Search Results: "zed"

16 July 2006

Uwe Hermann: Anonymous Google Earth over Tor

I'm probably not the first one to notice this, but you can actually use Google Earth anonymously (upon first glance at least) over Tor. It seems all the traffic (downloads of maps and textures etc.) goes over port 80 (http) and 443 (https), which can easily be anonymized with Tor (read an older post of mine for details on Tor). Just type 
export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
export HTTP_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
and set up Privoxy and Tor correctly, then start Google Earth in the same xterm and you're done. I haven't looked closely at the protocol Google Earth uses (any articles available on that?) but upon a quick glance in Ethereal / Wireshark all traffic is torified, not even DNS requests are leaked. Technical explanation: the Google Earth binary uses libcurl internally, which honors the http_proxy environment variable. However, that's not a guarantee that you're 100% anonymous, as Goole Earth could send some unique identifier (e.g. MAC address, hard drive ID etc.) to their servers which would spoil your anonymity. Btw, I actually discovered this accidentally because I have the above HTTP_PROXY lines in my .bashrc, so most of my HTTP traffic is anonymized by default...

Christoph Berg: Becoming an early riser

At the beginning of this year, becoming an early riser was a recurrent theme on planet.debian.org. At the same time, the urge to put some order in my messy sleeping pattern had grown, so I was very happy to read Steve Pavlina's blog posting on that. Before, I would usually stay up until very late (3am), being over-tired, and then sleep 9 or even 10 hours, sometimes still being tired the next day. The advice Steve gives is very simple: Go to bed only when you're too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning. This sounded exactly like what I wanted. Now, I'm still rather the night owl type, so I didn't pick something like 5am as Steve did, but a friendlier 9am. The first 2 or 3 days were somehow hard, but I soon realized how healthier the new rhythm was. I was getting up at the same time every day, including weekends, and go to bed around 1.30am. The downside was that 2..3am (CET) is often the best time on IRC and also very nice for hacking, but the additional time gained in the morning was well worth it. The hard part is to actually notice when you are tired. For me, it works best to read a book, and then go to sleep when I can't concentrate on reading any more. The difficulty for us computer people is that staying in front of the screen somehow makes you unaware of how tired you actually are - just turn the machine off and do something else (doh!). In the morning, it's important to actually get up, since the body will adjust to the additional time in bed. What I'm doing is to put the radio's timer at 9am, and the alarm clock at 9.05, so I don't have to jump out of bed. Many times, I would wake up myself just at that time. Of course, when going out late, I don't get up at 9, but try to get back to the rhythm immediately. Also, Debconf had thrown me out for some weeks, but luckily I managed to get back in.

John Goerzen: The Crew

Terah and I realized something the other day. This table should demonstrate:
>



PersonRelationAttends our church
Heating/Air PersonGreat UncleYes
PlumberFirst Cousin, Once RemovedYes
Interior DesignerFirst Cousin, Once RemovedYes
ElectricianSecond CousinYes
Phone Company Line InstallerFirst Cousin, Once RemovedNo
General contractorNoneYes
General worker #1None that we know of, but his great grandfather built the placeYes
General worker #2NoneYes
HistoriansYesYes

>



It seems this is typical for this sort of project around here.

15 July 2006

Erich Schubert: Extra exploit protection - SELinux

Apparently (as analyzed by Joshua Brindle), SELinux with the commonly used policies prevents the latest exploit (the one using a race condition on /proc/self/environ). Another way of preventing this would have been to mount /proc with "noexec, nosuid". I wonder why that isn't the default anyway? It would be good to have more people work on Debian SELinux. Currently, I'm not aware of anyone working actively on Debian SELinux. So although it was called a "pet release goal" earlier, this seems very utopic to me right now. The SELinux toolchain has received some important fixes/features (modular policy linking should finally be working!) but these are not yet in unstable, nor has the reference policy package been updated recently. Running SELinux on the main Debian servers probably is some work... there will be custom policy that needs to be written. It would however increase our security a lot, especially for boxes such as gluck that probably are our weakest point (because all developers need to be able to log in). Sometimes I have the impression that I'm the only one running a Debian system with SELinux and the reference policy... and I'm still busy with my exams, and I don't know yet if I'll have more time afterwards (a 6-month thesis is next after the exams, and I'm actually thinking about some business opportunities, too...)

Evan Prodromou: 27 Messidor CCXIV

I'm extremely excited to see that Creative Commons Salon Montreal will be launching on Thursday 20 July. The event will be at Le Pistol, 3723 St. Laurent, 7PM. Should be extremely fun -- Marcus Bornfreund, national director of CC Canada, will be there, and he's always good to see and talk to. tags:

Camping We're heading off to the wt:Mauricie for a weekend of camping at the R serve faunique de St.-Maurice. It's extremely difficult to get any camping reservations for the second half of July in Quebec, since it's the official Construction Holiday. This is a 2-week work holiday built into the union contracts of most (all?) construction workers in Quebec, as well as for many other unionized works. Which means that most Quebec vacation spots are completely packed for this period -- especially ones that are affordable. I managed to get us a weekend in St.-Maurice, which apparently has great lake swimming, but it's raining cats and dogs right now in wt:Montreal, so it might not be such a fun trip. I promised Maj we'd get out of the city this weekend, though -- they're predicting highs of 35C. tags:

Erich Schubert: JSP-like C++ webpages

TNTnet, just uploaded to Debian, looks interesting. Basically it offers JSP-/PHP-like embedding of C++ code into web pages (or the other way round). Well, if you want to be precise, the syntax is actually much closer to HTML::Mason, a perl-based web application framework I've used some years ago. You can bet that these pages, compiled into native code, are hard to beat speed-wise... Think of compiling your website into your webserver. It's obviously not suited for wide audiences - you can have your users upload PHP files, but you probably won't allow them to upload C++ code - but more for high-performance sites with specialized applications. I have, however, one major gripe with it: The syntax is not XML. I wish they would have picked true XML as data format, instead on basically using string processing. I hate how many people treat webpages as mere character strings with some special characters instead of structured data serialized in some way or another. I don't want to be stuck using a line-based editor for structured data forever. I'm still using vim, and I'll probably continue for a while, but for XML I'm actually just waiting for an editor with a true understanding of XML and the power and speed-of-use of vim... KID remains my favourite way of generating web pages. It's templating transparently embedded in a XHTML file using a separate XML namespace. And it's actually compiling the templates into python modules. P.S. if your ever need the Dummy 16 and Dummy17 functions, get them from microsoft (excel) now! No need to write them yourself anymore! (Dummy 1-15 are apparently discontinued.) P.P.S. I just wanted to point out, that I'm convinced that embedding much code into a layout file is a bad idea (one of the reasons why I despise PHP). Keep logics and layout separate. KID for example is quite good at that. In my DNSoupdate tool for example, all the template contains is loop constructs and simple case disinctions. This also brings me to my biggest gripe with KID: it depends on python. I don't see a way of using the same template with a different language. So maybe I'll actually go back to some TAL solution or so that is a bit more portable templating-wise (and still perfectly reuseable XML).

13 July 2006

Evan Prodromou: 24 Messidor CCXIV

I was a little sad today to see a complaint on a user page about a change I had made on a Wikitravel page. The Wikitraveller said, "I would like to [change the page in the future] in a more democratic way, even if Evan had good reasons for it." I couldn't help thinking to myself, "If someone has a good reason, and plunges forward and does the right thing, isn't that the Wiki Way?" I think the word that stuck with me is "democratic". The more I thought about it, the more I realized that wiki has little to do with democracy per se, and more to do with do-ocracy. Do-ocracy, or the similar term "do-opoly" (which more clearly puns on the word duopoly), is an organizational method in which people in a group self-select roles and responsibilities and simply do the jobs that need being done. Overhead is minimal, conflict is rare, and stuff that needs doing finds a person to do it. I thought it was an interesting enough principle to write up an article on DoOcracy for CommunityWiki. CW is a great site for wiki theorists and community activists; I'm proud to be part of the CW community. tags:

Second Look Speaking of CW, I was inspired by Lion's experience with Second Life, which was much more creatively rewarding than mine (see Journal/12 Messidor CCXIV). See CW's SecondLife article for a first-person account of Lion's building adventures. I might have to give SL another try. tags:

12 July 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Homophobic Airplanes in Boston

Airplanes pulling anti-gay marriage banners have been circling my building much of today, apparently in an attempt to sway public (or legislative) opinion during today’s constitutional convention (liveblog here). The banners don’t cast the organizers as the brightest bulbs. Two of the banners are opaque references to the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Margaret Marshall — the messages were “Marshall’s Courts Are A Disaster” and “Marshall Incompetent Says Judge Sosman.” Unless you are already a rabid member of the anti-Goodridge crowd, these aren’t going to mean a whole lot to you. The other one is printed too small to read, although after twelve or thirteen time circling past my window, I could make out that it said something like “let the people vote on marriage,” which at least is a little clearer on the message (if not the font). All three had a URL that was too small to read, at least from my vantage point. I finally pieced together that the banners were referring to massnews.com (I hesitate to link to the site and boost its PageRank, but ultimately I think the contents are so poorly written and reasoned that it probably advances the cause of gay marriage more than anything). The articles on that site really make these guys look like loonies. A great example is this article. Although apparently written by an attorney, the article demonstrates near total ignorance of how legal reasoning and constitutional principles. E.g.:
When Justice Sosman discussed who else could be applying for marriage after May if the decision is allowed to stand, she had to include the “buzz” words that Marshall and other judges and lawyers use to intimidate everyone else — even including most lawyers who know nothing about this arcane language.
The “arcane” language the article refers to are the standard terms of art in equal protection law: suspect classification, scrict scrutiny, rational basis, etc.. (See this wikipedia article). Any first year law student should be quite familiar with this sort of discourse. (See my class notes from my first year constitutional law course and search for strict scrutiny or suspect classification). “Most lawyers” know nothing about this “arcane” language? Similarly — the following apparently forms the basis of the writer’s claim that Justice Marshall does not have the intelligence necessary to be the Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court:
Justice Marshall was incapable of answering Justice Sosman. She felt it necessary to insert an unusual footnote to say she was unable to understand or to answer Sosman’s erudite critique. “In any event, we fail to understand why the separate opinion [of Justice Sosman] chastises us for adopting the constitutional test (rational basis) …”
“Failing to understand” in a court opinion (or brief) does not mean “we’re just not smart enough to get it.” It is a standard idiom used to criticize another position as lacking support. It is far from unusual to make that sort of statement in a footnote. It is generally a sign that the point being criticized is so weak that it does not merit full treatment in the main text of the decision. In any event, I’m happy to see the anti-gay marriage movement leadership so totally marginalized. In a few years, I expect we will wonder what all the fuss was about.

11 July 2006

Matthew Palmer: It's All So Simple When You Know How

As a followup to my Dapper is teh suck entry, it appears that my egregiously slow system is known bug. Of course, it'd be better if it were a fixed bug, but at least it's trivially work-aroundable (echo 1 >/sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate -- down from it's default, on my system at least, of 8). Apparently there's some "issues" with the SMP-compiled kernel on uniprocessor systems, and hitting that tunable down masks the problem, whatever it is. It's funny -- just the other day I was having a chat with the other sysadmin at a place I'm contracting at about the vagaries of SMP kernels on non-SMP machines, and he was amazed that you could have a modern system that didn't play nice with an SMP kernel. Now, it seems, I'm a walking, cursing example of the issue. I don't mind, though -- I'm playing Oolite at full speed again, so I'm happy.

8 July 2006

Martin Michlmayr: LSM, FrOSCon, FLOSSWorld

Well, I've been conferencing again. I'm currently sitting in a train with Andreas Barth, returning from the Libre Software Meeting in Nancy, France. We attended the conference to take part in a workshop organized by EDOS, an EU-sponsored project which focuses on challenges the makers of Linux distributions are facing. Andreas, Enrico Zini and I gave overviews of various issues in Debian and the EDOS folks (which includes a number of people working on Mandriva) presented their work. Some of it seems pretty interesting and can potentially be integrated into Debian but time will tell. Andreas posted a summary to get a discussion going. Last week I attended FrOSCon near Bonn to present the keynote speech. I really liked the conference because it was a true community event, with lots of effort put in by the local organizers, and the event was pretty relaxing (at least for me, probably not for the organizers who did a great job hiding all the work that is required behind the scenes). Just before attending FrOSCon, I met up with a friend from high school and spent a few days in Amsterdam. A few weeks ago I attended FLOSSWorld in Brussels to talk about skill development in FLOSS communities. FLOSSWorld is a project to study free software communities all around the world as an extension of the work done a few years which focused on Europe. One of the nice things about FLOSSWorld was that my hotel was a few minutes on one side of the cathedral in Brussels and the conference venue a few minutes on the other side. So I finally managed to visit the cathedral, something I never managed to do in all the years I attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Martin Michlmayr: Madrid: hasta luego

My stay in Madrid has come to an end and I'm currently sitting at Ralf Treinen's place in Paris. I had a pretty good time in Madrid. Basically, I just did the usual stuff (i.e., too much Debian, too little work for my research) but there are a number of nice guys in the group I was working in and we had lots of fun. Earlier this week, we went to Teo's place who has this massive swimming pool. He recently organized a BBQ, which was good as well, with lots of Sangria... A few weeks ago, Diego (at whose place I stayed), Alvaro and his cute girlfried Yaiza went bowling. It was really good fun and it turned out that Diego is a real master, scoring several strikes after each other! Now that summer is coming, a number of people are leaving for other places. Israel went to Canada for three months a few weeks ago, Gregorio left for the UK a few days ago and my stay is over too. Overall I had a pretty good time, even though I'm not particularly happen that I didn't manage to go to the beach once even though I was in Spain for three months... The last time I was here at Ralf's place in Paris was just before DebConf1 in Bordeaux in 2001, which feels like eons ago. Anyway, I'm heading out to take a look at Notre Dame.

5 July 2006

Daniel Burrows: Not Bavaria, but still fun.

With today being a federal holiday, Kate and I decided to take a four-day weekend and head to Leavenworth. This is a little town up in the Cascades that calls itself Washington's Bavarian village, and seems to be part of the complete Seattle experience -- everyone around here has visited it at least once. The short description is that while the Bavarian theme is a bit of a gimmick, there's good hiking in the area and some good food (if you don't mind the touristy atmosphere).

NOTE 1:

Why is this post written in the present tense? 'cos I felt like it.

NOTE 2:

For the convenience and sanity of people reading this on aggregators like Planet Debian, this saga is broken into segments.

Day 0

We get a late start leaving Redmond and drive along some pretty spectacular scenery on Highway 2 East ... although after living here for a while, I've become somewhat inured to spectacular scenery. Another craggy mountain with snow-spotted alpine meadows, thousand-foot waterfalls, and blankets of pine forest? You woke me up for THAT? But even by the standards of the Pacific Northwest, this is a scenic drive.


Kate has picked out a short hike about halfway to our destination, but when we pull up to the trailhead we learn that a Northwest Forest Pass is required to park. We decide to cut out that hike and make a note to buy a pass when we get a chance. Probably they're sold in Leavenworth. Further on we see a little picnic area with a path going back into the woods. We decide to stop there for lunch and follow the trail, which turns out to be a pleasant loop through a patch of forest and up to a decent-sized waterfall.

We arrive in Leavenworth in the afternoon. The town has done an impressive job of building a city center of half-timbered buildings in what looks to me like a reasonably German style (bearing in mind that my last visit to Germany was about ten years ago when I was in high school). They even have a two- or three-story clock tower. After checking into the bed-and-breakfast where we're staying, we head downtown to explore.


Leavenworth, at least in the city center, looks very Bavarian from the outside. It's a little less impressive when you actually go in the buildings. Most of the shops sell generic American tourist junk -- shirts that say I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either., kitschy statues (women holding beer tables on their breasts), etc. However, while I see very little that's recognizably Bavarian in town, there are some stores with nice selections of work by local craftsmen and artists.

After looking around a bit, we head to the Andreas Keller Restaurant for dinner. We have a nice meal of j gerschnitzel, sp tzle, red cabbage and knackwurst while listening to (live!) accordian oom-pah. I am surprised to see the Chicken Dance mixed in with the rest of the performance, but Wikipedia says that this was composed in Switzerland in 1950s for the accordion under the name Der Ententanz. Live and learn.

After finishing dinner, we walk back to the bed-and-breakfast and get an early sleep.

3 July 2006

Evan Prodromou: 15 Messidor CCXIV

Gar! It looks like life's not so rosy after all with this blog. YULblog, the Montreal blog aggregator, apparently uses TrackBack for updating the aggregator. So I'm going to have to build some kind of trackback system into WiLiKi. At some point I should probably collect my customizations for WiLiKi into a nice WikiBlog? add-on -- but there's still a lot Todo before that'd be ready. On the same subject, it seems that I'm getting more and more frequent WikiSpam on the About This Site page. I'm going to have to start instituting some anti-spam measures. Using regexps to refuse submissions with blacklisted URLs works very well for Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:Spam filter), so I'm tempted to try it here. tag:

Piknik missed We were going to head to Piknic Electronik yesterday -- we had a great time a few weeks ago, and Piknik is such a harbinger of Montreal summer -- but Amita June is going through some freaky personal schedule issues, and she wouldn't take an afternoon nap. By the time to leave for the Parc, she was wiggin' out from sleep deprivation, and we couldn't really force her to go out to the island and dance to big fun beats. Which was kind of a bummer, since our friends Meg and Patti were out there, and it would have been good to see them. They came by on Friday night for Pizza Night Chez les Bads, and we talked about Ignition 2006 (yes, Montreal Burners, it is going to happen... I think) and kids and dancing and weddings and fun. Amita June and Meg get along like gang-busters; they have a lot of fun together. So instead of going out to the Island Amita June and I went across the street to Parc La Fontaine and played in the baby pools right next to the playground. How is that for lucky? We have two huge pools, about 18 inches deep, right across the street, next to the baby playground. Oh, and there's a good bar a block and a half away. This is the greatest apartment ever. We moved in this time last year, and I feel so at home here now. So many important things have happened to us in the last year -- Amita June, Wikitravel -- and this apartment has been a part of it. We're going to look for a house to buy in the fall, but right now this feels like home. tag:

Two months I almost forgot that it's my two-month blogiversary. Yes, I just made that word up. And it's months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, not, like, real months. But close. tag:

My mom For those of you who asked: yes, my Mom's doing great. She was bit by a rattlesnake last week (!), but now she's back on her feet, the swelling is down, and she's doing all the stuff she did before. Good for her; she's pretty resilient. tag:

Microburst I now officially have a new phobia, since a Quebec woman was recently killed in her trailer by a microburst. Apparently a wp:microburst is a localized gust of wind that can reach speeds of 100 kph, kind of like a tornado. Unlike a tornado, a microburst doesn't spin around -- it goes straight down. It's usually accompanied by rain, and can be devastating. These freak winds happen several times a year in Quebec. Great. tags:

OpenID My current work project is enabling single-signon for all the language versions of Wikitravel. My preferred method for this is OpenID, since it will allow sign-on not only to Wikitravel language versions, but in the future other sites as well. So I'm writing an extension for MediaWiki to allow logging in to MediaWiki with an OpenID URL, and for making MW an authentication server for other sites. I realize this is a little roundabout for Wikitravel's needs, but for interfacing with new partner World66, as well as other MW sites like Wikipedia or Wikia servers, it'd be fantastic. I'm using the great OpenID Enabled libraries from JanRain. They're working out pretty well, although they're a little flaky around the Yadis edges. Given that I don't really care about Yadis -- sorry, LID and inames -- having to deal with those errors is pretty annoying. Even so, I managed to get a working consumer-side system going today. It was pretty exciting logging into my development machine for the first time with an OpenID, and having it work. Hooray for OpenID! tags:

2 July 2006

Evan Prodromou: 5 Messidor CCXIV

Good news for us: Wikitravel was selected as Featured Commoner for June 2006 by Creative Commons. There's a long interview with me and Maj about the origins of Wikitravel and why we think it's so cool. It may be the best interview I've seen about the project yet; I really recommend it for curious people. tags:

Creative Commons plugin for Microsoft Office I'll say it right now: kudos to both Creative Commons and Microsoft for the new Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office. I'm not a frequent user of Microsoft Office, but I do get lots of .doc and .xls and .ppt documents over the transom, and it's good to know that Creative Commons is doing something to make it possible to Free works in these formats just a little bit. There's been a bit of controversy on the cc-community list about the move, but I think it's great. It took me a while to warm to it, but I really like Creative Commons's approach to Open Content. It reminds me of wp:harm reduction theories. I think they're not universally loved for this, but I also think it's been a big part of the success of the project. tags:

Sucks-Rules-Votes-o-Meter I keep forgetting to ask Don about making a microformats-oriented version of the Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. After all, the VoteLinks microformat isn't much more than a semantic-web-formalized SROM, is it? I figure a plugin for Nutch to look for vote-links would do the trick; and I bet Technorati would be cool about adding an SROM system to Pingerati. tags:

100M We were driving from wt:Culver City to wt:Santa Barbara yesterday, and we stopped in wt:Calabasas for a soda and some breastfeeding. I had on K-RTH 101, the soi disant "soundtrack for Southern California", when on came a commercial for HP laser printers. We were astounded to hear that there have been 100 million HP LaserJet printers shipped since 1984. Yes, one hundred million. That's one HP laser printer for every 60 human beings on Earth. Do we really need that many laser printers? Why? What the hell are we printing so much? It's pretty obvious that 100 million people haven't bought laser printers; much fewer people have bought more than one laser printer over and over. HP seems to think this is something to crow about, but I've looked into a lot of laser printers, and they're full of some pretty heavy iron. Those old ones aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Some quick math suggests that that's about one million metric tons of trash generated principally by HP. Probably the majority of HP printers have been smashed to bits, like the one in Office Space. Whose fault is it that we've gone through 100 million of these poisonous, heavy, clunky metallo-plastic whizzbangers in 20 years? Does the company have a responsibility to make machines out of reusable, recyclable materials? To not make its growth based on wp:planned obsolescence? If you're marketing the machine as a disposable device, shouldn't you have a plan for where they go at their end of life. Why aren't more machines upgradeable in small chunks, so you don't have so much material going into landfills? One hundred million laser printers, buried under piles of banana peels and diapers, or embedded in the ocean floor, or rusting in basements and warehouses. It doesn't seem like something to celebrate; it seems to me to be pretty depressing. tags:

1 July 2006

Jeff Licquia: New Job

Now that the right people have been told, I can make it public: as of January, I’ll be a full-time developer for the Free Standards Group, producers of the LSB. This is, perhaps, one of the most difficult job decisions I’ve had to make. In every other case where I’ve changed jobs so far, I’ve done so only when it becomes clear that the old job isn’t going anywhere: either by going under, getting radically reorganized, treating me poorly, or otherwise being a dead end. None of that is true here. I still believe in what Progeny is doing. The co-workers are superb (yes, even that one), and management has always treated me well, even in difficult circumstances. But sometimes, opportunities are too good to pass up. I think that the next year or two will be pivotal to the future of free standards, and I’ll be in a unique position to influence the direction those standards go. Plus, I’ll be able to work with another group of brilliant and talented people, with the hope that some of that brilliance and talent will rub off. I’m also positive about working primarily from home. So, you can expect more blogging (he says, a month after his last post!), especially about standards in the free software world. I’ve created a new category for that topic, in case you’re interested in following just that conversation.

Evan Prodromou: 12 Messidor CCXIV

I got up this morning with hundreds of messages in my inbox, and re-sorted them to the correct folders. My monkeyplexer program, which sorts stuff into the correct folders automatically, has been running out of control. I developed it for a version of CRM114 that's now totally obsolete, but the file formats and interfaces have all changed. I've taken a poke at bringing the program up to speed with later versions, but it's just not bad enough to deal with. Also, the horrendous interface of crm114 is just too ugly to imagine. Blech. Instead, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from about 25 mailing lists that I no longer read and that go from my inbox to an overstuffed folder to a trashcan two weeks later. Hopefully this will take some of the pressure off of the monkeyplexer until I get time to either a) move to something easier and bayesian like ifile or b) upgrade monkeyplexer. tags:

My mom, the rattlesnake magnet So, my Mom got bit by a rattlesnake yesterday morning. She'd taken a baby car seat out of my Dad's car the night before to put it in her car, but it was too late and dark so she left it in the driveway to install in the morning. Apparently when she tried to install it the next day, a rattler had snuck in there to sleep and nailed her on the arm. (My folks live on a pretty big lot in wt:Los Altos Hills, and there's a lot of wildlife, of the fuzzy and also scaly nature.) She got to Stanford Hospital just fine, and she's had 4 rounds of anti-venom. She's hurting but they think it's going to be all right. The strange part of the story is that this is the second time she's been bitten by a snake. I'm not sure how she's survived the process twice, but I'm pretty amazed that it happened twice at all. Waiting for news, here in Montreal... a little nerve wracking. tags:

Peer-to-peer, broadcast style I read through TechCrunch that three major studios will be distributing shows via P2P in the coming months. That's all well and good, but if it's a for-pay system (content costs $0.99 and up), why should you have to contribute any bandwidth into a peer-to-peer system? For a dollar a pop, these should be easy, high-performance HTTP downloads, not shaggy and unreliable p2p stuff. I contribute my upstream bandwidth to Free Software and Open Content, not to re-forwarding something I had to pay for. tags:

Stimulus and response Thanks to Matt for forwarding this excellent summary of blogs. tags:

While on the subject Our home mail server went on the fritz while we were in California, and it was a serious pain in the keester. I had to redirect all our mail redirects from our home server (bad.dynu.ca) to Gmail. The home server's back in business now, but I hadn't changed the email stuff back yet... and today I decided not to. I've re-pointed mail for our business, Wikitravel, and personal domains to the old Wikitravel server at iWeb (the same server this site runs on). I think that's probably the best thing for us to have a "home" server that's not at home; we really need to be able to get to our stuff from the road. It's been good so far; most of the domains were pretty easy. It's been the ones I'd forgotten about that are a hassle. Like, say, bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us. Damn, man. The geographical .us domains used to be one of my favorite things. Now they're not so much. tags:

Second wife So, I guess I'd finished some work yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good about it, because after dinner I decided to spend a little illicit "me" time. And with me, that usually ends up being a game. I'd heard a lot about Second Life, and I was especially impressed by some of the important appearances in the world, like Larry Lessig and Mia Garlick of Creative Commons. But I also have a terribly addictive personality, which is exemplified by the large pile of coffee cups on my desk, but also by the way I go completely crazy over video games. I just don't play them that often any more, because they suck up huge parts of my life, and in the end I've just moved a few bits around. So I try to steer clear. So the fact that there doesn't seem to be much to do in SL -- no level-ups, no territory to conquer -- is kind of an advantage for it. So I gave SL a try last night. I had to use one of our laptops, since the Linux alpha of their client doesn't work on Ubuntu (as far as I can tell). I'll say this: it's awfully nice for graphics, and the world is incredibly built out. But I felt a little bit like a hobo in Vegas -- everything was about casinos and strip clubs and huge fancy houses and cars and planes that I couldn't afford. SL is pretty famous for charging for every little thing, and building an impressive dual-world economy. It seems to have worked pretty well -- there's lots of chasing after the lucre in SL. It was awfully good on the eye-candy, but I felt like Neo in the Matrix: all I could see was dollar signs behind the colors. When I told Maj this morning why I was up till 2AM last night, she gave me a serious scowl. I'm pretty sure my SL days are over... mostly. After all, there's a theory that MMORGs are the reason why we haven't met any aliens -- that any sufficiently advanced culture is going to get sucked into pretend worlds like SL and not go out and explore the universe. tags:

30 June 2006

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Debian Tutorial @ the V Jornades de Programari Lliure

Next week I'll be once again at the Jornades de Programari Lliure organized by the UPC's C tedra de Programari Lliure in Barcelona; this is the fifth edition of the Jornades and I've already been on the third and fourth editions. This year I'll be doing a couple of things there: a two hour workshop about Building Debian Packages on Friday and a half an hour conference about Agile Documentation Tools on Saturday. As always I've been busy with other things and I have not had the time to work on the workshop materials, but luckily the other day I saw on Planet Debian that Lars Wirzenius had prepared a Debian Packaging Tutorial and after looking at it I'm going to use it for my workshop probably as is, unless I find the time to do some small changes. There is room for 20 attendes and one week in advance there are already 13 people registered so I imagine that they will be quite interested. I'll blog about the results next week... ;) The conference is about the importance of documentation on software related projects and the tools and systems that can help developers to be more productive when writting it. I'm giving it representing the ITI and I have to finish it this weekend, once it is ready I'll publish it and ask for comments.

29 June 2006

Amaya Rodrigo: That painful time of the year again

I did my taxes yesterday, two days before the final deadline. I do that every year. I wait until the very last moment, until I get so stressed that it is painful. So the next year all I remember is the painful experience and then postpone it more and more and try to avoid it until the very last day again. Rinse and repeat. It gets worse every year. I also stupidly refuse any help that is offered to me when there's still plenty of time, and then I will want it desperately when there's only one day left, but I am too embarrassed to ask for help then because, $DEITY forbid, THEY (yes, whoever "they" is, the evil "they", the ones that would be all after me if I was paranoid) erm, yes, because THEY would find out that I procastinate.

Anyway, yesterday I was on the verge of a break down, that's why I missed the Gay Pride day blog post, when Bego called me, came upstairs with her laptop (with a very helpful windows partition), which broke completely after installing the tax software, so we migrated downstairs to Carlos' office, where i could finally calculate my taxes, and using my SSL certificate, send the outcome of my calculations to the tax office, online. It all was pretty much smooth once you completely give up all hope and stick to windows and explorer.

Carlos was shocked that I was demanding a windows machine, that's when he realized the situation was pretty desperate, as the Linux client has proven not to work at all. Jose even took pics of me using windows. I hope they don't make it to Slashdot.

Special thanks to H ctor, who in the midst of a huge headache, ended up fixing Bego's fucked up Windows partition.

25 June 2006

Alexander Wirt: Froscon 2006 Day I

Its sunday morning and I'm trying to get back into life with some coffeine. I had a really nice time yesterday, the Froscon was excellent organized, even WLAN worked all the time. I had to talks yesterday, one about backports.org and one about spam. The first one had 5 persons or so, but most of them were developers and they were really interested so it really nice. In the spam talk were round about 30-40 persons and we had some very good discussions, so that I ran out of time at last. The feedback of both talks was very positive.
In the evening I managed the KSP, which went mostly well, even if I was too tired to organize it the way I normally prefer to do.
TODO: create some video/animation about how KSPs work. (any volunteers?)

I organized to get some pretzels that looked like debian swirls, Sven Guckes has some pictures of it.

Social Event was also pretty nice, much Wheat Bear and Food :-).


Thanks to all who made this happen and I really hope that it will happen next year too.
And now I'll get prepared for day II.

Small Comment:
Madduck asked me about taking the slides online, here

24 June 2006

Andrew Pollock: [life/mtb] Biggest. Ride. Ever.

Yesterday I cycled from Mountain View to Santa Cruz. 50 miles (80 kilometres). Why? Google had its annual Engineering off-site, and there were a bunch of people riding. One ride was a "no rider left behind" one, so I figured I'd give it a go. We left Mountain View at about 6:50am, and 5 and a half hours later we finally arrived at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Man it was tough. I now have a much greater appreciation for the ride to Kosciusko that Sarah did, that one time, at band camp. I was really grateful for the use of Sarah's 2 litre Camelbak, and even then I was amazed at how fast I ran out water. And steam. Did I mention it was a tough ride? One of the highlights of the ride was the fact that Alan Eustace came on it. Here you've got one of the Senior Vice Presidents of the company coming along with the mere mortals. Early on in the ride, one of the riders got a flat tyre, and he changed it for her. He changes a mean tyre. When we reached the summit of whatever mountain it was we were toiling to cross, we came upon a store, and had a breather. He shouted everyone whatever they needed from the store to keep going. That was really nice. I was also really grateful to Richard, who saw me struggling at one point, and gave me a Power Bar to help keep me going. I really appreciated that. Just goes to show that eating only a banana for breakfast before embarking on a ride like this isn't such a good idea. The other highlight was the downhill coast once we got over the mountain. That was pretty sweet. Made me glad I was taking the bus back again, and not having to cycle back up it. Other than a lack of water and a lack of breakfast, I pulled up pretty well. I think I sat around for about an hour after arriving at Santa Cruz feeling pretty stuffed, but I didn't get any cramps or anything, and I cycled to work as usual the next day. I've got some funky sunburn on the backs of my hands where there's a hole in my cycling gloves. Would I do it again next year? Dunno. Maybe if I've improved my fitness some more, and maybe if it's on a road bike rather than a mountain bike.

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