If it rains for 7 more days, Seattle will beat the 1953 record of 33 straight days of rain. I’m not sure which is more depressing–the fact that it’s been raining for 27 straight days, or that it still needs to rain for another week to even break the record.

So it seems that the Caracas Trollparty 2006 is really going to happen from January 24th to 29th, 2006. This event will take part of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, and is sponsored by the SAPI: Intellectual Property Office of Venezuela (bad name for what they’re doing!) This would be the fourth Trollparty ever made, and the first outside Europe. We are really happy to have the trolls with us in Venezuela in the first Free Software event of the year. You’ll find more information in the following links:

• Caracas Trollparty 2006: this is the Troll-based webpage for the event, in english and french. It includes technical information on activities and workshops and is a collaborative environment for the event.
• Trollparty @ SAPI’s Wiki: this is the information Wikipage in the SAPI Wiki (in spanish) You’ll find general information on activities, times, dates and places, as well as contact information for participating.

BTW, this is my first post appearing on the Planet. Hope it turns out ok. Have a great day!

To get an X display, I have done the following:start Xnest :10. outside, I have done xauth list to show my key for :10 (which I have prepared earlier with xauth add).Then, I just need to install xbase-clients inside pbuilder session, and do xauth addinside chroot.Applications inside chroot can now connect to Xnext server outside of chroot.

I've just finished uploading new django packages to my repository, the python-django packages are now 0.91, so if you're using 0.90 beware! There are backward incompatable changes, it's probably worth reading http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/jan/11/091/ and then follow the links for the 5 backwards incompatable changes and fix your apps to the new system. I've also updated the python-django-magic-removal packages to the latest svn (or it was the latest svn when I built them ;). Oh, and a symlink has been added to both packages to link in to the admin-media nicely (OK - so I got bored of editing the python each release to point to the /usr/share location, and this works nicely and simply, I hope. Thanks for the pointer James! :) Oh, one other thing, there's a patch in the debian 0.91 version that means that the startproject part actually generates a settings.py with the "right" timezone and language. I haven't patched the magic removal branch with this (hey, if you're using that, I'm sure you can edit the settings.py and catch those yourself ;) Play, have fun, report bugs at me! (or something)

I had an urge to know what kind of memory mapping a powerpc machine had.I couldn't really figure out how to find out whichmemory address the kernel resided, or how to find out the physical memory address from a virtual memory address.Apparently, there is a virt_to_phys function in the kernelwhich does exactly this.I was surprised to discover that virt_to_phys gives me physical address 0 for virtual address 0xc0000000 (PAGE_OFFSET).If I was running on x86, I would be worried about real-mode code running around with a NULL-pointer.Is powerpc any different?

I can tell that LCA 2006 (23rd - 28th January) is getting close, becasue I've spent the weekend so far preparing presentation slides and a laptop to take. So, for those of you who have been waiting to track me down for good or for bad, you won't have to wait too much longer. I'm abandoning the cilly Tokyo winter and heading down to New Zealand for the entire week. I start off with a quick trip to the Bay of Islands, north of Aukland to visit my Dad (no I'm not from New Zealand and neither is he, but he's been living there for about a year now). I should get down to Dunedin on Monday afternoon, in time to freshen up for the performance night at Arc Cafe as part of the Dicital Art Mini-Conf, organised by Kfish and the gang. On Tuesday, if all goes to plan I'll be giving a presentation at the Debian Mini-Conf about what the Debian Kernel Team has been up to in the past year. And on Thursday my good mate Dave Miller is giving a keynote. I haven't even looked at the programme yet and already my week is filling up. LCA 2006, Dunedin.
I'll be there, and I will be wearing Speights underwear!

I noticed that when I'm using an expression like (exit 1) to exit 1 from inside subshell, shell wouldn't exit even when set -ex is specified.Is this a bug?

College is not the launching pad for a job. It's the launching pad for the rest of your life. High school is a mini-jail with strict standards that everyone must live up to. College is when you get to make your own choices. This is the sentiment behind this article. I agree with it on principle, but not completely on content. Computer Science in the past 7 years has gone through an evil transition - almost all of the Colleges out there shifted to a Technical style curriculum because that was what was in demand. While TAing the introductory classes here at the U of M, the most common complaint was that they weren't learning things which will be useful in the future. The classes are taught in Scheme, for reasons that I completely agree with - the students would rather have them taught in Java, because that would be useful in the market when they leave college. What were they missing? The knowledge that programming concepts are what make good programmers, not language skills. Students want cookie cutter code which solves the problems that they are given. That is why people are lambasting the teaching of Java: people aren't learning hard thinking concepts. In my opinion, college is not supposed to teach you the skills you need for your job - instead, you are there to learn your specific learning style. This will allow you to learn anything you need for your job. Most jobs which exist in the Real World™ aren't looking for people from a specific major, they're looking for experience. I also share the views that you don't need to get perfect grades - the effort required to get an A over a B+ or a B is not worth it for the slight bump in your GPA, and you will have much more fun in college. Meeting friends in college is just as important as your actual classes. The Real World ™ calls this "networking". Choosing your major in order to get a job is also such a crap shoot otherwise - you're betting that in 4 years, the market will need the skills that you learn in a major.

When I loaded Planet Debian today, the first story was «Pardon my French…ness?» by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. There seems to be a new meme going on, trying to find out «Who’s Your Inner European?» Antti-Juhani’s Inner European is French: «Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.» Well, since I’m quite francophile in many ways (cars, food, laissez-faire, etc.), I expected to get a similar result, but it was quite different:

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table. Who’s Your Inner European?

Well, I like what I read or saw of the Irish countryside in books or on tv, but drinking? Alcohol? Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. Doesn’t choosing the cute classic Citroën (They wrote it without diaeresis! Philistines!) suffice? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen «Those damn British - they really get under your skin», but the newest idea of the British government to sponsor voyeurs with access to public surveillance cameras to enforce their Respect Action Plan (German written Telepolis article about — BTW: Has Telepolis no more english translations?) really really goes under my skin. (Although stories about implanted RFID chips even go deeper under my skin…) One annotator of the Symlink article (German, too) about that British government programme associated their ideas with the concept of the Blockwart (“block warden” or “wonk” in English according to the dict.leo.org forum, Wikipedia also mentions “block leader” and “block attendant”) during the Nazi régime in Germany: They were the lowest officials in the NSDAP and the local contact persons to SS and Gestapo. I wouldn’t wonder if the British government gets a Big Brother Award for giving this “respect” to privacy and human rights. But back to the quiz: Well, let’s see with which of the questions I wasn’t sure what to answer. If I change Tiramisu (yeah, I know, that there is alcohol in it, and I only like it with nearly no alcohol in) to Apple pie, nothing changed. Same after switching Pasta to Seafood and vegetables. Hmmm, well let’s try one of the obvious but not really wrong answers: Mousse au chocolat instead of Tiramisu. Et voilá! La France! :-) Oh, and yes, the ideas of the French government to make open source software, the web and other cultural achievements illegal aren’t my French favourites either… Update, 21:03: Christian Perrier suggested that the quiz could also be used to find out, which Inner European you’re definitely not. Well, somehow I hoped, it would tell me, I’m not German (I also marked Mercedes in that round ;-), but it told me, I’m not Russian, which is also fine since the quiz seems to focus the prejudices about Russians on alcohol consumption.

Now playing: Europe — The Final Countdown

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Via Ihan kiva el m

So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer’s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, pointing this out brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
> you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.
Dear Anthony,
I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that
more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope
Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.
> In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
> you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
> rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.
> Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...
That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.
They poison the -devel list.
Best,

So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).

So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer’s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, pointing this out brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
> you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.
Dear Anthony,
I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that
more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope
Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.
> In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
> you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
> rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.
> Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...
That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.
They poison the -devel list.
Best,

So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).

Somehow John Ringo’s latest, Princess of Wands, reminds me of another book he’s written recently. Both have the overtones of some sort of literary self-congratulation. In Ghost’s case, I counted that as a fault. In Princess of Wands‘ case, I count it as a strength. Both books are also episodic rather than regular novels, but the similarities end here. One problem in reviewing this book is that one cannot really discuss much of the setup without writing major spoilers. The cover blurb takes one approach: describe what the reader learns within the first five pages, who cares that the picture that gives one of the book is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the cover blurb is so misleading that it can make people ignore this book even though they should have picked it up. The genre is urban fantasy. The main character is a devout Christian soccer mom who finds herself in an adventure. The magic system and the ontology are quite interesting. There are battles with evil. There is a con. The publishing house itself, Pier… erm… Baen Books, as well as some of its authors, make an appearance onstage. (In fact, if you aren’t a barfly, you’re going to miss some of the fun like I probably missed a lot of it, never having visited a con where Baen people gather.) I found it a satisfying read, especially the middle episode. The final episode was so short that it didn’t feel well balanced, but it’s a minor issue. However, I would probably hesitate to recommend this book to a certain kind of Christans: if you think Harry Potter is evil, don’t come near this book. Overall, I’ll rate this book 4/5.

I see a experimental-is-in-dists-now file on the ftp server.I didn't really know until a bug was filed against pbuilder.Was there an announcement? This requires change on end-user systems.There was an answer to a question, which I didn't notice.

We have a new django release, 0.91... I'll package it RSN... but here's some forewarning for those of you out there using the python-django packages... there's some backwards incompatible changes from 0.90 to 0.91, it's probably worth reading http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/BackwardsIncompatibleChanges if you are using django. The next real little boy^W^Wrelease will have the magic-removal branch merged in, so that'll be another set of backwards incompatible changes (if you want to stay ahead of the game though, as I said in my previous blog entry, there are some packages for that branch too ;) Fun fun fun fun fun!