I am just watching US Senator Barak Obama speaking at Google about his bid to become the next US president [1]. He has announced plans for allowing greater citizen oversight of the government including having all government data in open file formats (a great idea - the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a large amount of data online in Excel format). But his most significant item so far is to have a National CTO (Chief Technology Officer). It’s an idea that seems totally obvious now that I’ve heard it and leaves me wondering why I never thought of it before! Barak understand technology, wants a functioning democracy, and gets a +5 Insightful from me for the CTO idea! He also announced a plan to double federal funding for basic scientific research as part of a measure to make the US more competitive with other countries. He mentioned the US standing in the world as a problem (it’s the first mention of this that I’ve heard from anyone in the US government) and notes this as an issue which limits the ability of the US to save lives in regions such as the Darfur. He also claims that there is no clash of civilisations and cites his experience living in a Muslim country as helping to build bridges. When discussing his reasons for running he said that he believes that he can bring his country together to solve problems better than other candidates. That’s the type of thing you often hear and ignore in political campaigns. It is often difficult to believe that someone wants to be famous and powerful for anything other than the most selfish reasons. But Barak gives me the strong impression that he is genuine. He stated a plan to shut down Guantanamo bay (presumably just the prison and torture aspect - I’m guessing that he is not intending to close the military base) and to stop “rendition” (sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured). His plans for education are innovative, as part of educating young children (0-3 years old) he stated an aim to teach parents to read so that they can read to their children! It’s sensible and obvious once you have heard it, but no-one seems to have publicised that idea before. He announced that he will increase teachers’ salaries. He describes the US as having an “empathy deficit“, it’s obvious to almost everyone outside the US but not something that many people in the US realise. He wants decisions to be based on facts and is determined to use facts when dealing with health insurance companies. I just wish that we had some politicians like him in Australia. In terms of policy the Greens politicians would agree with him, but the combination of great policies, insight, and excellent delivery seems a lot better than any of the options in Australia.

• [1] http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo

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On saturday I decided to have a bit of fun hacking, so I got out my wiimote and decided to hack on some 3d gesture recogition.. There’s a great little library called libcwiid that allows an application to talk to a wiimote, with full access to the accelerometer (x,y,z force, roll, yaw) and the ir sensor. It also comes with a nice gui (wmgui) that shows you everything in real time. So far so cool. There’s also a nice project called wiigee that was written in conjunction with a paper (ACM access required) by a group at the University of Oldenburg. This uses a k-mean quantizer, a left-right hidden Markov model and a Baysian classifier to recognize and classify gestures in a 3d space. Downside is that it’s in Java, and I want something small and fast in C. So, I decide, lets see how hard it is to port some java code to vala… and yeah, takes me about an hour (including learning vala…) to covert the HMM. I then noticed some slight inefficiencies in vala’s generated code for accessing field members, so hacked a patch to vala for that. The HMM code also uses a lot of multidimensional arrays, and vala doesn’t yet support getting the array dimensions of an existing array, so today I finished a patch to add support to vala for this. All in all vala is a pretty nice language and valac itself is not hard to hack on! Next up, I’m gonna finish porting wiigee to vala and come up with some fun demos

A hijack of an important package makes me always uneasy. But reading the next two messages to the debian-dpkg list, which I can only read as "oh, I broke make dist. But why should I follow sane practises, all hail my workflow" and "oh, I brake Changelog, that's on purpose because I consider it a bad idea, if you want it make write some scripts to generate it" does nothing to make me believe such a person can be a good maintainer.

Today I was very nerved by searching for patches for mc. Every distribution has other patches for the same thing, The best point to show this are the utf8/slang patches. There are many different approaches which have different qualtity. Furthermore are in every distribution fixes which are missing in other ones. And I was really pissed by that :S In order to find a solution I contacted several other maintainers of mc (opensuse, mandriva, mandrake, fedora, ubuntu) and get a reply from several of them. Maybe we'll start to use one repository to start to unify our patches. My goal with this is to get better patches into debian (and into the other distributions), sharing patches between distributions and unifying them to submit them to upstream. Maybe this will help to get patches from distributions faster into the upstreams CVS. We'll see what will happen. I'm looking forward to the result of this initiative

Rubygems is one of the worst inventions the world has ever seen. If you are writing ruby software / libraries: do not use rubygems to “hand out a package”. It is NOT your job to do packaging. Write the software (thanks for that), but leave packaging to those that understand it, the distributions. Rubygems are worse than tarballs. A “packaging” tool going totally around the normal packaging procedures your system normally uses. How idiotic. So fucking great. I have rake 0.8.something installed, yet this braindead rubygem complains that it needs rake >= 0.7.2. Idiots. </rant>

Following the first phase, the second and final phase of the Penny and Martin adventure ended last Friday at Wellington airport. I am now 11 500 metres high on my way from Bangkok to Zurich, looking back at seven days on the New Zealand South Island, another in Wellington, and a night in Melbourne. Here s the summary of the 2200km we travelled, with selected photos inline. Penny has more pictures in her Flickr album.

• Thursday: ferry from Wellington to Picton and on to Amberley, where we stayed with Penny s sister Janey.
• Friday: via Christchurch to Lake Tekapo for a lovely swim in turquoise water, before we set up the tent at Lake Pukaki with Mount Cook in the distance. Camping with a car isn t all bad.
• Saturday: via Wanaka en route to Haast Pass with a stopover at the Gates of Haast for some rock hopping and full body immersion in the icy water (yes, Penny went in all the way, too). From Haast, we took the beautiful road to Jackson Bay and back, before heading into Cascade Valley for another night of camping, this time with millions of sandflies forcing us to dress appropriately. NB: please, no new offers for fashion modeling contracts, I am already fully booked. Penny might appreciate them though, especially if she gets to wear white socks.
• Sunday: fled the valley as if running for life (think final scene of Hitchcock s Birds) to prevent further sandfly attacks and headed north to the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, where we got soaked in heavy rain. Reached Greymouth in time for the tour of the local Monteith brewery and spent the night recovering from the camping in the Charles Court Motel. Monteith s Munich-style Golden lager beer is actually quite reminiscent of Munich-style lager! I also got to take three girls to the men s toilet to see the world s coolest urinal.
• Monday: the bad weather followed us up the west coast to Punakaiki but didn t deter us from taking a short hike to the pancake rocks, nor from visiting the seal colony at Cape Foulwind later in the day. I found out how much Penny loves Nikau trees. From there, headed west for Lewis Pass and passed up on camping due to the heavy rainfall. Instead, we booked into the Maruia Springs Resort Hotel and indulged in hot springs recreation and camping-stove-cooked pasta in the room.
• Tuesday: the weather in Kaikoura, which we reached around noon the next day, wasn t any better, which foiled our diving plans, so we continued on to Picton and decided to cut our road trip short by one day to give us more time tying up loose ends in Wellington.
• Wednesday: got up early to rent diving equipment for two dives at Karaka point, where we inspected (and swam through) an old ship s wreck. We also collected around 20 scallops, which we brought to Penny s parents and enjoyed them cooked in ginger and garlic for a late lunch. The ferry took us back to Wellington that night, where I got to see Eagle vs. Shark, a Kiwi movie starring Jemaine Clement from the Flight of the Conchords and music composed by local bands, foremost of which The Phoenix Foundation. I have to side with Penny: it s an enjoyable flick but probably not worth watching multiple times.
• Thursday: following breakfast at the Olive cafe, we went on shopping sprees (I found a store selling Icebreaker gear at 50% ), chilled in the afternoon, fetched excellent Sushi at the Wasabi Sushi Train, and finally saw The Phoenix Foundation play a free concert at Frank Kitts Park.

My New Zealand beer top-ten, in reverse order: Monteith s Original, Monteith s Black, Mac s Great White, Monteith s Golden, Monteith s Celtic, Monteith s Pilsener, Emerson s Pilsener, Mac s Hop Rocker, Emerson s 1812 India Pale Ale, and (drum-roll): Mac s Sassy Red. Yum! The Emerson beers get no links because the brewery website uses Flash. Thanks, Penny, for a fabulous two weeks! NP: The Flower Kings: Back in the World of Adventures

(This blog post is in Latvian and is about a public discussion that the capital of Latvia, Riga is having about where to put new bicycle racks in the center of the city. In the post I point to an article describing where to send in suggestions, point out a few possible locations for such racks and suggest installing racks with build-in locks that would require inserting a refundable coin to remove the key locking a bike in place) R gas dome v c ierosin jumus par jaunu velost vvietu novietojumu R gas centr . Es tur nos t ju sekojo us ieteikumus, parosieties ar j s. Vislab k velovietnes b tu izvietot t d viet , kas b tu p rredzama no ce iem, pa kuriem iet daudz cilv ku un ar kur b tu novietotas dro bas nov ro anas kameras, lai minimiz tu z dz bu risku. Viena vietne var tu atrasties Str lnieku laukum vai t tuvum , jo tur ir viegla piek uve no Krasta ielas. Vieta starp RTU ku Ka u 1 un
Krasta ielu var tu b t oti piem rota. Tas ar ierosin s studentus lietot velotransportu pa ce am uz lekcij m Ka u iel . Alberta laukuma var tu atrasties vieta velosip du novieto anai - vieta ir viegli pieejama no Stacijas puses un ir tuvu vair k m viesn c m. Ja ir pl ni izveidot Pay&Ride autom tisko velosip du nomu, tad is var tu b t par vienu no vislab kajiem punktiem dai iecerei. Pils laukums ir viegli sasniedzams no P rdaugavas pa Van u tiltu. Ja tur izveidotu velost vvietu, tad tas iev rojami atvieglotu iesp ju atbraukt ar velosip du pa J rmalas veloceli u p ri Van u tiltam, nogriezties pa labi un uzreiz dro i noparkoties. T pat l dzu apv rt ideju pielietot velovietnes ar ieb v tu atsl gu, lai neb tu nepiecie ams vest l dzi savu sl dzeni. Katrai vietai var tu b t sava sl dzene (bieza un pietieko i gara cietmet la trose) un atsl ga. Atsl gu var tu iz emt no sl dzenes tikai tad, kad sl dzene ir aiztais ta un sl dzenes meh nism ir ielikta 1 Ls mon ta. Atsl dzot sl dzeni ar atsl gu mon ta tiktu atdota atpaka . Tas nodro in s pret vand lismu, kad vienk r i vis m sl dzen m tiktu iz emtas atsl gas un aizmestas prom. Ta u jebkur gad jum j b t vieglam veidam k aizvietot nozaud t s atsl gas gan gad jumos kad velosip da pa nieks to pieprasa (tas var aiz emt vair kas dienas un pras t 5-10 Ls un iesnieguma uzrakst anu) vai ar kad velosip ds ir pamests piesl gt st vokl . Jaunas atsl gas izgatavo anai nevajadz tu pras t vair k k 1 Ls no pils tas bud eta, tad tas 1 Ls sl dzen os izdevumus atmaks s.

Currently in the US the main political parties are deciding who will contest the next presidential election. Naturally this gets some commentary from all sides. Planet Debian has syndicated two blog posts commenting on these issues, it’s interesting to compare them: First John Goerzen writes a post about an issue he (and almost everyone in the Debian community) considers important - copyright law [1]. He quotes the Randall Munroe who is the author of www.xkcd.com (described by the author as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language“) which is wildly popular in the free software community (I believe that there is a fan-club which has meetings). Randall’s commentary is quite interesting and I recommend reading it [2]. The most noteworthy fact is that Barak Obama has sought advice from Lawrence Lessig - who has done more for the free software community than any other lawyer. John’s post doesn’t contain much original content, but citing a lengthy post from a highly regarded source and quoting a particularly relevant paragraph make it very noteworthy. Next Jaldhar Vyas writes about “the war against Islamic terrorism” [3] and makes the claim “we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq“. To consider that claim it’s best to read some expert commentary. William S. Lind [4] is a widely respected conservative who is an expert on military strategy, his comments about stabilising Iraq are always interesting [5]. It’s sufficient to note that William has been predicting failure for the US occupation of Iraq right from the start and that events over the last five years have proven him correct. William S. Lind’s thoughts on Democracy are interesting too [8], I don’t agree with him in this regard (I generally disagree with him on most things other than military matters) but it’s an interesting thought. Jaldhar also claims that “Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws“, this seems to be a reference the the “liberal media” conspiracy theories. There seems no clear party association with bad IP legislation (both the Democrats and Republicans do silly things in this regard), and debunking the liberal media claims can be done simply by watching some TV (choose a couple of random news shows on different channels). Fox is not the only right-wing news outlet. Jaldhar also has a conspiracy theory about the Supreme Court and the “need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration“, not that the Democratic party is particularly “left” by whatever definition you might apply to the word. I prefer the www.politicalcompass.org analysis which shows that all the serious contenders in the Democratic primary are Authoritarian Right [6]. So the result of the next US presidential election will determine how authoritarian and right-wing the government will be, the fact that it will be authoritarian and right-wing is beyond doubt. That said it would be good if the authoritarian right-wing government that we (*) get at least has some decent policies in regard to IP law (which is the hope for Barak Obama). John Nichols has an interesting analysis of Ann Coulter’s support of Hillary Clinton over John McCain [7]. It would be interesting to see Jaldhar’s comments on this issue. (*) I use the term “we” when talking about US politics to acknowledge the fact that the Australian government will take orders from Washington. Some pundits predict that the Greens will be the second major party in Australian politics in a couple of elections time, so maybe in 8 years time we will have an Australian government that represents Australians instead of Americans. But for the entire duration in office of the next US president (be it 4 years or 8) they will be able to get the Australian government to do almost anything that they desire.

• [1] http://changelog.complete.org/posts/683-xkcd-author-endorses-Obama.html


• [2] http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/28/obama/


• [3] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=181


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Lind


• [5] http://dni2.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/on-war-247-crossing-the-channel/


• [6] http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008


• [7] http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=278859


• [8] http://dni2.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/on-war-248-my-masters-voice/

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http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.918 I've always preferred PostgreSQL to Mysql. I think the "worse is better" compromise is ok in some cases, but it's scary to see money being handled in transactionless MyISAM tables that are so widely used; I've done work for a number of places that had that kind of setup, and extrapolating from that, it's got to be very, very common indeed. I guess they heard it was "faster"... but I've always likened that kind of faster to the kind of faster you get by riding a bicycle with no brakes down a hill. Mysql's made lots of improvements over the past few years and is beginning to approach the robustness that Postgres has always had, but I'm going to stick with Postgres, and I'm glad to see they keep churning out cool new things, using the same sort of community open source approach that works so well at the Apache Software Foundation.

Jan 26 11:26:35 arrakis sshd[2515]: pam_unix(ssh:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=my-debian.org
Jan 26 11:26:38 arrakis sshd[2515]: Failed password for invalid user myra from 88.151.100.103 port 53744 ssh2

Note the rhost in the first line: my-debian.org. And, indeed:

% host my-debian.org
my-debian.org has address 88.151.100.103

Whois tells me:

Registrant ID:DI_6983786
Registrant Name:Czibulya Gergely

LART, anyone ?

Chris, buildd hosts keep those time and space usage statistics in a database, which can be queried...

Script started on Sat Jan  5 19:54:15 2008
wouter@country:~$ ssh kiivi.cyber.ee
Linux kiivi 2.6.18-4-mac #1 Fri Mar 30 23:05:11 CEST 2007 m68k
No mail.
Last login: Sat Jan  5 20:41:16 2008 from d51532c45.access.telenet.be
wouter@kiivi:~$ avg-pkg-build-time -s -t   head -n 20
boost:			2015312k (2015312k lastest)
iceweasel:		1846628k (1846628k lastest)
iceape:			1674172k (1674416k lastest)
icedove:		1624848k (1624848k lastest)
xulrunner:		1611880k (1611880k lastest)
mesa:			1230432k (1230432k lastest)
koffice:		1208062k (2115156k lastest)
gcc-snapshot:		1191866k (1207164k lastest)
gcc-4.1:		1185620k (1185620k lastest)
gtk+2.0:		1148634k (1208684k lastest)
k3d:			1145580k (1145580k lastest)
ardour:			1077800k (1077800k lastest)
lyx:			924876k (924876k lastest)
gcc-4.2:		909488k (909488k lastest)
gcc-3.4:		892015k (571084k lastest)
glibc:			891408k (891408k lastest)
linux-2.6:		725961k (744700k lastest)
kdebase:		720618k (1106804k lastest)
kdelibs:		716376k (1150372k lastest)
kdepim:			711858k (784356k lastest)
wouter@kiivi:~$ avg-pkg-build-time -t   head -n 20
gcc-snapshot:		220:52:14 (2 entries, sigma 27:38:21)
axiom:			216:27:57 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
gcc-4.1:		193:47:30 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
k3d:			177:22:10 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
gcc-3.4:		171:40:28 (4 entries, sigma 25:10:55)
boost:			141:13:38 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
koffice:		140:40:23 (2 entries, sigma 53:48:58)
ace:			130:04:14 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
linux-2.6:		129:36:19 (3 entries, sigma 10:12:24)
qt-x11-free:		105:00:32 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
xulrunner:		97:03:38 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
iceape:			96:23:13 (2 entries, sigma 03:12:58)
kdepim:			96:06:54 (2 entries, sigma 19:09:39)
icedove:		94:35:48 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
iceweasel:		93:56:26 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
gcc-4.2:		91:08:32 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
glibc:			91:01:58 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
kdevelop3:		84:27:21 (2 entries, sigma 02:47:35)
kdeedu:			82:09:55 (3 entries, sigma 10:59:18)
vtk:			81:44:20 (3 entries, sigma 00:46:32)
wouter@kiivi:~$ logout
Connection to kiivi.cyber.ee closed.
wouter@country:~$ ssh arrakis
Linux arrakis 2.6.12-1-amiga #1 Sat Aug 13 22:59:59 CEST 2005 m68k
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please read "links2 http://nefud/info.txt"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No mail.
Last login: Sat Jan  5 18:48:58 2008 from hahn.os.localnet on pts/5
wouter@arrakis:~$ avg-pkg-build-time -s -t   head -n 20
wxwidgets2.6:		1648020k (1648020k lastest)
qt4-x11:		1601086k (1753532k lastest)
gcj-4.1:		1135772k (1135772k lastest)
k3d:			1094345k (1159204k lastest)
kdebase:		1087375k (1087368k lastest)
python-kde3:		1018144k (1018144k lastest)
ghc6:			991524k (991524k lastest)
gcc-3.3:		988690k (990244k lastest)
glibc:			814536k (855720k lastest)
lyx:			804672k (804672k lastest)
bouml:			729888k (729888k lastest)
kdelibs:		685565k (1142304k lastest)
freedroidrpg:		673988k (673988k lastest)
mozilla:		663066k (636896k lastest)
ardour:			647580k (691128k lastest)
mozilla-thunderbird:	591384k (591384k lastest)
omniorb4:		576288k (576288k lastest)
subversion:		568764k (624768k lastest)
xorg-server:		527520k (527520k lastest)
mozilla-firebird:	498896k (502692k lastest)
wouter@arrakis:~$ avg-pkg-build-time -t   head -n 20
enlightenment:		198842:37:14 (3 entries, sigma 344403:17:35)
axiom:			164:43:54 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
ghc6:			159:20:15 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
k3d:			145:18:35 (3 entries, sigma 57:08:46)
python-kde3:		126:39:34 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
qt4-x11:		121:26:11 (2 entries, sigma 03:07:35)
gcj-4.1:		116:05:34 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
gcc-3.3:		108:45:19 (3 entries, sigma 02:01:50)
qt-x11-free:		99:12:17 (4 entries, sigma 14:12:32)
wxwindows2.4:		90:26:51 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
openscenegraph:		74:37:21 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
ardour:			63:44:55 (2 entries, sigma 07:23:05)
bouml:			62:01:16 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
gcc-snapshot:		61:10:07 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
mozilla-thunderbird:	60:47:29 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
mico:			60:15:15 (1 entry, sigma 00:00:00)
kdebase:		58:41:04 (5 entries, sigma 08:00:17)
glibc:			58:04:26 (6 entries, sigma 40:01:12)
mozilla-firebird:	52:47:13 (2 entries, sigma 11:31:07)
zeroc-ice:		52:34:03 (2 entries, sigma 28:12:19)
wouter@arrakis:~$ logout
Connection to fremen-os.dyndns.org closed.
wouter@country:~$ exit
Script done on Sat Jan  5 22:28:46 2008

"avg-pkg-build-time" is a script that queries the statistics database. It's quite CPU-intensive, so I don't like to run it too often (certainly not from cron); but, hey, here you go. In case you didn't know, "arrakis" and "kiivi" are both official m68k/unstable buildd hosts, and especially arrakis has been for quite a long time, although it's been reinstalled once or twice since. Oh, and yes, it does appear as though some bits of the data are invalid, but most of the idea should be alright. (oh, and before you ask, no, it didn't take two and a half hours to run those commands -- I just needed to go while the last one was running, and had only come back several hours later)

Some more important things happened this week for Debian Installer i18n:

• First of all, Amharic was activated. The longstanding translation effort is reaching its end with Tegegne Tefera completing 87% of the core D-I translations and, more importantly, all strings for the most used packages. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is indeed our second 'native' African language, after Wolof. This is indeed the first language we activate for lenny and that could be a sign of some revival in D-I i18n work.
• I also completed the tests phase of a new version of the 'synchronization script' that allows having all translatable strings for D-I package in a single (giant) PO file. Up to now, we were requiring translators to complete that file before we activate languages. However, many strings in the file are related to very rarely used features or high-end architectures. As the probably of someone installing Debian with LVM support on a s390 machine in something else than English is pretty low, we had to do something. So, very soon, the core D-I file should be splitted in five subfiles:
  • sublevel 1: default installs on common architectures
  • sublevel 2: general strings not used during default installs
  • sublevel 3: expert strings (some low prio, some for e.g. RAID)
  • sublevel 4: specific to less-popular arches (powerpc, mips, sparc) or used in experimental features
  • sublevel 5: same for high-end (hppa, ia64, s390) and hobby (m68k) arches and old stuff (partconf, partitioner, that are replaced by partman for a while)
  This will of course allow translators to better prioritize their work. We'll probably activate languages when translators complete the first two sublevels or so (that remains to be discussed). Thanks anyway to Frans Pop for the numerous good ideas he bringed when we discussed this.
• Armenian got its first commit in the D-I SVN. While the translated ratio is still very low, that's a positive sign
• Effort to translate D-I in Kashmiri should start soon as Rakesh Pandit seems very motivated to work on it
• Several languages from India should also soon raise their translation ratio: Kannada, Telugu, Marathi are expected...

All this work is meant to give some more push to D-I localization effort that paced for some time last months while I focused my attention on some other areas. It seems to show that things never work without someone to care about them, apparently..:-)...so, existing translators, watch out, I'm back on D-I i18n and will kick your asses if you don't keep your translations up to date..:-)

With four plane tickets already in our hands, it's official. Clara, Sabri, Joni and I will be flying to Marrakech as 2007 languishes, spending the first hours of 2008 in the city, and then start our way to the South during the following week. We still haven't settled on a planned route, but travelling with these friends is mostly a synonym of adventure and fun. The desert, the snow, the villages, the mosques, the souks, the spices, the hammams... I can't wait!

I've been using vim for long time. Last weeks I've been improving my configuration, and now I have:

* Integration with quilt
* Navigate into deb files
* It shows C functions prototypes
* auto-completion of C structures
* auto-completion of known strings
* Project management
* syntax correction
* translate documents with apertium
* doxygen function auto-comment
* extended shell scripts support (snippets insertion, syntax correction, parameters control...)
* highlight current line
* show unified diff for local file changes

And now: I must to program in java. I don't like it, and the worst is that the better I found to program in java is Eclipse. It's powerful but it needs a lot of processor, memory...

Recently I've discovered eclim, a vim plugin that integrates Eclipse on it!!! The only "problem" I found on it is that it need eclipse 3.3 and in Debian we only have 3.2. I've downloaded and old eclim version (1.2.3) and it seems to work nice in Debian.

The (overpriced) Amtrak train is rapidly hurling itself north toward New York City, the vanishing light gently illuminating the first snowfall of the year. I am heading back from the American Anthropological Association annual meetings, which were held in Washington D.C this year. After a year’s hiatus, I attended to present a short version of my paper on hacker conferences, which I have pushed along further to entertain more general questions and ideas about the role of conferences in ensuring forms of solidarity among publics that are dispersed geographically. While there are other events that are far more visceral or more profoundly produce what Emile Durkheim has called collective effervescence, conferences are probably one of the most common social forms for ensuring a steady state of moral solidarity among connected but geographically dispersed groups of people. Their importance and role is often overlooked, I think, because of their sheer ubiquity (and I am sure the fact that many are held in creepy corporate hotels populated by seriously over sized & gaudy furniture where you can sit and sip your overpriced Starbuck’s coffee does not help). But it is because they are so common that I think we need to take them a little more seriously as distinctly 20th century events that combine much older elements of ritual and pilgrimage. Because I have attended so many developer and hacker conferences, which tend to be longer as well as far more more enveloping, festive, and, frankly, well executed than academic ones, I tend to think of academic conferences as tepid, lightweight versions. But as I make my way back home, I am pretty worn yet inspired from this one as I decided to sort of let go to give it my all, sleeping far less than I really should have. I usually hold back some, perhaps because most academic conferences I attend are smack in the middle of the academic year, so my mind is partially occupied with the pile of work that awaits me, somewhat depressingly, at the end of your journey. Academic conferences can also produce a fair bit of anxiety, especially for younglings like myself, given that you are performing your skills (or lack of) and ideas (or lack of) to people you respect and admire too. Perhaps it is also due to the hotel environment, which I find not only particularly uninspiring but in all honesty, sort of soul sucking, though albeit, *very* conveniently so. This time, however, I was not going to let the hotel suck any more soul out of me because I was thrilled to see friends from time’s past, had a great time on my panel on digital subjectivities, and was excited to meet new folks and talk about those topics that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I also think the proliferation of (very cute) babies among my friends and the now visible crow’s feet adorning the smiling eyes of my friends made me feel the passing of time a little more forcefully than really I wanted to. So I did my best to turn that pesky faucet of time of off so as to give way to immersion, drawing those from past into the shared nest of the present, so that I would want to see them again in the future. And in the end, that is the point: social reproduction and shouldn’t procreation be fun? I think so… Now back to that pile of work.

It was two weeks ago now that we hopped on an Amtrak train in the middle of Kansas at the bright and early hour of 3AM, bound for Indiana.

This has been our third trip with Jacob. He's 14 months old now. We never really enjoyed long car or airplane trips before we had a baby, and haven't really had the desire to try a long car trip since. So we try to take the train, or if time is short, fly.

Jacob enjoys the train. There's lots to see and do. The one thing he doesn't like doing is waiting for food to arrive in any situation, so when we have sit-down meals in the diner, things can get challenging.

We arrived in Indiana the same evening and spent a few days with Terah's dad out at the farm.

Jacob enjoyed grandpa and grandma:





Jacob got his first ever ice cream there. Despite the concerned "unknown food alert" look, he opened up quick for another bite.



The big hit of the visit there were chickens. I've never seen Jacob so thrilled about watching something before. He was so excited he was just moving his arms all around, almost jumping up and down. Here he is watching them:





Terah wants us to get chickens now. Just because we still have a chicken house left...

On Tuesday, we went north to spend a few days with Terah's mom. On the way up, it became overcast. Terah's mom calls it the winter "permacloud", which is the best description of it I've heard yet. I didn't believe Terah at first when she said that they don't see the sun for 3 months in winter up there, but I believe her now.

Jacob found a rocking chair just his size there, and was able to make it rock. But the big hit of this stop were refrigerator magnets, at Jacob height.



He spent a long time with them, and got pretty good at working with them, too.

He also thought he ought to check out the camera in great detail. So of course, the camera checked him out.



Terah's mom wanted to spend some time with Jacob, so on Wednesday, Terah and I headed up to Niles, MI to visit some antique shops. We found some postcards from small towns in Kansas dating back to the 1930s, an old metal fan (still works), a wooden "apothecary box" with pull-out drawers, and some furniture we might have purchased if we were closer to home.

For the first time ever, Terah was the first one to say "aren't you done shopping yet?" She was getting tired, so we started heading back. Magically her energy returned as we approached the road leading to the South Bend Chocolate Co. factory and retail store, so we headed in that direction. The next tours didn't start for almost an hour, so we bought some chocolate, looked around a bit, and then left.

Terah's mom had a good time with Jacob while we were gone.



Thursday was the O'Connor Thanksgiving. Terah's grandma and some other relatives were there. Here's Jacob with his great grandma:



Jacob enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner, and managed to keep finding things to munch on all afternoon.

That evening, we went over to Terah's Yoder grandparents and spent a few days there. Not long after we arrived, Terah's uncle showed up and brought his adopted greyhound with him. Jacob was very excited about this, though the dog wasn't so sure about Jacob.

Eventually the greyhound calmed down and Jacob got to see him up close and pet him. Jacob didn't even mind getting his whole face licked.



The next morning at breakfast, Terah's grandma had set out the high chair that she used as a girl for Jacob to eat in. I got some pictures, but Jacob was far more interested in asking to have food ready to eat.



Here's Jacob with his Yoder great grandparents:



Later Friday, it was the Yoder Thanksgiving. Jacob got plenty of attention. He also was looking VERY CAREFULLY for Waldo.



Jacob wasn't feeling the best all week, but despite having a busy week and feeling not so good, he did really well. He has been walking with help now, holding on to one adult finger with each hand. He really enjoys that, but is short enough that adults have to bend over a bit to help him. I imagine several people had sore backs after the week was over, including us.

On the train trip home, I took him to the lounge car to go walking. Usually he likes to walk as fast as he can for as long as he can, but there he would only go a little bit at a time. He'd stop at each group of chairs to look at the people, and most of them were really happy to see him, too. After he was done with the lounge car, we walked back through the coaches to our seat. As long as he kept walking, he again would stop at each row of seats to make friends with anybody that wanted to.

We tried to find a nice place to go for lunch during our layover in Chicago. But let me tell you, downtown Chicago -- at least the part near Union Station -- is dead on Sunday and the fact that it was just after Thanksgiving probably didn't help. We wound up finding a place in Union Station to eat. Jacob fussed for awhile, then went to sleep on my lap (he rarely manages to go to sleep while being held). Then on our connecting train back to Kansas.

It was a fun and busy week, but it's nice to be home too. Our train arrived in Kansas at 3:15AM Monday morning. So we went home to catch a few more hours sleep before going to work. As I went outside that morning, we had a gorgeous Kansas sunrise. As the sun was coming up, it was lighting the underside of the clouds with a vibrant deep red and orange color. The whole sky to the east was lit up like that, and felt so warm and inviting on a bitterly cold morning.

Shintaro wrote an interesting post about Rakugo (a form of story-telling) and Mottainai (a particular form of gratitude that is now becoming an English word in reference to environmentalism) [1]. My definitions of the two words are poor, I encourage interested readers to read Shintaro’s post for the links. Recently I had been considering which jobs are most like a senior programmer position in terms of skills and the work environment. It occurred to me that a chess-master has a job that bears some similarities to that of a senior programmer. A chess master might play a Simul [2] which compares to a programmer or sys-admin fixing lots of small bugs at the same time. In a serious chess tournament up to seven hours may be on the time clocks - not an uncommon amount of time taken to find a subtle bug in a program. For quick chess games as little as three minutes may be on the clock for all your moves - similar to the situation where the network goes down and the CEO is watching you fix it. The intellectual abilities for playing chess and programming have many obvious similarities, memorising significant patterns to avoid re-calculation, having a large mental register set to allow considering complex situations or multiple possibilities at the same time, and being able to spend many hours thinking about a problem. With that in mind one thing that particularly interested me in Shintaro’s post was the reference to a Japanese apprentice system where “They are trained at his masters house from early years maybe after junior-high, living and caring his boss every day life, like Go or Shogi players“. I wonder how this could be used in other cultures and career paths (such as English-speaking countries and computer programming). Probably the “every day life” part wouldn’t be well accepted. When comparing with the high-school experiences that seem typical of people in the computer industry an apprentice program has a lot to offer. A small amount of pay (as opposed to school-fees) and an environment where laws apply (IE almost no bullying) are both significant benefits. Anyone who is reasonably intelligent is most likely to find that they can’t learn anything from the teachers in the final years of high-school because most teachers don’t know much about the subjects that they teach and in the instances where the teacher does know more the class environment doesn’t permit teaching more advanced material. Someone of average intelligence who has worked for 5+ years in an industry can always teach a beginner some useful things so there is some obvious potential to learn. There is a meme that apprentice programs only apply to trades not intellectual work. This meme is probably correct when applied to many categories of office work but seems obviously wrong when applied to computer work. My observation is that at most places where I have worked there has been a significant amount of time from the most productive, skilled, and highly paid people spent on tasks that are way below their skill level - and often requiring skills that they don’t have. One example is when I was working for an ISP in a senior sys-admin position, when things really went wrong on the network I was usually the person to fix them - but I spent moderate amounts of time fixing hardware problems with desktop PCs and some time fixing Windows networking issues (of which I know little). Some of the problems I fixed could have been fixed by a 16yo apprentice who would probably have taken less time to fix them while also having a much lower hourly rate - and in some cases may have done a better job). I’m not sure that having an apprentice assigned to an individual programmer would work well, but having one per team should. I have previously written about how to get the benefits of a university education without attending university [3] so I don’t think that the inability of such apprentices to attend university would necessarily be a problem.

• [1] http://intrajp.no-ip.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=707


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_exhibition


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/04/ideas-for-a-home-university/

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Best wishes to everyone in the Free Software community for the new year Vikari (VS 2064) Diwali/new year this time was kind of anticlimatic compared to last year when we were actually in India. It is cold and gloomy in NJ, and fireworks are hard to come by. (Though I did manage to scrounge up some so not a total loss in that department.) And we arrived late at the mandir for Annakut Darshan today so they were out of thor which sucks. The presents front has been the usual maddeningly practical things. The kids of course got better stuff. Shailu, for instance, got Hungry Hungry Hippos and we've been having fun playing that. So I shouldn't complain. Ma Lakshmi has blessed me tremendously over the past year and I just know this year will be even better.

Number of people killed on Sept. 11, 2001:	2,974
Number of suicides in 2004:	32,439
Number of people killed on American highways in 2006:	38,588
Annual deaths from obesity:	300,000
Total deaths from cancer in 2007:	559,650
Total deaths from heart disease in 2004:	871,500
Total military spending in FY2008:	$1228 billion
Funding for health research & improvement (NIH):	$29 billion
Total support of Amtrak (safer, cleaner than highways):	$1.6 billion
National Highway Traffic Safety Admin. spending in FY2008:	$0.8 billion

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[19:10] thanks to emacs you learned to play piano
....
You are welocome, vim.