Work

Well today will be the end of my first (four-day) week at work. Sadly I’m now going to be sent home. Without going into too many details after being signed off work ill for the past seven months the companies insurers will not accept me back at work unless I get a letter from my doctor certifying my fitness. So officially I was never here this week, and I will not be returning until I’ve seen a doctor and procured the relevent piece of paper. Hopefully no more than a week.

Users

Too often I’ve seen people looking for HOWTOs on different subjects, and complaining when none exist. (Most recently upon the xen-users mailing list). I used to be quite calm about this, but now the more I see it the more irritated I get. Where is the willingness to experiment yourself gone? Too many users seem to want to just consume HOWTOs and not try things for themselves. Hell if no documentation exists they could create it! That would be perfect.

More Users

In a similar vein to David Welton’s plea to users to use mailing lists for posting questions, and relating to the point above. It might be nice if people who follow a HOWTO would actually comment - even if it is just to say “Works as described. Excellent guide - will read again A+++++”. (Can you tell I’ve been buying toys from Ebay recently? ) A similar feeling always comes over me when I make a new release of software via Freshmeat.net. There is a little “voting” system where you can rate your impression of all the projects. The problem is nobody votes! Ever! Actually that isn’t true, but it might as well be. Take a look at a project with 100+ people monitoring it for new releases, I practically promise there will be fewer than ten votes on the software - which makes it hard for people to search for projects based upon rating. Ahhh well.

With Xorg 6.9, we've split xterm out from the main xorg package and have packaged it directly in its own source package taken from Thomas Dickey's site. He's been the maintainer of xterm for years now, and X.Org has just been pulling his stuff directly for their tree, so this way we skip the middleman. Thomas is also very notably a contributor and regular fixture on Debian lists, which is really cool.

David Mart nez Moreno did the grunt work a while back of making the individual xterm package, and he uploaded a version or two to experimental while 6.9 was sitting there. Now that 6.9 is in unstable (the next revision will hopefully be coming when I wake up tomorrow, btw) we needed the separate xterm package to join it. So today I did a little bit of work updating David's package to Thomas' most recent xterm version (208) and uploaded it to unstable, where it's already built on most arches.

This is the first bit of modularization you'll see, and I'm going to start uploading the more mundane bits of 7.0 to experimental this weekend if all goes well. The main requirement for getting 7.0 in to Debian is to have mesa updated. The package is ready for an NMU, and today I uploaded an NMU of libdrm to update it to the latest version. Once this package is accepted in to the archive, I can update mesa. From there on out, all the pieces will be in place to allow uploads of the modular tree to Debian as needed. Of course, these will go to experimental first until I'm confident in them, but my goal is still to ship them with Etch. Eugene Konev has started doing q&a; on the modular library packages, which will hopefully save us time and pain.

So that's where things stand with us. Once the major bugs are out of the way with 6.9, I'll be going full speed ahead for 7.0.

Inspired by the recent posts on Planet Debian, I've decided to question my sleeping habits. Right now, I'd consider myself as being in the "work 'till late, then sleep in" camp. When I wake up late, my productivity throughout the day is okay, although I always have the feeling it could be better. If I get up earlier than would have woken up on my own I am tired and generally unconcentrated. But no more! I will take the opportunity of the long weekend before me to try some of the suggestions in the various articles. While I (and the people around me) are probably not ready for polyphasic sleep yet, I will try the idea of getting up everyday at the same time, even on weekends, and see what it has to offer. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, obviously, and just as good as any day to start, so I will get up it a sane time, say, 7 o'clock, and spend some time on my Debian packages.

Ever since I got my portable ogg player a few months ago, I've been listening to music on a fairly regular basis, particularly when working on my computer (read: programming, mostly). I've noticed that what music happens to be penetrating my skull has a bit of an effect on my coding -- both from a productivity point-of-view (ever so slightly), but more interestingly, from an enjoyment point of view -- some songs just feel like they go well with cutting code, so I enjoy both the music and the coding more than I do normally. My personal favourites have been songs like Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Robbie Williams' Let Me Entertain You, and several tracks off Evanescence's album Fallen. (On the Evanescence point, when my wife first bought Fallen and played it, about 10 bars into the first track, I said "now that is music to hack to" -- interesting how I got that feel so quickly). The common factor that I can identify there is that they're all powerful tracks, with a strong, driving rhythm and a feeling of speed. They also all sound good really, really, loud (much to my wife's displeasure). So, in the interests of scientific discovery, I'd like to know what other people like to listen to when they're writing their stuff. Both from a point of view of "what else can I stock my iRiver with to encourage my coding", and also to see if people's tastes in Music To Hack To is universal, or a personal thing. E-mail your thoughts to mtht@hezmatt.org, or if your blog is syndicated on Planets Debian, Ubuntu, SLUG, or Linux Australia, Just Blog About It and I'll pick it up. Summaries to follow.

Matt: Please don't forget you are talking about the language with the "there should be only one way to do it" motto, where you have to "program the way Guido indented it". I also feel much more at home where I can play with the way my program works and looks like. I like whitespace to be irrelevant - Yes, Python is a nice beast alltogether, but you cannot expect much space for personal preferences once you understand how it was designed. And yes, as a Perl guy I often hate the style some of the modules I maintain are written in, but then again... It's the most comfortable style for the main upstream author, the person who will do most work with the beast!
...But anyway... Emacs knows best. I just press tab and it works magically, either becoming a set of spaces or becoming a proper tab. And as long as other people understand what I wrote (which can become messy if some lines have supposedly eight-spaces-tabs and some are made up just of eight spaces), and specially the compiler doesn't barf at me, I'm OK with it.
Using a decent editor helps you a lot when writing Python, YAML or such things..

Alexander Schmel writes in his web log:

Update: Small correction: We got some feedback. Liw raised some concerns. His mail was answered 8 minutes after we received it by a committee member. Since he didn't answered I guess he is satisfied by the answer or at least doesn't feel very strong about that point.

To clarify: On December 27, I mailed the talks committee and questioned the fact that Debconf6 will have a talk on OpenSolaris, when there are good Debian related talks rejected. I have received their response, and I understand their reasoning. I strongly disagree that their reasons are sufficient to approve the talk. I haven't responded yet is because I'm thinking about the appropriate way to do that. Celebrating the new year also intruded. Silence does not necessarily signify assent.

Unfortunately, this quick note will most likely not reach the people it needs to, but it needs to be said in any case: When contacting myself or other people who produce free software, please use the mailing list for the project in question unless you have a really good reason to keep the conversation private. The reasons:

• Other people can benefit from, and contribute to the conversation. They might also be more interested than I am in the problem at hand, or at least want to hear about how it's resolved.
• It gets archived, and therefore people can find it via search engines in the future. This is critical when you want to be able to point people at archives that led to decisions that affect the project.
• It creates more sense of 'community'. Most successful open source projects are not the fruit of only one person's labor. Perhaps they are initially, but at a certain point, everyone is better off if a community grows up around the project, and keeping conversations public helps that process along.

Please pass this along - hopefully people will start to get the idea.

Happy new year One of my Christmas presents was a brand spanking new USB key. For quite a while I’d been planning to put my SSH / GPG keys off onto something like this for some extra security. I’ll write up the exact steps of how I achieved my setup in the sometime next week, but it was all fairly easy. As part of the transition I followed Adrian von Bidder’s guide to multiple subkeys such that I have now a signing key (0×4054AB08) which I keep separately from the private key material of my primary key. My new key fingerprint is below

pub 1024D/59B2D9A0 2005-02-03
Key fingerprint = 6583 A11F 1428 FCDD 65FC C7B5 E0CD 3CDC 59B2 D9A0
uid Matthew G L Brown (Default Key)
uid Matt Brown (Debian Packages)
uid Matt Brown (WLUG Key)
uid Matt Brown (CRCnet Key)
uid [jpeg image of size 4390]
uid Matt Brown (MediaLab Key)
sub 1024g/DF8A0504 2005-02-03
sub 1024D/4054AB08 2006-01-04 [expires: 2008-01-04]

I’ve uploaded the new key to the keyservers, or you can grab it from my key information page. All in all I’m quite liking the new setup, plug usb key in, password dialog pops up for SSH key, enter password, password dialog pops up for GPG signing key, enter password. I then have both keys stored in the relevant agents easily accessible for signing email / logging into machines. Meanwhile my GPG private key is sitting securely somewhere else. I plan to sign all outgoing email from now on. Next step is to investigate libpam-ssh for local authentication so that I don’t have to type 3 passwords whenever I login. Moving House
We’re moving house tommorrow, this means that my DSL connection will be down for a few days while Telecom and my ISP get everything sorted out. Hopefully it will go smoothly and I’ll be back online sometime mid next week.

We live out in the country and both have allergies. But we both enjoy cats, and we've had one almost continuously since we moved to Kansas. Our cats are outdoor cats. They always seem to enjoy roaming around the yard so much, it's hard for me to imagine keeping a cat indoors. I know plenty of cats are happy there, but it's not for us -- especially since we're both allergic to cats. We've had Tux for about 2 of his 3 years. Tux is not a cat with your typical cat personality. Tux loves attention and loves to be petted. But he is also afraid of just about everything. Here are a few things that have caused Tux to be scared over the years. I promise I am not making any of these up:

• His own shadow
• Rustling leaves
• Terah getting a new hairstyle
• People carrying grocery bags
• Grocery bags sitting perfectly still on the ground
• Other cats, even if smaller than him
• The wind
• Terah wearing a dress
• Snow
• The lack of snow (it melted since he was outside the day before)

Tux's favorite activity is hunting. We often joke that if he can work up the courage to not be afraid of his prey, he'll do well. And he does -- even catches rabbits sometimes. Here's Tux starting his morning patrol: We always knew he had a routine, but only found out last month that our neighbors would see him coming up the hedge row, just poking his head around to look at their yard, and then head back to us -- each morning. He also jumps down in our window well, and we can see the shadow of a tail wisping by the basement windows, each afternoon. Tux gets half of our 4-car garage/shed at night. He enjoys going in there -- it's safe. (We put him in to keep him safe from the coyotes.) But he has a routine that Terah and I must follow precisely if he is to go in. First, we're supposed to go outside and look for him. Then, no matter where he is -- even if he's right by the garage door -- we have to walk to the house with him, then back to the garage. He doesn't like to be carried, but likes to walk just ahead of us, ears pointed backwards to make sure we're following properly. Then he will stop just outside the garage door and wait for us to step over him and go in first (to make sure it's safe). Then he'll go in. Tux has become quite the popular cat. Terah set him up with a very funny blog on Catster.com, and he was a featured cat on their site one weekend. Here's one entry:

June 16th 2005 5:06 am I just love messing with their heads. Last night I hid in some tall grass so that when they tried to put me in, they couldn't see me right away. Then, just when they were giving up on me, I bounded toward them. I have them trained so that when I jump up when running they ooohh and aaahh. What a hoot! Then I grossed them out by eating my barf.

Today just before I left work, Terah called. Tux was hiding under our porch, wheezing terribly and hyperventilating. He wouldn't move at all. Which is odd, since he had been doing great the past few days. He even looked in at us watching TV a few times lately. After I got home, we managed to convince him to walk to the garage. He seemed a little better. We checked on him again at about 8:00, and he was doing pretty bad. We took him into the vet, and they decided that he had either a rare incurable viral disease, a hernia, or fluid in his chest cavity. His prognosis was not good. His lungs were functioning at only 1/8 capacity. We could attempt to treat him, but treatment would only likely save him if it was the hernia, and it would cost well over $1000. So we made the hard decision to have him put to sleep. Although I've lived around animals most of my life, this was the first time we had this decision to make. Outdoor cats usually live good lives, but rarely live long enough to become afflicted by serious disease. Cars, dogs, or coyotes usually cause a sudden end for them. As I was typing this up, I got the call that he was put to sleep. They determined that he had the viral disease, so I don't feel too bad about our choice. We have quite a few fond memories of Tux, plus some very funny video of his first experience with snow. He certainly liked to be scratched: Goodbye, Tux. We'll keep an eye on the neighbors for you.

My previous post rewritten by the inimitable Anthony Towns:

An enigmatic lady named Erinn Clark,
Was scheduled to switch coasts in the dark.
But missing her plane,
She will happily explain,
Had little effect on her lark.
A bold southern dame, she insisted;
To be on the next flight or waitlisted
(She was, as you'll see,
A New Years escapee)
And her charms just could not be resisted.
Her flight went to Tampa and then to LA,
Finally dropping her off in sweet San Jose,
Florida thus departed,
And the airline outsmarted,
Finally, now it's time for horseplay!
Let's introduce her partner in crime,
Though "Val Henson" is too hard to rhyme.
Throw 'em in a ball pit,
To their necks if they fit,
And they'll have a glorious time.
But first to a black tie affair,
To greet the New Year in a style debonair,
She was ready to skate,
But was forced to placate,
With jewelry, a shirt and a glare.
The guests were exciting and fun,
All happy and gleeful but one,
She was Lina by name,
Thought the Eve's not the same,
Without fireworks, like a day without sun.
In spite of it all, it failed to suck,
A climax as midnight eventually struck,
The year's dawn arrived,
And our heroines revived
With vegan duck which you don't have to pluck.
To summarise the rest of the story in brief:
There's being spoonfed Indian bits by the chief,
In ballpits they're tossed,
In forests they're lost,
And meanwhile namesys provides light relief.
Finally it comes time to return,
To the coast where the sunrise will burn.
But a feeling of doom,
And a small viral bloom,
Can be quite a cause for concern.
But a satisfactory note that is not,
On which to end this poetical jot,
Instead wishing this:
A year full of bliss,
May all that is good be your lot!

And people wonder why I fangirl him?

A coworker and I were discussing whether we should eventually switch our company servers to Etch or Dapper. As Andreas Barth recently sent out a release announcement with a schedule prediction and goal list, I pointed him to it, and then followed up w/ my own predictions. Looking through the goals, it looks as though the easy stuff has been taken care of while the difficult things remain. This is not to discount the work done by the gcc and X people; I don’t mean technically difficult, I mean the things that have traditionally been difficult for Debian to accomplish. It’s more a question of manpower and motivation; there are plenty of people who want the latest software in Debian, and those people can also complete such work, so it tends to get done fairly quickly. On the other hand, the remaining things in the TODO list are the sorts of things that are not very much fun, or can only be done by a select few people. Point-by-point:
- amd64 as an official arch (and the mirror split as a pre-condition
for that)
Infrastructure work is not particularly fun, and can only be done by a few people. It tends to take a while, as we’ve seen in the past with things like the security queues, which blocked the release of Sarge for a decent amount of time. - sorting out docs-in-main vs. the DFSG
- sorting out non-free firmware
These two will not be fun, and will first require actual decisions about what should be done in each case, followed by actions that a lot of people will object to (that is, the stripping out of documentation from various packages, and the removal of functionality from various kernel drivers; hell, enough people complained when we removed tg3 firmware, imagine how many will complain when a couple hundred kernel drivers get their firmware removed?). The actual work here will require people dedicated to actually seeing a release put out, and will probably result in much unrest. I can’t imagine it will actually go smoothly. I guess we’ll see what happens. With a year to go still, there are a number of ways it could go.
(15:23:24) Andres Salomon: if etch actually releases on that day, i will shit myself
(15:23:40) Wes Chow: should we shake on it?
(15:24:02) Wes Chow: I think you should announce that on the debian dev list and see who takes you up on the offer
(15:24:13) Wes Chow: maybe people will actually push for a timely release just to see that happen!
(15:24:25) Wes Chow: and then you soiling yourself would be in the name of free software


Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]

2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net (somewhere there..) for eternity :)

my pictures from debconf.es 2 in December 2005 and debconf5 in July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy hackergotchi out of them!

debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.

In the end of december I went to 22C3 and had lots of fun and insights there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference (no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)

The CCC's conference management system, pentabarf, has been rewritten from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..

The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have "some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome to help!

Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa! That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its peoples situation.

I have noticed a new trend in my shopping habits lately: I will ask for help from a "sales associate" much faster than I did previously. This could be a product of the instant-gratification culture, but I really don't have much patience with floundering around a store trying to find what I need, especially if I have done all of my research earlier and show up at a store with just one thing in mind. I will go to great lengths to find a live person because even if I spend 3-5 minutes trying to find help, they will most likely be able to help me right away. That said, I won't just grab the first employee that I see in the store, I will actually make a reaosnable effort at finding the item first. After getting help, I can look at my handy palm pilot and see if there's anything else in the store that I need. I have noticed that Target is especially good at having random people walking around the store doing things that are quickly dropped in order to help a customer. In addition they have these nice little buttons sprinkled around the store that you can press and the entire floor staff gets paged notifying them that you have a question. I prefer this to the "pick up the phone" approach, although that is also available in some stores. The worst store by far for this strategy that I have come across is Home Depot. You sometimes have to walk a very long distance before you find anyone, and then when you do, they just point you back in the direction that you came from and said that someone over there can help you. If there was someone over there, I wouldn't be asking over here. I wonder if they just think I'm too stupid to read the HUGE SIGNS which state what is where in a Depot.

What happened to wml? I tried to make some modifications to my homepage and when I tried to “make” it I noticed it doesn’t compile anymore… On the other hand it seems that wml is the same since year 2000, so… Whatever! I guess I will just need to prepare a new homepage, possibly using some newer technology… Maybe I’ll write it in xml… or… we’ll see! :)

I have never liked bugzilla much, and for the past week or so, I've found a new reason to dislike it, or at least the GNOME instance of it: every time someone changes the subscriber list ("CC") of a bug I've submitted, I get mail. That's now happening daily. I really don't understand why that setting is turned on by default, and, worse, I haven't found out a way to disable that setting and only that setting. I've lost my patience and configured GNOME's bugzilla to never, ever mail me anything again. This means that if I want to continue to use bugzilla (not that I've ever done it much), I will need to actively poll any bugs I've reported. I am, however, also not going to be reporting any bug directly to GNOME again. Bugzilla is simply too much pain for casual bug reporting. I don't care how wonderful it is for the GNOME developers; if it is painful to me, I won't use it. All my GNOME related bug reporting will happen through Debian in the future. For a project that prides itself on simplicity and usability, GNOME's use of bugzilla is rather weird.

Early musings, but I wonder if it's possible to sign up with Engin, and score a local Australian phone number, which pops out in the US, terminated on an Asterisk box? It's all technically feasible. The big question is, will Engin allow me to sign up? Initially googling implies that Engin will support Asterisk, which is cool in and of itself. Watch this space. I suppose I need to get Asterisk working now.

Thanks to Grant, I discovered a couple of interesting blog posts about how to become an early riser, and about polyphasic sleep. I'm certainly interested in becoming an early riser. I'm not naturally a morning person, but for a few years I managed to force myself into it, but then I lapsed back into being a night-owl sleep-in type person. At the moment, when the weather permits, I'm trying to cycle to work with enough time to eat breakfast there and be operational at my desk by about 8:30am. It's just as fine to start at 10am, but I'd rather not get into that habit, and just treat it as a bit of a splurge from time to time. This of course means I can't stuff around in the morning, and ideally I need to leave the house by about 7:45am, with appropriate flow-on affects on when I wake up and get out of bed. It certainly takes a lot of self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. At the moment, I tend to opt for two alarms. One to wake me up and get snoozed a lot, and one to actually get out of bed. If I was more disciplined about getting out of bed, I could just have the one alarm go off, and get extra sleep. The extra waking hours gained by polyphasic sleep are tempting also, but I think it's altogether too disruptive to try at the moment. An interesting concept nonetheless. So once we're a little bit more settled, I'll hopefully become more of a morning person again. I think the key is consistency. Sleeping in on weekends just buggers everything up, which is a shame. I quite like my weekend sleep-ins. Downside is you spend half your weekend asleep, when you could be out exploring a fabulous new foreign country, for example...

(Working Title: "Light up the crack pipe boys, thinkin' time's over!") A tab is a wonderful thing. It makes everything line up nicely. So what does YAML ("indentation is so critical to proper interpretation of YAML" -- from the YAML FAQ) do with them? It bans them. Apparently Guido (van Python) thinks the same way -- using the key meant for indenting to indent things is a crime against humanity. And why is it such a heinous crime to use tabs, you ask? Because "they are treated differently by different editors and tools" . Where's the prohibition on using line endings, then? They're treated differently by editors and tools, too. Broken tools exist, that's true, but we don't pander to them -- we either fix them, or insult the people using them until they switch to something that doesn't suck. If tabs are criminal, why do we even bother to *have* a tab key, then? Just pry it off your keyboard and throw it out. It's obviously not useful for anything. Let us bang on our spacebars, and have endless flamewars about how many spaces a particular project should indent all it's code, instead of just using tabs consistently, and then setting your personal preference of tab stop width in your editor like the good lord intended. I am so amazingly and deeply pissed off right now. Bloody religious zealots -- "I don't like something, so neither will you".