will fade out. And then there will be none. It's kind of exciting to be the Primary Sleep Guy for the baby. We're re-connecting in a way that we haven't in a while -- I was only putting her to bed occasionally for a quite a while. It's also been pretty successful so far, which has been good. tags: amitajune weaning sleep parenting babies

Souper Bruncher When Maj and I first moved to Montreal, we had help from some friends who we'd known from before. After we moved into our apartment, we invited them all over for dinner to say thanks. In order to get to know people in our new hometown, we also asked each person to bring someone we didn't know, so we could make new friends. The event was so successful, and we met so many new people, that we made it a regular occasion. For almost three years, every Tuesday night we invited friends over to our home for dinner (or souper in Quebecois French), with an open invitation to meet new friends and interesting people. It was a great way to meet interesting folks in Montreal, and most of our best friends here we met through these dinners. We were even profiled in Elle Quebec as a model for how to make new friends. But when the baby was born, we just couldn't manage to organize dinners any more every week. Cooking for 20+ people isn't that expensive, especially since we're pescevegetarians and that kind of food just isn't that costly. But it does take a lot of time and energy, and with a newborn baby we just didn't have either. Now, with Amita a little more than a year old, we're trying to start up our regular home parties on a more manageable scale. We're doing brunch at our house on Sunday afternoons around 3PM, with a much smaller list of invitees, requests for RSVPs, and a clear indication that the event only goes until bedtime. (Our Tuesday night dinners would occasionally stretch until dawn.) It seems to be working pretty well; we've had a lot of fun at the last couple of brunches we've had. And brunch is a much more laid-back meal than a dinner party, anyways. (Although John Usher asks incredulously, "By what stretch of the imagination is 3PM between breakfast and lunch?") I'm looking forward to our next brunch (tomorrow) a lot, and I hope to get many more friends over to our home in the next few months of Sundays. tags: brunch montreal making friends souper bruncher

Ocamlnet 2.2: test it by yourself from experimental A couple of days ago I finally managed to complete the packaging work of Ocamlnet 2.2. This upstream version is a (r)evolutionary release in which it aggregate in a single source package libraries who used to be distributed separately, namely: equeue, ocaml-rpc, netclient, and ocamlnet itself. I've been quite surprised to discover that upstream is explicitly nice with us packages and provides guidelines on how to split the various libraries in binary packages addressing both dependency and licensing problems (e.g. for nethttpd which is GPL and can't be shamelessly linked with other components which are MIT/X11-licensed). The packages are in experimental but need NEW-processing, as well as cryptgps (a pure-OCaml implementation of some symmetric crypto algorithms, which is a new build-dep of Ocamlnet). Hence to ease testing I set up an apt-gettable repo here:

deb http://people.debian.org/~zack unstable ocaml

Please try it and give feedback to debian-ocaml-maint@l.d.o. In all my tests the upgrade from ocamlnet pre-2.2 has been smooth: the (too many) transitional packages I had to create did their dirty job. The only "issue" non-addressed (and I don't know how to actually) is that the nethttpd library used to be distributed in libocamlnet-ocaml-dev and is now distributed in libnethttpd-ocaml-dev. Since the former package is entirely useful without the latter there is no dep among the two and it's possible that upon upgrades an user ends up without a working nethttpd library on the system. I added a Recommends in the hope it's enough, let's see how many complaints I will receive ...

Yesterday we have been at a concert of Irie Révoltés. Interesting experience: Most of their songs are (partly) in french, while - may bubulle forgive me - I don't speak that language... We spent a nice time at the concert, and most of the time I could understand enough of the texts. (Well, at least until they started to sing really, really fast.) If you like Ska or social critical songs, give them a try if they happen to do a concert near to you.

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

After some comments on this post by Javier Candeira I've read more carefully Coloriuris license and I've revoked the license because I've some doubts that I should clear before anything. Also some statement are not as accurate as should be. I should not post anything when I've to study. Quick posts can be very dangerous :-/. Also I've closed comments because I've noticed that spam was hitting my blog. Sorry, I hope to fix this after exams. ... and I'm not talking about colors. Coloriuris is an organization that provides free licenses with the same spirit of Creative Commons. This well-known licenses are only applicable in the Common Law, countries like Spain, Portugal and the whole Latin America are based on the Roman Law where Coloriuris licenses should be used instead CC. For this blog I've choosen Coloriuris blue which allows comercial use and derivated works keeping the same license.

What a great day it was in the Bay Area today -- just beautiful. It's Rose Bowl weather, of course -- Nature blesses California on the day of the Rose Bowl, just so people in the rest of the USA say, "Damn those Californians and their great weather!" Still, there's something so rejuvenating every year around the 10th-11th of Niv se. I wonder what it is? Oh, and: no, we don't have the Rose Bowl in northern California. It's just one of the few times of year that San Franciscans are happy to share the state with their southern neighbors. tags: niv se rose bowl california weather

Fruitcake So, there's a comedy tradition around the holidays that marks the crappiest possible gift you can get for Christmas as a fruitcake. This is stupid; fruitcake is delicious. Candied fruit + nuts + cake + rum = hooray for fruitcake. My parents got a couple of fruitcakes for Christmas, and they tasted great. I've been noshing on them a bit at a time all week. Great stuff! Rumtastic. Anyone who says otherwise is full of malarkey. In conclusion, fruitcake is delicious and Carthage must be destroyed. tags: fruitcake christmas delicious carthage malarkey

New Year's Eve Maj, Amita June and I had a hard New Year's Eve. Our friends Earl and Sue have an NYE party in Walnut Creek every year, and a lot of our friends from Pigdog Journal are there every year. We had planned to have a room at the nearby Embassy Suites, and have friends over before the party to see Amita June (who needs to be asleep by New York midnight, i.e. 9PM PST). But Maj is feeling really sick -- flu-y and nauseous -- and we had to cancel this pre-event. Bad feelings about this; we've missed seeing this group of friends a few times since the baby was born, and some of them have never met her. Eventually, we all managed to go to Earl and Sue's party together, then left early so Amita could get to sleep. A pretty good solution all around. I got to see a lot of old friends, including Sam and Shannon who just announced that she's blogging for two now. (Congrats!) Tjames was there with his ladyfriend Robyn, which was really nice. They made out a lot, which makes me pretty happy. We saw Dan, Johnny, Randy, Dave, and of course Earl and Sue themselves. A really good party. tags: nye earl sue sick maj amitajune sam shannon pigdog

All is quiet I had a pretty mild shom-pan-yah hangover this morning, so we were fully able to go see friends Zach and Wendy in El Cerrito for brunch. We hit delicious Picante off of Gilman Street, which is a massive Mexican restaurant, near the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto and showing some of the foodie-ism of the weird East Bay scene. I had a really good plate of chilaquiles, and Maj had some huevos rancheros and made a pretty good dent in them -- the first food she's really eaten in a few days. Amita June got a great quesadilla with queso fresco that tasted really good. Then, everyone was ready for a nap, so we said goodbye and cut the visit short by heading back to Los Altos Hills. tags: zach wendy picante berkeley chilaquiles

Ads on Wikipedia So, there's been quite a dust-up on Wikimedia Foundation lists about their recent fund-raising drive. The WMF is having its annual fundraising drive (and, if you can, please help with a donation), and the Virgin Group's charity organization, Virgin Unite, set up a matching fund a few days ago so that all donations to the WMF were effectively doubled. All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice -- seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site -- was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising -- or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it. I'm not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I'm in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia's huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia's is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That's money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world. It's irresponsible to abuse that opportunity. Brion Vibber's defense of the logo on the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list is really interesting and instructive. tags: wikipedia wikimedia ads virgin unite

What is Debian Desktop?
Debian Desktop is a Debian's subproject created to be a joint effort of
all groups involved or related with the desktop to give our users a
better environment to use and easier to install experience.

Actually we've members from: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago,
tasksel and utnubu. We count with help from d-i and debian-cd members too.
The initiative merged the former Debian Desktop development page, debian-desktop
mailing list for the discussions and debian-desktop alioth project - its svn actually
hosts the desktop-base source package.

We did our best to deliver for our users a interesting desktop experience (including
laptop users) and it includes GNOME, KDE or Xfce (that's your choice) in our upcoming release: 4.0 (Etch).

What will be into Debian Etch Desktop ?
The desktop (task: desktop, installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• X Window System: Xorg 7.1
• Office suite: OpenOffice 2.0.4
• Graphics suite: GIMP 2.2.13

It also includes a simple window manager (twm), zeroconf (avahi), printing (cups) and scanning (sane) support

GNOME desktop (task: gnome-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• GNOME core: 2.14 with some 2.16 modules, eg.: totem (xine backend as default)
• Web Browser: Firefox 1.5 and Epiphany 2.14.3
• Feeds Manager: Liferea 1.0.26 (Liferea is Epiphany friendly)
  
• Mail/Calendar app: Evolution 2.6.3
• Instant Messaging Tool: GAIM 2.0.0beta5
• Multimedia Player: Rhythmbox 0.9.6
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: Network Manager 0.6.4
• Graphical Package Manager: Synaptic 0.57.11 with update-notifier
  
• Graphical Partition Manager: GParted 0.2.5
• CD/DVD Creation: GNOMEBaker 0.6.0
  
• Power Management Tool: GNOME Power Manager 2.14.3

It also includes bluetooth (bluez-gnome) support, multimedia in the browser support (totem mozilla plugin), bittorrent support (gnome-btdownload)

KDE desktop (task: kde-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• KDE: KDE 3.5.5 (base, pim, multimedia, graphics, artwork, network, utils and admin)
  
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: KNetworkManager 0.1
• CD/DVD Creation: k3b

We tried to add all the gnome task features into kde task too. KDE itself already contains a lot of them, if you find something missing please tell us at debian-desktop@lists.debian.org for a better next release, and wait your contribution enter Lenny.

Xfce desktop (task: xfce-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• Xfce: Xfce 4.3.99
• Calendar tool: orage 4.3.99
• Text editor: Mousepad 0.2.8

It also includes multimedia support and xfce goodies.

What if i've Debian testing or sid installed using GNOME or KDE or Xfce?
Open a terminal, check your /etc/apt/sources.list and run as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install desktop $foo-desktop

Please replace $foo with GNOME, KDE, Xfce - e.g: aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop

Note that desktop and $foo-desktop aren't metapackages - packages that usually contains just a few files (the required) to be installed in the system and its main feature is depend, conflict, recommend or suggest other packages. desktop and $foo-desktop are tasks and are in the tasksel source package, maintained by the tasksel team. The debian-installer uses tasksel to install a set of packages, and you should too.

How can i download Debian Desktop for tests?
The easier way to install is downloading a CD or DVD image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer . Please download
Debian Etch RC1 images or later for GNOME and something newer
(eg: weekly builds) for KDE or Xfce. Please note that DVD usage
is preferred, if you're going to use a CD broadband is recommended.

There are special first CDs images containing not GNOME key packages
but KDE or Xfce, look for debian-testing-i386-$foo-CD-1.iso (don't worry,
we've at least amd64 and powerpc images too) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/

How can i install Debian Desktop GNOME?
The first DVD image contains the entire GNOME set of packages, just
follow the installer and after the base system install select "default
desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for you and
proceed - no network is required during installation.

The first CD image doesn't contains the entire GNOME set of packages,
just follow the installer and after the base system install select
"default desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for
you and proceed - broadband connection is recommended.

How can i install Debian Desktop KDE?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=kde-desktop

* The first DVD image contains the entire KDE set of packages - no
network is required during installation.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire KDE set of packages -
broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

How can i install Debian Desktop Xfce?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=xfce-desktop

* The first DVD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

Katherine's father bought her mother a laptop for Christmas. I am ashamed to admit that although I was responsible for the specification it was purchased from PC World. There is a lack of shops in Northern Ireland where you can walk in and purchase a reasonably cheap laptop unfortunately. The model we ended up with was an Advent 8111 (Dixons link as it's saner than the PC World one). It's not actually a bad spec; Core Duo 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, wireless/ethernet/modem, 15.4" 1280x800 widescreen TFT. I think it claims up to 3 hours battery life and I certainly had 2+ out of it though not under heavy use. I decided that it was getting Linux; Katherine's mum isn't used to any form of computer so there are no preconceptions about Windows to get over. While I'm a Debian person myself I felt it was time to give Ubuntu a chance; mjg59 (and others I'm sure) has spent a lot of time trying to get it happy on laptops and make sure things Just Work. I didn't have a lot of time to sit fiddling with the setup, so a shiny out-of-the-box distro seemed ideal. I downloaded ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso and burnt myself a CD. Dropped it in the drive and it booted into the live CD installer fine. The install process was simple and it managed to resize the Windows partition without problems (I would have deleted it but I couldn't convince the Windows rescue CD creator to work and I don't want to burn my bridges until I'm sure Linux works out ok for the owner). Rebooting into the freshly installed system I was surprised at the time the boot process took. It certainly felt a lot longer than it takes my (lower speced) laptop to boot to a GDM prompt under Debian. Also the display looked a bit fuzzy. Further investigation led to the discovery that although X correctly detected a panel size of 1280x800 it was only using 1024x768. Much searching found me i915resolution which did some magic that made things work. However this doesn't appear to be part of Ubuntu proper so I'm not sure if was the correct solution or if I should have done something else? Getting to the point where I could download i915resolution was interesting too. My parents have a WEP encrypted wireless network (to prevent casual use rather than because it's secure). I was expecting Ubuntu (which detected the Intel wireless card fine) to pop up some sort of dialog saying it had found a network and would I like to connect (if I provided the key). Something network-managery. But no. Even when I went to the network control panel and added all the details the connection didn't seem to come up. I gave up and did it manually with iwconfig and dhclient (I needed it to work quickly and at present it won't need wireless usually). Once I had the display working happily my other task was to tame the modem. It's an Intel HDA thing and I'd hoped sl-modem-daemon would drive it. Of course it didn't. Although it's an Intel chipset it has a bloody Conexant codec on it. Which of course there are no free or Free drivers for. I ended up trying the trial Linuxant driver, which did work fine at 14.4k, but that's really painful so I gave up and paid for the full version. I'd really rather have voted with my feet and ended up with some proper modem hardware, but it would have been an extra set of wires and cost more. I hate Conexant. Anyway, the drivers work (though seem to break sound; I haven't had enough time to prod this and the modem is much more important to have working). Hopefully in time I'll convince them they really want ADSL, but at present I think it would be quite hard as they don't have a high expected use. Once the modem was working I needed an easy way to dial up. I started playing with modem monitor, which had been installed by default. However I just couldn't figure out how to get it to allow me to dialup and dial down - the activate/disable options stayed greyed out. So I installed GNOME PPP which seems to work fine and be easy enough to drive - put a nice link to it on the desktop and stored all the details so it's a double click to launch and then a click of the "Connect" button. My final issue was that once I actually took the laptop to Katherine's house to show her mum how to use it it started hanging on boot. Booting into recovery mode showed a soft lockup error message around the point where it was setting up the network interfaces. I think this might have had something to do with me hitting the wireless kill switch (no point having it on when there's no wireless in the house), as disabling the device in the BIOS made the problem go away. I didn't have enough time to do a fully exhaustive check, but will look at it in the future. I wait with interest to see how use of the laptop goes. Expected usage to being with is mainly web and email (provided by the Ubuntu defaults of Firefox and Evolution) so hopefully it shouldn't be too problematic now I've fought the install process. I was really quite surprised at the problems I encountered (well, aside from the modem drivers); I'd expected a much smoother install that would leave me with everything working fine out of the box. I haven't yet filed any bugs or done more investigation - I only had about a day to setup the machine so couldn't prod it more just yet. I will of course try to do so when I get a free moment, but if I missed some obvious stuff please do point it out to me! (As if you wouldn't...) Oh, and here's some lspci output for anyone interested in some more details about the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
05:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
05:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
05:01.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
05:01.3 Class 0805: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803c (prog-if 01)