Tim pointed out that it's worth travelling simply for the new timezone in your debian/changelog entries. We can use AptFs to work out who has collected the most so far:

14 timezone(s):
 * Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> (-0800, -0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, -0300,
   +1300, +1100, +1030, +0900, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
12 timezone(s):
 * Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> (-1000, -0900, -0800, -0700, -0500, -0400,
   -0300, -0200, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
11 timezone(s):
 * Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> (-0400, -0300, +1300, +1100, +1000, +0930,
   +0900, +0800, +0200, +0100, +0000)
9 timezone(s):
 * Barak A. Pearlmutter <bap@debian.org> (-0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, +0500,
   +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> (-1000, -0700, -0300, +1100, +1000,
   +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org> (-0800, -0700, -0600, -0500, -0400, +0300,
   +0200, +0100, +0000)
 * Sam Hocevar (Debian packages) <sam+deb@zoy.org> (-0700, -0500, -0400, -0300,
   +0930, +0300, +0200, +0100, +0000)

Full output. However, something tells me we aren't going to see widespread gamification of Debian development.

I have just bought a gamepad, the Saitek V.3 Cyborg Rumble Pad (also marketed as PS2700), mainly to play at SuperTuxKart under Debian GNU/Linux. It works perfectly, except for one minor feature, and it can be used for playing and as an X11 input device.System support This device uses USB HID so it is directly supported by the Linux kernel, with its module joydev, I guess: it appears as /dev/input/eventX and /dev/input/jsY. It can be tested with jstest-gtk from the package jstest-gtk: it has 7 axes (two sticks, one directional pad and two triggers that count as one single axis) and 13 buttons (4 regular, 2 rear, the 2 triggers that also send button events, 3 specials and the 2 sticks that can be clicked). They are presented in an order that is rather logical, except the trigger axis is inserted between the two axis of the second stick. It also features two strange buttons:

• a precision mode switch, that is meant to slow the sticks, restricting them to a narrow logical range to allow a precise aim: this does not work at all, I suppose it requires some driver support;
• a PC/PS3 switch that produces a disconnection and an immediate reconnection and changes the events the pad reports: in PS3 mode, the triggers axis disappears (and the two axis of the second stick become consequently adjacent).

Game support I only tested SuperTuxKart, but I think any game able to use a gamepad or a joystick should support it: after all, they all use the same protocol. The default mapping is rather logical but I find it more convenient to use the triggers rather than the main stick to accelerate and brake. I do not know if the vibration feature can be used at all, because I do not know how it is exposed and I do not think I have any game that would be able to take advantage of it. X.Org support This is an interesting feature: X.Org has a joystick(4) driver, available in the package xserver-xorg-input-joystick that allows you to use a joystick or a gamepad as an input device, both for pointing and typing. So, just for fun, I installed the joystick driver. It installs a default configuration file as /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-joystick.conf, that is enough to provide features equivalent to a regular mouse. But given the number of axes and buttons of my pad, it deserved a special configuration in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/rumblepad.conf:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier  "Rumble Pad"
    Option      "MatchIsJoystick"   "on"
    Option      "MatchProduct"      "Cyborg V.3 Rumble Pad"
    # Main stick axes: point
    Option      "MapAxis1"          "mode=relative axis=+1x deadzone=5000"
    Option      "MapAxis2"          "mode=relative axis=+1y deadzone=5000"
    # Second stick axes: scroll
    Option      "MapAxis3"          "mode=relative axis=+1zx deadzone=5000"
    Option      "MapAxis5"          "mode=relative axis=+1zy deadzone=5000"
    # Triggers: scroll vertically
    Option      "MapAxis4"          "mode=relative axis=+1zy deadzone=5000"
    # Directional pad: point
    Option      "MapAxis6"          "mode=accelerated axis=+1x deadzone=5000"
    Option      "MapAxis7"          "mode=accelerated axis=+1y deadzone=5000"
    # Buttons 1, 2 and 3 : click (no use for button 4)
    Option      "MapButton1"        "button=1"
    Option      "MapButton2"        "button=2"
    Option      "MapButton3"        "button=3"
    Option      "MapButton4"        "none"
    # Rear buttons: back and forward
    Option      "MapButton5"        "key=166"   # XF86Back
    Option      "MapButton6"        "key=167"   # XF86Forward
    # Triggers: no use
    Option      "MapButton7"        "none"
    Option      "MapButton8"        "none"
    # Special buttons
    Option      "MapButton9"        "key=135"   # select : Menu
    Option      "MapButton10"       "key=172"   # start : XF86AudioPlay
    Option      "MapButton13"       "key=180"   # home : XF86HomePage
    # Sticks click: click
    Option      "MapButton11"       "button=1"  # clic left stick
    Option      "MapButton12"       "button=3"  # clic right stick
EndSection

It is commented, but here is what it does:

• point with the main stick and the directional pad;
• scroll with the second stick and the triggers;
• click with the game buttons and the sticks;
• navigate back and forth with the rear buttons (I use that to switch between my virtual desktops);
• do some special stuff with the special buttons: open the context menu, play the music, open a file explorer to your home directory.

It is worth noting that joysticks have one feature that mice do not have: they allow to scroll at a variable speed, proportional to the shift of an analogue stick. This is the meaning of these zx and zy axes I mapped to the second stick, and it provides a scrolling experience that is far superior from that of a mouse wheel.

Hello I m happy to announce that Perl6 (as rakudo) is now available on Debian unstable. Thanks also to Gabor Szabo for the Perl6 talk he gave at FOSDEM. His talk made me think: Why the hell don t we have rakudo on Debian ? . So I stepped up, pushed to get a recent parrot package, ghedo and I created a pkg-rakudo team on Alioth, and we updated the old rakudo package done by ryan52. Enjoy

This weekend, the boys got what they ve been waiting for: another trip on Amtrak. For the last week or so, Jacob has had a morning ritual. He ll look at the calendar, figure out what today is, figure out when we ll get on the train, and then figure out how many days it will be. As the number gets lower, the excitement gets higher, of course. Friday morning, we woke the boys at 2:30AM to get to the train station. The only Amtrak trains through our area are middle of the night departures. Jacob is normally hard to wake up, but when I tell him that I m waking him up to go to the train station, he wakes up faster than I ve ever seen him before. It takes about 3 seconds for him to process that in his groggy state, and then he sits up straight, throws off the covers, and is instantly ready to go. Both boys were excited even in the station waiting room. Oliver has been on an Amtrak train before, but it s been awhile and he probably doesn t remember it. He constantly talked about it, jabbering as much as his vocabulary lets him. Once we were on the train, Terah and I would have liked to get some more sleep. The boys, on the other hand, were now wide awake, and didn t fall back asleep until about 5:30. That means Terah and I didn t, either. Here s what it usually looks like: When it came time for breakfast, we went to the dining car as usual. Jacob had already been telling us for days what he would eat for breakfast on the train: I always have French toast on the train, dad. And so he did. A few minutes later, I heard the waitress telling other people they were out of French toast, so I was glad I didn t have to disappoint Jacob over that! But it was Oliver that really came alive on this trip. I don t think I ve ever seen him so excited. It was almost constant. He happily talked about anything he could see or touch. But he also listened to other conversations, and would frequently pick out one word from a sentence and try to say it. He does that at home too, but not nearly so often as on the train. Both boys wanted to go exploring a lot my word for taking them for a walk in the train and seeing what they might find. We walked up and down the train several times, Jacob excited over opening the doors between the cars, and Oliver excited just to be there. Oliver s excitement kept him from sleeping well. He did eventually get a short nap, but that wasn t quite enough to avert a couple of tantrums later in the day. The reason for the trip was the 80th birthday party for Terah s grandpa. And it so happened that Oliver s 2nd birthday would be over the same time. So, Saturday morning, we all went for breakfast at Das Dutchman Essenhaus, one of the favorite local restaurants in northern Indiana. After that, it was over to a relative s place for some birthday festivities. The children got mini cakes to decorate as rail cars. There was frosting and all sorts of toppings. Great fun was had by all, and it was wise that this activity took place in a garage rather than indoors. Yes, that is a marshmallow stuck to Jacob s nose. Then in the evening, it was off to another relative s place for some more family time. Jacob had a great time all day, and was in high spirits. He asked me to sit by him at dinner, and started one of the longest conversations I ve had with him in some time. We just talked about the things that happened in the day, but it was nice when I told him, I like sitting by you, Jacob, and he said, Dad, me too! The big highlight for the day happened in the evening. We were gathered around a fire with a guitar to do some singing. Jacob was happily perched in his lawn chair, but got very excited when he saw some lightweight airplanes flying overhead. These kept flying at some distance, and he kept pointing them out to us. But that wasn t even the most exciting part. That came when the fireflies came out. Jacob ran around, catching them in his hands, and excitedly showing them to whatever person happened to be closest. He was laughing with joy for such a long time. At one point, someone asked him if the bugs were tickling his hands. He said, evidentally just realizing it, Oh yes, they ARE tickling my hands! He was one very happy boy. Sunday I had to leave to get back home, while Terah and the boys will return a couple of days later. Although I do sort of look forward to a train trip that I can relax without having to manage two young boys, I do miss them already and will be happy to have everyone back home in a few days. (This post written during the trip and posted a week later after arriving home)

When I recently switched my blog over to Jekyll as my blog/site generation platform, one of the driving forces was implementing comments. I ve been a comment-free blogger for years, but I ve just decided to change my opinions on things and see what happens. (Turns out: you get some cool comments. And a lot of spam.) However, the standard advice when it comes to handling comments with Jekyll is use Disqus (or, very occasionally, some other Insert-Javascript-Here cloud commenting service). Not being one to stand for the conventional wisdom, and given that I m allergic to the cloud , I decided to go a different way an all-static comment handling system for Jekyll. First off, you need a way to render comments inside Jekyll. This was disturbingly easy with Jekyll s plugin system. With around 30 lines of Ruby, it was done. It simply reads a pile of YAML files from a _comments directory, and adds them to the individual blog post objects in the templating system, which can then be iterated over when rendering a post. Obviously, you need to also adjust your blog post templates to suit. This is fairly straightforward; just render each of page.comments in a list. Adding a comment submission form is also necessary, and similarly trivial. The only moving part in this whole system is the bit of code that handles comment form submissions. The simplest way to handle it, which is what I ve gone with, is a few lines of PHP that writes the contents of the form out as YAML and e-mails it to me. Although I m not a fan of PHP for web applications, this is sort of job is where PHP excels it s ubiquitous, trivial to deploy, and easy to understand (in small doses). Using a CGI or anything larger (like, say, a sinatra app) would be massive overkill. Since I m still a control freak at heart, I m hand-moderating all comments by the simple expedient of having all blog comments e-mailed to me¹, and I have to import them into the blog and re-upload. Mutt makes this trivial; I ve got a script that I trigger by pressing C (for comment) that pipes the message to formail to strip the RFC2822 header, then drops the rest into my blog s _comments directory. A quick rake upload and they re published. If you re not as obsessive as me about hand-moderating your comments, it wouldn t be hard to write a slightly different PHP script that commits the comment directly to a git repo² and re-renders the site. All you d have to do when you wanted to make a new post is merge those new comment commits from the live git repo and go to work. This would then be a completely static site (with all the performance benefits that implies) with immediate-gratification comments. So, if you re suspicious of the cloud, or just want to be the cool kid whose blog comments load even when people have turned cookies off, check out my Jekyll static comments plugin.

He he , after6 months of hard labor (just kidding, it wasn t difficult) I m now a brand new Debian Developer. I plan to continue the work I did before, mainly Perl module packaging, helping getting a recent rakudo in Debian, and improving configuration tools (as upstream author). I wish to thanks heartfully all the people that helped me before and during the new maintainer process:
gregoa, xoswald and the whole pkg-perl team. Too bad I can t go to Banja-Luka. All the best

I've got a few projects which are hosted in mercurial repositories. To deploy them I manually checkout the repository, create symlinks by hand, then update apache thttpd to make them work. When I want to update my applications I manually become the correct user, find the repository and run "hg pull --update". I think it is about time that I sat down and started doing things neatly. I made a start at this by writing a shell script for each site called .deploy then I drive it like so:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/bin/deploy  execute the .deploy file associated with this project.
#
while true; do
    #
    #  If we're at the root directory we're done.
    #
    if [ $PWD = "/" ]; then
        echo "Reached /"
        exit
    fi
    # found our file?
    #
    if [ -x ".deploy" ]; then
       ./.deploy
       exit
    fi
    cd ..
done

It seems the main candidate is capistrano, which was previously very Ruby on Rails centric, but these days seems to be divorced from it. Alternatively there is the python-based fabric project which has been stalled for two years, vlad the deployer (great name!) which is another Rake-based and thus Ruby-loving system, and finally whiskey disk which is limited to Git-based projects as far as I can tell. In short each of these projects is very similar, and each relies upon being able to do two things:

• SSH to remote machine(s) and run a command.
• Copy files to the remote command / pull a repository from a known location.

I've automated SSH before, and I've automed SCP/rsync. The hard part is doing both "copy" and "command" over one SSH channel - such that you don't get prompted for passwords multiple times - and handling the case of runnign sudo where appropriate. Still most of the initial stages are trivial. I wonder what project I should be using:

• I like perl. Perl is good.
• I use mercurial. Mercurial is good.
• Rake is perhaps permissable, but too ruby-centric == not for me.

Anything I've missed? Or pointers to good documentation? ObQuote: "We need to be a little more constructive here, okay? " - Terminator 2

Warning, this post is COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL, do not spread outside of authorized corporate internal communication channels. Today Nokia will announce that in order to increase investor confidence and foster brand loyalty all Nokia Symbian phones in the world will receive two free Nokia-themed games. The first game will be Angry Nokias Nokias have discovered that other phones are taking their market share away and now they are very, very angry! Fling cool and shiny Nokia phone and destroy the competition. Complete all free 30 levels and be first to collect all golden Ovi s by gathering MeeGo and Windows Phone 7 logos in the levels! The other game that is sure to be an instant hit among true Nokia fans will be the Nokia Ninja you are a humble user and sales people are throwing phones at you all kinds of phones. But beware most of those phones are not Nokias! Use your finger to slice trough the competition, rake up combos and achievements! But be careful you do not want to slice trough a Nokia phone! Only trough instant brand recognition you can rake up truly great scores in this game. Nokia connecting people. (P.S. Check the date)

I m online again. (In case you didn t notice, duh ) Seems as if we (the Telco/ISP guy and me) just needed to look at it hard enough for it to go away first he could dial in, using my account data, which I probably should change now, then herc with ppp(8) and pppoe(8) was working (although at about 50 KiB/s down, he showed me 508 KiB/s a rate I had never achieved with his WiXP), then I took my notebook, which worked with pppoe(4). Now herc s working again. (Maybe altq(9) can explain the slowdown? Hm, from debian.netcologne.de I get 500 so it looks okay.)
But eurynome isn t, oh the joy. Luckily, gecko2 who administers its host system just woke up. Things we do want to see: the Telco/ISP guy accepting that I run MirBSD on a P-233MMX box with Hercules graphics card and a 9 monitor with no comment other than considering its age (and that it usually runs 24/7) as partial cause for the bug. Thanks, Netcologne! Things we don t want to see:
Mar 26 10:40:02 blau /bsd: signal 11 received by (screen:16857) UID(2999) EUID(2999), parent (screen:19111) UID(2999) EUID(2999)
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die... (luckily, I get it about once a year only) ObCoffeeSpices: Marrakech (Cumin, Allspice, Cumin Aroma) though, due to its relative strength compared to the others, the only coffee spice I have left. And another hint: pre-warming the coffee cup with hot water, so it doesn t cool down too fast with the amounts of milk I put in, rocks. I just wore the Squeeze Release (FOSDEM, Spacefun) T-Shirt to the bakery and got asked by a neighbour: Oh, a Debian fan? Developer, even now imagine the typical informed interested guy talk for a conference booth of your OS of choice here. How proud he was to get his wife and himself Windows -free at home; how he likes to tinker a bit (if he s got any time left), which has become harder with Windows; how his time constraints have him at OpenSuSE currently but asked how squeeze is; and the usual complaints at places like $ork where they have to use Windows and MSIE (apparently you can t centrally manage Firefox, eh, good someone tells me, because that s what we do ). Wow. Anyway, it s spring, so people, wear your shirts. (Hrm, what do I make of the fact that this is my only Debian shirt although I m thinking how to get Tartan Trousers if money were no issue and nobody had ever commented on my various BSD, FOSDEM, FrOSCon, etc. wear )

Although I promised in my previous entry that I'd made my last mention of the redisfs - replication friendly redis-based filesystem I have to disappoint. Ben Sykes informed me that he'd made a fork of redisfs, called shredisfs. I like forks. Forks are good, and this particular one was very welcome - from the README:

Steve's original managed around 250k per second for writes on my test machine, this version does about 15MB a second writes. ... Read speed on the test machine here now is around 180MB/sec..

Needless to say I "stole" the improvements and rolled them into my original release. Thanks all round to those of you that submitted bug reports, suggestions, and codez. I also had a release out briefly which used zLib to compress the values of keys stored in memory. Unfortunately that lead to a net-slowdown for files which were bigger than a single block - due to the overhead of file-system appends which translated to: "fetch", "compress", "append", and "decompress". Finally on the subject of qpsmtpd, my favourite SMTP-server - the exceptionally talented Matt Sergeant released a proof of concept rewrite in Javascript. Using nodejs this new SMTP server is heavily asynchronous and you can find it online under the name Haraka. Although my javascript-fu is weak I'm very impressed by the codebase out there so far, and I'd expect good things of it in the future. Even if it does use Javascript and not my beloved Perl. Finally I'm a year older. But birthdays aren't important. ObQuote: "Do you wanna know what makes all my candy taste so special? " - Epic Movie.

A few weeks ago, I had an "out-there" idea to try creating and selling a site at the same time. So far, it's not exactly raking in a major amount of cash: At $100 with a couple of bids, it doesn't look like I'll be able to retire on it! That said, I haven't spent a great deal of time on it, and part of the idea of the experiment was to limit the amount of time the 'new idea' would distract me from other things. I did hope to receive a few more "audience requests" in terms of what to build on Flippa.com, though. Hopefully, things will heat up a bit during the final two weeks of the auction, but I don't think "flipping" web sites is really a business I want to be in. It's been fun to see how much you can build with how little, though, what with all the widgets and API's out there these days. Since I'm a coder at heart, I also released some Ruby code that utlizes Google's stock screener API: https://github.com/davidw/google-screener - it's under the Apache license, and is kind of neat to play around with, I think, and is what I use to fetch information for the site.

For those of you who follow me through anything other than Planet Debian (who will surely tolerate this repetition): Interesting but frightful things are happening in North African countries. We saw what happened in Tunisia some days ago. Now, Egypt is a way larger, way more populous... And, dare I say, way more important country. Also, it is a country which borders Israel, where I lived in for ~18 months, and to which although I am today unaffiliated is very important for me. And what happens in Egypt will surely shape the whole mid-East. So, here goes a copy of Mohammed Sameer's post Not just a link to it, as he might have to take it down. Of course, Mohammed, if you in any way think I should delete this, please please tell me, and I will comply immediately.

Egypt has been fighting for freedom already for 3 days now. The whole country has experienced a large number of street demonstrations and protests within the last 3 days to be continued also on Friday, the 28th of January and afterwards. The protests' main goal is to oust dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime, which has been in power for almost 30 years. We want him out. A massacre has happened in Suez. Police used live ammunition and tear gas. There are unconfirmed rumors that the army might interfere. Even a bigger protest is supposed to take place a few hours from now. After the Prayer on Friday. The internet has been shutdown completely. Egypt is no longer online since Friday, the 28th of January 00:45 AM. Text messages to cell phones have been cut off too and all cell phones services will be following. No one knows exactly the intentions of the regime but it doesn't sound good. Please help us.
Please blog about it in English and in all languages.
Please spread the news everywhere.
Please talk to media.
Please petition your government if that will help. If there's anything that you can do, please do it and help us save the country and the people. More news from twitter #jan25.

...From what I read from Israeli sources, what worries them and many people around the world is that, although Egypt is formally a democratic country, the ruling party has seen towards having basically no oposition Besides the stubborn Islamic Brotherhood (very akin to Hamas). Now, the Islamic Brotherhood (as well as Hamas, and as well as most other Islamic regimes I know off, although I might be way mistaken) have got huge popular support because... They are true to their beliefs. In short, they are not corrupt Something that cannot be said about many political organizations around the globe. They are true to their word. And although many of us shiver at thinking of their word getting more power... It is only the Egyptians who should have a say on who rules Egypt. I honestly hope the Egyptian people get their long-owed self-determination. Of course, I hope Tunisians also get it, and not just a mirage of it. And every people, including us poor Mexicans who have neither had a chance to rule our destiny. And I hope it is a change for good, for tolerance, for peaceful coexistance with the neighbours, even if they are in many ways the rivals. [Update] I just found out that, as expected, the news have reached Slashdot: Egypt shuts off all Internet access. I'm sure you will find lots of more information there.

Egypt has been fighting for freedom already for 3 days now.

The whole country has experienced a large number of street demonstrations and protests within the last 3 days to be continued also on Friday, the 28th of January and afterwards.

The protests' main goal is to oust dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime, which has been in power for almost 30 years.

We want him out.

A massacre has happened in Suez. Police used live ammunition and tear gas. There are unconfirmed rumors that the army might interfere.

Even a bigger protest is supposed to take place a few hours from now. After the Prayer on Friday.

The internet has been shutdown completely. Egypt is no longer online since Friday, the 28th of January 00:45 AM.

Text messages to cell phones have been cut off too and all cell phones services will be following. No one knows exactly the intentions of the regime but it doesn't sound good.

Please help us.
Please blog about it in English and in all languages.
Please spread the news everywhere.
Please talk to media.
Please petition your government if that will help.

If there's anything that you can do, please do it and help us save the country and the people.

More news from twitter #jan25. read more

Friday, I wrote about the train trip Jacob and I were planning to take. Here s the story about it. Friday night, Jacob was super excited. He was running around the house, talking about trains. I had him pack his own backpack with toys this time, which were you guessed it trains. Plus train track. His usual bedtime is around 7. He was still awake in his room at about 11, too excited to sleep. The train was an hour late into Newton, so got up, got ready, and then went into Jacob s room at 3:15AM. I put my arm around him and said his name softly. No response. I said, just a little louder, Jacob, it s time to wake up to go to the train station. There was about a 2-second pause and then he sat bolt upright rubbing his eyes. A couple seconds later, in a very tired but clear voice, OK dad, let s go! That is, I believe, a record for waking up speed for Jacob. We went downstairs, got coats, mittens, hats, etc. on, made sure we had the stuffed butterfly he always sleeps with, and went out the door. As usual, Jacob chattered happily during the entire 15-minute drive to the Amtrak station. One of these days I need to remember to record it because it s unique. He described things to me ranging from the difference between freight and passenger trains, to what the dining car is all about, to tractors and how to ride them safely. Newton has some winter lights , and a few places still had Christmas lights, which were of course big hits. We had to wait a few minutes at the Amtrak station, and Jacob hadn t shown any signs of slowing down yet. He wanted to look at every Amtrak poster, picture, logo, or sign in the building. This generally meant me holding him up high while he leaned over to touch it and make out a few words. Then, of course, he would pick out minute details about the trains, such as how many coach cars he thought they had, and we d visit about that for awhile. We got on at about 4:20. We found our seats, and Jacob showed no signs of calming down, despite having had only 4 hours of sleep (instead of his usual 11) so far. We checked out the buttons for lights. And, of course, he excitedly yelled out, Dad, the train is moving! He spent the next while mostly watching out his window, but also still exploring his space. Finally at about 5, I said, Jacob, I am really tired. I am going to sleep now. Will you sleep too? His response: Oh sure dad, I will sleep with my eyes open! As a result, no sleep was had for Jacob, and only a little for me. The dining car opens for breakfast at 6:30, which is normally a rather foreign time for breakfast on the train for us. But we were both awake so I figured might as well go. So Jacob and I went to the dining car. We sat with a woman going from New Mexico to Lawrence for her grandpa s funeral, though it was expected and she was having a good time on the train. Jacob turned completely shy, and refused to say a word, except maybe a few whispered into my ear. He got his favorite railroad French toast, and had me drizzle some syrup on it. I used the word drizzle for syrup the first time he had French toast on the train, and if I fail to use that word in the dining car, I will hear about it in no uncertain terms from Jacob. He loved his dining car breakfast, but we spent about an hour and a half there. He was really slow at eating because his face was pressed up against the window so much. But that was just fine; we had nowhere else to be, the person eating breakfast with us enjoyed visiting (and, apparently, scaring the dining car staff with tales of bears in the New Mexico mountains). This was what the train trip was all about, after all. We played in the lounge car for awhile. The almost floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows provided a great view for him, and more opportunities to press his face against a window. We talked about freight trains that he saw, noticed the snow on some of them. Then we found the back of the train and he got to look out the back window. Back at our seat, he played with his toys for about 10 minutes, which was all he used them on the entire trip. There was just too much else to enjoy. When we used the restroom on the train, he d comment on how much he liked the Amtrak soap. It smells SO very very good! He wanted to wash his hands on the train. By late morning, he had decided: Dad, I LOVE this Amtrak soap. It smells like peaches! Shall your hands smell like peaches too? And, when we d get back up to our seats, he d put his hands in my face, saying, Dad, smell that! My hands smell like peaches! It was from the AMTRAK SOAP! At some point, he discovered the airline-style safety brochures in the seat back pockets. These were filled with diagrams of the train car, a few photos, and lots of icons with descriptions. I don t know how many times I read the thing to him, or really how many times he then recited it to me from memory. It was a lot. He spent hours with those brochures. Jacob had already told me that he wanted pizza for lunch, so I got him the kid-sized pizza. It wasn t all that big, and he could have devoured at least half of it when hungry. But he was getting really tired and ate only a few bites of pizza and a few chips. Pretty soon he was leaning up against me, the window, and eventually had his head on the table in some tomato sauce. But he didn t quite fall asleep by the time we went back to our seats, and of course was wide awake by that point. Jacob loves spotting the word Amtrak on things. It was very exciting when he noticed his orange juice at breakfast, and milk at lunch, were Amtrak juice and Amtrak milk due to the logo on the cups. At dinner he noticed we had Amtrak plates, and when I pointed out that his metal fork had the Amtrak logo on it, he got very excited and had to check every piece of silverware within reach. Dad, I have an Amtrak fork too! . And dad, YOU also have an Amtrak fork! We ALL have Amtrak forks! *cackling laughter* I finally insisted that Jacob lay down for some quiet time. I closed the curtains, and he finally did fall asleep less than an hour before our arrival into Galesburg. So by 2:15 he was up to 4.75 hours of sleep, I guess. We stopped in the train station briefly, then started our walk to the Discovery Depot Children s Museum, which was right nearby. Although I made no comment about it, Jacob said, Dad, there is a train museum RIGHT HERE! Yes, you re right Jacob. I can see a steam engine and some cars here. Let s go in! I don t think it s open today. It IS open shall we go check? It wasn t, and that was mighty sad though when he spotted another old caboose sitting outside the children s museum, the day suddenly seemed brighter. He complained of how cold he was, although my suggestion that he stop walking through the big piles of snowdrifts was met with a whiny, But dad, I WANT to do that! We went inside the museum (having to walk right buy the locked caboose thankfully the people at the desk promised to unlock it for us when we were ready) and Jacob started to explore. There was some wooden play trains big enough for children to climb in which he enjoyed, but in general he went from one thing to the next every minute or two as he does when he s really tired or overstimulated. Until, that is, he discovered the giant toy train table. It had a multi-level wooden track setup, and many toy trains with magnetic hitches. It was like what we have at home, only much bigger and fancier. He spent a LONG time with that. We then briefly explored the rest of the museum and went out into the caboose. It wasn t the hit it might have been, possibly because there are several at the Great Plains Transportation Museum that he gets to go in on a somewhat regular basis. After that, he was ready to go back into the museum, but I was feeling rather over-stimulated. On a day when the highs were still well below freezing, it seemed just about every family in Galesburg was crowded into the children s museum, making it loud and crowded which I don t enjoy at all. So I suggested maybe it was snack time instead. A moment s thought, then he started to pull me out of the caboose before I could get my gloves back on Yes dad, I think it IS snack time. Let s go. Let s go NOW! We walked over to Uncle Billy s Bakery (Google link or minimal website). Jacob spotted some sugar cookies shaped like mittens. Despite my reluctance to get him more sugar, he was so excited plus I had barely prevented a meltdown at lunch by promising him that he would get dessert later in the day so he picked two red mitten cookies. I got myself a wonderful peach muffin and a croissant and we sat down at one of the tables by the window. I taught Jacob how to hang his coat on his chair and he lit into those cookies. I spotted a guy at the next table over wearing a BNSF jacket, and asked him if he worked for the railroad. He had retired as an engineer a couple of years ago, and had worked various jobs before that. He grew up in Manhattan, KS and so was interested in our trip and very friendly. While we visited, Jacob devoured his cookies and increasing portions of my snack as well. He told us about a new shop The Stray Cat just two stores down that was having a grand opening event today. They make decorations and art out of basically discarded items, and had some really nifty things that I may have bought had I not been wanting for space in our backpack. Then I spotted Sweets Old-Fashioned Ice Cream, Candy, and Soda Shop across the road. I figured he d love it and I was already in for the sugar so might as well. He picked out some birthday cake flavor ice cream for himself. I got huckleberry ice cream, which he insisted on calling purpleberry and managed to get some tastes of as well. After that, we went to the train station. It was about an hour until our train would be there. I wasn t sure if we d find enough to do, but I shouldn t have worried. Earlier, we had made the happy discovery that the station s restroom featured the Amtrak soap, so there was that. Then there was the model Amtrak train in the ticket window, which Jacob kept wanting to look at while I d hold him. And also, the California Zephyr came in. We watched it arrive from the station window, saw people get off and on, and saw it leave maybe the first time Jacob has witnessed all that in person. And, of course, we looked at the pictures in that train station. The ticketmaster gave Jacob a paper conductor s hat with puzzles and mazes on the back side. And then it was time to get onto our train back home. We ate dinner Jacob again ate little and almost fell asleep and got back to our seats. I let Jacob stay awake until about 8, when he was starting to get a bit fragile. It took him awhile to fall asleep, but he finally did at about 8:30. Today he s still been all excited. He will randomly tell us about bits of the trip, that the man at supper called his grilled cheese sandwich piece little when it was really big, what we did at the ice cream store, etc. And I do think that he is now a train safety expert. All in all, I think that is probably the most excitement he s ever had in 24 hours and it was a lot of fun to be with him for it!

Back in July, our family took a train trip from Kansas to New York for Debconf10. And then in September, we went to Indiana. The only train service from here leaves at about 3AM in both directions. So starting about November, Jacob started asking me, Dad, will you wake me up in the middle of the night to go to the train station TODAY? He didn t seem to get it through his head that we didn t have another trip planned, although we surely would at some point. It just couldn t possibly be, right? So around Christmas, I booked a round trip from here to Galesburg, IL for just Jacob and me. We ll get on the train at 3AM Saturday morning, get to Galesburg about noon, and then head back home at 5PM, getting home again at, well, 3:30AM. Jacob is super excited about this. When the tickets arrived, he didn t yet know about the trip. I thought he d be excited then, but the ticket sleeve had a picture of a toy train that he didn t own, so he was somewhat sad. But starting the next day he was very excited. We wrote Amtrak on the Jan. 15 spot on his pharmacy calendar (a local pharmacy gives them away free each year). He carefully checked off each day as it went past. And he s been getting increasingly excited all week. Tonight he couldn t really think, couldn t really play, couldn t really calm down. He jabbered about how he would sit by the window, how precisely I would wake him up, and his eyes would open up right away and we ll go straight there. He talked about how he will look out the window at the dark night, and was extra excited when I told him he d see snow out the window like one of the Amtrak videos he likes to watch on Youtube. He already placed his order for breakfast in the dining car: French toast with syrup on top. He ran past the computer while I was looking at things to do in Galesburg, and saw I had a map up, and immediately noticed the train tracks. Then he pointed to the station, and said, Dad, that says Galesburg Amtrak . A rather stunned dad replied, Yes indeed it does, Jacob. I guess it was some combination of pre-reading and detective skills, but that surprised me. Anyhow, this is the first trip with just Jacob and me. We re going to have a blast, I m sure. I may, however, wind up going 24 hours without sleep if his adrenaline level is any guide

Some people claim that AZERTY is a crime against humanity. I claim that if you're going to point and laugh at one layout in defense of another, you should have that other be something actually better, like the dvorak or Turkish F layout, not QWERTY. One additional reason: the mechanical layout of a US QWERTY keyboard (the ANSI layout) is inferior to the mechanical layout of the AZERTY keyboards. This is a mathematical fact the ISO layout has 102 keys, the ANSI one has only 101 of them. In that light, I find it highly disappointing that Thinkgeek.com's Das Keyboard uses the ANSI mechanical layout, and that there is no ISO version of the same thing. If there were, I'd have bought one years ago. (Yes, that's meant as a hint, in case you didn't catch that) Update: apparently it exists, it's just that ThinkGeek doesn't have it. For those who want one, it's available here, amongst others.

Wishing everyone a happy, auspicious, and prosperous Gujarati new year. (Vikrama samvata 2067 called "Shubhakrt") For Diwali I got a smartphone after enduring years of pointing and laughing at my previous decidely dumb phone. It's a T-Mobile G1 with Google or in other words a rebranded HTC Dream. I didn't want an iPhone (evil) or the phone the sales people were trying to push, the G2 (very evil.) As evil is the default in the telecom industry I especially wanted the ability to run CyanogenMod and this phone, though it doesn't have all the latest whiz-bang features, is perfect for that. (Btw, people are working on porting Cyanogen to the G2 but why let your dollars encourage the carriers and their shennanigans?)

Something was bound to go wrong when changing the policy for boot loaders. Let me try that again.

When we were going on holiday lately we took some 2-3 hours of videos. It's a Panasonic HDC-SD600 camcorder we bought for that matter. Usually I'm connecting the camera to my Mac and import the videos into iMovie or such. During the holiday I copied the clips to an external USB drive to save the space on the 16 GB SD card. The plan was to copy it back to the card and import it later. This usually works, but somehow it did not for one backup. Sadly iMovie is so dumb that it can't import directly from those file. So I needed another way to import the movies. Kdenlive is able to import the movies as well as Handbrake on OSX is able to convert them. In the end I used ffmpeg on Debian to convert the clips:

for i in *.MTS ; do echo $i ; ffmpeg -i $i -deinterlace -threads 4 -sameq /srv/video/iMovie/ffmpeg/$ i .mp4 ; done

This converts the MTS files from the camera into some MPEG4 format that iMovie is able to import by itself. The quality seems to be ok on a first quick view. Or do I miss something and there's a command switch that will result in better quality? Basically I want the same video and audio quality as the source files have.

In the evening today (Tuesday), the Debconf organizers arranged for a screening of the Creative Commons licensed film "Sita Sings the Blues" by Nina Paley. I went to see it as I had missed it when it was first released among tales of trials and tribulation at the hands of copyright meanies. So first let me say yay Free Culture!, boo Intellectual Property! etc. etc. Now we have that out of the way... "Sita Sings the Blues" has two main narrative threads: The breakup of Ninas relationship with her boyfriend and the Ramayana particularly a story from the uttarakanda about how after Shri Rama returned from Lanka, Sita had to undergo the agnipravesha to prove her chastity and even after she passed that test was eventually banished to the forest. I had an adverse reaction to this film. In fact I stayed to the end to be polite but I left afterwards as soon as I could. I had almost a physical feeling of nausea and I was surprised by this. Since then I have been pondering why this is so. It's not that its blasphemous. Shri Rama is not just a "perfect man", he is God (an avatar of Vishnu Bhagavan as is briefly touched upon in the film) for millions of people so, well, yes it is blasphemous but its more Rowan Atkinson style rather than Norwegian Black Metal style blasphemy. One never gets the impression that the author hates Hinduism or Indian culture the opposite in fact. And in fact it is not uncommon in our culture to speak of Sita and Rama in this way. They are not remote authority figures but as familiar to us as our own friends and family and the Ramayana is not just about events that happened long ago it is relevant to our lives right now. Even the "good woman done wrong by big dumb male jerk" narrative is not unknown. (See the Uttararamacharita of Bhavabhuti for instance.) though I would suggest reducing the Ramayana this way is akin to treating the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a book about towels. Even the milder criticism that it is not accurate is offbase because although the Sanskrit poem by Maharshi Valmiki is the canonical rendition of the Ramayana, there are other well-known versions. Not just in Sanskrit, the Hindi retelling by Sant Tulsidas called Ramacharitamanasa is more popular than Valmiki. Also speaking as someone who has preached Ramakatha "professionally" I can tell you that even the priests do not stick to the letter of the text. It is encouraged and expected that they will riff on the basic stories adding or removing details according to the needs and taste of the audience. And the device of the three narrators made me smile as this is exactly the kind of discussions that go on after hearing the Ramakatha. (I must say Paley picked a notably illiterate trio though.) One place where this fell flat was when they discussed the alleged discrepancy between Sita living simply in the forest and dropping a trail of jewellery on the way to Lanka. Although I can imagine someone at some point saying, "Do not question these stories" not at this point. Even the most retarded westernized Indian would know that removing ones ornaments is a sign of widowhood. A married woman would only do that in extremis certainly not just merely because she was a hermit. In a few cases some extra details might have helped the story. It was not explained that Ravana does not just have rakshasas in his command but he is one himself. (And he certainly wasn't a good guy until one day he got up and kidnapped Sita.) Shri Ramas brother Lakshamana accompanied the couple into the forest to Lanka and back but he only pops up (for no apparent reason) at the end. But look at me, I'm turning into one of those people who rant about Star Trek continuity errors or complain that the Romans in a gladiator movie have the wrong helmets for that time period etc. One has to cut a storyteller some slack and I entered the screening determined to be charitable. It's also not because I don't really see much connection between the two stories. Getting dumped by someone who simply loses interest in you hardly seems equivalent to being trapped by a moral code that doesn't allow for individuals feelings. Paley could have easily made "Princess Leia Sings the Blues" and it wouldn't have changed the significance much. But in India people make far more tenuous connections between the epics and events in their own life so one can hardly complain about that. Aesthetics are not the problem either. The first version of the Ramayana I ever read was the Amar Chitra Katha comicbook version which partly influenced the visual style of this film. (In fact you briefly see it in one scene when different editions of the Ramayana flash by.) Hindu popular culture is very gaudy. (See Ramanand Sagars '80s Ramayana Hindi TV serial, which was very reverential, insanely popular and tacky beyond belief.) The animation in this film is very good and quite artistic. "So Jaldhar", you might be asking if you've read this far, "what exactly is your problem with this film?" I have read the Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit with the commentaries from beginning to end. I've read other Ramayanas in Sanskrit, Gujarati, and English. I have read the comicbook, I've read anti-Ramayana polemics. When you learn Sanskrit in the traditional way the first lesson, in the declension of masculine gendered nouns ending in vowels is rAma.h rAmau rAmA.h ... I am well aware there are different emphases, different interpretations in various versions. Why can't I accept this as just another take on a story that has shown its fluidity over and over again? It's just...wrong on a subrational level. How can I put this? Imagine you are flipping through the TV channels and you see your grandparents amongst Lady Gaga's backup dancers. Or you came home one night to find everything that was on the floor meticulously glued to the ceiling. Over the course of my life (to hear my mother tell it my first exposure to the Ramayana was before I could speak.) I have developed a mental bond with this story a certain idea of how it should be. I think so has Nina Paley. And this is the problem. "Sita Sings the Blues" is Nina Paleys Ramayana not mine.