I've been extremely busy with labwork lately, trying to get a second paper ready for submission in the coming months. It's taken an obvious toll on my free software work, but that's life I guess. The upside is that the other night I realized why a year and half's worth of experiments kept turning up with negative results that seemed to contradict our other results. It turns out that this experiment was conceptually flawed, and even though I wasted a year and a half on this I did learn something even from those negative results that should go in to the final paper. I'm actually relieved, because even though I don't have all the data yet I can really see how the paper will end up, so I can start writing soon. Oftentimes knowing why something is wrong so you can fix it is even more important than being right.

I set up an ikiwiki to help organize my lab data a few weeks ago, and it's been a huge win. Joey really did a fantastic job on the program and I can't imagine using a wiki that doesn't share a very similar design for any of my personal stuff. I showed my boss some of my data using it and now he wants me to set up a wiki for the lab. He actually wants me to show off my wiki to give my lab members a feel for the idea. Since ikiwiki doesn't seem to be appropriate for my lab members, I'm going to have to look in to the giant list of wikis to figure out the exact right one for my lab's requirements. This is something I never expected to be doing in grad school.

Because there's no way my brain can go without doing a little bit of programming, I finally sat down and wrote myself a small shell script that lets me grep through pdf's, which is something I couldn't find googling around. If you have a lot of pdf's like I do and don't something like beagle or tracker churning away in the background constantly just so you can search them, this is very helpful. It's obviously very crude, but it gets the job done nicely. It relies on the pdftotext program; hopefully it'll be of use to someone.

I've been digging in to my copy of UNIX Power Tools lately, trying to pick up new UNIX and vi arcana, which is something I haven't made a real serious effort to do in a long time. It's been surprisingly fun to try and replace old habits with things that I know are better but don't use. A good example is that I usually will fire off a new subshell in vim when I should really just suspend vim and use my original shell to save time. Re-examining the basics of how I use the system has been a lot of fun, and has made me a lot more comfortable with the simple day to day tasks.

I am a huge political junkie and I have been closely following Europe and US politics for more than 5 years. After this time and several disappointments, I have to admit that Obama is the first truly inspirational politician I have seen (listen to the Yes We Can song based on his New Hampshire speech). Some of his detractors dismiss his speeches as lousy, empty or vague, but you just have to listen to a couple of them to see that he is genuinely smart (such as the one about faith and atheism or the interview at Google). He doesn’t only take the right stance on most issues that I care about (Iraq, foreign policy, ethics, net neutrality, …), but he does it in a sincere way. Obama just gets it. I have got this impression from watching several of his speeches and interviews, but Marc Andreessen had the chance to spend an hour and a half with him a year ago and got the very same feeling. The main argument against Barack Obama nowadays is his alleged lack of experience. “Watch how I run my campaign”, Barack said to Marc when inquired about that. It’s obvious that running a primary campaign isn’t the same as being POTUS, but being the president’s wife isn’t exactly the same either. So if we compare the Obama and Hillary campaigns we can easily see Hillary’s experience as an “old school” politician. She overstates, lies, accepts loads of money from lobbies (because “they represent people too”, haha), resorts to fear-mongering (”Obama is not a muslim, …, as far as I know”, 3 a.m. ad), sides with McCain if needed to get some extra votes, surrounds herself with nitwits, … . To summarize, she uses every dirty trick she has learned in these years in Washington, and that’s exactly what I am so sick of right now. On the other hand, Obama’s campaign hasn’t just been one of the best organized and executed campaigns I have ever seen, but also the cleanest one. He has managed to overcome double-digit Hillary leads in most states without having to resort to any of these experienced politician’s dirty tricks. If I have to trust one of both to run a country, the decision is obvious. If I didn’t manage to convince you, I hope Lawrence Lessig and xkcd’s Randall Munroe do. Obama is leading and almost there, he just needs the final push. Please, do the right thing.

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) No Tags

(To be fair: It is not theirs, Tolimar will be the godfather. But they do it with a perfection.) Personal

As I mentioned in an earlier article, one of the goals for the Android port of Hecl is to make it as easy as it is to create Java ME applications:

1. Write the script.
2. Wrap it up and send it to the phone.

No "compiling" (well, none that's obvious or explicitly asked of the user, at least, as we'll see) or fiddling with build files or writing new Java classes or any of that. We're still not there yet 100%, but I did managed to hack together a system that, from an original Hecl.apk, creates a new application that can be installed on the emulator. This is tricky, because Android looks at the uniqueness of the package and class utilized for the application, meaning you can't just rename Hecl.apk to Foo.apk and install it as a separate app. The emulator will overwrite your old copy of Hecl. Here's what we go through to make this work. Be forewarned - big, ugly hacks that are not for the faint of heart follow. The command line isn't exactly beautiful either, but it beats all the individual steps that it replaces, as we'll see.

java -jar /home/davidw/workshop/hecl/jars/AndroidBuilder.jar -android \
    /opt/android-sdk_m5-rc15_linux-x86/ -class Example -label "Hecl Example" \
    -package my.example -permissions ACCESS_LOCATION,ACCESS_GPS

1. The first thing that needs to be done is to replace the AndroidManifest.xml that is contained within our "template" application, that resides in Hecl.apk, a copy of which is contained within the AndroidBuilder jar file. Since the compiled version of the xml file is a binary format that hasn't been reverse engineered or documented yet, the best way to do this was to simply:
2. Write out a new AndroidManifest.xml in our temporary work directory that uses our provided package name, label and class.
3. Using the aapt command in the SDK, create a new, empty apk file, specifying the newly created xml file as the manifest file to use.
4. Now we can extract the compiled version of the xml file, for later use.
5. At this point, we extract a version of Hecl.jar contained within AndroidBuilder.jar to the temp directory.
6. Now we need to generate some Java classes that correspond to the new package and class names that we've passed to AndroidBuilder. Ideally, I would have done this with some tools to write the byte code out directly, since the classes are so simple: all they do is subclass the Hecl and SubHecl classes so that methods fall through to those.
7. But instead, I just write out the .java code and compile it.
8. The two new classes get stashed inside the copy of Hecl.jar that we're working with.
9. We now use the dx command to compile the entire jar into the classes.dex file that Android uses.
10. Since Hecl.apk is just a zip file, we can replace the AndroidManifest.xml file and classes.dex file with the new files we have created.
11. At this point, we rename the whole works, and move it out of the temporary working directory to the current directory.

Phew! That's a lot of ugly work. It's obvious that a lot of this should and could be handled in a less "brute force" way, but for now it gets the job done. The only thing left to do is replace the Hecl script, which is very easy:

zip -r Example.apk res/raw/script.hcl

This makes it possible to whip out new Android Hecl scripts without carrying around a lot of project infrastructure - all you really need is AndroidBuilder.jar and your script. Naturally, all of this is very much a work in progress, so it may not work as advertised, and, given the mess that we go through, bugs are likely as well. Do report them if you find any, and have fun! In the future, it will be necessary to make it so that it's possible to add resources to the apk file with zip, and have them be available to Hecl applications, which was actually the focus of the previous article.

I finished reading the electronic advance reader’s copy last night. Overall, I’m glad I read it, though it was quite infuriating. The book is set about a decade in the future. In the book’s world, anthropogenic climate change and global warming turned out to be a hoax; instead, a global cooling (caused by solar variation) was beginning. At the same time, the bird flu (H5N1) became a major pandemic. The United States was governed by the democrats and “the bitch” (a thinly disguised demonisation of a certain democrat presidential candidate), who handled everything wrong. The book is a fictional autobiography (or a series of blog posts) by a US army officer who became famous during those turbulent times, first commanding a company finding its own way back home after being abandoned in the Middle East (the later stuff I won’t describe to avoid spoiling the book). The Last Centurions is a television propaganda show featuring his unit in action, intended to counterspin anti-military news reports. Several chapters early in the book are pure political ranting by the narrator: how anthropogenic climate change is false, how socialized medicine is bad (and causes lots of unnecessary deaths during a pandemic), how republicans are good and democrats are evil et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Then again, it’s a Ringo book, political ranting is a given.) Given my political persuasion, it was not easy to read: I kept yelling, “where are your footnotes!” I actually tried to verify some of the claims the narrator makes, and found nothing persuasive. Still… in the end, it all turned out to be justified. It explains the character, and it explains the world. Perhaps it should be a bit trimmed during editing (remember, I read the author’s submission draft which has not been through the usual editing and copyediting cycles), but a lot of it is necessary for the story. The premise that anthropogenic global warming is a false theory made it very hard for me to suspend disbelief. However, given that premise (and the premise of a totally incompetent government in the USA), the story is compelling and interesting. There’s a quite a bit of military action as we have become to expect from Ringo. The beginning grabbed me, – apart from the couple of chapters of exposition – held my attention tightly to the end, and left me shell-shocked. I especially liked the wife’s edits. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see their courtship. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to re-read the book, but I’m still rating it at 5/5. The book is now available as an e-ARC, and will be released as a regular book in August. There is a companion site at www.thelastcenturion.com.

It's funny sitting down to finally write something on LJ and not being sure what to write. I can tell stories of Angie's mom coming to support her and giving me time with my wife. I could rant about students putting in some of their first IVs (or not, actually since after the third try I got bitchy and she ran away. Literally. Oops.) I could talk about recovery, the joy that is delaudid, the devil that Valium turned out to be, or wonderful nurses who were so helpful and encouraging (and the ones who bent the rules and let me see Leif on his first year birthday) or the ones who lied, failed to check in on me and left me in distress for several hours.

On the whole, the people and experience were very good. From almost immediately after I woke up, things have been better. I hadn't realized there was pain associated with all this until it was gone post-surgery. The numbness is still there, but better that it was before by a long shot.

I do want to make sure I say thanks for all the energy, thoughts, and prayers. I felt good on Monday going in with the power and energy of literally hundreds behind me. Religiously, I have a complex relationship with this stuff, but I believe that at moments where a yes or a no gets to be decided by luck or external unknown forces, this can really help the answer be a yes. And I think we'd be surprised at how much of life fits into that category.

There are lots of emails and posts I haven't replied to yet. My lifting restrictions are such that I can't pick up my laptop. So if you see emails or LJ posts from me, its been typed on the iPhone or the Blackberry. Same with the instant messenger. I have my status set to "do not disturb" when I'm around so that I don't exceed my ability to type by getting into talking to too many people at once. My lifting restrictions continue for the next 6 weeks.

That said, I do enjoy chatting and writing. It just takes a while and is quite tiring.

I haven't figured out how to upload pictures to flickr such that the pictures are public, but that are not forced onto people who just wanted to see pictures of Leif. :)

Tired now. If there is any particular part of the surgery/recovery you want details on, let me know and i'll write about it.

*hugs and love*
Jeff

Sledge blogged about "running again". For one second, I imagined he just joined the ever growing club of DD who happen to use running as a way to escape from hacking and, as a consequence, run a marathon next August in mar Del Plata. Then I realized he's "just" running for DPL..:-). Sigh. This confirms me that I'll be left with a though choice between 3 people I have great confidence in.

I previously wrote about my visits to Turkey to develop our export market in the Middle-East and how I ended up representing the whole Estonian business world in bilateral negotiations with Turkey. I'm going there again for two weeks, this time accompanied by a whole business delegation headed by Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip. Asides from various official events organized by our Turkish hosts to present Turkey to their Estonian guests, the crux of the visit is a conference hosted by DEIK and the Estonian embassy, on Tuesday, March 18th. The goal of this conference is to present Estonia's extremely advanced use of ICT technology in E-Business and E-Governance. Speakers from several private and public sector organizations will explain how they benefited from Estonia's hyper-connected lifestyle and, most of all, how this has made every Estonian's life more pleasant, because it offers a convenient way of performing a broad range of online transactions not just with businesses, but also with governmental organizations. Yours truly will speak about the advantages Estonia offers to investors and technology freaks alike, from the perspective of an industry insider who, given the opportunity of choosing his first pick for a liberal high-tech nation, dropped the Nokiaesque lands of Suomi to go Eesti. The morning of conference will end with a business lunch where interested Turks can network with their Estonian counterparts and create lucrative bilateral opportunities. Space in the TOBB Plaza auditorium is limited so those interested in attending should promptly contact DEIK to get their name added to the guest list. Turks interested in learning more about Estonia in their own language should visit estonya.net.

This week I finally realized where problem with random crashes in Wammu and python-gammu lies - python-gammu was using two version of C library - mscvrt.dll and mscvr71.dll. First one came from Gammu and second one from Python. Starting with 1.19.0, Gammu is built with mscvr71.dll and random crashes are gone. Any tester did not report problems with Windows binary, so I decided to make it finally an official release. So after year or more Windows users can finally use up to date Wammu version! Fortunately I can produce this version without even touching Windows. Thanks to tools such as MinGW and Wine, everything from compiling to generating installer can be scripted and done automatically on Linux! So Windows users can now also download current version from http://wammu.eu/download/, enjoy it.

Being fairly interested in this whole mobile phone software thing, it's pretty hard not to sit up and take notice of the iPhone SDK that was just announced. A few thoughts:

• Of course it's nice, polished, and lets you do some interesting things with the phone. That was not too surprising though.
• The "investment fund" seems like something of a response to the Android Developer Challenge, and is certainly an interesting move on Apple's part. Strategically, it certainly alters the focus of the money flowing into the equation. Comparing the two, the dollar amounts in the ADC are much smaller, but they are also more "concrete": N people will get X dollars in time frame T. As an independent developer, that works fairly well for me as something to have a go at and then move on from, win or lose. An investment fund backed by Kleiner Perkins is on a whole different scale and level. The amount of money is huge (they won't even bother with less than 100K), but who knows how that works out in practice, or how much of that is actually 100% committed to iPhone companies. KP aren't the sort of people that are going to just hand that out to any old company that does an iPhone app. They're also going to want to be involved in the companies, which means there won't be too many of them. In short, it brings in all the good and bad aspects of venture capital. In short: in one corner, lots of money for relatively big, organized players, and in the other, small, quick incentives to do cool things that anyone has a shot at. We won't really be able to judge the results until we see how it plays out. (As an aside, I still have some bad memories of the management that KP foisted off on Linuxcare).
• The system for selling applications is smart. You will have one place to go to to get your apps, and as a user you'll have some assurance that they're up to certain quality standards. People will like that kind of thing, and is far nicer than anything JavaME ever had. Instead of multiple, fractured marketplaces, you get one big one. Of course, it also keeps Apple in control of everything, which also has some negative implications as well.
• 37 Signals seem to be wildly ecstatic about Apple's potential, but I'm a bit less sanguine. I don't doubt that the iPhone has a bright future, that much is pretty obvious. However... dominate? First of all, if it's so widespread, it loses some of its cachet, doesn't it? I don't think Apple wants that. I don't see them licensing the system so that other phone manufacturers can use it, so it will only be adapted as widely as Apple sees fit. Cheaper Nokia models are very popular over here in Europe. Will iPhones at those price points (less than 100 euro) be available and competitive with Nokia's offerings? Open and adaptable aren't necessarily things that Apple is known for, which might be the difference between "strong presence" and "dominate", as we saw with Mac vs Windows. Getting 10-15% towards the high end of the market might be what they aspire to, rather than ubiquity.
• I could, however, very easily envision Apple getting into some kind of business niche and dominating that completely, as they did with education for a while. That might not extend to the broader market, though.
• Moving on to other considerations, this one is important to me: apparently, according to the license agreement, you can't run an interpreter that fetches code and executes it, amongst the various other restrictions! That's kind of a deal breaker for Hecl, which counts that ability as one of its strengths. I don't think a port was in the works in any case since Hecl is written in Java. Still, though, that's the kind of annoying restriction that reaffirms my commitment to open source.
• As an aside, I wonder what Sun is up to at this point - between this and Android, they have to be under enormous pressure to release a successor to Java ME, which was a good effort for its time, but is beginning to look dated and limited, even though it is very widely deployed.

I'm an open source guy at heart. I love openness and source code and the freedom to tinker... and while I'll certainly give Apple their due for making some fine products, closed and controlled is simply not for me. Others may feel differently - it's a matter of taste and preferences. So for the moment, my efforts will be focused on Android, which I see as the best, most open thing out there at the moment.

Many of you have seen the net classic If Operating Systems Were Airlines. Today, let's consider what the world might be like if version control systems were airlines...

Before anyone gets mad, this is all in fun, OK?

RCS Airlines: One of the first airlines, from way back when this whole aviation thing was new and exciting. Each RCS flight carries exactly one passenger, which RCS believes is a superior way to fly. Although most RCS airplanes are rusty and battered today, RCS Airlines still retains its historic dedication to security. Each airplane is kept locked as much as possible for safety. Occasionally flights will be delayed for hours because the pilot can't open the locked plane. When this happens, the pilot will frantically try to get the cell phone number of whoever it is that has locked the plane. When the plane finally gets unlocked, you may be tempted to ask why it was locked for so long. Veteran RCS users have learned that the answer is usually disgusting, and never ask anymore. Main competitor: CP/M airlines.

CVS Airlines: Founded on the belief that they could be more efficient than RCS by carrying multiple passengers per flight. They still carry each passenger in a separate RCS-built airplane, but the airplanes fly in a goose-like ",V" formation. Watch out for layovers, though. It can take hours to merge new passengers into the formation properly, and it might take several attempts to take off afterwards.

CVS flights often feature fights over who gets to fly. CVS piloting fights are legendary; rumor has it that OpenBSD got started after CVS airlines refused to allow a passenger to board on the grounds that he had in the past refused to stow his tray table in the upright and locked position.

CVS airlines mostly counts as customers the "over-50" crowd who grew up using CVS and don't like change. Its in-flight magazine features advertisements for balding-reversal treatments and uuencode tools.

Main competitor: AIX airlines.

Subversion Airlines: Started by some grey-haired CVS executives with long, wispy beards, Subversion airlines got started by trying to be "CVS, but better". Subversion airlines was the first major airline to use planes that seat more than one passenger. Unlike CVS airlines, all passengers on a Subversion flight travel in the same plane.

Subversion airlines is famous for its Soviet-like centralized control. All operations must be approved by the Kremlin, and you are allowed, by the grace of the Party Leader, to gaze at the massive airplanes. Those that have served the Party and Airline well for many years are allowed to enter the Great Shrine of the First-Class Comitter, and actually make changes to the airplanes themselves. Plainclothes Subversion Airlines security agents lurk on every flight, and you should not be surprised to be thrown out an airplane window if you make a joke in bad taste about the pilot's flying skills.

Subversion airlines thrives on the concept that "photocopying is cheap". You are encouraged to make photocopies of your ticket, or to photocopy your photo ID, and give copies of each to as many people as you can. At checkin time at the gate, if more than one person arrives with a copy of the same ticket, they are ushered into the "merging room" and each person is given a brick. The door is closed, something magical occurs, and the one person that emerges still able to walk is allowed to board the plane.

Main competitor: Windows airlines with no Administrators allowed.

tla airlines: Founded by one of those eccentric British noblemen, Lord Tom's airline is the utopian philosopher's airline. Chafed by the heavy-handed control of Subversion Airlines, tla airlines wants every passenger to be created equal. As you approach the gate area in the terminal, you will find many philosophers occupying the gate area, extolling the virtues of tla airlines. They compare tla airlines to reaching out and touching the heavens, leaving behind the bonds of a ground-based life, actually merging with the stars. Oh, the gorgeous beauty of it all! The things we will see!

As you see people arriving from another flight, you observe that some of them have burn marks. One of them comments that "merging with the stars doesn't work." Immediately, a dozen philosophers get in a fight with him, claiming that he simply doesn't understand what it means to merge with the stars, and that if he gets his inner being in the proper state first, he'll have a much better experience.

As you board the tla airplane, you obvserve that the jetway is a mile long. The airplane itself reminds you of something of a cross between a gothic cathedral and a level of Doom. There are spectacular archways everywhere, sometimes where they don't really belong. Each archway is supported by ornate curly braces which you don't normally see on airplanes, and frankly, you'd rather not, because they look all pointy and confuse the kids.

As you arrive as your destination terminal, you see it too is full of philosophers, most of them dining.

Main competitor: VMS airlines.

Darcs Airlines: Unlike every other airline, this one uses physicists instead of engineers to design its airplanes. One brilliant Darcs physicist has finally come up with The Theory of Everything, and as such, Darcs knows where you want to go before even you do. Darcs airlines prides itself on customer service, and asks your preference for even the tiniest details about your trip.

Each seat pocket features a copy of the Theory of Everything for your reading enjoyment, but nobody actually understands it.

Occasionally, you will find that Darcs pilots get into angry conflicts with the control tower in mid-flight. This results in the control tower revoking your permission to land. Legend has it that one Darcs pilot of a plane with exceptionally large fuel tanks actually resolved his conflict with the tower and landed two weeks after taking off. Experienced Darcs users board with several parachutes: one for themselves, and a few more for the newbies.

The Darcs physicists claim that the Theory of Everything predicted the pilots would act this way, and that all pilots eventually act this way throughout the entire universe. They toil day and night finding a way to adjust the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby reducing the anger factor of the pilots.

Main competitor: OS/2 airlines.

bzr airlines: Founded by a South African who had been injured by a curly brace on tla airlines, bzr airlines aims to be "tla done right". They have shortened the jetway, gotten rid of the curly braces, chased out the philosophers, and no longer have a vision of merging with the stars. Many that were injured on tla airlines fly bzr airlines, and out of respect for tla airlines, bzr airlines will still honor tla tickets.

bzr passengers consider themselves part of an exclusive club because each flight takes off from a launchpad. They often can be seen standing in the terminal passing out bzr literature, trying to get passengers of other airlines to fly bzr, and can't understand how other airlines continue to exist while people keep walking past their airplanes.

Main competitor: BeOS Airlines.

Bitkeeper Airlines: One of the world's faster airlines, Bitkeeper airlines occupied that obscure gate for rich people at the end of the terminal for many years. Tickets on Bitkeeper Airlines were rumored to cost thousands of dollars, and were rare and jealously guarded. Then for awhile, Bitkeeper Airlines started giving away tickets for free, though they also kept around the expensive tickets for those with discriminating tastes. Free tickets were made widely available, but the 3-point type on the back of tickets said that you were never allowed to think about another airline before, after, or during your flight, and some people claimed they actually saw the small print morphing right before their eyes.

Bitkeeper flights often featured arguments over whether people were harboring secret thoughts of other airlines. If you were caught thinking about another airline, you were expected to scream vigorously while being thrown out the escape hatch without a parachute. All of this commotion tarnished the rarified air that the rich people paid to experience, so one day it was decided that there would be a Great Purge, because obviously all free ticket holders had harbored lustful thoughts of other airlines, so they were all thrown off the airplanes simultaneously. Today, people aren't exactly sure where the Bitkeeper gate is, but everyone suspects it still lurks somewhere.

Main competitor: SCO Airlines.

Mercurial Airlines: The "there's one right way to do it" airline, Mercurial is a sterile, agile, and shiny airline. Every Mercurial airplane looks identical to every other one, shiny and clean. You could swear that all the passengers look alike too, and as you approach the gate, it seems like you too look like everyone else. Mercurial passengers tend to be a happy bunch, who can't comprehend anybody that flies Git Airlines. Specks of dirt and dust confuse the pilots, so it is best to make sure you have showered before boarding. It is rumored that, through bolting on more engines, some Mercurial airlines can fly to as many places as Git airlines can, but most Mercurial passengers are content to not worry about that.

Main competitor: Python Airlines.

Git Airlines: The "there's more than one way to do it" airline, Git flies the world's largest and fastest airplanes. Git Airlines was founded by some priests who were flying for free on Bitkeeper Airlines and survived the fall after the Great Purge. Git airplanes start as spartan, empty cabins, with no carpeting, chairs, or piloting controls. At the departure gate, each passenger is handed a bag containing 173 standard airplane components, accompanied by a 4x5" sheet of information on the theory of flight, written in 1950. Once onboard, the passengers use these components to finish out the airplane for flight: installing chairs, rudder controls, etc. Every flight results in a plane assembled in a different way, and passengers on each flight believe they are flying the world's best airplane. Arguments in the terminal after a flight are common, as passengers from different flights debate the merits of their particular design.

Despite all this, Git planes turn out to be safe, and Git passengers believe they get to their destinations in half the time it takes any other passengers, though sometimes they secretly wonder if the Mercurial flight got there faster. Occasionally, passengers on Git airlines build an airplane that appears to go into a tailspin. When that happens, they simply assemble a tool that lets them go back in time and change history so that it doesn't crash, although it is rumored that if you are a member of the public watching this happen from the ground, it will lead to seizures.

Git airlines takes special pride in the one piece that passengers don't have to assemble: the plumbing. Every Git lavatory is equipped with state-of-the-art never-fail plumbing, and the best porcelain washroom fixtures money can buy. None of these cheap plastic toilets like you get on every other airline. Here, we have fine porcelain fixtures.

During a flight, after passengers use the lavatory, they frequently get into arguments with each other about which style of porcelain toilet is the best. These arguments are only resolved by the Zen-like Git Priests, who insist that only inferior passengers need to use a toilet while in the air.

Main competition: Perl Airlines.

As many of you might not know I love steam. Steam power, specifically. Steam engines represent one of the most interesting engineering developments in history as far as I'm concerned, (closely followed by the accurate mechanical clock). Why? When I was a kid I had a computer. Each part of it was labeled and described in a manual. I knew what it was. I understood how it worked. I could build one myself if I had the time and re$ources. Nowadays? Hell no. Sure I can assemble the different components, but I can no longer visualize the whole entity, and I couldn't build one from scratch. I'm amazed at youngsters (~18 yrs old) who can understand a modern PC. Me? I do, but only barely, and that is primarily because I've watched the transition: Hercules Graphics -> CGA -> VGA -> SVGA -> & etc. Coming in cold? Right now? I'd be lost. I'm impressed (saddened? That this stuff isn't more accessible?) that people can pick up technology and understand it, without having watched the developments along the way. "Southbridge"? "Northbridge"? "APIC"? It's the same with everything. Fixing a car engine? These days? With electronics? Hell no. My (non-existant) car breaks, I'd be fucked. I can strip a simple engine. I could repair it if I had to. I could build a steam engine. I could, given a suitable template and collection of eye-glasses, build a mechanical clock. But computers? Modern Cars? Aeroplanes? More complex than a simple person like me can understand. And somehow I think that's a bad idea. It almost reminds me of the old Asimov stories where only computers could design new machines. People just didn't undestand them anymore.   So, in conclusion. I have new steam car. It works, as you can see in this adhoc video. (Randomly captured by my partner whilst I was too busy squee'ing. Excuse the quality and lack of editting. Notice too that I've removed the seats for the test drive, just to give me a safe place to pick it up without burning my fingers!) Lets hope the rise of the machines is soon, otherwise mankind will have collectively lost all knowledge of things less advanced than hot & cold electricity and the microprocessor. (As you can tell it is late and I've just had many beers and a beautiful curry. All is well! Thanks for reading!)

Last week-end, I spent 3 days with Elizabeth and our daughters in a recreation park. Basically doing nothing, just rest and enjoy time passing without a net connection...:-) I just was infortunate enough to have an ankle tendinite and therefore could only run once on a "short" distance while a great running circuit in the forest was available (23km of paths in the woods, sigh). I however had the great pleasure to re-enjoy sauna. I didn't practice it since Debconf 5 where most of the Debian crowd discovered how great are those Finns who invented this. So, we went to sauna two days in a row. Of course, that was a kinda civilized sauna: no fully naked people, no lake to jump into when exiting (but a cold water pool, though) and only 94 degrees at the very maximum (when I could pour water on the stones without looking like a freak)....but, still. That was sauna and that was great. And we also had hammam to make interesting sauna/hammam/sauna combinations. And, guess what: the ankle tendinite is not there anymore. Is sauna also good for that? Are there saunas in Mar del Plata?

JoeyH wrote a while back some thoughts on why he hates the DGT SVN repo (mainly our policy to import just the incomplete source of packages - usually just the debian/ directory).

He updated that blog entry and latter said:

Update: I realized after posting this that while the space gains on alioth might be illusory, there is certianly a space gain for people checking the whole repo out. What's really needed is a way to keep all the upstream sources in svn, but check them out only when wanted, and check out all the debian directories for cross-game work.

I was thinking, how about having a different area of the repo where the full source is present and which pulls the debian directory as an external from the current location?

I know it has the huge disadvantage that anything outside of the debian/ directory, but part of the diff, is, for sure, lost. (Still, there is also another team policy to not track anything outside debian directly, except through patches[1], except for really exceptional cases, but even then, there is a need for a strong justification).


Would that work? (I know git-svn doesn't support externals properly, yet, so there's not much gain).


[1] I know Joey, you hate those, too

I'm looking around for a way to handle a bunch of command line options, and so naturally I was drawn to the Apache Commons CLI, where I found this line:

There are currently no plans to continue the 1.x line beyond bugfixes. The 2.x design is generally preferred and is in use, however there is no current activity to make a 2.0 release. To this end, the 1.1 release is recommended to most users while the 2.x line is recommended for anyone interested in helping to get this better API released.

So: one is not being worked on because it's old, and the other isn't being worked on... for some other reason? This is, in part, what The Paradox of Choice is about. I'm sure either one would meet my needs, but the doubts cast on the whole thing by the lack of a clear and easy choice make you a bit frustrated because you have to choose between two things, neither one of which is clearly the "right" choice. This is clearly a bit irrational given that you're getting, in any case, a bunch of good code that very likely does its job, but there you go... that's why it's called "the paradox of choice".

I recently realized how nice the Packages Tracking System is for upstream developers who want to follow the status of their software in Debian. By subscribing, they can easily monitor (and reply to) bug reports, and the general status of their software in Debian. I’m trying to help with coreutils maintainance, and it’s great to see upstream developers answer directly to bug reporters on Debian. So, maintainers, tell your upstreams about the PTS! ;) It might be a good idea to actually mention that use case on obvious places (not sure what the obvious places are, though).

Like Meike already told, it was a nice event, like always. IMHO it’s based on the good balance of community and a small amount of business booth and of course the visitors.
This year we was apart the Sidux Project. Didn’t heared about (much) before, but their slogan is Hot & Spicy! Maybe ‘hot’, cause it’s based on Debian unstable. Hopefully you won’t get tears if it’s too spicy. Anyways … if you want, you could take a look. My opinion is, this would be a good case for a Custom Debian Distribution, if there would be a requirement for it. But he.. everybody is free to do, what ever he want, if nobody else is restricted.
The talks I attended was in most cases excellent, some of them was funny … only one of them did really suck. Desktop Virtualision … after the talk, my question if there could anything else virtualized then the OS from Redmond, was answered with ‘Unfortunetly only XP’ … how lovely!