Today, a UPS delivery guy delivered a largish box, containing the Quadra 700 that had been donated to me by Sebastiaan Couwenberg (thanks!). The box was much larger than I expected, however. At first, I was afraid; if it ended up very large, I wouldn't have any space to put it anywhere. Fortunately, on opening the box, I found that it was, in fact, not very large, as the case is the same as that of the IIci (which is the smallest case I have—people who went to DebConf5 may remember what it looked like, since it stood in the hacklab the whole time); instead, the box contained more than I expected. Aside from the Quadra, the box also contained a keyboard, a three-button ADB mouse (I didn't even know those existed in the first place), and a monitor. Whee. I had four macs (of which one has a broken LC040, so is not usable), but only two ADB keyboards (of which only one is in perfect working order), one ADB mouse, and one monitor (which beeps annoyingly if it's been powered on for more than a few minutes). With this, that amount has suddenly doubled, which is very welcome. I'll probably move this monitor to the office, and move the one at the office home some time. Not just yet, though.

So, many people have had many things to say about Gobby, the much-vaunted app with the most phenomenally awful and unfortunate name I've ever seen in a free software app. This tends to be either hype (oh my god, it will enable us to leverage synergies to maximise shareholder value like we've never leveraged synergies before!), or disappointment (is that it?). Mine is neither, really.

I don't find that collaborative editing is hugely groundbreaking; a small IRC channel which everyone uses to document things, then assembled into a text document from there, can do roughly the same job. One thing we've been using it for at Ubuntu Below Zero is taking notes in BoFs. Most people in the BoF log in and the main note taker does the bulk of the work, and either him or the assignee steers conversation.

Normally in BoFs, I either get so involved in it that I forget that I'm supposed to be taking notes and thus don't, or tune out somewhat and forget to take any notes, and have to reconstruct it from vague memories later on. What Gobby is useful for in this case, is keeping the note-taker honest. If the notetaker is writing down anything inaccurate, you can just fix it; if they're forgetting to take notes at all, you can stop talking and throw some Mentos at them.

I think this alone makes it tremendously useful for stuff like note-taking in BoF sessions, and could be useful for minuting conference calls also. Adding the IRCalike interface is useful too as an out-of-band channel to throw URLs around (and to give Seb crap about using azerty) also. So I'm pretty sure I'll keep using it for that.

The moral of the story is always, always use at to schedule a reboot shortly in the future, no matter how harmless you think something is... Today I stopped procrastinating about upgrading daedalus's kernel to 2.6.12 and did it. That worked fine. The reason for the upgrade was that I'd read somewhere that 2.6.12 fixed the problem with things like Dell's Baseboard Management Controller, where if you downed the interface in Linux, it downed it so far so that the BMC (which does some funky low-level physical interface sharing) also stopped being remotely accessible. So I upgraded, hopeful in the fact that if I were to ever remotely shut down daedalus, I could turn it back on or reboot it remotely with ipmitool. I thought I'd test this, so I did this:

daedalus:~# ip l s dev eth0 down; sleep 10; ip l s dev eth0 up

and promptly kissed daedalus goodbye. Not just for 10 seconds, for until I could get the colo guys to kick it in the guts for me. Grrr. At least I determined that the problem appears to persist. If I down an interface in Linux, it's down for the BMC as well. That sucks.

I was at Berlinux 2005 this weekend and though the very chaotic — because understaffed — organisation it was interesting and also funny. Thursday I arrived around 20:15 in Berlin, met Klaus Knopper and others at the train station, headed to Sven Guckes’ appartment for dropping all my luggage, then going back to meet with Klaus and the others for a theremin concert with Dorit Chrysler. No wonder that it sounded sometimes like one of my favourite musicians, Jean Michel Jarre, since — according to the Wikipedia theremin article — he also plays this instrument. On Friday I held my talk about WML in front of a — for that topic — surprisingly high number of auditors (around 30, maybe 35). In comparision to my WML talk at OscomTag 2005 all people who asked questions had understood about what the talk was, so the questions were most time interesting and justified. As usual I held the talk using Lynx with LSS support (picture by Sven Guckes) on my nine year old Pentium 1 ThinkPad bijou running Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 aka Woody. Before and after the talk I helped out at Werner Heuser’s xtops booth (another picture by Sven) and the booth of the Debian Project (yet another picture by Sven :-) directly beside Frank Ronneburg’s Debian powered model railway. (picture by you-know-who ;-) In the evening I was at the social event, hanging around with alphascorpii, Tolimar and Joey and being surprised that Joey studies biology — as I did as minor to computer science. On Saturday I was on alphascorpii’s talk about why being a BOFH is not funny, hung around at the same booths as the day before, fixed the X configuration on my laptop after hints on a unknown Debian booth visitor. Before the exhibition closed I heard a very interesting talk about web accessibility held by Sebastian who is blind himself. Although or maybe because I’m interested in that subject, the talk opened my eyes regarding two things: First Captchas are evil and Blind HTML tables aren’t as evil as all the priests of web accessibility are always preaching . They are easier than frames for blinds and seem to have only little disadvantages against a CSS based layout for blinds nowadays if used the right way. Oh, and btw. — nested tables are still evil. :-) Saturday evening I had dinner together with Stefan Gerdelbracht, Frank Hofmann, Klaus Knopper and Manfred Krejcik. Later Thomas Winde joined us. It was very interesting evening, especially talking with Klaus and Manfred. On Sunday, after having brunch with Stefan and Manfred, we met with Sven (who was our host at Berlin, thanks again!) and shortly after that, Stefan left for visiting some other friends in Berlin. Sven, Manfred and I visited C-Base where Sven stumbled over a sound editing seminar while Manfred was preparing his zipFM show for Monday which mainly consisted of an interview with Klaus. After that we headed to a small but fine birthday party of a friend of Sven and were back home around 2:30. My train left Monday morning at 8:56 and I was at home around 14:30. And on Friday I’ll go to Dresden for the Linux-Info-Tag by train just to go back to Berlin afterwards, where I meet my parents for a two week baltic sea holiday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania near Rügen. But due to the Systems fair at Munich and autumn holidays I have to stay at work this week. And yes, I wrote this and the other postings posted today offline, so they’re dated quite close together. :-)

I always found Captchas annoying. But since I also had or have problems with guestbook or comment spamming, I understood that people and especially companies saw no other choice against comment or wiki spamming, mass account grabbing, etc. But since most captcha are based on the fact that people can still read deformed or garbled texts in images while machines can’t or at least only with a big effort, there is one big drawback with them: They are even more an insuperable obstacle for blinds or visually handicapped people than for machines. The blind computer science student Sebastian Andres showed at Berlinux how blinds navigate and use the web and where they (must) stop. So because of GMail uses visual captchas as a defense against mass account grabbing, he couldn’t get such a “free” e-mail account. (And yes there exist non-visual captchas. But they’re seldom used.) Thanks Sebastian for this insight.