Friday - The Party Good food. Good times. (Though, I have to admit it was considerably more interesting when it got dark and the torches were lit and we tried to avoid melting the beach ball.) Helpfully labelled drinks. Saturday - The Graduation Good music. Good speeches. (<plug> yes, this is me </plug>) Saturday - After We Are Graduated In which I pose with the superintendant. In which I pose with my brother outside in the blinding sunshine and blazing heat, while thinking about the cool water that happens to be behind us. In which I pose with my parents and brother in a moderately more forgiving environment at home. In which I pose with my brother and grandparents, who could probably stand in for an alternate Matrix cast, and kick your [posterior]. At least in this picture. In which my cousin Mark discovers that my stole is kinda fun. In which a good friend of mine gives me a freaking awesome shirt. I will now proceed to summarily disappear off the face of the ‘net from sometime tomorrow until late Monday or so, in which I Move To Cambridge.

Several people's blogs have appeared recently in the planet with the different points of view on the different candidates and various rants regarding the DPL office - Well... This time I have not yet been able even to read the platforms of the different candidates (of course, I plan on doing it quite soon), but I follow the posts on the subject with interest. The most interesting post so far is Martin Michlmayr's - Of course, being an ex-DPL, there are important experiences he has that few people do.
A couple of days ago I was talking with one of the candidates with whom I have talked and worked in the past. My main gripe with the whole process is that, although as a project we need a leader, an easily identifiable single contact person who knows the teams, knows the people and can speak on the project's behalf, I have not seen much being done by the past DPLs towards the inside of the project. Of course, it's easy to bitch around when I sit in the comfortable silent majority most of the time - Currently I am devoting quite less time and effort to Debian than what I should, although it is true that setting up Debconf6 in Oaxtepec takes a _lot_ of time and that it will facilitate much more interaction between Debian people (which is good for the project) than me working more and better on my packages and on doing interesting team work.
Maybe something that would make me to vote for somebody, more than the most coherent and best written platforms, is for the candidate to admit the lack of importance of the role to most of the project - or to defend how to make it again a leadership position.
Following Martin's post, maybe we do need a Bruce-like leader who tells us what to do and drives the project. Or maybe not, maybe we could do better with reducing the importance of the post towards the inside and emphasizing it's mostly a confidence vote for somebody to speak on behalf of us all. And even this would be difficult, as a sad flame in debian-private some months ago reminds us that nobody can speak on behalf os the whole project because somebody might be offended by the viewpoint taken by the official?
I am no big believer in democracies. I do think that sticking to much to a democratic constitution (where democracies are very scarce in the Free Software world, where projects tend to have benevolent dictators grown by meritocracy instead of democratically elected) and allowing everybody to voice too much the same opinion in our regular flamewars has lead Debian to the communications swamp it is right now. We do have very effective small teams (quoting Andreas Schuldei' term for the phenomenon that seems to work best and appear naturally in our project), integration between teams is quite good... But having 1000+ people sitting in a big room and shouting at each other is plainly not fun. Maybe we should stop pretending that there is no cabal (forgod'ssake...) and admit that there is and it works, and we (the drones) implement Their decisions? Nah... That sounds it would only create more flamewars.
But seriously: Towards the inside, do we need a leader? Have we ever used it?

Over one month ago, I truly hoped an evasive network misbehavior issue was solved. In the institute, we had a strange situation which caused a (seemingly random) stack of switches to go out to lunch and leave one of the floors without network access until it decided to restore itself (usually power-cycling it was not enough). The equipment, ten 4200 SuperStack switches, is new, we got it ~September, so I expected 3Com to give me at least some support on the issue. The behavior was apparently random, and I could not track it down, only (thanks to the very nice Cacti) prove it existed.
December 5 was terrible. The whole building's network refused to work. Switches were able to reply to my pings for no more than a minute after booting before they got flooded with "Spanning Tree CTRL MAC PAUSE: Quanta 65535" (according to another great tool, the Ethereal protocol analyzer).
I had been bugging the support people at 3Com for at least three weeks before this incident, they kept promising they would come soon to help us track the cause of the ellusive problem - We threatened to send the switches back and pursue reimbursement through whatever means we could (we had much better stability and performance with our old 10Mbps hubs, so my boss insisted on replacing them), so we got them to come. The answer they gave me? Upgrade your firmware to version 2.50 (not available at their website, of course) and disable spanning tree functionality at the switches.
I have to admit the big problem immediately ceased. This is not to say I was pleased with the response time or with the switches' software quality, but at least we could work.
Happily, ~7 weeks passed by with no major outages (although with a few small ones).
Yesterday, we got back the complete chaotic conditions. This time, though, I was able to get a good and useful tcpdump snapshot, passed it through Ethereal, and actually got something interesting (available to whoever requests it to me if it sounds interesting). In short: Something happens that confuses a switch (I guess it's a faulty NIC), and makes it request to all of the neighbouring switches (via spanning tree protocol - Yes, it's disabled, but still) for their complete ARP tables. But somehow, this noise or whatever keeps confusing it, so the spanning tree requests start repeating every two seconds for slightly over one minute. Then, the same switch which requested this information gets tired of too many ARP tables being thrown at it, and sends out a storm of packets (one each 0.04 seconds) asking every other switch _not_ to send updates anymore. This is broadcasted to all of each of the switches' ports, and the network dies.
My grudge against 3Com is: How come this frigging noise (at least that's what I assume it to be) on one of the ports kill all of the network? If a switch is supposed to be smart, would it be too much for it just to disable the misbehaving port?
Anyway... One and a half days went down the drain trying to find the cause for the problem, sending the report to the 3Com guy (who is very nice in person, yes, but that's by far not enough!), running up and down the stairs to reset different switches, lock down on the source of distress... And as my 3Com contact was busy with another client (who presumably had not yet given them money), I never got a call back from them.
All my good intentions to spend a nice quiet time coding for three projects we currently need to have ready soon (one of them is in production and many of you have used, my dear Comas conference management system, but requires heavy tinkering to be able to extend it) were stuck at that: Good intentions.
I seem to have locked down the problem in one of three computers (that is, network seems stable again once I disconnected them). I insist it must be a faulty NIC. My boss bets it's an ber-contaminated Windows machine. My boss' boss insists we should get the switches double-grounded just to be sure that's not the reason for failure. I am tired, bad mooded, and -again- bored you to death with a too-long blog entry.
Blame it all on 3Com.

I switched to modularized X last night and it went quite well. Thanks to whole X team for their tremendous work on it. I had only two problems. First one was not-working my beloved font for xterm (xfonts-terminus), but that's effect of some changes in paths. Second one is still not-solved... xev stopped printing symbol names for multimedia keys of my keyboard and installing xkb-data as I was told on #debian-devel didn't help to fix that. I suppose because of that my fvwm behaves strange and I'm not sure whether fvwm have to be fixed or the problem is new X. Update: As usual fix was trivial. I chose wrong keyboard layout.

As soon as summer hits, my muse takes an extended vacation and I only write sparingly and occasionally (and somewhat painfully without the muse). But as soon as I read and heard from a number of places, notably Savage Minds that the American Anthropological Association is lobbying against open access, I decided to work against my disinclination to write to say a few words. Rex at Savage Minds, as well as others have already covered thoroughly and thoughtfully, the basic issues as well as why it is incredibly problematic for the AAA not to endorse what is an otherwise powerful and positive Federal initiative that would require final mauscripts based on federally funded research to be accessible to the public after 6 months. So I wont be redundant here and will keep this short, but I would like to say that in an era in which government roll-backs (and in nearly every quarter of life) are simply commonplace and causing a fair deal of social problems, any initiative in which there is a push to make scholarship, *based on federal funds*, public and accessible, seems imperative to support, not squash. Many anthropologists, as probably many scholars, I imagine,like to think that some of their work has some public import and as such, we should do everything possible to make the work as accessible as possible, which will also give access to the communities and people we work with. They mention the supposed threat open access will have to peer review. First I don’t think that arguement stands up and more important, if peer review is simply a self-referential exercise, in which it can’t happen in a context of openness and accessiblity, what good is peer review?? Given the recent AnthrSource Initiative, as well as the general open/populist/ liberal/downright radical political inclinations among anthropologists, and the fact that the discipline in the last 25 years has been somewhat obsessed with the question of ethics, I was quite shocked at this move. But apparently (and thankfully) there were very few people at the AAAs behind the decision, which is somewhat comforting. What I hope now ensues is the formation and expression of a very strong response among the members of the AAA asking for a response from our elected board and an eventual rethinking of this stance.

As this blog has become one of the top sources of information on the Webloyalty scam, I’m reporting this news about Webloyalty and Marketworks, a third party eCommerce site that supports high volume eBay sellers. Marketworks is apparently throwing the switch to make a Webloyalty subscription the default for the thousands of eBay sellers that use its services:

Over the past two years our users have experienced tremendous success incorporating WebLoyalty in their checkout. For those of you unfamiliar with WebLoyalty, it’s a special rewards program offered by Marketworks that benefits merchants with cash and repeat shopping. Given the success our participating Sellers have experienced, effective June 21, 2006, WebLoyalty will be enabled as a default setting in all US-based users’ StoreFront/Checkout profiles. We’ve updated our Terms & Conditions to reflect this setting (effective June 21, 2006 for existing users). If at any time you wish to discontinue your participation, simply indicate your participation preference by clicking the appropriate radio button on the WebLoyalty settings of your StoreFront/Checkout profile. Note that at this time WebLoyalty is only available to US sellers and buyers. Learn more about WebLoyalty. The Marketworks Team

So now not only will there be millions of Webloyalty subscribers who aren’t even aware they are paying for this useless service, there will also be thousands of eBay sellers who aren’t even aware that they are signing their customers up for this useless service. I understand that a number of Marketworks sellers who actually know this is going on are upset, but the majority of users don’t read the forums where this is being discussed. (Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with Marketworks myself.) To be fair, I should mention that a Webloyalty executive (the “lead Consumer Affairs representative” — Mary O’Reilly) has apparently posted to my blog in defense of the company. The following comment appears about 1,000 comments down on my main Webloyalty entry, and is in response to this entry mentioning inflammatory comments posted by other Webloyalty employees calling Webloyalty customers ‘suckers’:

As lead Consumer Affairs representative for Reservation Rewards, I apologize on behalf of WLI Reservation Rewards for the inappropriate and offensive comments posted by the person identifyingthemselves as “WLI Customer Service Representative”. Our company does not condone or tolerate this type of unprofessional behavior and providing consumers with the highest level of customer service is of utmost importance to us. If we can confirm that the comments were actually posted by one of our customer service representatives, appropriate action will be taken with that employee. As a company, Reservation Rewards takes consumer comments very seriously. We have hundredsof thousands of satisfied customers and we consistently strive to provide our customers with first class membership programs and customer service. In the past, our approach has been to deal with consumer concerns on an individual basis rather than in a public forum. To fully address a consumer’s concerns we need some specific information (e.g. the consumer’s full name or email address) so that the consumer’s record can be accessed. Once the consumer’s record is accessed, we can identify exactly how, when and where the membership offer was accepted and also cancel the membership if that is what the consumer wants. However, it troubles us to see the concern that some consumers have expressed on this blog with regard to Reservation Rewards. At this time, wewant to make an open and sincere attempt in this public forum to clear up the misunderstandings that are generating the concerns. We thought the following Question & Answer type format might be the clearest way to share information and address the primary areas of concern expressed on this blog: 1. How Is The Reservation Offer Presented To Consumers? How Did I Get Signed Up For This? We try to make our offer as clear as possible so that consumers can make an educated decision on the offer. Over the years, we’ve incorporated a number of client and consumer suggestions to clarify the offer even further. Consumers are presented with the ReservationRewards offer when completing a transaction at one of our client’s websites. It’s not a check box that you have to unclick to reject the offer. Instead, the consumer is presented with a full offer page (separate from the client’s transaction page) and is required to take 3 actions to accept the offer and authorize the data pass of personal information. In addition to entering their email address twice, a consumer must also click on a ‘YES’ button to accept the offer. The offerpage includes all the Offer Details, clear mention of the monthly charges, a description of the membership benefits and instructions on how to redeem the Cash Back award. 2. How Does Reservation Rewards Get Consumer Credit Card Numbers? Please be assured that our clients aren’t passing credit card information to us without the consumer’s authorization. The security of your credit card information is of utmost importance to each of our clients. They would never provide a consumer’s credit card information without proper authorization. The security of your credit card number is also important to Reservation Rewards and we require consumers to provide us with authorization. In order to accept the Reservation Rewards membership, we requirethe consumer to provide us with their email address twice to make them pause and take the time to read and understand the offer. Immediately next to the boxes where a consumer is required to enter their email address is the statement: ‘By entering my email address as my electronic signature and clicking YES, I have read and agree to the Offer and Billing Details and authorize to securely transfer my name address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing.’ If a consumer just clicks on the ‘YES’ button without entering their email twice, the membership is not accepted. If a consumer does not want to accept the offer, there is a ‘No Thanks’ option right under the ‘YES’ button. 3. Reservation Rewards customer service said they sent me multiple emails about the membership before billing. What emails? I never got any. Once a consumer accepts the membership we make a significant effort to make the consumer aware of the membership and send multiple communications to the consumer before the first membership billing occurs. We use sophisticated monitoring tools to track the deliverability of these emails and our records show a very high delivery rate. We actuallyhave these records audited by a third party to ensure we are consistent in sending them to consumers.We also work with two outside companies to assist us in maximizing our high delivery rate. If an email bounces back as undeliverable, we send the consumer a letter via U.S. postal mail. However, we do understand in this day and age of spam, some of our email communications maybe filtered out and not read by some consumers. So, in addition to the email communications, each member is also presented with a membership acknowledgement page immediately upon acceptance of the membership. Our intent with this acknowledgement page is to make the consumer immediately aware theyaccepted the membership and to give them an opportunity to cancel it if that is what they want. We have hundreds of thousands of members that happily use the Reservation Rewards benefits and we don’t want people to be in the membership that they didn’t intend to join. 4. Why didn’t I get my Cash Back Award or access to membership benefits? I don’t believe there really is a Cash Back Award or Membership Benefits. We apologize if some consumers find it unclear how they can redeem their Cash Back Award or take advantage of the membership benefits. We have many members taking full advantage of the membership benefits and redemption of their Cash Back Awards. We encourage members to redeem their Cash Back Award and use the membership benefits by immediately presenting them with the membership acknowledgement page. In addition to instructions on how to redeem their Cash Back Award, the membership acknowledgement page also includes a password to log into the Reservation Rewards website. We also send each customer an email 13 days after accepting the membership that reminds them to redeem their Cash Back Award. We encourage you to go to www.reservationrewards.com to review the array of membership benefits. We think you’ll find that we partner with many top names in leisure, dining and theme parks to provide our members with significant discounts. At the lower left-hand corner of the home page you can review positive comments from Reservation Rewards members who regularly use the benefits. When a misunderstanding occurs, we’re more than willing to cancel the membership and provide a refund. Wecan assure you that our customer service representatives are all trained to respond to consumers in afriendly and accommodating manner. When you contact our customer service department to cancel a membership, you won’t be faced with a rep trying to convince you to keep the membership ’ our reps aren’t allowed to do that. The rep will just need some basic information from you such as your email address, full name and/or zip code to access your record and immediately accommodate your request. Once your membership is cancelled, you can be assured that we will not bill your credit card again. We value consumer comments whether positive or negative. They help us consider ways we can further improve the communication and value of the Reservation Rewards offer to consumers and they also gives us the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings. If anyone would like us to provide more specific information on the actual offer that was presented specifically to you, just send your full name and email address directly to consumeraffairs@webloyalty.com. We’ll be happy to assist you and address any further concerns you have. Sincerely,
Mary O’Reilly
Consumer Affairs
Reservation Rewards

I don’t know whether or not the above description is currently true, but it is certainly entirely inconsistent with my experience. I did not enter my email address once — or twice — to “confirm” my subscription. My server logs from that time period showed that no confirmation emails were ever sent by Webloyalty (regardless of whether they might be caught by a spam filter), and the customer service representative I spoke with did try to keep me to keep my membership (and moreover was exceedingly rude). Hopefully my experience with the company is no longer true, but based on the comments on my blog that’s not the case. Webloyalty seems to have found a novel and profitable solution to the opt-in vs. opt-out tradeoff — don’t give the customer any option at all!

Blog commenter James pointed out to me that the esteemed Mark Pilgrim has recently moved back to Linux for his desktop OS as well. Since Mark’s blog post doesn’t have to be conformed to fit conventions of a major technical publishing site, the style is more conversational. His take on the faux openness of the Mac platform is insightful. My favorite two paragraphs from the entry are the following:

I would like to point out that it is entirely Apple s choice that their operating system does not run on my new Lenovo ThinkCentre. I m not saying it was a bad business decision they are a hardware company, after all but it is particularly galling to realize that if I bought a new Mac, I would be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform. I realize that most people don t look at it that way, but there it is.

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was free enough to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn t beautiful anymore. I ve worked around it or ignored it for a long time, but eventually the bough breaks.

Spot on, Mark. I still kick myself for thinking it perfectly normal at one time to have to own a PCMCIA network card just to be able to use WLAN with my Aluminum PowerBooks equipped with “Airport Extreme”. Deciding to “switch back” was almost like realizing I was in this relationship with someone who was taking without giving back, and using manipulative schemes to win my allegiance. Oh yeah, and more Mac zealot whinging in the comments, apparently enough for Mark to have turned off comments on that post.

This is an old bug, but an amusing kuro5hin article pointed it out to me: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119185.
Back in the days of Redhat 8 and 9, I had to deal w/ many corrupt rpm databases. Never again. The behavior displayed by Jeff in that bug report makes me pleased that Debian has the formal means (the ctte) to deal w/ such issues (that is, maintainers acting like autistic cunts).

I thought I knew most of what was wrong with rpm, but this bug has opened my eyes to whole new levels of evil. (It's also a textbook example of exactly how not to respond to bug reports.) Description of why using rpm to upgrade a package with /usr mounted read-only can cause the package to silently be removed from the rpm database:

RPM uses a "best effort" algorithm when doing upgrades. What actually happened here is that the previous versions were removed as part of the upgrade process, and the newer versions were installed. At least as much as possible. :-) As many files as could be removed from the old install were, and that install was removed from the RPM DB. As much of the new stuff as could be installed was, but the install of some items failed, so the new packages were not added to the RPM DB.

dpkg's behavior in the equivilant situation is to complain as soon as it can't write to a file, and roll back the package state to the previous version.

After getting back from DebConf and the 1-week trip afterwards, it took me a full week to get out of most of the chaos travelling usually leaves behind. I still haven't unpacked all stuff from the suitcase, but at least managed to wash the dirty clothes. Oh, and I've signed all keys from the KSP - including madduck's, he showed me his proper German ID card when I asked what this funny Transnational Republic was. (Oh, and if you were listed at the KSP, didn't show up, but I've signed your key anyway, that's because we met before and you have a new UID, in case you are wondering.) The pictures I took are still scatered over several home dirs on different hosts, I'll try to sort/rotate/rename them over the next days. (Oh, and DebConf was great, the trip afterwards likewise - I'll try to write a separate blog post on that later...) At the moment I'm slowly starting to get into frontdesk work. I have some notes from Neil's and Enrico's AM BoF and the discussion BoF round around my "NM process future" proposal that I still have to write down once I'm finished with answering my own NMs' mails. Both BoFs went pretty well, the major outcome being that we should discuss much more among AMs on -newmaint and IRC, have older AM reports available for reference by other AMs, and have some sort of "AM report template" that lists the points the DAMs want to see in the report. About the propsal, my feeling is that we shouldn't implement any major NM changes (like the DM idea) until we really understand what the problem with the current process is. (It takes too long, but that can be fixed by throwing out the not-ready applicants more aggressively.) Thanks to all the people who provided very valuable feedback during the BoFs and in the private conversations afterwards. So far, I've assigned a few applicants to AMs, added comments to the database on the level of prior contribution of the new applicants, and worked a bit on the web pages. The major visible change is that the NM graphs are now included on nm.d.o. The 'big' thing I'd like to implement next is to let the applicants write some application email where they list what they've done for Debian so far before the AM assignment, so we can match NM-AM better, and also improve our judgement of the level of prior contribution. Also, we will probably require 2 advocates per applicant in the future, to make sure people have worked with more than a single DD before. Of course, all this must not get excessive, we don't want to make joining Debian harder than it already is. Then there's also the usual 2k+ message backlog waiting in the Debian mailbox...

I was recently complaining about how much kids these days depend on Macromedia Flash to create websites. This, on the other hand, is a fully appropriate use of flash. (Not sure if I’m ahead or behind on the meme propagation curve here.)

Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.

Next OS — the recently released Debian-derived distribution Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). Install

1. First, I downloaded a Ubuntu 6.06 CD image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
2. The first installer screen allows you to choose between a normal install, "safe graphics mode", "check CD for defects", "memory test", and "boot from first hard disk". If you hit enter and wait a few minutes, you're dropped right into a fully working GNOME session (think Live-CD). No user-iteraction is required at all...
3. If you like you can use the system for normal tasks already (web browsing, whatever). If you want to install Ubuntu, you click the "Install" icon on the desktop...
4. After choosing the language, timezone (by clicking on your country on a nice graphical world map!), and keyboard layout, the installation begins.
5. You must enter your user password (no root password, in Ubuntu you have to use sudo for everything which requires root permissions), user account name, and (ugh!) you must enter a full name (same annoying behaviour as with PC-BSD).
6. The partitioning tool is graphical and quite easy to use. It takes ages to scan the disk(s) and partitions though (yes, I have quite a lot of them, but still)...
7. That's mostly it, the installation of the packages starts now, and after it's finished, a window pops up asking you whether you want to reboot or continue using the Live CD for a little longer.
8. What's noticeable is that I was not asked where or how I want to install a bootloader, Ubuntu simply scans the disks, tries to detect the OSes and writes itself into the MBR. Which sucks quite a bit, especially for more complicated setups like I'm using here. For example, it didn't detect the PC-BSD installation, so I can no longer boot that for now (need to fix GRUB manually).
9. That's it, after a reboot you're dropped into GNOME and the installation is done. Pretty impressive how easy such Linux installations have gotten recently...

Security Continue reading here...

The problem with going away on these lengthy trips, is I never end up blogging about it while I'm there, so I have to write a behemoth post when I get back, and try to remember everything. Oh well... Aggregator summary Photos are here. Had a great time seeing more of the country. Seattle was nice, albeit a bit wet. Portland was also nice. We've now covered the whole West Coast. Read on, Macduff!

While working on Hecl, it has sometimes really surprised me how much it's possible to delve into seemingly trivial details. Just for starters, we've been talking about what to call string commands. Originally, I'd used names like slen and sindex to have something quick and easy to write, but no one seemed to like them that much. Wolfgang implemented a bunch of new string commands (very much appreciated!), and took the Tcl approach of command subcommand, like string index, and also suggested some other things like str.index. I am strongly opposed to the string length style commands though, because I think that's just too much typing for a language that's supposed to get you up and running quickly. The compromise I proposed and implemented was to use more 'C style' commands like strlen, strindex, strfind, and so on. I'm not a big PHP fan, but they seem to have taken a similar approach. It's not too verbose, but you can tell more or less what the command is for. Even more seemingly trivial - indexes for strings and arrays. Hecl takes the Lisp approach rather than the C approach, and utilizes commands instead of syntax, even for list and string access, so to get the second character of the string "foo", you would do: strindex "foo" 1 . Like C, Hecl indexes start at 0. Where things get tricky is in calculating indexes "from the end" - how do you tell the language to "fetch the last character from the string 'foo'"? Tcl lets you write a string like "end" or "end-1", which is handy compared to the process you would go through in a language that doesn't help you out: take the length of the string, and subtract from that as needs be. I prefer the approach that I first saw in Python, though, use -1 for the last character:

>>> "abcde"[-1]
'e'

Ruby takes the same approach. It's nice to be able to just insert a -1 rather than have "end-1", which sort of looks like an expression, but isn't really (Hecl doesn't even have normal infix expressions), especially because you can easily calculate the -1 and insert it as is, instead of having to do some string interpolation like "end-$foo". Where things get tricky is when you want to do something like specify a range, say from the 3rd letter to the end of the string. In Python, they use syntax, specifically by simply not including the end of the range:

>>> "abcde"[3:]
'de'

That doesn't work really well with Hecl - I suppose we could pass in a blank string instead of a number, like so:

strrange "abcde" 3 ""

But that's not very clear, and IMO it's slighly ugly to pass in a string where you want to use a number. I had a look at Ruby's behavior, and found it more to my liking:

irb(main):001:0> "abcde"[3..-1]
=> "de"

The difference with Python is that the second index is inclusive, whereas Python includes the character at the first index, and excludes the second:

>>> "abcde"[3:-1]
'd'

I decided the Ruby approach worked best for Hecl, so now we have:

hecl> strrange abcde 3 -1
de

If you're still reading this, I guess you see what I mean by how much one must delve into what must seem like very unimportant minutiae to... well... normal people!

Yesterday I was making some operations on the BTS Control Server and found some nice behaviours that I already reported to owner, and Don answered right the way. If you use reportbug to make an ITP (because, err, you want to) it will say that your mail should be cc’ed to debian-devel, per Policy. It will also cc the report to your address. So yesterday I made an ITP and the mail went out with the following headers:

From: Jose Parrella <joseparrella cantv.net>
...
X-Debbugs-Cc: <debian-devel lists.debian.org>

Everything ok. When it arrived to the BTS, a new header appeared:

Resent-CC: <debian-devel lists.debian.org>,
<wnpp debian.org>, jose parrella <joseparrella cantv.net>

Notice my lowered-case name. I didn’t notice this, and I was merging bugs later, but the merge operation failed because of a case-sensitive mismatch between “Jose Parrella” and “jose parrella”. So there’s an incongruence in what happens when it tries to get the owner from the pseudo headers and when you try to set it through Control Bugs. At least if you use reportbug, be careful if your name is being lc’ed since merges will fail.

As you probably know by now: DebConf6 is over! It was an excellent event at a nice location with some amazing network details - such as 1.8km of cable to get all our areas linked into the local network, and having a fiber link into the tower - with 10mbit hubs. We would like to say thank you to all the people who helped to run and organize this conference, taking on tasks such as

• Getting the reception to do the right things at the right time
• Running our info desk, handling a very broad set of tasks
• Getting the local network running, including all the cables and wireless parts
• Getting the uplink running
• Maintaining the local servers and video machines
• Recording videos of the talks, workshops and BoFs
• Managing the sound equipment
• Streaming the videos to the world
• Printing name tags and food tickets
• Packing the bags for the participants
• Managing Talks
• Collecting food tickets
• Laundry management
• Translating Spanish to English, and vice versa
• Maintaining the schedule
• Taking people to the medical service
• Making T-Shirts
• Managing the Formal Dinner
• Tidying up
• Arranging a great day trip
• Translating texts
• All the tasks we missed to mention here but still got done

Additional thanks go to all the people who lent us their hardware, our sponsors for making the event possible in the first place (see the full list at debconf6.debconf.org), and to all the attendees who managed to keep on smiling even when things didn’t always turn out as expected.

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While we are at it: There is a central gallery for DebConf6 behind gallery.debconf.org. As it is open for everyone, just create a user there and send a little mail to gallery-admins@debconf.org to get your account activated. We would like to have this as a central point for all pictures taken at DebConf6 (and all prior / following DebConf-Events), so we would really appreciate if you can (in addition to your own gallery) upload the pictures from DebConf6 or all prior events you attended there.

By Monday morning, it was my turn to get up ludicrously early. I managed to catch a hot shower, which was very welcome. You see, they turned off the hot water late at night, and didn't turn it on early in the morning. So if you kept hacker hours, you'd get a cold shower before going to bed. I bid goodbye to my sleeping companions as I rolled my suitcase out of the room and checked out at the Reception desk. I sat on my suitcase with laptop in hand, as we waited for the others to show up. We were carpooling to town in some taxis, as I had an awful bus experience coming in to Oaxtepec. It was in this hour that I taught myself how to blend exposures in the Gimp. There was a lot of fiddling with alpha channels and masks, until I hit upon exactly the right solution. By the time I was done, a rather large group of people had gathered about me. It was about then that four taxis pulled up and we threw all our luggage into little hatchbacks. Then Nattie, Ben, and I squeezed inside and we were off! Instead of choosing the toll highway, our driver decided to take the country roads. This was not such a poor idea, since we got a good look at the countryside. I had never seen fields of cactus before, but I suppose that makes sense. After all, it is edible and requires very little irrigation. We drove along the winding roads and passed through town after town. In one, we had to stop momentarily. That's because a herder was driving his flock of sheep through town. We saw them turn a corner, and then our car was surrounded by a sea of bleating wooly sheep. Then, as quickly as they appeared, they were gone. As we neared Mexico City, we noticed a rather large mountain in the distance. A mountain that spewed smoke. Our driver informed us that it's Popocatepetl, a local active volcano. He pulled over by the side of the road and let Nattie hop out to take photographs. The taxi behind us pulled over as well, and they spent a few minutes snapping shots. I noted that where we had stopped was rather hazy, so I just snapped a few photographs when it appeared in my window. I lucked out, I suppose. You could tell when we approached the city, as the traffic got heavier and things got louder. I awoke from my brief nap to see us pull through a toll-booth and on to a six-lane highway. We managed to get to the international gates at the aeroport, have our luggage unloaded, and paid our driver for his troubles. Then we checked in. My luggage tested positive for explosives about four times. The security guard for Mexicana kept swabbing away with test strips, each time coming up with a different result. Eventually, he printed up a chart, stared at the squiggly lines, and let me put it on the conveyor belt. Then, I met up with Nattie and Ben, and we also bumped into Peter. We bought some postcards and sat in a restaurant. There, we ate overpriced American food and wrote back home. Or rather, Nattie and Ben wrote charming postcards and I dashed off twenty-three hastily worded missives. Then, we hugged goodbye and it was time for me to board my flight. Ben graciously offered to post my mail, because I had run out of time. Liftoff was quite exciting. The wind was gusting so as we took off, I got to see the engine shake furiously in its housing. And we did a little hop as we pulled off the ground. A little girl, sitting behind me, shrieked in distress when we did that. I really don't blame her. Landing in Montr al was a lot safer. Even though we had to go through layers and layers of clouds to do it. It was sort of depressing, actually, flying from gorgeous blue skies into a city covered by grey. But I had brought the sunshine back with me!

I stepped out the front door Monday morning at 2AM. Our house was a bit warm and stuffy, and I expected a nice, cool breeze. But instead I got a blast of... slightly warmer and stuffier air. Summer must be here.

Terah and I were setting out on a train trip. The train east out of Newton, KS leaves at 3:01AM. We got our bags loaded and set off to the station.

Not long after we got on the train and to our room, the train started moving. Terah fell asleep right away. It's hard for me to fall asleep so quickly the first night of a train trip. The excitement of the upcoming trip keeps me awake. Plus, once I wake up, I usually stay awake. Even if the alarm woke me up at 1:20AM.

This time, I lay awake remembering my ancestors, who migrated from Russia to Kansas in 1874. Some of our trip will follow the same route that they took 132 years ago.

In the train, you hear what sounds like a distant train whistle fairly frequently. It's from the locomotive on our train, but sounds distant because the passenger cars keep the noise out.

We slowed a bit, went around a gentle curve, and the whistle sounded again. Off to one side of the train were the lights of a small town. It's Peabody, KS -- where my ancestors arrived in the middle of the night back in 1874. They were excited to finally be at the end of their journey -- which had taken months and spanned oceans and railroads on two continents. So excited, in fact, that they set off to find their new land in the middle of the night rather than wait for dawn. But how did they cover those 15 miles at night? Did they rent horses and wagons from someone? I couldn't remember, trying to sleep here in the middle of the night.

I'm still awake. I come to a pause in my thoughts and notice the train's horn again. Somewhere ahead, there is a dirt road crossing the tracks. Nobody is there, but the train is sounding its horn to keep them away anyway.

I think back to 1874 in Russia. Not everybody in the Mennonite settlements there left. Those that were too old, too weak, or that couldn't make the trip for whatever reason stayed behind. For most, when they left Russia, they were saying goodbye to their families for the last time. They would never have the opportunity to see them again.

Then their trip began. Through rickety Russian railroads, to long days at sea, then through New York, and on the railroad again, stopping some points along the way. They'd never seen what would be their new home. And there was no going back if it wasn't to their liking. I can only imagine how hard that must have been for this group of German-speaking immigrants from Russia. And how anxious and exciting it would be to finally get off the station and head to their new home.

This group of settlers made quite the impact on Kansas. They brought their "turkey red" winter wheat with them from Russia. This wheat turned Kansas into the world's leading wheat producer. And it helped rescue the ATSF railroad from the precarious financial situation it was in. That was a good move on the railroad's part -- they were the ones that sold land to the Mennonites in Kansas, recruited them to settle in the area, and even built them temporary housing for their first winter in Kansas.

And that's the same railroad we're taveling on now, as I hear the crescendo and then the WHOOSH of a passing train just a few inches from ours.

By now its 4AM. I think back to the train station in Newton, which we left behind just an hour ago. I remembered how earlier in the 20th century, after the Mennonites were well-established in Kansas, they would send off missionaries to other parts of the world -- China or India especially. Those that went off served two 7-year terms. They departed from the Newton train station, just like we had. They probably waited for the train to carry them away in the same room we did. But they knew they wouldn't see their friends, relatives, or home for 7 years.

When missionaries would leave, a large group of church members would accompany them to the station. As the train approached, the people there would start singing their favorite hymns -- a capella, in German. The sound filled the old station, and followed the departing family out onto the platform as they boarded their train. The people leaving weren't the only ones to miss their friends and relatives. Those staying behind would also go 7 years without being able to talk to the missionaries that were departing.

A light flickers by the window. Maybe a yard light, or a small town, or the back side of a warehouse somewhere. Off in the distance, the horn sounds at another crossing.

Time for some sleep.