Search Results: "will"

27 February 2006

Anthony Towns: #debian-tech, Redux

Back in September last year I blogged on #debian-tech, a new IRC channel for discussing Debian, but with a charter and some ops with a mandate to enforce it. At the time I wrote:
It’ll probably be quite a bit different from #debian-devel on either OFTC or FreeNode; hopefully that’ll turn out to be in a good way. We’ve got (I think) a pretty good variety of ops, who have (I think) some pretty good ideas on encouraging good productive activities on Debian. We’ll see what happens!
Since then, we’ve had a couple of significant discussions on it, reflected on the wiki page; the multiarch discussion was interesting and spontaneous, and the release and archive qualification discussions were both potentially highly contentious discussions that seemed to end up being conducted really well, and have both had some pretty significant results. That’s pretty pleasing – this time last year, there wasn’t anywhere I’d’ve been comfortable having those sorts of discussions in public, now there’s somewhere that’s been demonstrated to work fairly well. A more surprising outcome is that we’ve never actually banned anyone from the channel. To some extent, this is to be expected since people who don’t like the concept just won’t join in the first place, and to the extent that’s true, it’s a good thing. And at least Wouter, who’d also objected in the past, was willing to join briefly for one of the discussions important to him and get along fine. Unfortunately that’s not the only reason for the total lack of bans. The other aspect is that people have turned out to be far more ready to ban themselves than the ops have been. To anonymise an example from November last year: Read the rest ...

Martin F. Krafft: FOSDEM 2006

FOSDEM 2006 is over, I am now sitting at one of the weirdest airports I have seen so far: passages are intertwined and long, and it seems like you have to walk several hundred kilometres in circles before you finally end up at the place you ned to go to. I gave a talk Saturday on my Ph.D. research. Having spent almost an entire week preparing it, which involved rethinking my topic, the approach, and fighting doubts several times, I was all too pleased that a new aspect of my research was dawning upon me just in time to change a lot of the slides around a bit on the plane from Zurich. Even though my goal is to work a lot on Debian, I think the question on which I really want to concentrate is along the lines of "how to get volunteers to adopt new models and methods." Debian seems like a perfect environment in which to search for an answer, but I assume I shall also be looking around the Zope and Plone communities. Unfortunately, my talk didn't go as well as I had hoped. Part of it was on the Debian security situation, and having talked to a couple of people up front, and receiving even more feedback to my online personna, which apparently sometimes misrepresents my intentions, I took specific care to do with the delicate topic of Debian security with utmost care (and I think I succeeded; oh, and as a German I have a right to run-on sentences...). As a result though, I lost about 10 minutes of time, and additionally, I got confused about the length of my talk slot somewhere in the middle of the talk. So after giving an overview of my research idea, model, and approach, and the security situation, and just before coming to the exciting meat on possible extensions to Debian package management and the upload process which are geared to making it easier for others to contribute, h01ger kindly pointed out I had 10 minutes (not 25) left, a bunch of people walked into the room, generating noise and switching lights on and off, and on top of it all, OpenOffice crashed with the remainder of my slides -- those that contained graphs and other means to convey the complex ideas I was about to introduce. So everything seemed to be going wrong. I tried to give brief overviews of the ideas from the top of my head, but I didn't manage to piece together all the details that made the ideas interesting in a Debian context, and how the approach differs from Ubuntu's Launchpad and their new tool hct. So at the end of the talk I felt like I hadn't persuaded anyone of anything. Oh well. I was down for a while afterwards, it's been a long time since I felt a talk of mine failing as I did this time, and it wasn't until Hanna and some others consoled me by mentioning that they appreciated the contents I did convey (especially the security stuff), and quite a bunch of people found me afterwards with questions, suggestions, and comments. My slides are available online (~ 4.3 Mib) and I am looking forward to your feedback. I apologise for the size of the PDF and herewith promise never to use OpenOffice.org again. A bzip2-compressed version is available here (~ 1.4 Mib). Saturday night then ended with dinner and a bit of beer drinking, but noone was really up for anything more after the excessive opening party the night before. Sleep. Sunday morning, my laptop was still frozen by OpenOffice, and I rebooted it to find myself dumped into busybox as /dev/hda5 (my root) didn't exist. I quickly found the problem to be a missing udevd and udevsynthesize in the initramfs, but I did not manage to bring the system back up until Tollef gave me a hand to get pivot_root to do what it was supposed to do. Here's approximately how: 
busybox mknod /dev/hda5 b 3 5
mount /dev/hda5 /root
mount -o move /sys /root/sys
mount -o move /proc /root/proc
chroot /root /sbin/udevd --daemon
chroot /root /sbin/udevsynthesize
exec run-init /root /sbin/init 2 < /root/dev/console > /root/dev/console
While we were at it, Daniel Silverstone showed us a wonderful way to help debug problems of this sort: /usr/bin/open. If bash only has /dev/console, it won't enable job control. This is exactly where open comes in: 
/root/usr/bin/open /root/bin/sh
This will put an interactive shell on the next free tty with job control and all. Thanks, Daniel! I think that the above approach actually failed in the end for some weird reason we did not investigate further, so Tollef resorted to fixing the initrd instead: 
update-initramfs -c -t -k 2.6.15-1-686
The important part is -t, which essentially redoes the filesystem so that custom changes are undone. I hadn't made any custom changes, but from the point of view of initramfs, I had deleted the udev binaries. Within an hour I had a working system again, and a 
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.15-1-686
zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-1-686   cpio -t   grep udev
verified that the problem was only intermittent (I rarely reboot my laptop but update it often). The T-Shirts Uncle Steve and I were selling pretty much all found new owners. This is great because I had been sitting on about a dozen shirts in XS and XXXL, and I thought I'd never get rid of them. Unfortunately, I sold them at no-profit, but given it was the last batch from Kernel Concepts, I am now thinking of arranging something with Steve to get a bunch of his shirts (which are nicer anyway). With talks coming to an end that day, everyone's departure was a stressful time and I was all the more glad to have had another night to spend in the city. I linked up with Jordi and some of the Debian Catalan people who were staying with a friend, Raoul, in the city. Raoul took us around a bit, showed us some of the historic sites in the centre of the city, and finally lead us to the bar of 2000 beers, where supposedly "the best beer of the world" was served: Trappist Westvletern Bleu 8. We ended the night around midnight for our flights were in the early morning. This having been my first FOSDEM, it was a great experience and I shall definitely try to be in Brussels again next year. Thanks to Wouter and all others who have helped out. Update: My slide links were previously not working. Thanks to all who pointed that out to me. They are fixed now. See above.

Bernhard R. Link: Gnu FDL

My suggestion for the GFDL vote is 1342

( 1 ) Choice 1: "GFDL-licensed works are unsuitable for main in all cases"

of course that only means documents only available under FDL or only available under FDL or other non-free software licenses. Documents also available under BSD, GPL or whatever are still free. That "in all cases" means without looking at the loudness of the proponents of some document.

( 3 ) Choice 2: "GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free"

This does not mean "without unmodifiable sections", it means "without additional unmodifable sections". FDL has always to include the license within the work. (I still do not know how to include the license within a binary easily. But as the FDL as GPL-incompatible anyway it perhaps makes such work-flows impossible, anyway).

( 4 ) Choice 3: "GFDL-licensed works are compatible with the DFSG [needs 3:1]"

That's even worse. We have non-free for non-free stuff some of our users might not live without. (Or think so). Foist non-free stuff on them will severly hurt them in the long run.

( 2 ) Choice 4: Further discussion

Don't forget this option. If you do not like choice 2 (perhaps because you think like me that it is almost choice 3), rank 4 above it. Otherwise with equally many [3214] and [1234] votes, choice 2 would most likely win.

So only rank 2 above 4, if you want to see 2 in action. Otherwise vote 4 over 2. (same with 3 and 4, but 3 does not look so innocent as 2)

MJ Ray: The FDL Position Statement Vote

I just started composing my FDL PS ballot paper. Obviously, I prefer the "1.2 doesn't follow DFSG in any combo" option, but I was again arguing with myself about how to rank the others relative to Further Discussion (FD, which I regard as "try again to get agreement" instruction). One thing I can't remember is whether ordering multiple options beneath FD has any useful effect. I browsed The Debian Voting System by Jochen Voss, but I seem to be too stupid to find the answer from it today. Looking at past tally sheets, it seems many people do order them, so probably I will too.

Lars Wirzenius: Debian: FOSDEM slides up

I'm back from FOSDEM 2006. I had a very nice time, and will be writing a fuller entry about that later; this is entry is to mention that I've made my slides available. I'll be giving an updated version of the talk at Debconf6 in Mexico, so beware if you fear spoilers.

Pierre Habouzit: kde 3.4.1 upload

Here is the mail I just sent to the debian-kde list : the QT-KDE team just uploaded to experimental packages for the 3.4.1 kde following modules : the other kde modules are either maintained outside from the team, or depends upon packages that are maintained outside from the team (here is a nice picture showing the build deps and the maintainers of the official kde modules). A mirror has been set up on alioth : deb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.1/ ./
deb-src http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.1/ ./ In order to install the package, you will need the dbus-1-qt package from current experimental. this package has not been mirrored on alioth yet. kde 3.4.1 has to wait for dbus to migrate into unstable, and for obvious reasons, this move will wait for sarge to be released (which *should* happen next week). Nota:

Axel Beckert: Slides for Berlin and Chemnitz online

The slides for my next two shell efficiency talks are now online. I’ll hold one 1.5h talk on Thursday, 2nd of March, 19:30h at the New Thinking Store in Berlin Mitte. Thanks to Sven Guckes for the idea and for bringing me in contact (again) with New Thinking. The second will be a 3h workshop on Saturday, 4th of March at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. I’ll also hold a short 30min talk for beginners about the “Command line helper” on Sunday, the 5th of March, 10:00h at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides for this talk will follow during this week. All talks will be held in German. Update, 12:57h: I’ll travel from Berlin to Chemnitz with the famous LinuxBus and there are still some seats free. So if you plan to come from Berlin to Chemnitz and want us to join, please quickly contact Frank Hofmann <linuxbus@efho.de> for reservation.

Clint Adams: But will the evil spaghetti take flight as a monster?

Disney is releasing the 50th Anniversary Edition DVD of Lady and the Tramp on Feb. 28.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Low Blogging Frequency

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:
I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

26 February 2006

Simon Richter: Back to the (sweet?) uni life

Hooray, the papers from my new uni arrived today. Now the interesting question is how much of the courses I took so far will be accepted by them, as I certainly do not want to do the entire shebang again from the beginning. Well, I'm quite confident most will be.

25 February 2006

Enrico Zini: Reorganization of the DCG

I've recently received a substantial amount of feedback about the Debian Community Guidelines and went into some reorganization of it. The previous general section still stands as the Main Guidelines: those are the substantial few things to always keep in mind. What previously was the long list of checklists is now split in two: the Debian-specific Guidelines, which should be a shorter lists of non-obvious suggestions for people who already have experience with online life, and the General Guidelines, with the fuller checklists with useful suggestions for everyone. I still haven't gone through the selection and reorganization of the Debian-specific and General part, so at the moment they look fairly similar and most things overlap. But the good news is that I finally found a structure that I like, and that can allow more experienced people to make use of the guidelines without getting bored with simpler things like "google before asking a question". This division also suggests a little workflow: new suggestions can be added to the Debian-specific part, and then later moved to the general part when they become obvious for everyone. I'm happy. This layout seems to be good in getting me unstuck with how to think of the DCG. More will come of course, as I'll prepare my DCG talk for Debconf6.

Joerg Jaspert: Old DebConf websites are back up

Finally we have the websites of past DebConf events back online. We have the sites from debconf3 til 5 now available. I dont think debconf2 and 1 had something that was seen as one site, but if someone somewhere has parts of it and wants it to be available from debconf.org Im happy to include it there. The sites are accessible via debconfX.debconf.org, replace X with their number, ie debconf4.debconf.org will show you the site from the Brasilian DebConf. We currently have: http://debconf3.debconf.org http://debconf4.debconf.org http://debconf5.debconf.org http://debconf6.debconf.org As you see debconf6.debconf.org already works. That one will be the URL if DC6 is over, www.debconf.org then will move on to DC7. IOW www will always point to the upcoming event. Some little notes: - The past events had PHP driven websites, and a CMS. As there is no reason to have a running root hole on the system for events that dont change anymore I mirrored the page and now only have static content. It *may* be that I made a mistake in that process, so a link doesnt work. If you discover that - please inform me, or best send a diff (or if its more then some sed statements). - Of course I disabled all the login possibilities from those CMS stuff and turned off counters. - What to do with the es.debconf.org site when DC6 is over? We have two options, one is to just ignore it until we have another DC which needs a spanish site, the other is to “move” it to debconf6-es.debconf.org - Of course no comas is running for the old debconf site. Gunnar said he has a backup somewhere, so with a bit of luck and time we can make the links to the talk details from debconf5 working. - Gallery isnt up yet. I have the data for it, so it will come back.

Zak B. Elep: Turbulence

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! :D On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) :( I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out ;) On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. ;) It would also prepare me better for NM as well. :D As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. ;) But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. :D So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop! :P

24 February 2006

Pierre Habouzit: satisfaction

Yesterday, one user of whitelister reported me a bug. That made my day : this meant that there was actually users in the world that used whitelister, and thought it worth the effort to report a bug ! It motivated me to fix a couple of problems that I knew where there, and I released (and uploaded) a new version yesterday. I have to mention that whitelister will also soon be in production of a quite big mail system (even if not a FAI, we talk about MX that do more than 300k mails per week, which is not nothing). I have to mention that I also changed the license to BSD, I'm quite afraid of the direction the GPL is taking, and BSD is definitely better, spam is a too big problem, and if people want to do money with my idea, let them do it, if that can stop spam GPL has no sense at all when you don't plan to exploit the software yourself. When I'll release 1.0 (there is a couple of things I'd like to fix in how the configuration file is handled before) I'll try to give some public visibility to the project, because I really think it's based on a really good idea.

Pierre Habouzit: vim-shell

I was searching today for a tool able to launch a shell in a vim. I found vim-shell. It took me only a few minutes to have a patch against vim 6.4 working, and some more seconds to have the debs. sadly, it didn't fit my expectations. I hoped that vim-shell would allow me to switch between interactive shell and editing sessions, allowing to scroll in the history buffer, copy things, edit others, remove some lines, well, having the shell living in a vim window. sadly : I hope such evolutions will come fast ...

Pierre Habouzit: Debian and pam-LDAP

I use now extensively lib(pam nss)-ldap and was really tired having to forge my .ldif to add users. Since I don't need samba, smbldap-tools does not work (I don't use samba.schema whatever the name is)... So I discovered ldapscripts, those worked, even if they don't provide a lot of functionnalities. At least, you can : I've just written some bits of magic that make the ldapscripts discover its settings from libpam-ldap and adduser config files, so that the average user will see those script work out from the box after having configured libpam-ldap. Now I'm a fully happy pam-ldap user. And btw, I've submitted an ITP, and look at the magic : w00t

Pierre Habouzit: Married ...

it's done ... You know what ? it's awkward to type with a ring ... I will get used to it I suppose ... anyway, that was a very nice wedding celebration. update : a photo of the wedding (me and my wife[1])
Notes [1] that feels odd to write ...

Simon Law: CodeCon 2006, Day 3


Green
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some. We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle. In the Q&A; period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6. I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word. My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool. At lunch, [info]wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat. I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences.

Truck
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you. I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers! As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy! Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult! After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealh eow and charming [info]akashayi who went off to dinner without me. Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with [info]breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable [info]spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss. I had a very good night.

Erich Schubert: Copyright infringing brilliance

I have posted the link to this flash before, but it still rocks... And I especially love this comment on it:
Seven hundred monkeys and seven hundred stolen copies of Flash have turned out a work of copyright-infringin' brilliance.
So, enable proprietary flash, turn up your speakers, prepare to rock and browse here. Click all the arrows. Heck, I can't even say which one I like best! I wonder who made that, and whether there will be a version two featuring even more copyright infringements. The Wikipedia entry on this song mentions a meme... - and it looks like Here is one of the originals. And there are tons more you would not have thought of. ...and explanations.

Steve McIntyre: Time for FOSDEM!

Heading to Brussels tomorrow; I hope this cold doesn't get any worse... :-( It's a shame to see that Lars has dropped out of the DPL election. Hopefully some of his platform ideas will be picked up whichever one of us wins - I agree with him on several of them. Anyway, time to get to bed early for once - tomorrow's going to be a long day with lots of beer at the end of it!

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