can be summaryzed in one word: Ohmygodineedholidays. You guys enjoy your DebConf in Scotland.

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

gimp-plugin-registry Dear lazyweb, since a few days there s gimp-plugin-registry waiting in unstable. At the moment the package contains several tiny GIMP plugins I like to use and which are not included in the gimp package or in other gimp-* packages. In my opinion a collection like this one was missing in Debian, since there re a lot of very nice plugins/scripts out there, which are too small to package them on their own.
Which plugins would you like to see in the collection? Packaging all plugins from http://registry.gimp.org/ doesn t make sense, so I d like to know which plugins other people are using and put them into the next release of the package. Any feedback is appreciated. P.S.: As I didn t find a real alternative for my needs, I ll stay with Dokuwiki. As far as I remember is a rss feed with proper html on Andi s todo list, and there re more other nice features going to come Although somehow I still would like to rewrite Dokuwiki in python

hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic Hi, Planet!
Welcome to my blog, and thanks to Martin for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on freenode or oftc (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).

After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at work: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and UTF-8 for file names instead of ISO8859-15. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way.
In theory this is easy, as convmv happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (Apple_Filing_Protocol) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX1). Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:
Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the CAP encoding. So we had to find a way to

• convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8
• replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character

Luckily netatalk ships the uniconv(1) util2) which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID3) Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd CNID backend:

• uniconv assumes that cnid_metad is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time!
• If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your AppleVolumes.default (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished.

Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! 1) and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (UTF-8#Mac_OS_X), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms 2) it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with netatalk 3) Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac OS versions

I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic. So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale version to meet the requirements of that locale. That allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed.

monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179

Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (~sans-serif) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Though DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, another thing I’m interested in. Unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly. Ouch. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free, sigh…. My friend also writes:

sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts...

I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some core fonts instead dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic and learn from the lazyweb. :) So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale to have it’s own Webconverger i18n version. I hope this approach allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale well is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed.

monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179

Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (actually they are the same, thnks Panthera!) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Update: Mike Day informs me this is what Red Hat are doing, developing a set of fonts that are metrically equivalent to the key Microsoft fonts. DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, though unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly, as it was designed with some other proprietary font in mind. Ouch! Web designers please use ‘em’ units and this problem such as over lapping text could be avoided. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free theft, sigh…. My friend also writes:

sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts…

I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. Update: Henri Sivonen wisely points out that “in the case of DejaVu, adding glyphs to Vera as an open source project seems to work”. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some cultural core fonts for their locality instead of being dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

The Atari 130XE was my first computer. Not the first computer I used, but close. I got it around 1986, when I was in 4th grade. My dad and I bought it at some store, probably Sears. I paid part of the money for it, and he paid part. I think he planned to use it for word processing, since he also got the one piece of commercial software I ever had for it, AtariWriter Plus. We also picked up one game for it, some kind of space battle thing on a cartridge, with a special controller, and a huge, clunky trackball. That game never worked (maybe it was for some other model of Atari?), so I was stuck with playing with programming in BASIC. The Atari had a nice manual that made this very fun to learn. At some point in here, I think in the first year I had it, disaster struck. I had a cup of OJ at the computer and it fell onto the keyboard. I didn't know that you could just toss a computer in a sink and take it out and blow-dry it and it'd be fine, so I did nothing. Until keys began to not work, and others to repeat over and over. Not sure if the OJ etched the circuit board, or just gummed up the connections, but the Atari was out of operation. A bit later, I'm not sure how long, "I" wrote to someone at Atari's offices in Sunnyvale, CA, asking if I could get it fixed, and "I" sent it out there and miracuously they sent back a completely new Atari. I knew it was new, because it was much cleaner than the one I sent out. I'm not sure why I remember doing this, since it seems likely it was really my parents writing the letters and doing the shipping. I am still grateful to that unnamed person at Atari, who may have known at the time he was at the last days of the company's heyday, and sent that replacement to an already out of date and out of warantee machine. The several years after I got it back were probably my most productive on the Atari. I wrote a lot of games and other programs. Often I'd see some program on another computer, like the original Tetris, or Lode Runner on a C64, and write up my own clone on the Atari. I did a lot of semi-original stuff too. I was a pretty horrible programmer, by the way. I remember whaling at code over and over, pretty much at random, until I randomly found something that sort of worked. Well, hey, it was just BASIC.. At one point I found a book at the library about Atari game programming. It had one thing that blew me away; some weird ATASCII characters that if entered just right, in the middle of a BASIC program, would let you redefine the Atari's character set, so you could use characters for sprite based graphics. That was some precompiled assembly code, and while I used it, I had no idea how to change it, or write anything like it. By the time I learned what assembly was and started looking for an Atari Assembler, it was too late to buy one. Anyway, the key thing was that, if I didn't write the software, I didn't have any software. Especially a few years later there was no chance of even buying any, and without a modem, I wasn't tied into any BBS scene. The Atari was its own little island, with its own little colony of unique programs growing up without fear of competition. That, and the lack of an assembler to get really low-level (though I did plenty of PEEKs and POKEs), defined my early programming time, and have probably defined where I went and what I did since. I remember when this ended. My dad got a second computer, a 286 laptop, and I started getting ahold of programs from friends at school and putting them on it. At one point I got ahold of Battle Chess, and I realized that here was a game that I couldn't hope to replicate myself on the Atari. For the first time I compared my attempts on the Atari to the wider world, and found them wanting. The last program I wrote for the Atari was in 1992, when I lent it to Mary Calhoun to use as a display in the waiting room of her office and wrote a program to handle that. This is also the only program that has my name on it, and even a copyright notice. By then I had moved on and was clearly trying to do programs that were more like the stuff I was seeing on the PC.

Thomas grumbles about websites with password policies, that make it impossible for you to use your 'standard' password which you use for other sites. I cannot agree with him more. I have memorized a number of multi-character random passwords (generated with 'pwgen -s'), but these cannot be used on such sites; sometimes they require me to use a character that just doesn't happen to be in the password, or sometimes they're "too long", or whatever. The worst of them all is sites which require you to change your password every so often, as I've ranted of before; after all, making people change their password too often makes it harder for them to choose a hard-to-guess password; after all, hard-to-guess passwords are often also hard-to-remember passwords, and nobody likes to memorize something useless every two months In all, I decided not to use my secure passwords on such sites anymore. Not only do their policies usually suck, they also often have dodgy "security questions" which are easy to guess by anyone familiar with yourself. On top of that, there's usually nothing to make me believe their password database is actually secure. Except, of course, if they have OpenID. Because then it's actually my own server where the password is verified. Whoo.

Even though Iceweasel has been a reality since November, it seems that there is still some backlash about the rename. Thanks very much to Andrew for jumping to my defense (and also for organizing dinner the last time I was in Mountain View, it was a fun evening). Nothing he said was fundamentally incorrect, but it doesn't paint the full picture.

Once upon a time (somewhere around Firefox 0.9) we happily shipped the fox hugging the globe icon. Then it was pointed out the copyright license on that piece of artwork wasn't DFSG free (and probably wouldn't be free under any reasonable free software or even open content license), so we removed it and used the plain globe icon they shipped in the tarball instead. Eventually the Mozilla Foundation asked us to remove mozilla- from the package name (it was mozilla-firefox at the time) which we did, and the issue of the icon and trademark came up. After explaining why we couldn't ship the icon they gave us permission to continue to use the name. They said they would periodically check up to make sure we weren't shipping crap that would harm the brand. This seemed a fairly good compromise and we accepted.

This situation persisted for a year or so, in both Debian and Ubuntu, but then the Mozilla Corporation (who was now in possession of the trademarks) insisted we couldn't use the name without the non-free logo. They also wanted to approve any changes made before they were uploaded. They are certainly within their rights to do this, but to hear Mr. Fowler tell it we were on a crusade to purge the name from the distro. We were not, we were content with the status quo. I also must take exception with Mr. Fowler stating: "They've persisted, despite the best efforts of the Mozilla project team to engage with the Debian packagers to resolve the situation." I think from the discussion we were trying our best to reach some sort of compromise and the Mozilla side seemed firmly entrenched in their position, not offering us a lot of alternatives. The non-free nature of the logo and the unprecedented "control-freak" review process didn't leave us with a lot of alternatives.

Ubuntu does ship the officially branded version of the Firefox, but they have a weaker set of freedom guidelines than Debian. Whether you think that is good or bad is personal choice, but one of the reasons I like Debian so much is its commitment to free software, even if that means not everything is as easy or expedient as one would like.

With respect to the new name and icon, this is again a matter of personal taste. I do tend to think "Iceweasel" doesn't have that much sex appeal but it was a popular choice and had the benefit of having already been used to refer to a potential name fork of Firefox. And BTW this is really only a name fork, the amount of changes we've actually put in to the tree (beyond renaming ones) are minimal. In fact the last time it was checked, our patches were a strict subset of the patches Ubuntu uses in their Firefox package. So Iceweasel is in fact functionally identical to Firefox with what I like to think are some minor improvements from upstream.

As to your other points, I will admit to being poorly-socialized, but I think most who have met me wouldn't call me self-obsessed, egotistical or a moron.

I think Debian is developing a bit of a bias against it where we're assumed to be a bunch of crazy Free software nuts, and the presumption is anytime we act against the grain we're the ones being unreasonable despite any evidence to the contrary. I don't know how we can fight this perception, but I think we should.

Yesterday, I read a Ben Maurer post about reCAPTCHA. It is a free CAPTCHA system but with a hidden feature: you will be used to decipher words that were not correctly recognized by OCR software in text from digitized books, that will be made accesible in an electronic form. Currently, they helping Internet Archive. The idea is to present a couple of words, distorted as usual in CAPTCHAs, once of them yet correctly recognized by OCR software and the other unrecongnized. The CAPTCHA will be resolved in the known one is entered correctly while the unknown one is guessed to be the word entered. To be sure about what has been entered, the unrecognized word will be presented to more users. A nice idea

When Mika gave me a haircut a couple days ago, I was a little concerned she might give me a bad haircut. I realized I was worried because bad haircuts have become cool and I was afraid of looking hip.

Incredible day here in Montreal. The temperature got over 31C today -- about 88 F -- which made for a steamy, jungly day. Remember how I said we had predictions of snow flurries two weeks ago? Things change quickly. Of course, hot weather and high humidity are a recipe for smog. Add on top of that the fact that Montreal is in the middle of a public transit strike, and you've got a serious air quality problem. Fortunately we should have some rain this weekend to shake that out. tags: weather montreal hot smog

EC2 I spent a big part of my day twiddling around getting a nice Ubuntu server running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon's EC2 is an innovative server-provisioning API; beta testers for EC2 can build or tear down servers for any purpose in a few minutes using EC2 and Amazon S3. I wrote a few years ago, in a widely-reproduced email, a reply making fun of Jeff Bezos and Amazon's supposed innovations. But let me be frank: Amazon Web Services are a shithouse crazy idea. I think that Jeff Bezos must have been a complete nutjob to bet the company on these zany technologies; I also think it's brilliant, and it's going to change the way we think about using computers. I included EC2 in Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. I think that decision was really justified. My EC2 instances now run Ubuntu Feisty Fawn; lighty, MySQL and PHP. It seems to be a winning combination; I'm looking forward to using EC2 for a production Web or database server. tags: ec2 amazonwebservices amazon jeffbezos oneeyedman

rel-edit I mentioned already the great work that AboutUs.org is doing to organize a Universal Wiki Edit Button. I decided to kick in on the machine-readable side and proposed a rel-edit microformat. So far the microformats-discuss mailing list has been pretty positive on the idea, but I'm going to wait a few days before posting a draft on the microformats wiki. tags: rel-edit microformats uweb mailinglist microformats-discuss

Salt I just finished reading Salt: A World History, a nice non-fiction book by researcher extraordinaire Mark Kurlansky. The book covers this important mineral, its importance to human life, and the many ways to extract it to make it available for us. The book covers mummification in ancient Egypt, salt taxes in China, fish sauce in Vietnam, and Mahatma Gandhi's great salt march in India. It's so comprehensive that it can really make your head spin; but it's also exciting to see world history refracted through these whitish crystals. I think it's a great book, and I'm looking forward to reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by the same author. But we just got Everything is Miscellaneous from Amazon this week, so I think I'll be digging through that before I get to Cod. tags: salt markkurlansky nonfiction nacl cod

reCAPTCHA I heard about recaptcha via Hugh's article about same. Brilliant idea; why didn't someone think of this before? (Update: it was about 5 minutes after I posted this that I realized, "Hey! That can't work!" So I went back and re-read the docs on reCAPTCHA again. Now I'm even more impressed.) tags: recaptcha ingenious ocr

I want to ride my I've been thinking of picking up a bicycle for a few weeks now, as the weather has cleared here in town. So today I went up to Garantie Bicycle on rue Marie-Anne and bought the cheapest damn bike they had that wasn't made specifically for pre-pubescent children. Woohoo! The last time I had I bike, I lived in San Francisco. It was a beautiful cherry-red Cannondale hybrid -- with that great fat Cannondale tube, but light enough that I could lift it with one finger. I rode it around SF a lot, and took it out for trail biking on weekends in Marin County and the Peninsula and even the Sierra Nevada. It was a tough bike to ride, but once you got used to it it was a dream to take up hills. But that bike was stolen at Burning Man 2001, during the actual Burn. It's a classic mistake: professional bike thieves go to Burning Man each year to snag bikes left unlocked by tired and idealistic Burners, especially at times when camps are left empty, like during the Burn. To be honest, it was kind of a relief: I'd already moved out of my apartment and was planning a trip around North America, and I didn't have room in my Citro n DS for a bike. Nor in my storage locker at the weird and wonderful Sunshine Storage in Oakland. But it was too nice a bike to throw away or give to one of my no-good friends, who were mostly too short for it anyways. So bicycle theft was the best solution. Sam Phillips had his bike stolen at the same time. The bike thieves left a lot of cheapo bikes around our camp. They liked mine and Sam's, though. Anyways, my new bike was quite inexpensive, and it weighs a metric ton. It's built like you're supposed to drive trains over it. I could never, ever carry it up a steep and muddy hill, and I wouldn't bother. Fortunately for me Montreal is really, really flat, so I don't really need to worry about riding this thing up hills. It will look pretty good with a baby seat on the back, though. tags: montreal garantiebicycle burningman bicycle theft samphillips sunshinestorage oakland cannondale

$ 5000 medical bill (that insurance won’t pay for)
$ 450 water bill in Puerto Rico
$ 150 library fine for one lost book that normally costs under 20 dollars Anxiety and rage from dealing with these ludicrous bills: priceless. Ok seriously I am now dealing with these three things and it has been really really really unpleasant. I sometimes wonder if I was once a bad as* Roman tax collector by the name of Biella Plebius and now, reincarnated as Biella Coleman, I am suffering the karmic consequences of extorting people in the 3rd century A.D. Other times I take a lighter approach to all of this and console myself that if nothing else, I am learning a lot. For example, as I had mentioned awhile back, Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon of New Jersey is stalling and denying health insurance bills for my mole surgery. Because I had a pre-existing clause in my contract, they are trying to squirrel out of it. However, since I never had a pre-existing issue with moles, I am pretty sure they are required to pony up the cash but getting them to do this has been a Herculean, no Sisyphean task. Since it was clear they were not going to pay if I alone was applying pressure, I was about to file a claim in Special Civil court (the bill is too high for small claims court) but I wanted to see if I had any other options. So hours and hours after diligent web research, I finally found on lawyers.com that I can file a complaint against my health insurance via the Department of Banking and Insurance. I am amazed that NO ONE in the doctor’s office, including those whose only job is to deal with health insurance, had a clue about this option. And even when you go to the Dept of Insurance website it is not totally obvious that you can file a complaint (it is under the “file for assistance” category). But once I got in touch with them, they have been incredibly helpful. Now, my detailed complaint letter is with them, and some other documentation and apparently they have an investigator on the case. I am not sure if this route will be enough pressure to get the job done but at least by the time this is over, I will be in the greater NY area so that I can move to the court option. The take away lesson here is that if you are having any trouble with claims and health insurance, do do do do file a complaint with your state Department of Banking and Insurance. This is a great first option to use.

* I tried to get “tag cloud” of my blog, it works! Kartik Mistry@localized-gujarati-geek!:/# cloud

about after again all almost also amazing another any are around article back bad before better blog book books both brother build bus but came can can’t cds com come coming cool day days debian did don’t done due during end etch even festival file finally firefox first foss found free from fun gave get gnome gnu gnunify going good got great gujarati had happy has have help here his home hope how http iiimf india install installer irc its just kde know l10n language last late like linux list live long look looking lots made make many may meet met mom mono more movie mozilla much mumbai near need net new news next nice night nirav not now office old one only openoffice org other our out package packages palanpur people place post problem python read really released right rinit sat saturday see session should since site some soon start started still stuffs sunday system take talk talked team thanks there they thing things till time today too took tried two ubuntu use user using utkarsh very waiting was way week well went were what when where which while who will work working works write www year yesterday yet

Eh!

Dear layweb, I know that somebody from the kernel team (iirc) posted an article/mail about how to make a customized version of the Debian linux-image package, but I can't find it anymore.

For short, I want to produce a slightly modified linux-image-2.6.18-4-amd64 package. Which is the right source I want?

Is

apt-get source linux-image-2.6.18-4-amd64

what I want or is it

apt-get install linux-source-2.6.18
?

I am confused. Help would be appreciated.

Eddy has been exposing some of the long standing feature requests for Mozilla. They have a huge record or such requests. My favourites:

• needsterminal flag in /etc/mailcap not supported, 5 years old,
• Support for $http_proxy environment variable, 6 years old,
• -width and -height options ignored, almost 7 years old,
• Reply-to-List feature in mailer, almost 7 years old,
• Support for the <ruby/> xhtml element, 7 years old,
• Inheritance of alignment attributes in table columns, almost 9 years old

And these requests are only a small subset… On the other hand, I’m amazed the 1.8.1 branch (the one for Firefox 2.0) is ABI compatible with 1.8.0 (Firefox 1.5). I’m currently running epiphany with a pre-release of libxul 1.8.1.3 (coming soon in sid), and it works flawlessly (so far), without rebuilding epiphany.
I must say I’m impressed, especially when I look back at how 1.7.x releases were.

Bernd Zeimetz wanted to play Lotto using the famous crypto key that was used a processing key for most HD-DVDs so far. But he ran into the problem that the key (which is usually represented in hex) uses 256 numbers, lotto only has 1-49.Well, remember that in fact the key is a single number. So why process it as hex digits which is very artificial?

def lotto(x, y):
  if x = 0: return y
  return lotto(x / 49, [int(x%49+1)] + y)

lotto(0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0, []) Here's your list of lotto numbers:

[43, 25, 5, 27, 12, 13, 44, 45, 1, 6, 10, 1, 20, 30, 2, 44, 5, 20, 18, 11, 6, 34]

Base 49 representation (lower digits last, shifted by 1) of the key. If you need more digits, add leading 1s. (which is the same as adding leading zeros to a decimal number).

At my Institute, we get the El Financiero newspaper - I like it quite a bit. It's very well balanced, with opinions from all of the political and economical points of view. Of course, it has huge business and market sections which I don't usually even care on looking at, as I won't understand much anyway. Those sections usually include advertisements for potential courses and businesses.
Today, Nadezhda showed me an ad that's just beautiful - It shows off the level of commitment and seriousness a company has. It is so beautiful that it deserves me copying it in Spanish and translating it for your further enjoyment. Of course, if somebody stumbles upon this advertisement at my personal blog - I don't know them, they might just be serious but clueless :)

GRUPO DE ASESORES PROFESIONALES
CONVOCA
A acad micos, investigadores, intelectuales, economistas y expertos en reformas estructurales para el an lisis de las siguientes:

• Econom a y finanzas
• Educaci n y empleo
• Seguridad y desarrollo social
• Pol tica y Energ a
• Reforma del estado

Para integrarse a un equipo serio y propositivo de Profesionales en estas reas que brinde asesor a puntual sobre las antes descritas.
REQUISITOS: Titulados con Maestr a y/o Doctorado. Contar con publicaciones especializadas.
Interesados enviar CV al correo electr nico:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

And now, for your further amusement, in my hastily translated English, as faithfully as I can do it.

GROUP OF PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS
INVITES
Academics, researchers, intelectuals, economists and structural reform experts for the analysis of the following areas:

• Economics and finances
• Education and employment
• Social security and development
• Politics and Energy
• State reform

To join a serious and propositive team of Professionals in the above areas that gives punctual advice regarding the aforementioned.
REQUIREMENTS: Holders of a title, with M.Sc. or Ph.D. studies. Having specialized publications.
Interested people, send your CV by email to:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

Yes, several of the redaction mistakes are in the original text (and several more were introduced due to my English translation, of course).
Anyway... Would you believe in the seriousness of a professional-looking group of economists, paying around US$2000 for 1/4 page in one of the leading Mexican newspapers? By the way, their offices are located at one of Mexico City's most exclusive, expensive areas. But... For $ deity 's sake... COME ON! Please tell juan_zzz to get a decent-looking mail and domain! Having their main contact addresses at two free mail providers, Starmedia and Yahoo, does no service at all to their professional image! How can people still not pay even a bit of attention to those basic details?

The first lesson was about wrong assumptions that people do when it comes to i18n. This article is mostly targeted at developers which want to support i18n properly, in particular, plural forms.

This is my second n?getetxt lesson.
This is about making your update-po target to include all the strings you want localized in the pot file.

Probably, at some point you, as a developer have written something like:

print("You won %d point%s", points, points>1?"s":"" ) ;


Well, is nice and dandy that you want to make the proper choice of words when you have more than one point. I appreciate that, but you are doing it wrong. There is a tool for that, as I explained before.

Now, lesson 2.

You have understood what you have to do, but you just hate typing ngettext/gettext all over the place, so you probably defined something like:

#define _(X) gettext(X)
#define _n(sg,pl,n) getext(sg,pl,num)

So now you can write trhis piece of code:

print(_n("You won %d point", "You won %d points", points), points ) ;

The problem: how to convince xgettext to add those strings to the pot file?

Nothing simpler... just add _n as an additional keyword when invoking xgettext... but you have to specify that this is a definition for ngetetxt, so, you will end up having in your update-po target something like this:

xgettext ../src/*.c --keyword=_ --keyword=_n:1,2


TADA!