Russ Albery has described why he doesn t support comments on his blog [1]. I respect his opinion and I m not going to try and convince him to do otherwise. But I think it s worth describing why I want comments on my blog and feel that they are worth having for many (possibly most) other blogs. Types of Blog The first thing to consider is the type of post on the blog. Some blogs are not well suited to comments. I have considered turning off comments on my documents blog [2] because it gets a small number of readers and is designed as reference material rather than something you might add to a public Planet feed or read every week as it has a small number of posts that are updated. So conversations in the blog comments are unlikely to happen. One thing that has made me keep comments open on my documents blog is the fact that I am using blog posts as the main reference pages for some of my projects and some people are using the comments facility for bug reports. I may make this the main bug reporting facility I will delete the comments when I release a version of the software with the bugs fixed. One particular corner case is a blog which has comments as a large part of it s purpose. Some blogs have a regular open thread where anyone can comment about any topic, blogs which do such things have the owners act more like editors than writers. One example of this is the Making Light blog by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden [3] who are both professional editors. The next issue is the content of the post. If I was to create a separate blog for authoritative posts about SE Linux then there wouldn t be much point in allowing comments, there are very few people who could correct me when I make a mistake and they would probably be just as happy to use email. When I write about issues where there is no provably correct answer (such as in this post) the input of random people on the net is more useful. Another content issue is that of posts of a personal nature. Some people allow comments on most blog posts apart from when they announce some personal matter. I question the wisdom of blogging about any topic for which you would find comments intolerable, but if you are going to do so then turning off comments makes sense. Finally there is the scale of the blog. If you don t get enough readers to have a discussion in the comments then there is less benefit in having the facility turned on the ratio of effort required to deal with spam to the benefit in comments isn t good enough. In his FAQ about commenting [4] Russ claims that controlling spam can take a tremendous amount of time or involve weird hoop-jumping required for commenters . I have found the Block Spam by Math [5] Wordpress plugin to be very effective in dealing with the spam, so for this blog it s a clear benefit to allow comments. Since using that plugin my spam problem has decreased enough that I now allow comments on posts which are less than 1 year old previously comments were closed after 90 days. The plugin is a little annoying but I changed the code to give an error message that describes the situation and prevents a comment from being lost so the readers don t seem too unhappy. The Purpose of Comments Russ considers the purpose of comments to be meaningfully addressed to the original post author or show intent to participate in a discussion . That s a reasonable opinion, but I believe that in most cases it s best if comments are not addressed to the author of the post and are instead directed towards the general readers. I believe that participating in a discussion and helping random people who arrive as the result of a Google search are the main reasons for commenting. For my blog an average post will get viewed about 500 times a year and the popular posts get viewed more than 200 times per month, so when over the course of a year more than 1000 people read the comments on a post (which is probably common for one of my posts) then 99.9% of readers are not me and commentators might want to direct their comments accordingly. Of course a comment can be addressed at the blog author so the unknown audience can enjoy watching the discussion. For some of my technical posts I don t have time to respond to all comments. If I have developed a solution to a technical problem that is good enough I may not feel inclined to invest some extra work in developing an ideal solution. So when a reader suggests a better option I sometimes don t test that out and therefore can t respond to the comment. But the comment is still valuable to the 1000+ other people who read the comment section. So a commentator should not assume that I will always entirely read a comment on a technical matter. Comment threads can end up being a little like mailing lists. I don t think that general discussions really work well in comment threads and don t aim for such things. But if a conversation starts then I think you might as well continue as long as it s generally interesting. Generally for most blogs I think that providing background information, supporting evidence, and occasionally evidence of errors is a major part of the purpose of blog comments. But entertainment is always welcome. I would be happy to see some poems in the comments section of technical posts, sometimes a Limerick or haiku could really help make a technical point. Political blog posts can be a difficult area. Generally the people who feel inclined to write political blog posts or comment on them are not going to be convinced to entirely change course, but as there are many people who can t seem to understand this fact a significant portion of the comments on political blog posts consist of different ways of saying you re wrong . The solution to this is to moderate the comments aggressively, too many political blogs have comments sections that are all heat and no light. I m happy for people to go off on tangents when commenting on my political posts or to suggest a compromise between my position and their preferred option. But my tolerance of comments that simply disagree is quite small. Generally I think that blogs which directly advocate a certain political position should have the comments moderated accordingly, people will read a site in the expectation of certain content and I believe that the comments should also meet that expectation to some degree. Comments on political posts can provide insights into different points of view and help discover compromise positions if moderated well. How to provide Feedback Russ advocates commenting to the blog author via email it is now the only option he accepts. My observation is that the number of people who are prepared to comment via email (which generally involves giving away their identity) is vastly smaller than those who use Blog comment facilities. This means that you will miss some good comments. One of the most valuable commentators on my blog uses the name Anonymous and has not felt inclined to ever identify themself to me, I wouldn t want to miss the input of that person and some of the other people who have useful things to say but who don t want to identify themself. I have previously written about how not all opinions are equal and anonymous comments are given a lower weight [6]. That post inspired at least one blogger to configure their blog to refuse anonymous comments, it was not my intent to inspire such reactions (although they are logical actions based on a different opinion of the facts I presented). I believe that someone who is anonymous can gain authority by repeatedly producing quality work. Another option is for people to write their own blog posts referencing the post in question. I don t believe that my core reader base desires short posts so I won t write a blog post unless I have something significant to say. I expect that many other people believe that the majority of their blog comments would not meet the level of quality that their readers expect from their posts (posts are expected to be more detailed and better researched than comments). As an aside forcing people to comment via blog posts will tend to increase your Technorati rating. :-# A final option is for people to use services such as Twitter to provide short comments on posts. While Twitter is well designed for publishing short notes the problem with this is that it s a different medium. There are many people who like reading and discussing blog posts but who don t like Twitter and thus using a different service excludes them from the conversation. For my blog I prefer comments for short responses and blog posts for the longer ones. If you write a blog post that references one of my posts then please enter a comment to inform me and the readers of my blog. Email is not preferred but anyone who wants to send me some is welcome to do so. If this post inspires you to change your blog comment policy then please let me know. I would like to know whether I inspire people to allow or deny blog comments.

• [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2010-03/008.html
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/
• [3] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
• [4] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/comments.html
• [5] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/block-spam-by-math/
• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/13/not-all-opinions-are-equal/

I ve just uploaded Portslave version 2010.03.30 to Debian, it replaces version 2005.04.03.1. I considered waiting a few days to make the anniversary but I wanted to get the bugs fixed. I had a bug report suggesting that Portslave should be removed from Debian because of being 5 years without a major release. It has been running well 24*7 on one of my servers for the last 5 years and hasn t really needed a change. There were enough bugs to keep me busy for a few hours fixing things though. The irony is that I started using dates as version numbers back when there were several forks of Portslave with different version numbering schemes. I wanted to show that my fork had the newer version and a recent date stamp was a good indication of that. But then when Portslave didn t need an update for a while the version number showed it and people got the wrong idea. The new project home page for Portslave is on my document blog [1].

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/portslave/

March 21 was a day of sitting. We ate breakfast in our hotel in Prague that morning, which was pretty similar to an American hotel breakfast, save that the rolls contained black olives and that the all-you-can-eat buffet didn t have people take a new plate on their second time through. Anyhow, we made it to the airport in Prague with plenty of time to spare. That trip that involved a tram, a subway, and a bus, and was on a Sunday morning when all of these services run less frequently. I wasn t sure what to expect, but we did it in right at an hour, just as the hotel desk had estimated. Anyhow, in Prague they were heavily steering people to the self check-in kiosks. So we tried it, and got about halfway through the procedure when it asked us to put our passport on the glass scanner. I did so, and it appeared to process, then complained that the document is not a passport. Eventually an airport employee came over, had the same result after trying it twice, so beckoned us over to the counter. Then on towards our gate. We briefly considered some sort of snack, since we wouldn t get to Munich until after lunch, but the terrible prices scared us off. An entire dinner with friends the evening before cost only 235 crowns ($12.53) for the two of us together, and one restaurant was advertising a panini and Coke for 1 person at 220 Kc ($11.72). Anyhow, we eventually found ice cream bars at a reasonable price. While sitting down at our gate, in the out-of-the-way small planes only part of the airport, we noticed only the second drinking fountain in Europe conveniently labeled with an icon indicating what it s for. The only person other than me that used it washed his hands in it, and did not sip the water. We eventually got on the packed bus to our plane, then flew to Munich. Over there, announcements at regular intervals suggested that passengers flying to the USA go to their gate immediately so they can pass the extra security screening. What joy. We headed in that direction, stopping only to change my remaining Czech crowns to dollars. And then we got to go through passport control followed by security for the second time of the day. This one took special interest in our camera and Terah s scissors. Mysteriously, there was a stream of people not going through security, and we never quite figured out why. We wanted something for lunch, and inside this special security zone there was only one real option: a bar of sorts. We got there, and watched a guy pay for two small beers and a pretzel. They shop conveniently let him pay for dollars, and the price came to $25. Worst exchange rate ever. We bought a pretzel and two croissants and I got rid of my last Euro note (EUR 5) and a EUR 1 coin. Eventually our flight got going. It was interesting comparing our international flight on Lufthansa to our flight to Hamburg on Continental. Lufthansa came through the cabin even in our cheapest economy seats section with hot wet wipes, handed out and later collected with tweezers, before each meal. The food was slightly better than Continental. The in-flight entertainment system had more things on it, though there were not power hookups at the seats. I still didn t really care for any of the entertainment options, though I did watch a Ricky Gervais movie which was OK. I caught a brief nap and read my Kindle. In Chicago, we got to go through American passport control. To get into the USA, even as a citizen, you get to fill out a whole form. That s a bit different than getting into Germany, where they check your passport and send you on your way without even bothering to inspect your bags. (There s a voluntary office you can go do if you have anything to declare.) I had noted on our form that we were bringing in food, and they asked me what kind. I told them it was chocolate still in the wrapper, and they said, OK, that s fine, and waved us on. So in the end it was really no more involved. All the customs people we saw in every country were friendly and helpful. In Chicago, you have to go through security again after customs, so that made our third security check of the day. At our gate, CNN was showing the House debate on health care, and the bill finally passed just prior to boarding for Indianapolis. That was a pleasant welcome home ! Our flight got to Indianapolis a bit after midnight (as scheduled, sigh), and then there was a bit of a drive. We spent the night in Indiana. Jacob and Oliver were staying there with their grandparents, but of course were already asleep. Jacob woke up in the middle of the night at one point, panicked because he couldn t find the butterfly he always sleeps with. Terah helped him find it, and apparently he just sat there staring at her for a minute. Both boys were happy to see us in the morning. Jacob was talking about the toys, and Oliver was just laughing. We ate breakfast, then tried to get on the road as soon as possible we had an 11-hour (before stops) drive ahead of us, and had to complete it all in one day. We had talked about what we would be doing, and Jacob was sad to leave grandma & grandpa and their farm. About an hour into the drive, Jacob said, Dad, where are we going? We re driving home. Kitty doesn t like that. We should go that way. (and he pointed out the back window.) Back to grandma & grandpa s house? Yeah! Jacob has this habit of referring to himself in the third person as a kitty, and probably more so when there s something sad or difficult. We stopped for lunch or running around breaks a few times, and wound up getting home at about 8:30. Oliver started laughing when he saw our porch, and we got inside, Jacob said, I want to run around all over the place! and he did. They were happy to be home. In Leipzig, Fritzi had chosen a book to give to Jacob. On Monday, I got it out, and explained it was from Fritzi in Germany. Jacob was very interested. I told him it was about a mole (Maulwurf), and he thought that was great too. I couldn t remember Brad s translation of the German story, so Jacob and I made up our own story as we went. This was a big hit, and he had me read the book three times all at once. Then he wanted to talk about who gave him the book again. In all, I m very glad we took the trip. It was fun seeing the sights, visiting with friends, and being a part of an environment that s different from our own. I hope we can do it again before too long.

A truckload of compost was dropped off today. Went out this evening to put together a raised bed for it, and when I looked up, I saw a wonderful surprise. I've been trying to catch this groundhog for ages. It's still fat from last year's garden and the whole other contents of the yard, and also, I think, pea shoots that came up recently. But it would not set foot in the trap for any bait, and I had given up (again) and planned to put the trap away this evening. I came out at just the right instant, to confuse the beast, already stressed by the appearance of big piles of dirt, to dodging for the wrong hiding place. It's now enjoying its new home out at the lake, and I'm looking forward to enjoying vegetables.

On 20th of March, at five to midnight, we have released out most straining and time consuming project ever. Its codename is Simon Andr and we are pleased that it was (more or less) a smooth release process with just a minor delay of three days but the best don't release on time but when it is ready. Because everyone loves screenshots, and a few might be viewed on our dedicated Screenshot Page, for completeness this announce contains one: After one week into the release we have to say the feedback and the interest so far is pretty good, the maintenance is requesting its toll, but nothing really unexpected happened so far. We look into a bright future! Thank you for your attention, enjoy the nice spring weather!

Hello As the author of Config::Model, I ve often pondered whether my project was mature enough to be released as 1.0. After all, every time I seriously use it, I find new bugs or need to make it easier to use or even add some new features. So I thought that my software was not good enough for V1.0. Then again, all other software have the same issues: fix bugs, improve usage and follow user requirements. Then, I ve realized that wondering about software quality is not the right question. Sure, you need a decent quality level for 1.0. But the more important is not there. The most important is the compatibility pledge. Do I pledge to keep backward compatibility so people can rely on me and my software? Will I do my utmost to preserve the work done by others ? In fact, that s what I ve been doing for several months now, all the changes I ve made are backward compatible (even if warnings are issued) and people have a smooth migration path. So, yesterday, I ve released Config::Model V1.001. Ta-da !

On Saturday we received the disc from Netflix that enables instant streaming on the Wii. This gave me a good excuse to plug the Wii back in, as I hadn't gotten around to it since we moved house. The set up procedure is very nice. You put in the disc, start the "game", and it spits out a code. You go to http://www.netflix.com/Wii and enter the code. I imagine it looks for a request from the Wii with that code, and an authenticated submission with the same code from a web browser, within a certain period of time, and puts two and two together. It beats having to enter your username and password for your Netflix account on the Wii. The UI is very nice. You get a horizontal list of the titles in your Watch Instantly queue, and you just pick what you want to watch, and away you go. The video quality seemed fine. We'll definitely be watching more stuff from our Watch Instantly queue now. Full disclosure: I am a Netflix shareholder

14:31:33$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- rubygems
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:33:in  require'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:31:52$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- gettext
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:32:11$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- lockfile
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:32:31$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- mime/types
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:32:39$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- ncurses
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:33:08$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- net/ssh
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

14:33:19$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- ferret
/home/jon/wd/web/sup/Rakefile:35
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

So I identify which package is necessary and install it. Then:

4:33:31$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
Don't know how to build task 'default'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

Well, at least that's the dependencies sorted! This is how I would have preferred things to have worked:

14:31:33$ rake
(in /home/jon/wd/web/sup)
rake aborted!
missing dependencies:
    rubygems
    gettext
    lockfile
    mime/types
    ncurses
    net/ssh
    ferret

Once I've resolved which rake target I want (rake tarball gave me an installation tree I could use), I'm finally in a position to run the thing:

14:38:12$ sup-config
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in  gem_original_require': no
such file to load -- highline/import (LoadError)
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in  require'
        from /home/jon/wd/web/sup/pkg/sup-999/bin/sup-config:4

Ah.

The Claim I have seen it claimed that renting a virtual server can be cheaper than paying for electricity on a server you own. So I m going to analyse this with electricity costs from Melbourne, Australia and the costs of running virtual servers in the US and Europe as these are the options available to me. The Costs According to my last bill I m paying 18.25 cents per kWh that s a domestic rate for electricity use and businesses pay different rates. For this post I m interested in SOHO and hobbyist use so business rates aren t relevant. I ll assume that a year has 365.25 days as I really doubt that people will change their server arrangements to save some money on a leap year. A device that draws 1W of power if left on for 365.25 days will take 365.25*24/1000 = 8.766kWh which will cost 8.766*0.1825 = $1.5997950. I ll round that off to $1.60 per Watt-year. I ve documented the power use of some systems that I own [1]. I ll use the idle power use because most small servers spend so much time idling that the time that they spend doing something useful doesn t affect the average power use. I think it s safe to assume that someone who really wants to save money on a small server isn t going to buy a new system so I ll look at the older and cheaper systems. The lowest power use there is a Cobalt Qube, a 450MHz AMD K6 is really small, but at 20W when idling means a cost of only $32 per annum. My Thinkpad T41p is a powerful little system, a 1.7GHz Pentium-M with 1.5G of RAM, a 100G IDE disk and a Gig-E port should be quite useful as a server which now that the screen is broken is a good use for it. That Thinkpad drew 23W at idle with the screen on last time I tested it which means an annual cost of $36.80 or something a little less if I leave the screen turned off. A 1.8GHz Celeron with 3 IDE disks drew 58W when idling (but with the disks still spinning), let s assume for the sake of discussion that a well configured system of that era would take 60W on average and cost $96 per annum. So my cost for electricity would vary from as little as $36.80 to as much as $96 per year depending on the specs of the system I choose. That s not considering the possibility of doing something crazy like ripping the IDE disk out of an old Thinkpad and using some spare USB flash devices for storage I ve been given enough USB flash devices to run a RAID array if I was really enthusiastic. For virtual server hosting the cheapest I could find was Xen Europe charges E5 for a virtual server with 128M of RAM, 10G of storage and 1TB of data transfer [2], that is $AU7.38. The next best was Quantact who charges $US15 for a virtual server with 256M of RAM [3], that is $AU16.41. Really for my own use if I was paying I might choose Linode [4] or Slicehost [5], they both charge $US20 ($AU21.89) for their cheapest virtual server which has 360M or 256M of RAM respectively. I ve done a lot of things with Linode and Slicehost and had some good experiences, Xen Europe got some good reviews last time I checked but I haven t used them. The Conclusion When comparing a Xen Europe virtual server at $88.56 per annum it might be slightly cheaper than running my old Celeron system but would be more expensive than buying electricity for my old Thinkpad. If I needed more than 128M of RAM (which seems likely) then the next cheapest option is a 256M XenEurope server for $14.76 per month which is $177.12 per annum which makes my old computers look very appealing. If I needed more than a Gig of RAM then my old Thinkpad would be a clear winner, also if I needed good disk IO capacity (something that always seems poor in virtual servers) then a local server would win. Virtual servers win when serious data transfer is needed. Even if you aren t based in a country like Australia where data transfer quotas are small (see my previous post about why Internet access in Australia sucks [6]) you will probably find that any home Internet connection you can reasonably afford doesn t allow the fast transfer of large quantities of data that you would desire from a server. So I conclude that apart from strange and unusual corner cases it is cheaper in terms of ongoing expenses to run a small server in your own home than to rent a virtual server. If you have to purchase a system to run as a server (let s say $200 for something cheap) and assume hardware depreciation expenses (maybe another $200 every two years) then you might be able to save money. But this also seems like a corner case as the vast majority of people who have the skills to run such servers also have plenty of old hardware, they replace their main desktop systems periodically and often receive gifts of old hardware. One final fact that is worth considering is that if your time has a monetary value and if you aren t going to learn anything useful by running your own local server then using a managed virtual server such as those provided by Linode (who have a really good management console) then you will probably save enough time to make it worth the expense.

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/
• [2] http://www.xeneurope.co.uk/packages
• [3] https://www.quantact.com/signup.cgi
• [4] http://www.linode.com/
• [5] https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new
• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/18/why-internet-access-in-australia-sucks/

Note: this post written on March 20-21 and posted after our return.
(two women looking into the crypt at St. George s Basilica) We ve had a good couple of days in Prague. The city definitely feels more, well, foreign than Germany and that is perhaps accentuated by the fact that I don t know any Czech at all, while I know some basic German. It s been slow going at times, and surprisingly easy at others. Despite my lack of knowledge of Czech, I d say communicating here has been roughly as easy as in Germany. That is perhaps partially due to the fact that, of the places where we ve needed to communicate, we are either making simple requests (buying bread at a bakery) or the people we re talking to know some basic English. (Or, in one case, a guard at a museum at the Prague Castle complex used German to ask me to check a bag at the coat check, mildly surprising me and confusing Terah when I started to comply with instructions she didn t understand, and didn t know how I did.) The very first time we had a situation where it was a bit difficult to communicate, in the bakery, I got into my difficult to communicate mode and accidentally slipped in a couple of German words. Oops. Terah was laughing at me later, and commented that the store owner might have also been laughing at me or perhaps at his employee that also accidentally slipped into basic German mode. On Friday, we visited Vy ehrad Castle, the one that nobody that visits Prague seems to know about. That is perhaps because the palace/castle part of the complex has been mostly destroyed (but we did know that before going there.) It is in a nice, quiet, and beautiful park, and has the beautiful and old Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, as well as a large ornate cemetery. Then we visited two iconic Prague places: V clavsk n m st (Wenceslas Square) and Starom stsk n m st (Old Town Square). Both were beautiful. And, unfortunately, also packed with tourists and made-in-China plastic trinket shops. There I got my first clue that large tour groups tend to have a detrimental effect on any free site in Prague. They come in, the guides yell, they clog up things, and also generally miss the sites of true interest because buying tickets to them makes the price of the tour uncompetitive. On Saturday, we took the tram out to Pra sk hrad (Prague Castle) the one that everybody knows about. We got there at about 8:15, and although the grounds are open, most of the buildings weren t open until 9. As a result, we had 45 minutes almost to ourselves in the nearly-empty castle complex. We could walk around on the giant squares, take some photos, and generally enjoy a crisp and quiet morning. At 9, it was still pretty empty and we went into the ticket offices to buy our tickets. By the time we got out a few minutes later, it was packed mostly due to the arrival of innumerable tour groups from all over Europe and, apparently, Japan. We went to the Star kr lovsk pal c (Old Royal Palace) first, since I knew from their website that it would close at noon due to a visit from Prince Charles. That was a beautiful building, and it s amazing to read about the features of it that are centuries old or even almost a thousand years old. The Vladislavsk s l (Vladislav Hall) and chapel particularly caught my eye. Underneath the palace is a museum, including some 1000-year-old jewelry and flooring, and some clothing that is several hundred years old recoverd from burial plots.
(Vladislav Hall) Next, we went to the iconic (and free) Katedr la svat ho V ta (St. Vitus Cathedral). Our audioguides fortunately allowed us to bypass the long line, and we could step inside at a side door. That was one of many times in Europe I stepped inside a building, and suddenly came to a stop with a wow . That building is every bit as much impressive as it is made out to be, even crowded as it was. We also went to Bazilika Sv. Ji (St. George s Basilica), which one of the guides described as ancient . It was another wow moment, and it felt like the oldest church we were in yet. I think it probably was, actually; last rebuilt in 1142. For lunch, we asked for a recommendation from our hotel. They suggested one place, which we walked to. It was a nice easy walk down some Prague side streets, but the restaurant and all the others along our walk were closed on Saturday. We eventually made our way back to the hotel and asked for a new recommendation, which was successful this time. Terah ordered some ribs, while I ordered a more traditional Czech goulash, which happened to be served in a bread bowl. A minute later, the waiter brought Terah a fork and knife. And he brought me a bowl of water with a slice of lemon, and announced wash for you. That was a surprise, and a bit puzzling one at that. Turns out that eating bread that had stew served in it is indeed a bit messy, and having some water to clean up with is indeed helpful. We met up with Anna from Leipzig and one of her Czech friends for dinner Saturday night. We found a nice local Czech place. I had ham with sauerkraut in a folded potato cake. It was excellent, and the total bill for Terah and me came to 235 Kc or about $12.50. We had a nice walk back to the hotel in the crisp, dark evening. Sunday morning we had breakfast at our hotel the only time we ate a meal at a hotel this whole trip then got on the tram, the metro, and the bus to the airport. Total cost for that trip for two: 52 Kc, or about $2.75. Far cheaper than a taxi. One weird thing happened to us in Prague. We were riding the tram towards downtown, and as we would be on it for several stops, Terah was sitting. I was standing as there wasn t an available seat for me. Terah and I were both looking out windows, until Terah was startled because her arm was wet. She looked around and it turned out a middle-aged woman had spit on her, and was glaring at her. We never did figure out why. About all we can think of is maybe someone else, such as a very old person, had gotten aboard but Terah hadn t noticed and therefore didn t offer to give up her seat. That was probably the only real rude gesture towards us on the entire trip. We ran the story by Anna s friend (the native Czech) and she was as surprised and baffled as we were. As I wrap this up, we re sitting at our gate in Prague waiting for our flight to Munich. In this airport, in an out of the way corner on the very lowest floor, I spotted only the second drinking fountain I ve seen in Europe this entire time and also perhaps the continent s most expensive cup of coffee. After we get to Munich, it s a flight to Chicago, another to Indianapolis, and finally a drive home Monday.

Fourteen months after the renaming of the Free/Open Source code of GForge 4.x to the new FusionForge name, we're pleased to announce version 5.0. As mentioned in the release notes, this is still an incremental step over version 4.8 rather than a revolution, but the changes are important enough, and numerous enough, that we felt it justified to bump the major version number. Major improvements, beyond a host of bugfixes, include:

• a rewrite of the version control integration (with support for Bazaar, Darcs, Git and Mercurial in addition to the traditional CVS and Subversion);
• a much better integration of Mediawiki (one wiki, with its own set of permissions, per project);
• a cleaner database layer, more robust against SQL injections;
• configurable display for the trackers;
• more powerful tracker engine, with configurable workflows;
• a rework of the default theme, with better accessibility.

FusionForge 5.0 now also includes new plugins that were previously only floating around (or completely private):

• projectlabels gives a simple way of adding bits of HTML onto project description pages, so the forge admin can, for instance, highlight a project of the month ;
• extratabs allows a project to define new tabs in its pages, pointing at external resources;
• globalsearch is a first step in the federation of forges concept, whereby a project search can be conducted on several forges at once;
• contribtracker allows a forge to prominently display major contributors to projects, to give them visibility beyond the simple commit logs.

These plugins, as well as a large part of the improvements in the trackers and the rewritten Mediawiki plugin, are a direct consequence of the upstreaming of work having been done in private instances of forges. We're happy to note that this goal of ours (to merge local patches into the central repository when it makes sense) seems to be working well. For the record, this 5.0 release includes work and plugins that were reintegrated from sources such as Alcatel-Lucent, Adullact and AdaCore. This release is also the first to have had the benefit of automated testing during the whole cycle. Coverage isn't 100 % yet, but the existing unit tests and functional tests help us be confident in the quality of the release. We'll keep adding more tests as time passes, of course. Looking back at the initial goals stated when the project started, we seem to be on the right track:

• stable release pushed out: check (this is the third one, not counting minor releases);
• new plugins merged: check;
• automated testing: check;
• external contributions merged: check;
• explicit governance model and release process: sort-of (there's still a cabal, but it's partially documented).

We still need to work on the database schema and the cross-distro part, as well as cross-forge interoperability. The good news is that work is happening on these fronts already. And with almost 2500 commits, we truly seem to have accomplished at least one of the (implicit) goals: to bring development back to a healthy state. And we're far from being out of ideas for the future, so there's a lot of good stuff still cooking!

For a few weeks now, aptitude is really slow updating the package list downloading the lists is actually fast as normal but it always waits for a minute or so with a 99% [Warten auf Kopfzeilen] (Waiting for headers) message. I tried apt-get update same problem. Now the funny thing is: LANG=C apt-get update or LANG=C aptitude -u works just fine! I also tested with LANG=de_DE, it_IT, fr_FR and even en_US always slow, so it looks it always occurs when LANG is not set to C? Anyone else noticed this problem? I skimmed through the bug reports of apt, but didn t find a similar bug. Update: Looks like google-chrome is the problem! Commenting out the content of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, as Jaime suggested in the comments, everything worked fine again.

I ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted by Xero and BNZ (as MoneyMap) for the last few months. Unfortunately my first impressions of the product today are extremely underwhelming. Xero Personal is definitely not worth anywhere close to $5/month for me at this point in time and I m unlikely to even keep using the free trial. To set the context for that statement, Xero Business set the bar high. I first used the original version of Xero while it was still in beta and even then it was clear that it was an application that took accounting to a new level and would provide an order of magnitude improvement in how I maintained the accounts for our business. That promise held true once we started paying for it, even though the cost of Xero is more than 10% of our annual expenses, the time and hassle it saves makes it a worthwhile investment. By contrast today s release of Xero Personal offers nothing new above existing personal finance websites or desktop packages and would take me extra time to use as it fails to handle many of the basic transactions that a normal household will encounter. The way Xero Personal works is by having you manually upload your bank statements (the automatic import functionality that is so useful in the business version of Xero has been restricted to BNZ MoneyMap customers only). For each transaction you are asked to provide two pieces of information. The first is a category which serves as a basic form of account to track expenses and income. For each category you can set a spending or saving goal which Xero will help you track progress towards. The second is a name to identify the other party in the transaction. Xero Personal comes pre-loaded with some fairly generic categories. Annoyingly you re restricted to no more than 8 additional custom categories and the names associated with each transaction are are simple strings you can t link a transaction to another account or entity. To represent a transfer you need two separate transactions, one in each account, which you assign to the special category Transfer so that Xero knows to essentially ignore it. Nothing links the transactions together or ensures that the values balance. In addition to the basic categorisation functionality the application also attempts to track your assets and liabilities (bank accounts and credit cards show up automatically) so that it can compute your net worth. Unfortunately as soon as you try and use this you hit the problem that there is no way to link transactions from your accounts back to your assets and liabilities. This means unless you regularly and manually update your assets and liabilities the net worth calculation only takes into account changes in your cash position and becomes blatantly incorrect. As an example, take the common case of a household with a weekly mortgage (or other loan) repayment. You want the weekly payment to decrease the balance of your current account, increase the balance of your interest expense category and decrease the value of your mortgage liability. Your net worth should decrease by the value of the interest expense only, as the decrease in the value your mortgage liability offsets the remainder of the decrease in the value of your current account. Xero Personal doesn t come close to being able to handle this example today. The ability to split payments to different categories has also been left out (even though it s present in Xero Business and therefore presumably in the underlying engine) so your only option is to categorise the entire payment as a mortgage or housing expense, decreasing your net worth by the full value of the payment. Even if you could split the payment between two categories, one for the interest and one for the principal the inability to link the category for the principal to the liability account means the net worth calculation will still be incorrect. Maybe I m being to hard on this newly released product? It is a SaaS application after all and Xero has an excellent history of releasing regular updates to the business version of Xero. The reason I m so surprised and disappointed by this initial release is that it essentially lacks any double-entry accounting support many of the missing features are core functionality that is already implemented in the accounting platform that supports the business version. Assuming that Xero Personal is built on the same platform (and that would be the obvious choice wouldn t it?) the fact that Xero Personal has been released and is being heavily promoted without these features (compared to the initial version of Xero Business which was fully functional and obviously awesome even in beta) suggests to me that it s a conscious decision to significantly limit the scope and usefulness of the application rather than simply a limit on what could be implemented before the initial release. I sincerely hope that I m wrong and that the coming months bring significant improvements to the functionality of Xero Personal, but until it can support common transactions like mortgage repayments correctly I won t be using it or recommending it to anyone.

Steve Langasek:

As a developer, how do you embody the spirit and culture that has made Debian a great operating system? If elected DPL, how will you inspire the same in others?

I do not believe that there is any one single spirit or culture that has made Debian great, never any truly united community. With contributors from various places around the globe, we have a melting pot of different cultural viewpoints. Furthermore we have people doing things for a variety of reasons, some more selfish than others. The interplay between these differences has led to tension, and it has also led to greatness. I am certain that some of the great things in Debian have come to pass borne out of anger and hatred. We have had shifts in cultural norms over the years. When I joined the project, it was considered highly controversial to use the word fuck . Many community members would scream at anyone who did that, rudely sending private emails to admonish them. Eventually, enough anti-censorship people joined that the political tide turned, and many of the people offended by the use of the word fuck quietly faded away. We effectively disenfranchised them. Now the pendulum may be swinging in the other direction, and if it does, we can expect the same sorts of tensions and the same sorts of attrition. Perhaps this is part of the natural cycle of things, perhaps not. So if I list what I do or what I try to do, I do not believe it adequately answers the question. I think that Debian is superior for technical excellence and cohesive policy, so I try to do my part to meet those standards. I think that Debian is great for being a good Free Software Citizen, so I try to forward relevant bugs and patches upstream. I think that Debian is great for not being fully beholden to corporations, other financial interests, or dictatorial personalities, so I try not to encourage that sort of thing. I think that Debian is greater because of a few team efforts, so when someone tries to set up a worthwhile endeavor, I feel some compulsion to join in or at least be supportive. I think that Debian is greater because of some commitment to transparency, so I try not to do anything important behind closed doors, and even when I assume that something is transparent enough because it has been discussed only in public channels, and someone yells at me for hypocrisy, I try to increase the distribution of that information to a level that people feel is appropriate. As DPL I would try to set a good example by not being a hypocrite about any of the things I think are important to Debian, and would try to inspire an atmosphere of more teamwork, cooperation, and empowerment. I think that this could be revitalizing. Alexander Reichle-Schmehl:

Suppose that you would not run for DPL: Who would you vote and why?

I am not sure of how I will be voting. Each of the candidates had said things that I like, and each of the candidates has said things that I dislike very much. I am choosing not to get into specifics here, because I do not consider it appropriate or ethical to try to affect other people's votes in that manner.

Serafeim Zanikolas:

With respect to attracting new contributors, please ponder the idea of a formal one-on-one mentoring scheme (as opposed to one-off interactions via d-mentors).

I see nothing particularly objectionable about this. A long time ago people were talking about replacing NM with a saner mentoring process, and I am certain that mentoring occurs unofficially. I see no reason that you could not set up a formal one-on-one mentoring infrastructure with or without the Project's blessing. Charles Plessy:

So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and program about membership?

I think that we have enough inequality in the project as it is. That is why I consider DM to be a bad thing, even though it has practical benefits. I think that NM is probably fundamentally broken, and I get a bit nervous when people are talking about increasing the amount of NM indoctrination or bureaucracy. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with some kind of mentorship-type process, though I would worry it would not scale. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with something like Lars's proposal a while back, though I would worry that it would encourage popularity contests and cliques and cabals. Raphael Hertzog:

1/ Do you believe that it's a good move to standardize our packaging tools? (example: debhelper is almost standard, quilt is gaining status of the standard patch system thanks to the new source format) 3/ Do you have any preference on the tools that we should try to standardize on (which source format/patch system, dh7/CDBS/yada/etc., VCS helper, etc.)? 4/ Organizing changes that have an impact on (a large part of all) the archive is very difficult: How can we change our processes so that doing/organizing such changes is less of a burden? 5/ I have the feeling that Debian is innovating less than it used to do. We are more often followers rather than leaders. Do you share that feeling? What shall we do to make that change?

1/ I think that we should standardize on dpkg-dev. If there are features which absolutely every package needs, it would seem the logical place to add them. 3/ Right now I wish everyone were using git, but I do not believe in forcing them. Of the available source formats, I like 3.0 (quilt) with no additional patch system, and no package helpers at all. I am not quite sure what a VCS helper is so I have no known preference to express. 4/ I am not sure whether or not what you are talking about should, in fact, be less of a burden, and why it should or should not, so I do not have a valid opinion on how to change the process. 5/ I do share that feeling. I think that sometimes we get bullied by Ubuntu when there are things we would do for our own benefit which would make their lives difficult. I think that people are generally resistant to change, even when it would be of little cost to them and great benefit to someone else. These problems are social and might be correctable with a better spirit of teamwork and cooperation. However, I do not think we should be innovating just for innovation's sake or to be known as the most innovative kid on the block. We should be making my favorite operating system.

Hector Oron:

Secondly, I was wondering how Debian could make it easier for people to contribute than other (derivatives and non-derivatives) distributions. I came up with a really nice draft howto[1] which I would like to bring up to your attention, so the basic question would be what do you think you could do to make contributions paths easier (take in account not all teams, groups follow such community guidelines)

Human beings are not computers, so I find that applying HOWTOs to them to be misguided at best. As for enforcing a set of arbitrary community guidelines, I would not do that. Frank Lin PIAT:

planet.d.o has became one of the most visible media for Debian, if not the most visible one. Do you think it is a good thing?

I consider it neutral. If people start thinking of blogs or microblogging as important though, I think we might have a problem. I am in favor of our informal policy to never post anything important on blogs unless it is merely a copy of something communicated properly on an official channel. This includes anything that would go into our packages. Consequently I do not think it a valuable goal to respect copyright law by enforcing DFSG-free licenses on blogs, whether they are aggregated or not. Kumar Appaiah:

One of the questions which I've not yet seen exactly in the discussions is on the transparency in the maintenance of non-core but "important" packages, such as python, wherein the maintenance of the package and policy (till a short while ago) has been, poor at best, and we've had near zero communication from the maintainer(s) for over a year. This has led some parts of the "community" (Debian Python, in this case) to knock the doors of the tech-ctte[1] (recommended reading, unless you have done so already).

I think that is a failure of the entire community that the situation has even come to this point. In other analogous situations, the package would have been hijacked by now and the situation resolved. I think it would be appropriate for the DPL either to step in and mediate situations like this before they get anywhere near the tech-ctte, or to delegate someone to do the same. I think it would be equally appropriate for the people involved to resolve this themselves. Of course all of this should be open.

I have written a tutorial on how to produce colored comic strip from script to finished image, using pencils, ink, paper, scanner, and the Gimp. It, of course, suffers from the fact that I am myself fairly new to this stuff, but there it is. I hope someone finds it useful.

I happen to notice a quite high CPU load average on my Core2 quad core. The load average was about 0.5 or even up to 0.8 when running the KDE4 desktop. Funny enough my old Pentium4 the load average with KDE 3.5 (lenny) is near to 0.0. Both hosts are used a "home server" and gateway running some processes like Squid and Apache. "Ok", I thought, "when I stop KDE, load average will be back to normal". So I stopped kdm. But the quad core still has an higher CPU load average than the Pentium4:

On the Quad Core:


On the Pentium4:


I would have expected the opposite: a higher CPU usage on the Pentium4 and a lower one on the Quad Core2... The Quad is a Q9550S and supposed to be more power efficient than the Pentium4, but I doubt that the Q9550S can save more energy with an higher CPU load. The reason for the high CPU load is still mysterious...

I have been at Amazon.com for a very short while (I have only gotten one paycheck from them so far), but long enough for first impressions to have settled. Dress is casual, Parking is limited. Cafeteria food is merely OK, and is not free. There is a very flat structure at Amazon. The front line work is done by one-or-two pizza teams size measure by the number of large pizzas that can feed the team. Individual experiences with the company largely depend on what team you happen to end up with. I think I lucked out here. I get to work on interesting and challenging problems, at scales I had not experienced before. There is an ownership culture. Every one including developers get to own what they produce. You are responsible for our product down to carrying pagers in rotation with others on your team, so that there is someone on call in case your product has a bug. RC (or customer impacting) bugs result in a conference call being invoked within 10-15 minutes, and all kinds of people and departments being folded in until the issue is resolved. Unlike others, I find the operations burden refreshing (I come from working as a federal government contractor). On call pages are often opportunities to learn thing, and I like the investigation of the current burning issue du jour. I also like the fact that I get to be my own support staff for the most part, though I have not yet installed Debian anywhere here. While it seems corny, customer obsession is a concept that pervades the company. I find ti refreshing. The mantra that it s all about the customer experience is actually true and enforced. Whenever a tie needs to be broken on how something should work the answer to this question is usually sufficient to break it. Most other places the management was responsible for, and worried about budgets for the department this does not seem to be the case for lower to middle management here. We don t get infinite resources, but work is planned based on user experience, customer needs, and technical requirements, not following the drum beat of bean counters. The focus is on the job to be done, not the hours punched in. I can choose to work from home if I wish, modulo meetings (which one could dial in to, at a pinch). But then, I have a 5 mile, 12 minute commute. I have, to my surprise, started coming in to work at 7:30 in the morning (I used to rarely get out of bed before 9:30 before), and I plan on getting a bike and seeing if I can ride my bike to work this summer. All in all, I like it here.

For me, this is the year of the conference, mostly because I am helping to organize Debconf10, which so far has been quite fun, though I know that as we approach August, the planning will become more all encompassing. It is also the case that my piece on the hacker conference has finally been published by Anthropological Quarterly (and thanks to those who help be hunt some of the mistakes and typos). If you have university access you can get it via the traditional (and closed) routes but you can find a copy via my department web page or here. For those that did not catch my last post about this piece, it is a rare specimen for academia: a feel good piece or so I think and so I have been told. If you have been to Debconf before and liked it, it is a good piece for reminiscing. If you have not been and are thinking of going, I would also recommend it (and btw the deadline for the end of registration is fast approaching. Now that I am organizing the event, I know the experience of the conference will feel, look, and be quite different from what I have portrayed in the article. So maybe at the end of August, when I am worn, torn, and deflated from months of hard work, I will write a piece poking fun at my feel-good description, a nice counter-weight to what is admittedly a bit of a romantic piece.