From time to time it's funny to run a scriptlett and play a bit with numbers. For example:
find /pub/debian/pool/main/ -name \*_i386.deb -or -name \*_all.deb -exec ls -s \; sort -nr
157696 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fgfs-base/fgfs-base_0.9.10-1_all.deb
152284 /pub/debian/pool/main/v/vegastrike-data/vegastrike-data_0.4.3-2_all.deb
141144 /pub/debian/pool/main/o/openclipart/openclipart-png_0.18+dfsg-4_all.deb
89808 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fgfs-base/fgfs-base_0.9.6-1_all.deb
86304 /pub/debian/pool/main/k/koffice/koffice-doc_1.5.1-1_all.deb
81892 /pub/debian/pool/main/l/llvm/llvm-doc_1.7-1_all.deb
78860 /pub/debian/pool/main/t/texlive-extra/texlive-latex-extra_2005-2_all.deb
67844 /pub/debian/pool/main/b/beneath-a-steel-sky/beneath-a-steel-sky_0.0372-2_all.deb
67764 /pub/debian/pool/main/b/beneath-a-steel-sky/beneath-a-steel-sky_0.0368-3_all.deb
62252 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fillets-ng-data/fillets-ng-data_0.7.1-1_all.deb
61660 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fillets-ng-data/fillets-ng-data_0.6.1-1_all.deb
58984 /pub/debian/pool/main/v/vegastrike-music/vegastrike-music_0.4.3-1_all.deb
56260 /pub/debian/pool/main/t/tetex-src/tetex-src_3.0-3_all.deb Interesting, I always thought one of my packages would be on of the biggest, bit according to my find, planetpenguin-racer-extras is just on place 117! But now I sponsored an upload for an other member of the pkg-games group: nexuiz_2.0-1_i386.changes uploaded successfully. Sadly Bruno decided to splitt of the music of the -data package, so we won't take the crown, but will still get the fourth place, as soon as Ganneff let it the packages through new :) PS: Damn, they still didn't fixed the bug, that I allways get killed.

Ciao everyone... My talk on Hecl has been accepted for the Italian Java Conference in Milan! http://it.sun.com/eventi/jc06/programma/milano_more.html If you're going to be there, let me know... it's always fun to see people I haven't had the occasion to see in person for a while. Unfortunately, I won't be going to ApacheCon Europe in Dublin, which seems like it will be a fun event. Note comments broken due to Typo being...abandoned?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on extending the dbconfig-common packages to support the SQLite database format. My primary motivation for this is so that I can start using dbconfig-common to manage the database(s) for the PHPwiki packages which currently only support SQLite out of the box. The main changes that were required were to separate out the debconf questions that are only relevant for remote and authenticated database types. These changes were committed yesterday. I plan to make the remaining changes required to bring the SQLite support up to scratch over the next few days, so hopefully dbconfig-common 1.8.18 with SQLite support will be uploaded before too long. NM Application
In other news, Alexander Wirt finished off my NM Report, so now I’m waiting for the front desk to review it and send me on to the DAM. It’s great to be making progress and a big thank you to Alexander for taking me through the process, testing my knowledge and sponsoring my packages.

Friday - The Party Good food. Good times. (Though, I have to admit it was considerably more interesting when it got dark and the torches were lit and we tried to avoid melting the beach ball.) Helpfully labelled drinks. Saturday - The Graduation Good music. Good speeches. (<plug> yes, this is me </plug>) Saturday - After We Are Graduated In which I pose with the superintendant. In which I pose with my brother outside in the blinding sunshine and blazing heat, while thinking about the cool water that happens to be behind us. In which I pose with my parents and brother in a moderately more forgiving environment at home. In which I pose with my brother and grandparents, who could probably stand in for an alternate Matrix cast, and kick your [posterior]. At least in this picture. In which my cousin Mark discovers that my stole is kinda fun. In which a good friend of mine gives me a freaking awesome shirt. I will now proceed to summarily disappear off the face of the ‘net from sometime tomorrow until late Monday or so, in which I Move To Cambridge.

Scoble barada nikto, apparently. Through Don, Doc, and Nicholas Carr, I found out the news that Robert Scoble left Microsoft. I've liked his Scobleizer blog for a while, but I guess being on the road this week I haven't really been reading so much. Cool beans for him, bad news for Microsoft. Hope things work out and they get another nice guy to be their designated hoo-man.

Via Susan (who is unlinkable), a thoughtful essay on the net neutrality debate: Net Neutrality is a Deep Issue. The writer identifies what is probably the key battleground: video delivery. The question isn’t whether Google is going to take five seconds to return search results; it’s how multimedia content will be handled.

Today I did some serious polishing of the first deliverable of the boot process project and made it available here. One of the things added were some hotspots ordered by how promising they are. The final version of the deliverable will be ready tomorrow evening.

One question that I had today was about the relationship between Debian's update-rc.d and Fedora's chkconfig command. Both of them seem to arrange the order of execution of the init scripts. The other question was about the acceptance of file-rc and it seems that, at least for debian, it is used quite seldom (1).

Finally, as a result from Petter Reinholdtsen's feedback to the previously published bootcharts of woody, sarge and etch, I compared the bootcharts time using a stopwatch. Petter considered that the times were too small and it looked like KDE autologin time was too short. The time results (in seconds) for Sarge and Etch are:

Sarge 0:44 (bootchart) and 1:06 (stopwatch). Difference = 0:22
Etch 0:34 (bootchart) and 0:49 (stopwatch). Difference = 0:15

Big difference. The stopwatch was activated when the key ENTER is pressed at the GRUB selection screen and stopped until the KDE in-progress window disappeared.It should be noticed that bootchart doesn't account for the time of initrd.

Besides, from the time that the message of starting kdm appears until the KDE stops loading there is an important time difference:

Sarge ~0:06 (bootchart) and 0:23.5 (stopwatch). Difference=0:17.5
Etch ~0:05.5 (bootchart) and 0:19 (stopwatch). Difference=13.5

Then, most of the time difference seems to be because of bootchart stopping to count the time before the KDE stops loading.

Just as a final remark, the PC time from pressing the ON botton to the grub is around 11.5 second. Then the total startup times of Sarge and Etch end up being as big as 1:17.5 and 1:00.5, respectively. Both above one minute.

(1)http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?popcon=file-rc

Right it is 23:43 and I’m just back from a dodgy metal night - picture the winners of the Eurovision song contest but with a lesser budget. Normally this would be described upon my real blog which contains adult language, and a mixture of random trivia, sadism, and geekyness in more detail than is displayed here. (You might think this is a hard mix, but I’ll tell you it isn’t suprising if you’ve ever programmed Gtk 2.x in raw C ) Anyway the reason I went to the gig in the first place was that last year one of my partners was a bass-player, and she was often playing gigs in different locations. Unfortunately for the duration of our relationship I managed to never actually hear her play. Not deliberately - it was just the way things worked out. We kinda tailed off seeing each other because I was sleepy and she lived in a different city. Actually this is a common theme with me. I once lived with a concert chello player and for the entire 2.5. years of our relationship I managed to never hear her play, or practise (and we lived together!). Again not deliberate, it was just the way things worked out. (Even now I don’t think she’s ever heard me play the guitar.) Later I had a relationship with a Swedish dentist and for the duration of our relationship I refused to let her look inside my mouth [mostly ]. It was only after we’d ceased being .. close .. that I let her extract some wisdom teeth of mine. Of course she was Swedish, living abroad, and all her friends were Swedish too - so I had a lot of Swedish “friends” around that time. Maybe one day I’ll even meet a genuine blonde Swede. (I can say “hello”, “goodbye”, “I love you”, “marry me”, and “you’re cute” in Swedish!) (I’m not a slut; I just know what I like.) Anyway .. enough side-tracking. The only reason this is coming up at all is because I think context is important when writing about people that aren’t known - I hate seeing people in blogs write about “J”, or “C”, with no hint of the nature of the relationship, or why we should know/care about their actions - people are important, and if you’re going to bring them up you should explain who they are, and why they are relavent. The fact that I’ve drunk 5 bottles of cider now is also helping extend this entry If it helps I almost promise not to mention these people again. So, to recap, I’m at this metal gig, and damn they were a fantastic band. Miranda (the woman I was “with”, previosuly if not recently) was a total camera-slut, and she was technically extremely competant. I guess I shouldn’t have been suprised but I was. So, why do I mention any of this? Well I was standing outside before the band started as it is illegal to smoke in public enclosed places in Scotland (since Marche this year) and this obviously rules out smoking in a pub in the basement bar. (The bar was unstaffed since the bands playing tonight were “too loud”. Sucky having to walk upstairs to find beer.) So .. stood outside, totally under-dressed for the occasion. Almost everybody else in the (very sweaty) basement bar was dressed in monochrome and I had shiny white shoes and colourful t-shirt. Still I was one of the tattoo’d + pierced people so all was good. “Excuse me, you look like Steve Kemp”. For the first time ever somebody recognised me from my planet debian hackergotchie. Neat huh? And now it is 23:58 and I’m going to listen to some nice Rammstein and go sleep. Tomorrow I must do some Debian work, and tidy a friends flat - since they just moved out and want their deposit back. In the future I will try to keep the entries here more on-topic, unless people actually care about this kind of entry …

My friend Dick rarely asks anyone anything. If he needs some information, he looks it up himself, on the Internet, in a book, from source code, or wherever. Only after spending considerable effort himself will he ask someone else. He takes this so far that he'll get very upset if you give him the information. It ruins his day to get derailed, and then he sulks the rest of the day. My other friend Ollie, on the other hand, always asks immediately when he has a problem. Either on IRC, by e-mail, by calling on the phone, or by shouting over a cubicle wall. He'll even run to the other side of the building to find someone he suspects has the answer. Only if he can't find anyone with the answer will he start looking for the answer himself. Both Dick and Ollie are smart. Both are successful in their careers and both are regarded well enough by their colleagues, but only Dick is considered an expert. Looking things up yourself is slower and harder, in the short run. You spend a lot of energy finding the little bit of information that solves your immediate problem. On the other hand, you learn things on the way. You learn about things related to or surrounding the immediate bit, and most importantly, you learn where to find more information. You might even learn that the bit you're looking for is the wrong bit, and there's an altogether different way of looking at the problem that lets you do things in a much better way. There's nothing wrong in asking questions, but on the whole, it's better for yourself to try finding the answer yourself first. In a hacker culture, where being good at something is valued exceptionally highly, someone asking frequent questions is often considered annoying. Doubly so, if they seem to be an Ollie. Don't be an Ollie. Do yourself a favor and be a Dick. (This entry was written some time ago, in reaction to a certain someone's umpteenth question of the day, and seeing people responding simply with Google's domain. I've postponed publishing it because I didn't want to attack that person directly.)

It is a daily fight with the oddities of PyGTK. It seems that there are severe issues in conjunction with the way I use the threading in Python. The patch is almost complete in terms of functionality. (Not everything is committed yet, because I will review all core changes again, to keep them both compact and sensible.) But there are issues with the GUI, like it not reacting after a program switch in conjunction with the GTK accessibility module. Scrolling the log window to the bottom does not work neither, even if I call the corresponding function scroll_to_mark in an idle handler (and thus in the main thread). Still those are minor, mainly cosmetic issues. It's just that the deadline is approaching. (Considering that I face the final examinations for my High School degree in a bit more than a week, I need to hurry up. I get my topics on Monday, so there is one week of preparation time for both a presentation and all content of one class.)

Here’s what you get when your python maintainer is too busy working on Ubuntu, unwilling to team maintain the thing in Debian, and finally rushes an upgrade :
dpkg: error processing python2.4 (--remove):
Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should
reinstall it before attempting a removal.
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::logic_error'
what(): basic_string::_S_construct NULL not valid
zsh: abort sudo apt-get -f install
Not happy at all. Even the modular X.org transition went better than this. Oh, and CUPS is b0rked too. Less than 6 months before our target release date for Etch, this really doesn’t sound too good.

...or so Spock said. Apparrently. Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading something on Wikipedia. Don't ask me what I started with, I don't remember; however, my journey through Wikipedia eventually got me to the Rare Earth hypothesis, the Principle of Mediocrity, and other related things. Both are subjects relating to whether or not there would be life on other planets. The latter claims that this is, in fact, quite likely; the Principle of Mediocrity basically says that "Earth is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star in a relatively ordinary galaxy which is one of countless others in a giant universe, possibly within an infinite multiverse". This is supported by a number of astronomical findings. The contrast to that, the Rare Earth hypothesis, claims that Earth is, in fact, not a very ordinary planet. That to be able to reach a point where complex multicellular can have evolved—such as on Earth—such a high number of variables have to have the exact right value, with in many cases such low margins for errors, that while possible, the likelihood that life would exist on other planets is very low. They were both interesting reads. However, there is one thing to which I did not find an answer: Why does it have to be Earth-like life? As I understand the theory of our origins, life began on the Planet Earth in a relatively stable body of unclean water—known as the "Oersoep" in Dutch, though I couldn't find the English term for that—on which the sun shone; that sunshine made the elements of the "oersoep" react with eachother so that it eventually formed single-cell life, which then evolved into multi-cellular life, and so on. Even today, the sun still shines on Earth, and almost all energy in use on Earth can in some way or another be attributed to something that once received sunlight; I suspect the only exception to that is nuclear energy. As I understand the Rare Earth hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity, both seem to assume the basic premise that the only way in which life could evolve is the way in which it evolved on Earth; that is, you need direct sunlight so that you can have some chemical reactions. You cannot have too much ultraviolet, gamma, or x-ray radiation, because that would kill life. You cannot have too many impacts of extraplanetarian bodies, such as comets or asteroids, because these impacts and the resulting fallout would destroy life. I did not find any argument for that assertion, however; and what I don't see is why it would be necessary. We could define the "oersoep" as some sort of a "stable chaos": a bunch of chemical elements and a varying external influence (sunlight) means that you have a brewing and reacting bunch of matter, where the composition of the matter is constantly changing; however, at the same time, when viewed over a large amount of time, not much did in fact change. The varying external influences have a regular and stable rhythm; the sun appears in the morning and disappears in the evening. The sun shines longer in summer than it does in winter. While it is not the same all the time, there is predictability. If a number of chemical elements react with eachother in a certain way on one day, then they will react the same way again the next day. If this happens for years on end, you may have a series of reactions that is more or less reproducible, where the final result of all the chemical reactions turns out to be the original starting point again. At least almost so. Such a series of chemical reactions could be called "life", especially if it occurs within a small group of chemicals that sticks together, like a cell. While a body of unclean water with regular sunshine certainly is one way to get to a series of repetitive chemical reactions, I fail to see why it would have to be the only possible way. If there were a planet composed mainly of Helium (rather than Hydrogen and Carbon, as on Earth) but also containing a bunch of other elements (so that they can react with eachother) with a star that sends out lots of gamma radiation and an atmosphere which blocks sunlight (I don't know whether Helium can do that, but let's assume it can), then I do not see why it would not be possible for life to evolve on such a planet which would be based on Helium rather than Carbon and Water, and which would require gamma radiation to survive but would die when brought into prolonged contact with light, just like we will die when brought into prolonged contact with gamma radiation. Another example could be a planet where every year a comet of approximately the same composition impacts on the same place on the planet's surface. Such an impact would regularly stir up the chemical elements on this planet, and could provide the needed energy to produce the chemical reactions required to sustain life. If any life were to evolve on this planet, not only would it be able to survive such constant extraplanetary impacts, it would also require these impacts to continue in order to survive. I haven't been able to find any information on that. It would seem that either I'm missing something very basic, or that nobody has thought of this before—and I would find that highly unlikely. So, anyone who's been thinking longer than me about this subject (that is to say, just a few hours) who could enlighten me? Of course, one answer could be to say that God created all life, and that the evolution theory is only a theory, which is not grounded in any reality. But make a comment to that effect on my blog, and I will moderate it away. After having a good-hearted laugh at it.

Always a tinkerer and an explorer, I've known I wanted to self-host a blog for some time. Blog hosting sites have their pluses, but I couldn't resist making something distinctively mine with cool technology like the Rails-based Typo. Besides, I couldn't be outdone by my wife, who has for months now kept a successful knitting blog. The time has come. Syn.theti.ca will include ideas about programming at work and play, Debian development, home-based learning, kids and family, or whatever else strikes my fancy or seems noteworthy at the time. No lofty goals, in other words. Just a place to collect my thoughts and connect up to the blogosphere.

At the last FOSDEM, I gave an interview to the guys of Source21.nl. Which has been published on their website right now. As you will be able to see if you have a look, I did not have much of a voice—mainly because I had been yelling people to please move away from the bar on friday night. But, well—it still came out pretty well, I think. Yes, my hair looks ugly (I shaved it off a week later or so), and yes, I made some factual errors regarding the release date of Sarge. But let's not dwell on that too much, shall we? ;-)

Next Tuesday, 20 June 2006, I will be taking part in the Bike To Work event in King's Lynn. Groups will be meeting up at 8am at: the Norfolk Arena, Saddlebow Road; the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gayton Road; and the Co-op Rainbow, Langley Road. At 8.30am, riders will set off for the main Post Office, Baxter's Plain, probably arriving [...]

Programming, windows style
I'm now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don't mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft's IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that's about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn't know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it's hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren't apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I'm not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I'm beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can't really complain that much though, I knew the tools we'd be using when I accepted the job.

Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren't released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:

• MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.


• DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana's use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.


• Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.

I also have a couple of smaller applications which won't really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.

Today I mostly packaged a current version of ecartis, to avoid content-transfer-encoding weirdness (#176667). There is also a compiled version of the package for sarge should that be useful to anybody. I also updated the “blog” facilities on the Debian Administration website - this was after I wrote a very long entry - and was annoyed that it seemed to spam the associated planet site. Entries can now be truncated by the use of the magic “<cut>” tag. I imagine few people will need/want it, but I’m sure I’ll find it handy.