This is driving me insane... Oo.org has an option not to load settings with the document. The biggest part of it that we're using is that the default printer should be selected no matter which printer was last used in the document (think networked environment.) And this doesn't work, and apparently nobody noticed from 2.0 to 2.2. (Debian #428646, oo.org #78365, and greetings to _rene_.) Oh well, I'll just have to stamp down hard on the fingers of users who question this behaviour and tell them it's just to keep them on guard... (meanwhile, villa.debian.org. or the netwerk between it and our site comes close to dial-up speed, which is pretty annoying when downloading openoffice.org debs... Yes, I could use another mirror, of course. But now's lunchtime, so I guess I'll just wait.)

Hopefully fuzz testing is well known nowadays, right? But did you check how smart your software can handle ENOSPC - the ‘No space left on device’ error? I like stress testing software (to be honest: no, not really). Yesterday I debugged a problem regarding zsh history writing on ENOSPC. Usually I use the grml Linux live-cd for stress testing (often running inside Qemu, Virtbox, VMware,…) like in:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/home.lo count=1000
losetup /dev/loop1 /tmp/home.lo
mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop1
mount /dev/loop1 /home
mkdir /home/grml
chown grml: /home/grml

Now after restarting the shell session of user grml I can play with ‘No space left on device’ situations. (Notice: I adjust the count=… according to what type of application I want to test.) Too many applications don’t really cope with the ENOSPC situation. Firefox for example is very funny, depending on the situation it either just segfaults when trying to start up, or decides to not start up at all and just exits with ‘1′. See the relevant strace output:

mkdir("/home", 0700)                    = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
access("/home", F_OK)                   = 0
mkdir("/home/grml", 0700)               = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
access("/home/grml", F_OK)              = 0
mkdir("/home/grml/.mozilla", 0700)      = -1 ENOSPC (No space left on device)
access("/home/grml/.mozilla", F_OK)     = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
exit_group(1)                           = ?

Opera also just exits when already running and receiving an ENOSPC - I encountered data loss (for example the transfer history got lost) more than once. Very "funny" to see how applications like dillo, joe, wireshark,… behave in the ENOSPC situation. Not. Oh, your application handles ENOSPC just fine? Then continue testing with read-only filesystem, using NFS, removing files randomly,…

Floris Bruynooghe commented:

"My experience is that European (including UK) drivers can't cope with wide roads, resulting in even more dangerous behaviour. Wide roads with on-road cycling lanes are probably pretty good. But they need to be clearly separated by a double line sort of like in Belgium, combine that with UK quality road surface (on average) and you might have someting usable. The cycle lanes on UK A roads are a joke though, a very good example of how not to do it."

I assume this means the converted edge strips that you see on some fast roads (note: not all edge strips have been marked as cycle lanes and you especially shouldn't use unmarked ones). There's one of those in Milton Keynes, alongside the A5D dual carriageway. My main complaint against them is that they are too narrow and you get HGVs passing close enough to pull you around. Also, you have to cross every slip road/ramp which is a fairly unpleasant experience at busy times. Redway Route Types The unique Redway network was built in several phases. To be fair, I can't recommend the original network for anything other than low-speed connecting use, but the later, straighter additions (the "cross-city Redways" mentioned in the 1998 paper and my introduction a couple of posts ago) to the original plan early in the 1990s improved matters immensely. Although the different types are mentioned in the introductions, this difference seems entirely ignored by the accident data, which is my main complaint against the papers. There's no way of comparing like with like, as far as I can tell. You can split the accident data for 60/70mph grid roads from the 30/40mph link roads and 30mph estate roads, but you can't split the long-distance maybe-40kph cross-city Redways from the maybe-20kph estate Redways. Based on my years cycling around the city, I expect that the difference between grid Redways and grid roads is pretty small and that local Redways are far worse than local roads, but I can't prove or disprove that from his data. What's more, none of the studies I've seen differentiate between construction phases or route types, which is like only having combined accident figures for the Fosse Way and the M1. It suggests interesting topics for further studies, but how can anyone draw useful conclusions about cycle track design in general from it?

A few people have asked what I meant in my "boxes" comic. Other just look at me strangely. Some hackers have enjoyed the comic, so I thought I'd try to unpack the meaning of it a bit for the layperson. Of course this will spoil the joke, but what the hey. A hacker who looks at the comic probably thinks about things like recursion, fractals, unicode, fonts, and bugs. fonts A font is how the computer knows how to draw the letters on its screen. Before computers, a font was a bunch of metal bits that could be arranged and fed into a printing press. As with most things involving drawing on a screen, font technology is much more complicated these days than you'd ever imagine. Fonts and the programs that draw them (font engines) are something of a mystery even to most hackers. unicode Unicode is an absurdly complicated version of the alphabet. Or rather, of every alphabet and similar thing used by anyone on earth or in Star Trek. It's not a font, it's a way for the computer to store text internally, by basically assigning a unique number to each letter. Since most hackers grew up in a world without unicode, and suffered through the (still continuing) transition to it, they're familiar with lots of quirks and weird and broken behaviors you get from it. One of these quicks is what to do when the computer wants to display a particular letter from unicode, but that letter is not available in the font. Since unicode contains effectively an infinite number of symbols, and each symbol in a font is carefully crafted by hand, this occurs pretty often. Handling of this situation varies, but often the computer will just display a little empty square box for the letter that it doesn't know how to draw. Some font engines go a step further and write the number of the unicode character in little tiny numbers inside the box. Presumably so that a hacker can look at it and tell what character is missing. The numbers are typically written one in each corner of the box, and you'd have to squint to see them. fractals A fractal is a special kind of picture, where parts of the picture repeat over and over at different scales. You've probably seen pictures of the most famous fractal, the Maldebrot set. That one is generated by a kind of formula, but there are much simpler ones, like the Koch snowflake. Hackers love fractals, because they're pretty, and complex, while based on very simple math. recursion "Recursion: See recursion." Ha! That's the best hacker joke ever, a true classic. Recursion is when the computer sees an instruction like that and mindlessly repeats it over and over. This actually turns out to be useful, and hackers see a kind of beauty in it. bugs Bugs are what happens when a computer program, which is supposed to be internally clear and simple, and have well-defined behavior, instead turns out to exhibit unintentional complexity. Kinda like a fractal. This begs the question of whether hackers like bugs, or not. Most of them spend most of their time creating more, so you be the judge. The bug I'm alluding to in the comic is this: What if the computer, when drawing some word, stumbled over a unicode character that was not in the font. And then say it went to draw the little box instead, and fill in the numbers to indicate what character it was. Except it turned out that its font didn't tell it how to draw the numbers either. And thanks to a really unlikely bug, it then proceeded to recurse, drawing smaller and smaller boxes for these characters that it didn't know how to draw. Until it drew a fractal instead. See: It's just hilarous once I've explained it. (And that explanation of the word "cat", by the way, is why I don't try to write most of the technical posts in my blog in a form that a layman could understand.)

Hospital CEO Paul Levy is seeking responses to some remarkably frank comments on competition in the hospital industry:

…Please remember that health care is not like other industries, in which companies are rewarded in the marketplace for being the high-quality, low-cost provider. That situation does not yet exist in the health care system. So, am I better off being a industry leader with regard to that approach, or am I better off biding my time and continuing to follow the traditional path until there is a real sign of change in the marketplace?

As I’ve written before, this kind of openness is refreshing and potentially a brilliant business strategy. (It may continue to be so even once every one is doing it.) Paul’s comments and receptivity to feedback remind me of my numerous concerns about Children’s Hospital Boston, which, as far as I know, has no analogous public forum. I’ve sent in comment cards, but they may just drop into a black hole. Two principal complaints about Children’s Hospital: television and food. There are TVs everywhere, including in the waiting rooms. They are always on, even if no one is watching them. On one occasion, we were the only ones in the waiting room. When we attempted to turn the TV off, the staff told us we couldn’t. When we went in examination rooms and our daughter was unhappy, the first response by the medical staff was often to turn on a TV. Our daughter (just over two years old) has never watched TV, and doesn’t find it comforting. Research indicates that TV is not good for young kids, and especially not infants:

Babies are glued to television sets these days, with 40 percent of 3-month- olds and 90 percent of 2-year-olds regularly watching TV, according to a University of Washington study released Monday. …”While appropriate television viewing at the right age can be helpful for both children and parents, excessive viewing before age 3 has been shown to be associated with problems of attention control, aggressive behavior and poor cognitive development,” Frederick Zimmerman, the UW study’s lead author, said in a news release…. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children younger than 2, and only one to two hours a day of quality programming for older children.

Recently, we had to stay over in the hospital for a night. There were no private rooms available, so we requested at least not to be stuck in a room where the TV would always be on. They looked at us like we were from Mars. (In the end, our roommate’s TV was always on. The three month old patient didn’t care, but his private nurse wanted to watch TV.) Why is a pediatric healthcare facility encouraging TV for infants? The food complaint is similar: so much of the hospital food provided for children is high in fat, refined sugar, white flour, and artificial ingredients. I was looking for a fruit-juice popsicle for our daughter (what she eats at home), and the only options the hospital could offer had high glucose corn syrup as the first ingredient after water. Again, this is not rocket science — these are not appropriate foods for one- and two-year old children. I realize in both cases (TV and food), the hospital is just mirroring popular culture in an attempt to provide familiarity for most kids, but I wish they would at least provide an option for those families whose kids don’t watch TV and eat a high-sugar diet.

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After about 18 hours of public transport, I arrived tired but savely in Edinburgh. Chairs in DB night trains are not the same as chairs in CityNightLine trains, but if you have only two people in a compartment, you can atleast spread out on three seats. I still didn t get too much good sleep. The Eurostar train from Paris to London behaves as if it were a plane: Long queues before check in, security and passport checks. The benefit of taking a train (hassle-freeness) gets somewhat lost there, and it feels as if it was the marketing department s descision. The train itself is comfortable and has power plugs nice.In London I had to take the underground from Waterloo International Station to Kings Cross. If I had bought a simple one way ticket paid in cash, they would have charged me 4, but with the so-called Oyster-Card, it s only 1.50. But please, if you put ads and leavlets for that card all over the place, mention somewhere that the card itself is basically free! Well, I had to ask to find that out and got myself the cheap ticket.The train to Edinburgh was not different to German trains, besides the fact that it offered on-board wireless network. Pricy, but still reasonable, and not entirely secured.In Edinburgh I tried to go to the hostel first, but walked too far and ended up in Teviot, where the DebCamp is happening, just in time for Dinner. My first brief impression of Edinburgh is: Massive, Dark, Old. Not bad! Also the room I m sitting in right now, the Hack Center, looks lik an old curch, with coloured glass and a balcony around it.

Amaya talks about a case where an upstream developer contributed a patch to the Debian package of his software. I'll take this opportunity to mention a couple of positive experiences of my own:

• CUPS-PDF is a CUPS backend to generate PDF documents instead of printing out hard copies. Given my complete ignorance of CUPS internals, I figured that I would kindly ask upstream to subscribe himself to the PTS, just in case an RC bug would rear its ugly head. Volker immediately agreed and, sure enough, someone filed a number of RC bugs resulting from an audit they had performed. Volker replied and argued every point with the submitter by himself, then promptly released a new tarball which included all the fixes. This is the best case of collaborative maintenance I've encountered so far: Volker maintains his code and I maintain the Debian package. Everybody wins.
• Ispell-et is an Estonian wordlist from which all 3 dictionary variants (aspell, ispell, myspell) are generated, plus an hyphenation pattern for OpenOffice, which upstream also uses to generate compound words. Jaak is a linguistic technology developer whose extremely busy schedule leaves very little time for hobbies. However, the appearance of my package in the Debian repository renewed his interest in maintaining his wordlist. He promptly reviewed my package and suggested a couple of fixes to improve the quality of the dictionary generation process. He also proposed further improvements to eventually generate Hunspell dictionaries as well. Once again, everybody wins.

Wouldn't it be great if all upstream developers subscribed to the Debian PTS for their software and answered bugs related to the codebase themselves?

Open Source 2006 is a one-day seminar that provides Free Software actors of Finland with a forum to present their work and the current trends in Free Software development to a greater audience comprised mainly of decision-makers from the business and governmental sectors. Finnish Open Office localization team This year, a noticeable trend were governmental cases of transition to Open Office and other Free Software solutions on the municipal desktop. Thus, it was only fitting that Finnish localization took greater importance than before and, in concordance, that this year's Linux-tekij award went to the Finnish Open Office localization team. The jury invited 3 people from the localization team to receive the award on their team's behalf:

• Pastor Asmo Koskinen of the bilingual Finnish-Swedish parish of Kokkola; an active promoter of Open Office in the Finnish public sector that has given many training sessions on Open Office and helped countless end-users transition to Open Office.
• Translator Marko Gr nroos; a leading Finnish localizer that is involved in the localization of an impressive number of Free Software products.
• Language Technology Expert Harri Pitk nen; the initiator of the Hunspell adaptation for the Finnish language.

Pastor Koskinen also gave a very stimulating lecture on the collaborative effort behind the localization, mentioning in passing that Czech Pavel Jani k also plays an important role in building the Open Office binaries for a number of Baltic and Scandinavian languages. Debian community of Finland The jury also granted an honorary mention to the Debian community of Finland to acknowledge years of achievements, reaching an important milestone in 2005 when Finland hosted the yearly Debian Conference. Another motivation was a number of nominations for Ubuntu, both as a distribution and for its extremely active local user community. Given how a majority of Ubuntu developers actually are Debian Developers, the jury unanimously decided to honor them collectively from the perspective of Debian and its derivatives. The jury invited 3 people to receive the honorary mention on the community's behalf:

• Inquisitor Lars Wirzenius needs no introduction; an early adopter and promoter of Debian in Finland, his strong voice has eloquently sung the merits of Debian and Free Software to large audiences and persuaded a significant number of Finns to join the Debian project.
• Educator and Translator Tapio Lehtonen; appearing himself among this year's nominations for his extremely friendly attitude towards people making their first steps as a Free Software user, he is mainly known for localizing the Debian installation software.
• Event organizer Aschwin van der Woude (represented in absentee by co-organizer Fabian Fagerholm); personally initiated countless Free Software promoting events and developer workshops throughout Finland, culminating in 2005 with the important responsibility for Debconf5's budget and legal matters.

Lars gave the audience a very interesting perspective of his long involvement with Debian, while Tapio emphasized particular pride in seeing non-programmers that maintain documentation or localize software be acknowledged. Fabian gave a very emotional speech in which he praised the commendable efforts of dozens of volunteer DebConf5 organizers that discretely handled unpleasant tasks that were nonetheless essential to the success of the event. The Jury Yours truly was invited to join the jury on behalf of Linux Aktivaattori, alongside representatives from the academic, business and Free Software communities. During the prize ceremony, FLUG chairman Arto Ter s and myself took turns at describing the award's selection process and at introducing the winners.

Being involved in no less than four different projects, all with excellent prospects for a permanent job, reminds me of why riding the Free Software bandwagon as yet another opportunistic buzzword won't do: In three of the projects, people insist upon communicating using the closed source VoIP application Skype. There indeed is a crude port for Linux on i386 (though not for amd64, powerpc, or any other architecture), but the dependencies are broken and my friends at Skype emphasize that Linux is a non-market for them, so I should not expect any solution any time soon. Still, the people behind some of these projects regularly threaten that I'm wasting their time by "refusing" to install Skype on my computer. Free Software promoters who don't understand what "non-free" means. In two of the projects, the corporate homepage is made as a single Flash animation. Mentioning that Flash support is extremely broken and thus essentially non-existent on Free Software platforms is pointless: the people behind the project are Windows users and yet they insist that their project is about promoting the free circulation of ideas using Free Software. Free Software promoters who don't understand interoperability. In one particular project, the product follows the Googlesque model of "the Web as my application and file server". Great idea, except that ― once again ― the people behind the project are Windows users and they insist that the Thin Client hardware must have a standard set of applications pre-installed and some storage media, thus defeating the purpose of this business model. Promoters of "the Web as my application and file server" model who don't understand the implications of a Thin Client solution. In all cases, the people behind the project mean well, but ― not being Free Software users themselves ― they clearly don't understand the profound implications of the Free Software agenda; they only see it as a license-free technology to connect the masses for cheap and they evidently find it difficult to think outside the Windows PC framework. Free Software as a business model, in a nutshell: data interoperability and the client-server model. Either get it or you're wasting my time ...and yours too. Nothing personal; just business. PS: I sincerely hope that anybody who recognizes themselves in the above rant will acknowledge my honest concerns and embrace this opportunity to truly adopt Free Software. Just do it! It doesn't matter where you get the FOSS. Just make sure that the FOSS gets you! (inspired by a great Candy Dulfer song currently blasting through the headphones).

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox? Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany. Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific. This must be fixed.

Today, getting increasingly tired of the incoherent User Interface in Gaim 2.0 release candidates, I fetched the recently uploaded release 2.0.1 of Pidgin (same software, different name; the result of a trademark dispute) from Debian/unstable and built it against Stable dependencies. First impressions: excellent harmonization of the behavior between supported protocols, thanks to a new user status handling that is common to all protocols, coupled with unified a icon theme. Overall, this feels much more consistent in everyday use and it serves to blur the distinction between protocols to maintain the focus on the conversation taking place. However, two major annoyances:

1. The old behavior of stealing focus, every time a tab pops open, is still there. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!
2. Extremely tiny fonts in the conversation window and trying to make them inherit the default system font size via Pidgin's built-in GTK plug-in simply fails.

Conclusion: libpurple may be technically amazing, but Pidgin really is in desperate need of a complete UI overhaul.

I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

There's a lot going on behind the scenes and today is a good day to break the silence and inform you that I'll attend my second debconf! Hopefully, I'll have more good news soon, meanwhile, I'll enjoy my birthday with friends and wait for the key email message.

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

• stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
• thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
• the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release 0.5 (newsbeuter is the best available console based rss reader) looks rocking - killfile!!1! (thanks to andi for implementing this cool feature)
• using zsh-mime-setup might result in unwanted behaviour
• the catalyst web framework seems to rock (thanks, koki and tom!)
• I should take a closer look at template toolkit as well (thanks again, koki)
• even though I’m not a perl monkey attending to YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna (Yet Another Perl Conference) would be cool (meeting people like Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus)

I was responsible for the booth of grml (Linux live-cd for sysadmins and texttool users) as well as for the ones of Debian and Debienna (Debian in vienna) - especially in the first two days, until Markus and Kira joined. Regarding the grml booth: It was once more amazing to see how many people already know and use grml. I had the pleasure to meet people from a professional data rescue organization who use grml in their daily business. Not to forget to mention all the people who let me know how often grml managed to save their lif^Wdata. Oh, and some nice ideas were brought to my attention and are now part of the todo list for grml. Very geeky was the 13 year old boy who visited our booth and when asking him whether he knows how to work on the console (he was staring at our grml-CDs with shining eyes) he replied: "YES, of couuuuurse!" I couldn’t resist in giving him a grml-CD. Oh, and we were running out of grml-CDs earlier than expected. Thanks to my girlfriend - who can even explain the difference between grml meilenschwein and grml64 to you now - I had the chance to attend some few talks - besides my own one about grml of course. I once more didn’t manage it to take just a single picture but I just received a pointer to the linuxdays photogallery of jostusz, thanks Sven.

This thread on the Sun initiative to produce a more Linux-like distribution of OpenSolaris is interesting not so much for the technical goals, but as an insight into the community. The immediate response to the proposal? A set of complaints that it hasn't followed the correct process.

Now, to be fair, there have been other threads discussing the technical and social desirability of such a distribution already and some are still ongoing - it's not like the OpenSolaris community has ignored it entirely in favour of process fetishising. However, it's indicative of a community that's more concerned with procedure than it is with producing high quality software. What I suspect has happened is that Sun felt it was important to ensure that procedures were put in place before creating a community in order to avoid the problem of it immediately turning into low-grade anarchy. The problem with this is that if you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.

Sun's clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place here. They don't want to be seen to be directing the community too strongly, or they'd end up like Red Hat did with Fedora - you alienate your community by giving them the impression that they have no influence over the direction of the distribution. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the Ubuntu community strongly suggests that having a strong leader can ensure that people don't get too bogged down in procedure at the cost of technical progress.

I suspect that Sun made the wrong call here. Having more corporate influence to begin with might have put off some contributors, but it would also have allowed the development of a functional community at an earlier stage. Sun could then gradually withdraw (as Red Hat have been doing with Fedora) and let the community play a larger role. Perhaps that way we'd hear more about the technical contributions coming out of OpenSolaris and they wouldn't be left with just the same two cards they've been playing for a couple of years now - dtrace and ZFS.

On something of a tangent, I don't think their choice of license has helped a great deal here. Two of the areas where OpenSolaris is most behind Linux are hardware support and desktop/kernel integration. The choice of a GPL-incompatible license strongly discourages any Linux developers from working with the low-level code of OpenSolaris due to the perceived risk of contaminating the Linux codebase at some later point. That rules out a huge pool of skilled developers (I'm going to be potentially controversial here and say that I suspect Linux has a larger skillset here than all the BSDs put together, and quite possibly Solaris added to that) who are writing a good deal of advanced code. Meanwhile we're left with OpenSolaris having even worse laptop support than FreeBSD. These are people who could have added to the community socially as well as technically. Instead you've got a community led by a set of Sun staff who are paranoid about doing anything that might make it look like Sun controls the community. Score.

Got the whole family out Sunday morning for the annual Bike The Drive in Chicago. The weather looked unfriendly, but behaved as rain stayed away under gray skies (before the day turned into a screamer of a sunny day, very fitting for a holiday). All in all a nice outing, the weather notwithstanding, and we ended the afternoon at a Chicago Fire soccer game.

gpe-expenses is now stable enough for a 0.1.0 release - the NEW queue is really short so it should be in unstable soon.

In order to support the developing gpe-cash (and later gpe-invoice) application(s), the package has been split into a (small) binary and a new shared library - both licenced only under the GPL v2 or later.

The binary depends on libqof1, as before (GPL v2 or later). The new shared library contains the QofExpenses and GpeCurrency objects. QofExpenses is registered with QOF to provide data storage and queries. GpeCurrency is based on the Palm Default Currency Table. http://pilot-qof.sourceforge.net/manual/ch06.html#defaultcurrencytable. This provides a much simpler interface to standard currencies whilst retaining GnuCash data compatibility.

Splitting the objects out allows gpe-cash to share live data with gpe-expenses, reading expense data into double-entry accounts and allows gpe-cash to use sane currencies that can still be converted to GnuCash commodities. gpe-cash will itself contain one or more shared
libraries that include the double-entry financial objects, ready for gpe-invoice to collate data from gpe-contacts, gpe-calendar and gpe-expenses, create invoices (in SQLite) and post transactions to gpe-cash. Early days, I know, but that's the plan. (Invoices would be rendered in HTML/PDF/foo using scripts in the datafreedom packages.) pilot-qof already includes the basic support for generating an invoice from contact, calendar and expense data.

gpe-cash is a fork of gnucash, splitting the behemoth into small(est) functional units and dropping large sections of code - like reports which can be better managed using packages like datafreedom-perl on the desktop. datafreedom already includes example reports from
gpe-expenses. Even so, gpe-cash may well be a large application compared to other GPE packages. So far, gpe-cash comes in at just over 1Mb installed (including libqof1) but there's more Gtk+ stuff to write yet. (Compare with gnucash where the architecture-dependent part alone is >5Mb without any translations, images or other common files or the extra dependencies.) gpe-cash will have none of the dependency problems of gnucash: it just has the object definitions, libqof1, glib2.0, gtk+, gpe and sqlite. (There is an issue with GConf2 right now but I'm sure I can remove the need for that.)

http://gpe-expenses.sourceforge.net/ (CVS available via SF)

http://cashutil.sourceforge.net/gpecash.php. (SVN available via SF)

The good thing about having kept a blog these last few years, is I have a searchable record of hardware changes. Recently, I noticed a few disk errors on caesar, and I was wondering how old that disk was. I disk some searching, and found via this post that the disk in it was a hand-me-down from when I decommissioned daedalus Mk I. One of the reasons I decommissioned it when I did, was the RAID-1 was exhibiting some strange errors during resynchronisation, and I didn't want to leave the country leaving behind an ageing problematic server with my stuff on it. I'd previously been unable to fault either 120 Gb disk under some light testing with badblocks, so I just reused them, and so around October 2005, I put the larger disk in caesar. So this disk has seen a fair bit of use, originally in daedalus, and then in caesar for another 20 months. It's allowed to fail, it's served me well. Anyway, so I bought a 750 Gb drive a couple of weeks ago, because one thing that I've wanted to do with caesar was do remote backups of daedalus, and there just wasn't enough space to do that, so I went for as big as I could find, and essentially repeated the same trick as last time, to upsize:

1. Power down, attach new disk as a slave
2. Boot into single user mode
3. Unmount everything, remount root read-only
4. sfdisk -d /dev/hda sfdisk /dev/hdb to copy the partition table (I use a root, swap, LVM, three partition layout)
5. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1M to copy the root filesystem to the new disk
6. mkswap /dev/hdb2 to put the swap signature on what will become the new swap device
7. cfdisk /dev/hdb and blow away the third partition and recreate it using all of the available space (there's probably a programmatic way of doing this, but hey, it's not exactly hard to do in cfdisk either)
8. pvcreate /dev/hdb3 to put an LVM signature on the new LVM physical volume
9. vgextend base /dev/hdb3 to tell LVM there's two disks in the volume group for the time being
10. Remount the root filesystem read-write
11. rm /boot/grub/device.map and run /usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/hdb to install GRUB in the MBR of what will become the new boot disk
12. Power down, swap the disks around so that the new disk is now primary and the old disk is now the slave
13. Boot into single user mode again, unmount everything except root
14. pvmove /dev/hdb3 /dev/hda3 to relocate all of the allocated physical extents off the old disk onto the new one
15. Twiddle thumbs for a couple of hours. Admire artwork on computer's motherboard (did you know Compaq EVO's have a picture of a car on their motherboards? A map of Texas?)
16. vgreduce base /dev/hdb3 to take the old disk out of the volume group
17. pvremove /dev/hdb3 to remove the LVM signature from the old disk
18. Power down and remove the old disk
19. Reboot into multi-user mode and profit from all the additional free physical extents

I absolutely love how I can do this with LVM, with a minimum of fuss. Last time I did this, I had a kernel panic during the pvmove, but that didn't even stop it, I just rebooted and reran the pvmove and it carried on from the last checkpoint. No such excitement this time. I'm sure Solaris' ZFS does all of this with substantially less manual steps, but hey, I like my Linux :-)

Ilenia and I are looking for tickets to go "home" (Eugene, Oregon) this summer. We've had pretty good luck with Lufthansa in the past (as opposed to Air France, which lost a huge bag of my stuff), so we turned to them first to look for flights. I like the page they have for prices/dates, which gives you a nice way to look around for a better price without stabbing randomly at dates: Big long Lufthansa URL However, the maddening thing is that the prices change frequently. Not every day, but often after even 5 minutes! They bounce around up to 100 euro at a time. I understand the theory behind price descrimination, but this is the classic case where the customer ends up feeling like they're being made fun of and goes elsewhere. United, in our case, which offers a cheaper price for the same plane (they're Lufthansa's partner and thus share flights).