It's not the reason that you think. Sure, it includes a bunch of iPod functionality, but that's not what I'm referring to. Not the least of which is, absolutely everyone is talking about this device. I haven't seen this much buzz over a device in a long time.

Buzz is definitely nice, and warranted, but that's not why either. Back in the day when the iPod was released, everyone thought that it was going to flop - because it had a hard drive, and almost all of the players at the time were using flash. The iPod changed the mp3 player from a device that had a tiny screen that you could display maybe 2 lines of text (if you were lucky), and that you needed a course in computers to use, to a high-resolution screen, easy to use device. Nothing else at the time was even close. It succeeded because of it's complete rethinking of the user interface, and that is why the iPhone is the next iPod. This got pretty long, so I'm cutting it. (Sorry, people who hate clicking!)
Continue reading "Why the iPhone is the next iPod."

Just spent a long weekend (Thursday night to Monday afternoon) in Finland. Hanna invited me over a while ago with a promise of sauna and ice swimming, and I'm a sucker for travelling to parties these days... *grin*. Unfortunately, the weather in Finland (just like in the UK) at the moment is ridiculously warm for the time of year. When I visited in November for the BSP, there was some snow on the ground and temperatures were as cold as I expected. This time, there was no sign of any snow and I was worried that we might not get any ice...! Lars was kind enough to offer me some crash space at short notice for my visit (there's nothing like last-minute organisation for this kind of jaunt!). On Friday we met up with Jesus, Jeroen, Hanna, Pixie and Dave for lunch and some wandering around in the middle of Helsinki. Then on to some bars later for some drinks and food. I could get used to this... :-) On Saturday, we got up early, bought large amounts of food and drink to take with us, and caught the bus north-west out of Helsinki towards central Finland. 90 minutes on the bus and in a taxi, and we were dropped off at Hanna's family's cottage by the lake below: As we got there, the temperature was dropping just enough that we could actually see the ice forming on the lake. Beautiful! In the middle of nowhere in the forest, things were incredibly quiet and peaceful. We lit the fire for the the sauna, and wandered off for a walk through the forest. Later on, beer, sauna and (almost) ice swimming. Naked geeks! I must admit that I chickened out a little - coming out of the sauna into freezing temperatures slowed me down a little. By the time I reached the bottom of the steps to the lake surface, I couldn't force myself into the lake fully. I got three toes wet, then ran back inside into the warm... :-) Dave was more resilient (in and out FIVE times!), but it looks like he maybe overdid things. He crashed out later and was acting quite oddly for a while - we worked out that he was probably dehydrated. We carried on drinking and snacking at the cottage, then headed back into Helsinki for the bars and clubs later that night. More of the same on Sunday along with a cinema visit, and I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to head back to the UK on Monday. Thanks very much to Hanna, Lars, Jesus and the others for making my trip so much fun. Helsinki is a lovely place to visit, although probably too expensive for me to manage it too often. I'm saving already for the next time! I've put my photos online as usual.

There are some things that I have learned over the years as bad practice. There are some that I have learned through reading and contemplation, and a little experimentation. One of the categories of bad things that I have learned is visual aids for statistics. There is basically one cardinal rule for data presented in a graphical form:

Let the user see the actual data.

It seems kindof obvious, doesn't it? I'm presenting data, you should be able to see it. If you want to show me that there are 450 widgets, and 230 whazits, and only 210 whositz, then you should show those. The simplest way of doing this is by just listing them out in a table:

Type	Amount
Widgets	450
Whazits	230
Whositz	210

That's simple, isn't it? However, it doesn't help the viewer any. They're pretty good if you want to know exactly how many of something there is, but not great at other things that you want to do with data. How do you find the minimum (or maximum) of all of the values? You scan, remembering the highest one you saw so far, and then go back to that one and find out. If the goal is to somehow compare, the viewer will be helped out by using a graphical display of some sort. One thing that humans are good at estimating is length. Quick, tell me what we have the least of:
That was easy, wasn't it. Bar charts are good - they can still be abused by people in evil ways, but most of the time they're pretty useful.

All of this is working up to pie charts. What's smaller, Whazits or Whositz here:

Is Widgets half or more than half of the pie? Pie charts are the bad seed of the graph world. They aren't very useful, hang out a lot, and don't help you much. The worst thing about pie charts is that they aren't even good at the thing they're supposed to be the best at: comparing relative sizes. Consider thanksgiving, or christmas, or whatever large gathering you prefer where there is pie. Lots of pie slices are laid out on the table. Which one is the biggest? It's hard to tell. It's even hard to cut even slices from a normal pie. Sure, you can cut in 4ths, 6ths, or 8ths, but I challenge you to cut a pie in 5 pieces equally - it's really hard! It's because humans aren't great at judging the differences between angles. They're only really good for seeing one thing: the largest piece in the pie. Even then, it's sometimes questionable - if you looked at a evenly sliced pie, could you tell the difference between a 23% piece from a 20% piece? The bad thing about this is that they are ingrained into our culture. There wasn't a finance report in the last 10 years without a pie chart.

All of this ranting was basically brought to you by a recent post on BoingBoing. This post features the most horrible monstrosity I have seen in a long time: the hierarchial pie chart. Feast your eyes on this monstrosity. I challenge any reader to tell me: what is the smallest third-level category? What is the largest?

Quadmachine is a virtual instruction set architecture, designed mainly as a target for simple educational compilers. It has the following noteworthy features:

• RISC design
• word size 64 bits
• address size 64 bits (theoretical maximum memory size 16 exabytes)
• all memory access is in word units
• 65534 general-purpose 64-bit registers
• 2 additional special-purpose 64-bit registers
• a variant of the “register windows” technique with automatic spilling

All of these, except for the preposterously large register file, are more or less realistic for a 64-bit RISC design. The size of the register file is intended to trivialize register allocation in compilers. This is the second Quadmachine design. Main differences from the previous design are a move to a load-store RISC architecture and the upgrade of the word size to 64 bits. There is a software realization of the Quadmachine architecture, with a graphical debug console. It is written in Java for portability; speed was not an implementation concern. Read more

You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male, nor female in the way you perceive your surroundings. As bad as this may sound to some, it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, but it might. Either 64% Male 57% Female 43% Neither 18%

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?*
created with QuizFarm.com

This quiz was blissfully short. I've seen ones at quizfarm go hundreds long. I love the "this does not mean xxxx, but it might" complete cop-out.

I've just glanced over to see how much it costs to get there.I don't seem to be able to get the exact fares yet, but it's looking like it will be around 140000 yen (approx 1000 euros).I won't have a direct flight there, I'll be flighing through Heathrow.Humph.

We got back to Montreal yesterday morning just after midnight. Maj got us upgrades on United to business class, which was really a life-saver. There's a direct flight from San Francisco to Montreal, but it's 5 hours one way and 6 hours on another. This time traveling to California, we decided to split up the flight, stopping in Chicago about halfway between. Returning was a good flight. We were comfortable, there was room, Amita had enough space to play on the ground and sleep comfortably on our laps. Maj: "Business class isn't anything fancy; it's just enough space, good service and quality food that you feel like a human rather than like livestock." The only downside was that Chicago O'Hare is a half-ass airport. For one of the most (the most?) visited and transited airports in the world, it's really skimpy on services inside the security area. There aren't any big restaurants or nice bars or stores inside the B and C concourse; just stand-up kiosks. We walked halfway across the airport to find a pub to eat at. Probably the best thing about the airport is the giant brachiosaurus skeleton in B concourse. Amita June couldn't stop looking at it; she ran from foot to foot banging it with her hand. Good for her; it's a pretty neat thing to see in a boring airport. tags: airport travel ohare brachiosaurus amitajune maj

Ebjo Another Maj quote: "It's just a coincidence that we use the term blog as a cutesy contraction for 'Web log'. It could have easily have been a 'Web journal' people were contracting, and then we'd call it an ebjo." tags: ebjo blog maj

Goethe One of the things that I've found as a participant in Open Source software and Open Content is that there are a lot of different people involved. And today, in 2007, Germany and France have become important loci of new developments in Free Culture. I've been working on my French for a while, and I think I'm getting pretty good, but I've never learned any German. At all. But German Wikitravel is one of the largest and most popular versions of the project. And I want to be more of a participant -- or, at least, have some better relationships with our German users. So, today I signed up for German lessons at the Montreal Goethe Institute. The Goethe Institute promotes German language and culture world-wide, including high-quality lessons in German. Montreal's is in a beautiful old building right at the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Denis. It's got a nice office and a friendly warm bookstore, "Das Buch". I'm going to take the intensive beginner's course -- mornings Tuesday and Thursday for 6 weeks. I hope at the end of that time I'll be better able to meet German-speaking Free Software advocates, Open Content participants, and most of all Wikitravellers a little more towards halfway. tags: goethe institute german wikitravel classes montreal

La ka I went to La ka this afternoon again to meet a couple of people. It was my first two-meeting day at La ka, which I think is a bad sign I'm turning into a serious maven. But like they say, it's really where the hipsters are doing business on this le lately. The nice thing was that I got to introduce two Montrealers that I like a lot. Hugh Macguire of, among other things, the Librivox public-domain audiobook project, is really interesting and passionate about communities and free content. Nicolas Ritoux is one of the most clued-in tech journalists I've met. It was nice to introduce them, and it was good that they seemed to get along. Depressing, on the other hand, was walking around the Plateau in January with 12C weather. This has gotten beyond funny into scary -- we just haven't had any serious snow in Montreal this winter. I'm worried that it's going to get worse, too, and I don't know what that will mean for Quebec's culture. Mon pays, c'est l'hiver, goes the song, and I'm not sure I get what a city without winter would mean here. tags: winter laika hugh macguire nicolas ritoux librivox montreal snow

House Maj and I have been watching House on DVD. It's really good, although a little formulaic. Everybody's always running around and bleeding and vomiting, and people get an average of 3.8 different rare diseases per episode. There's also a lot of cheating and sneakiness. It's great. tags: house tv

Mantini One nice thing about New Year's Eve this year was that Baron Earl served a refreshing -- nay, energizing -- spocktail called a mantini. I was especially pleased to find out that the first ingredient was not, in fact, a praying mantis. With the Baron, you never know. tags: mantini spocktail baron earl

You scored as Neither. You think neither like a man nor like a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting.

Neither		75%
Male		43%
Female		43%
Either		36%

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?*
created with QuizFarm.com

Hardware evils

I've had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]'s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I'll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn't start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn't even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn't start either. So now I'm left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn't work, I assume. I don't really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can't test the motherboards with another CPU because I don't have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They're ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a "repair" install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you'll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I'm looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It's got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I'm debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I've given ceilingsarecool to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn't really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it's still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn't seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

* The GE Soft White electric 60 bulbs are CFLs that are much more pleasant than the other's we've tried. Sometimes it's surprising that name-brand can be better. =) We've now got 6 of them in the house. We'll have more as soon as I find a brand that works in a dimmer. I've read that they exist, and this brand doesn't say "not for use in dimmers" like the other ones do. We'll see. =)

The weather in Montr al is supposed to be a high of 16 C on Saturday. In January. C'mon people, it's time to do more than we have been. I don't care if you don't believe using less electricity, less gas, eating less meat, etc. will help fix global warming. Doing nothing certainly *won't* help and until you have a better plan, put down your cheese burger, get out of your SUV and bloody well go for a walk to buy some CFLs.

* auzure_skies is 33 weeks pregnant today! =)

* PHP 5 sucks far less than I thought it would. The object model seems to actually match what I expect for umpteen years of other programming. Further, the Eclipse PHP editor has already helped me catch some mistakes. I did wind up installing IBM's JDK for PPC in order to get the speed to where I needed it to be, though. Java 7 should rock. =) I've been hacking on a project for the church called 'ConnectUU', and the code had crufted pretty badly over a handful of maintainers and upgrades from what looks like early php3. One file in particular was special:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 jbailey users 623863 Dec 17 02:37 events.php

And that's been split nicely now into 37 classes.

* Various friends, family etc have asked to be notified when the child is born. The best I can say is 'well, alright'. If seeing it here on the LJ isn't good enough, let me know and I'll add you to the super-secret-mailing-list. But don't expect anything exciting. Probably something along the lines of 'Showtime, Synergy'.

* Oh: Happy New Year! For this year I've made no resolutions. I can't predict my future more than about 6 weeks out, and I'd be totally fooling myself if I claimed otherwise. But hey. =)

* We've totally finished moving now. Pictures are coming soon, but I'm trying to get ones without boxes and mess in the background. I've put a few up so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbailey/tags/4537/

I'm a simple guy. I don't necessarily need the latest technology, especially if it's more annoying than the previous tech. I also don't need a lot of TV channels. In Montr al I just had basic, analog cable. That was just fine, and I have a TV tuner card in my box and I could watch TV from the comfort of my chair.

Now I move to Brooklyn and my only choice for cable is Time Warner. Fine. So I'll just get Internet and super basic analog cable. But they don't offer analog cable anymore. In fact they're completely turning it off come January 15. The replacement is digital cable, which requires some sort of a set top box, which is just another large piece of hardware taking up space and I wouldn't be able to change channels using the computer, let alone PVR type applications. There seems to be a standard called CableCARD to allow you to not have a cable box, but there doesn't seem to be tuner cards out there that work under Linux and take these cards. I find this all really annoying. No wonder people turn to Bittorrent for their TV.

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

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

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] Arrived at Ko Phuket a few days ago, I'm off the ship and at a hotel. In Bintan, we saw an interesting looking resort with plenty of coconut trees, logs and other stuff floating in the harbour, a snake oil merchant (with a live cobra), barges and transformer ferries, pouring rain and bad drainage. We left Bintan, went south for Selat Durian, then north past Singapore Straits, into the infamous Straits of Malacca and north past Malaysia and to the tourist island of Phuket. Along the way, we saw the coals of sunset, massive jellyfish in the dark green water, huge queues of massive ships covering the horizon as we passed the entrance to the Straits of Singapore, lights from Singapore in the distance, the pirate-free Straits of Malacca, where many large cargo and other ships passed us, the fleet of lights/boats that sprung up as if from nowhere some 50 miles off Phukey, the last sunrise on the ship (in a bay near Phuket) and an awesome NYE party on the ship. Leaving the Heraclitus has been hard, I'm gonna miss that black and red ship and the awesome crew who got us the 3000 or so nautical miles from Cairns to Phuket. Now it is time to visit some Thai Linux developers and return to Australia.

Yesterday Bel n and I got confirmation from the travel agency: it's now official! We'll be going to Barcelona (third time this month for me) tomorrow, spend New Year's Eve with my cousin and early during the morning of January 1st we'll be taking a flight to Tunisia, to end up in Hammamet for a one week long trip around the country. Before this very late confirmation, the agency was only assuring one of us could come back; the other return ticket was missing, and I wasn't planning on staying there alone. :) This is pretty exciting because I've never been anywhere in Africa, despite it's very close from where I live, so I'm really looking forward to discovering the cultures of the Islam in Northern Africa. We plan going to way too many places, but I think I'll most enjoy the different Roman buildings in a few of the important cities, specially in Dougga. If you have any suggestions of things I can't miss in Tunisia, feel free to comment here. Have in mind I'll probably be moving around in louages (shared taxis) so maybe going to places too far away from Hammamet isn't that easy -yeah, I'm thinking about Matmata and the Skywalker's village ;)- and we don't want to spend lots of money. Hopefully things will be normal at El Prat airport tomorrow, after the distressing news coming from Madrid this morning... More when I come back on January 8th!

Somebody intends to challenge DJB’s license for qmail. Most likely we don’t hear from them again, but there is a small chance something might happen. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Chris Samual writes a good summary of Peter Gutmann's analysis of the cost of Vista (in terms of DRM).

The following paragraph in the article however seemed more interesting to me:
Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum functionality like generic 640x480 VGA support will still be available in order for the system to boot). This means that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found.

Now just imagine that you want to cause widespread disruption - a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack against Windows users. What better option than to cause most of them to have hardware that's not acceptable to the OS? I expect that there will be many instances of security holes in drivers and hardware being concealed by MS because they can't afford the PR problems resulting from making millions of machines cease functioning. But just imagine that someone finds hardware vulnerabilities in a couple of common graphics drivers or pieces of hardware and publicly releases exploits shortly before a major holiday. If it's public enough (EG posted to a few mailing lists and faxed to some major newspapers) then MS would be forced to invoke the DRM measures or lose face in a significant way. Just imagine the results of stopping 1/3 of machines working just before Christmas!

Of course after the first few incidents people will learn. It shouldn't be difficult to configure a firewall to prevent all access to MS servers so that they can't revoke access, after all our PCs are important enough to us that we don't want some jerk in Redmond just turning them off. Of course disabling connections to MS would also disable security updates - but we all know that usability is more important than security to the vast majority of users (witness the number of people who happily keep using a machine that they know to be infected with a virus or trojan).

If this happens and firewalling MS servers becomes a common action, I wonder if MS will attempt the typical malware techniques of using servers in other countries with random port numbers to get past firewalls. Maybe Windows updates could be spread virally between PCs, this method would allow infecting machines that aren't connected to the net via laptops.

Finally, I recommend that people who are interested in such things read Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow, he has some interesting ideas about people DOSing corporations that they work for which seem surprisingly similar to what MS is doing to itself. I'll post about my own observations of corporations DOSing themselves in the near future.

One of the reasons I have only blogged 21 times in thirty months is because of the very kludgey work flow I had for blogging; I had to manually create the file, and then scp by hand, and ensure that any ancillary files were in place on the remote machine that serves up my blogs. After moving to ikiwiki, and thus arch, there would be even more overhead, were it not so amenable to scripting. Since this is arch, and therefore creating branches and merging is both easy and natural, I have two sets of branches -- one set related to the templates and actual blog content I server on my local, development box, and a parallel set of branches that I publish. The devel branches are used by ikiwiki on my local box; the remote ikiwiki uses the publish branch. So I can make changes to my hearts content on the devel branch, and the merge into my publish branch. When I commit the publish branches, the hook function ensure that there is a fresh checkout of the publish branch on the remote server, and that ikiwiki is run to regenerate web pages to reflect the new commit. The hook functions are nice, but not quite enough to make bloggin as effortless as it could be. With the movge to ikiwiki, and dissociation of classification and tagging from the file system layout, I have followed the lead of Roland Mas and organized my blog layout by date; posts are put in blog/$year/$month/$escaped_title. The directory hierarchy might not exist for a new year or month. A blog posting may also show in in two different archive indices: the annual archive index for the year, and a monthly index page created for every month I blog in. However, at the time of writing, there is no annual index for the next year (2007), or the next month (January 2007). These have to be created as required. All this would get quite tedious, and indeed, would frequently remain undone -- were it not for automation. To make my life easier, I have blogit!, which takes care of the niggling details. When called with the title of the prospective post; this script figures out the date, ensures that the blog directory structure exists, creating path components and adding them to the repository as required, creates a blog entry template, adds the blog entry to the repository, creates the annual or the monthly archive index and adds those to the repository as needed, and finally, calls emacs on the blog posting file. whew.

Creating a new locale I'm currently in Cilamitay, in the east of Taiwan. There is a little meeting of Taiwanese Free Software people and people from the Amis, Taroko and Puyuma tribes, with the idea of starting localisation efforts for some aboriginal languages. These are some of the issues we are going to discuss: Language code A new ISO standard (639-3) will hopefully be formalised in January that will include the language codes for the Taiwanese aboriginal tribes. We'll have to work some temporary solution, but there's good hope that it won't have to be temporary for long. List of characters Because of Christian missionary influence, both Amis and Taroko use a roman alphabet, with accents. We need to work out the complete list of character and accent combination, see if everything is in Unicode, see how they sort. We then need to find a comfortable way to input them using the keyboards normally available here (English US layout): compose key? Dead keys? How about on Windows? Womble2 on IRC tells me that on Windows one can works with MSKLC. Technical terms and country list We need to work out how to map terms that do not exist in the language. Technical terms are usually borrowed from Japanese. Names for all the countries in the world probably do not exist. Translation interface We need to find an easy to use interface to input the translations. There is Rosetta. There is Pootle. (Thanks to Christian Perrier for pointing me at it) There is Webpot.

Mozilla Firefox Locales In 2004, we had for every individual localization a dedicated source package in the Debian archive, such as: mozilla-firefox-locale-ar, mozila-firefox-locale-ca, etc. This is a mess from every point of view. First, it creates much overhead on the archive infrastructure side as well as on the maintainers one, and second, since it often results in localization packages out of sync with the browser, it is a major pain in the ass for the users. Mozilla Firefox Locales All In January 2005, Cesar Martinez Izquierdo introduced the common source package mozilla-firefox-locale-all which included most of the available localizations. That was the inital step to clean up the mess. Later, David Moreno Garza and Luk Claes took the package over and accompanied it through the Mozilla Firefox to Firefox transition. Iceweasel l10n In September 2006, I jumped in as the new maintainer. Since then, the package did continue to evolve:

• rebranding for the Firefox to Iceweasel transition (currently, the foreign locales are fixed, only the en-US locale included in iceweasel is not, patch is at #400721).
• renaming to use the proper l10n naming scheme ($ program -l10n-$ language and not $ program -locale-$ language ).
• with the inclusion of the Catalan and Ukrainian localizations, iceweasel-l10n includes now really all Iceweasel locales which were previously packaged seperately in Debian (Thanks again to Jordi Mallach and Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for their permission for inclusion).

Additionally,

• with the readdition of temporarily removed locales within the Firefox 2.0 release (he for Hebrew and pa-in for Punjabi, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),
• with the inclusion of unofficial but complete localizations (fa-ir for Persian and fur-it for Furlan),
• and the half-official localizations (ka for Georgian and ku for Kurdish, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),

iceweasel-l10n as of 2.0+debian.1-1 supports 43 languages in total. That is more than any other distribution (yes, including Ubuntu :) contains. Icelizard Currently, the locale packages for iceape and icedove are not unified. This September, I was writing to the some of the maintainers but they seemed not interested to fix it for Etch. I will try it again in 2007, my aim is to have proper unified localization packages for all icelizard applications in Lenny. Update: iceweasel-l10n 2.0.0.1+debian-1 adds Valencian localization, so supporting 44 languages now.