Search Results: "storm"

17 April 2007

Gunnar Wolf: Init-related ideas BoF submitted for Debcamp

Ok, so it just seems like a hot topic - I just submitted a BoF for Debcamp to talk about the init-related ideas we've been discussing. As Debconf's Pentabarf conference management system does not like disclosing talk details before the talks are accepted, I'll reproduce here my short blurb:
This BoF comes out from several ideas posted in Planet Debian by Erich Schubert, Sven M ller, Joachim Breitner, Mike Homey and myself (so far). It's not to be "chaired" by any of us particularly, but I expect an interesting brainstorming session.
There are several different init systems present in Debian - However, we are only supporting currently one of them, good ol' sysv-rc - We have close to a thousand packages providing init scripts suitable for it, and close to none for all of the other systems.
In current systems, full of hot-pluggable devices, changing network configurations and so on, however, I think this situation is quite prone to change - sysv-rc and its runlevels are better suited for stable server-like systems, and is hard to adapt for future needs.
We will talk about the potential difficulties Debian will face in order to better support more init schemes, and discuss some ideas to solve them.
This should be a brainstorming session, not much material will be prepared (maybe some sketches by each of us, but nothing formal). If you plan on attending, take a look at the messages linked to in the 'links' section.
Note that, following Nomeata's suggestion, I'm presenting this for Debcamp - If you are not attending Debcamp and are interested, we will try to set this up via some sort of videoconferencing (or at least the usual video feed + IRC feedback), and I do hope we can have something showable (at least a broken concept) after Debconf.
In not-so-closely-related topics, I just learnt there is a shadow of doubt regarding my presence in Edinburgh - I will do my best to dispell the threat. I just don't want to miss a Debconf!

5 April 2007

Evan Prodromou: 14 Germinal CCXV

Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de li vre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow. tags:

JFS So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS. Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found. The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils). So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay. Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build. tags:

YULblog YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all. tags:

N hours later Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special. tags:

20 March 2007

Benjamin Mako Hill: PHLanthropy

Last week, I had planned to travel from Boston to Tampa with a connection in Philadelphia. I landed in Philadelphia without a problem but an ice storm descended on the airport and, after five hours of our flight's departure time being pushed back, the entire airport was closed and all flights for that day were canceled. When I arrived back at PHL the next day, two hours before the scheduled departure of my flight home -- my trip to Tampa was, by this point, called off entirely -- the airport was in chaos. Flights were still being canceled, airport information displays were inaccurate or switched off entirely and stranded travelers were everywhere. US Airways had deactivated the automatic ticket machines and there were thousands of people in scores of lines hoping for new tickets and assistance. But unlike the day before, we all knew that planes were theoretically going to be leaving and that, stuck outside, we were not going to be on them. People wanted boarding passes and they wanted them desperately. But the lines were not moving and nobody -- or almost nobody -- was going anywhere. Meanwhile, the four teams of TSA workers at the security station were standing idly talking to themselves like attendants at a light night gas station. The only people inside the terminal were those that had slept there or flown in that morning. After finding the end of a line, I asked someone what their line was for. Nobody knew, but each hoped it lead to someone who would assist with their particular problem. Usually they merely wanted to check in. Several people I asked had been waiting in line for five hours that morning only to find out that their line was, in fact, not a line at all but merely a mass of people leading nowhere or simply dissolving into other lines. Nobody knew what else to do so, I, like everyone else, queued up and hoped for the best. An impeccably dressed and obviously wealthy woman asked what I was in line was for. I told her that I didn't know but, like everyone else, hoped it would lead to a boarding pass. She wanted the same thing. She asked if there was a separate queue for first class and I pointed out that it seemed unlikely, in the chaos, that first class was getting special treatment. I pointed out that I also had a first class ticket -- it was the only seat available when the harried agent rebooked me the day before and I had not paid extra for this, but I did not tell her this. She nodded to me in camaraderie. She stood pensively next to me for five minutes and then fumbled for her wallet and ticket. She asked me if I would hold her place in line and I agreed. Five minutes later she reappeared with a boarding pass in her hand. Surprised, I asked her how she had obtained it. She stated, quietly so as not be overhead by the other would-be passengers but matter of factly, that she'd found a baggage handler and flashed a twenty dollar bill and her itinerary. She mentioned that the man she had paid had left but that, "any of them will do it." Sure enough, I was in the terminal less than ten minutes, and twenty dollars, later. Despite growing up partially in the third world, I've only personally bribed a person once before -- also in the United States. Like my previous experience, I didn't feel good about buying my way out of what seems to have, in fact, devolved into a racket. I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the situation and my action in the last several days. Everyone, or nearly everyone, outside the Philadelphia airport terminal had twenty dollars and most of them would have happily paid it to escape their predicament. The reason that most people did not pay off baggage workers is not because they found it prohibitively distasteful, although certainly some of them would have, but because most of us, and I include myself, would have spent the whole day frustrated, desperate, and standing line after line without even considering a bribe as an option. While we know it on some intellectual, reflective level, the vast majority of us do not, in practice, imagine that we can use money as a way to manipulate people into special treatment. As a result, even in situations like that morning in Philadelphia, I simply don't even think of the twenty in my wallet as a way to solve my problem. It's true that wealthy people, like the woman in line behind me, get what they want because they can pay lots of money for products and services. But it is not quite this simple. Some wealthy, powerful people get what they want in part because they think to use money in ways that the rest of us do not. Perhaps this is because this type of spending is frequently not an option for most of us or, we tell ourselves, perhaps even truthfully, because we find it distasteful and immoral. The difference between being inside or outside the terminal last Saturday was not about having or not having money. It was, in fact, about having a particular relationship to money and, through money, to other people. It was not about the value conferred by money but about a set of values that can result from having it in abundance.

19 March 2007

David Nusinow: Much Like The Internet, Your Mom Is A Series Of Tubes

This article got me thinking about some new ways we could dramatically improve Debian. We had a lot of success in the past because good packaging helps people get over the fearful hump of installing and setting up new software in order to learn it. We're great at that, and the battle is pretty much over there.

Afterwards though, I don't think we're so good at helping our users through the scary parts. We include a lot of documentation, but that's not really cutting it any more. I set out to work on X because the scariest thing for a lot of users is getting X up and running, and I wanted to help them (and myself!) do it. We still don't have that nailed, but it's in the pipeline, so I think the next stage will be to help people do cool things with X that they wouldn't have done before. In the past, this would have involved doing things like setting xrdb settings, but these days such things aren't really useful. I'm going to continue brainstorming this, but to this end I've started a page on the wiki that's expressly for helping users get over some of the more difficult and interesting things that people might want to do with, or to, X.

Currently the only tip is on building packages using upstream's git HEAD and our own packaging, but I'm looking to put more stuff up in the nearish future. While we haven't been maintaining it so well, the XSF FAQ has a lot of these sorts of tips too.

I think we can push harder and be more clever about giving our users and ourselves cool things to do with Debian beyond packaging. The XSF move to git opened up the opportunity to easily track the X.org HEAD with the Debian packaging, and I think that sort of thing is indicative that we can be clever about enabling people at all stages of the development process, not just through the packaging itself. If you guys have any ideas for more X tips you'd like to see documented, please edit that wiki page or at least drop me or debian-x a mail so we can write it up for you. I want to see how far we can push this.

16 March 2007

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Blizzard 2007

We’re finally having a decent snowstorm! Blizzard of 2007 Technorati Tags:

14 March 2007

Francesco P. Lovergine: Playing with mod_chroot...

... or why PHP sucks so much?

It is quite common (at least for me) finding abused web applications on shared hosts around. The most typical case is finding some kind of IRC bot running as www-data and a few unauthorized files around used for phishing, cross-site scripting or what else. That motivated me to try playing with mod_chroot in order to minimize the possibility of webapps abuse from our friendly kiddies^Wcrackers. Mod_chroot is a nice tiny Apache module whose purpose is the confinment of webapps within a limited tree, where nothing but a few files and dirs are available to try exploits and abuse badly written code.

Unfortunately, I found that mod_chroot poses one major problem (among others, see its CAVEATS doc): the sucking mail() function is not working out of the box, because PHP folks - God knows why - decided to implement that stuff by calling a local /usr/sbin/sendmail program within a shell call. The most sane option is simply ignoring the issue and living happy with a disabled local mail() function. A nice solution in that case is using a PEAR Mail module, which is able to send mails via SMTP in much more elegant way. Unfortunately, there are quite a good number of morons out there, and that could be not a viable option if you are the system administrator of a bounce of shared hosts which are exposed to those morons, who absolutely need a working mail() function.

After a few googling around, I did find that many people had the same problem, but none found (or explained) a working and neat solution for a working mail() implementation, so I'm writing some notes about that. My implementation is based on a nice tiny program (mini_sendmail) which has the great advantage of not requiring a configuration file or a spool directory to work. It also works without suid bit on, which is a good thing as well. It is statically compiled by default, so it simplifies things a lot. In order to have mail() working you need also to install a (statically compiled) shell, e.g. bash-static as sh under the /bin directory of your chroot tree (a more tiny shell would be appropriate). I commented out the silly username autodetection code in the mini_sendmail.c source, because it creates some problem within an empty chroot tree (it failed with a "can't determine username" message with or without the /etc/passwd file available).

Now, the next step is using an entry like

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -fwww-data@your.domain -s127.0.0.1

in your php.ini file. You can also use another IP address if your SMTP server is not your localhost or you used some more exotic routing setup. Having a suitable /etc/hosts is also useful. A final trick is adding a var/lib/php4 or what ever directory is required to store PHP session files. No other files should be required in order to have all working. Of course, you have also to use inet sockets for any required connection (e.g. mysql) but this is typically the default in etch. I would also suggest to add only ad hoc statically-compiled binaries within the chroot tree when required, else you will need to store all required shared libs: in that case you will need to find binaries requirement by using ldd and chroot to find loading/running errors by means of an usual trial-and-error cycle.

6 March 2007

Evan Prodromou: 14 Vent se CCXV

We had a good weekend this weekend. It was the Nuit Blanche here in Montreal -- a winter festival in which people stayed up all night on Saturday night, visiting art museums, dancing, seeing theater, or having hot chocolate. It's a good tradition in this city, and a lot of fun. We went ice-skating in Parc LaFontaine on Saturday afternoon -- except the ice wasn't very skatey. After the big snowstorm on Friday, the temperature went up to 4C on Saturday, so the ice was mushy and soft. Amita enjoyed riding around on the lake on her sled, though. On Sunday we had a bruncher at our house with friends who were a little worn out from the long night. I made fondue fromage, a big salad, potatoes, and a fondue v g tarien -- veggie bouillon boiling in a pot, with various vegetables that people could dip in, let cook, then eat off their forks. It was a good time. tags:

RoCoCoCamp is a go I spent part of the day today meeting up with the other CoConveners of RoCoCoCamp to go over some logistics for the event. RoCoCoCamp is an unconference centered around wikis and wiki-like Web sites, but stretching out into issues of collaboration, creativity, and self-organizing social groups. It's the Montreal version of RecentChangesCamp, and it's going to take place 18-20 May 2007 here in Montreal. We're finalizing the space and starting to line up funding for the event, as well as catering, lodging, etc. I've sent out a lot of invitations to wiki friends to come join; I think it's going to be a great conference. tags:

More certs for certifi.ca I've been trying to streamline the user experience on certifi.ca, the OpenID identity-provider I set up that uses only client-side certificates for authentication. I've added support for 4 more CAs: GeoTrust, TC TrustCenter, CACert, and StartCom. They all seem to be working well, which is great, although I could really use some help beta-testing the service by users of some of the newer CAs (especially CACert and StartCom). tags:

3 March 2007

Evan Prodromou: 11 Vent se CCXV

We had one of the biggest snows of the year today in Montreal. The storm, which happened overnight and was supposed to let up around noon, still hasn't stopped. It's a practical white-out outside -- big fluffy flakes everywhere. The radio said we had more than 40 cm of snow, which is just amazing. I headed over to La ka this afternoon for an interview with Steve Faguy of the Montreal Gazette. I was pretty worried about going out, but as usual I was pleasantly surprised when I was outside. Snowy weather is pretty gentle, and although I was cold and wet when I got to La ka, it wasn't all that bad. I had a good talk with Steve about Wikitravel, Montreal tech scene, and the French Revolutionary Calendar. I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out. tags:

certifi.ca doing well I was glad to see a post about certifi.ca in the Solution Media Blog of Thomas Huhn. Thomas set up the extremely useful OpenID Directory, so his opinion is pretty valuable. I'm glad he's as enthused about certifi.ca as I am. tags:

Registration and privacy I think I have an account on every free OpenID service on the Web. I need lots of accounts for debugging purposes, and I also like to have an idea of what people are doing with the protocol. I checked out prooveme.com a few days ago. prooveme.com gives out OpenIDs with SSL cert authentication, like certifi.ca. It seems like an OK service, but I don't think they use SSL and certs the right way. I tested the prooveme ID on a couple of services, had a couple of errors, and that was that. So I was surprised to see this posting in the proovemeblog today:
  • certifi.ca is another site doing certificated OpenID. Evan, the creator of certifi.ca is a subscriber of ours. We'll obviously be pleased if he carries on using us!
Now, I've been in wikis long enough to know that you have to AssumeGoodFaith when people post things in public forums, so I'll take this comment as nothing more than clumsy but good-natured ribbing. Ha ha ha. But: I haven't publicly said that I'd tested out the prooveme server. I'm not particularly embarrassed about it, but I hadn't had any reason to mention it to anybody, either. So the only way the poster could know that I'd registered for their service was to check their database records for my registration information. Publishing users' registration info without their consent steps over an important privacy line for me and, I think, for a lot of people. I'm not sure making a joke really justifies that kind of privacy invasion. I don't feel fairly treated, here. I partly blame myself: after all, I submitted personally-identifying information (PII) into a Web form on a site without an explicit privacy policy. I've gotten so used to OpenID providers being experienced with security and privacy issues that I made assumptions that turned out not to be the case. I've taken the incident as a wake-up call to put a privacy policy on certifi.ca. I hope that will communicate to users what I consider acceptable use of their data. And I'll make sure to check carefully for privacy policies whenever creating a new account in the future. For clarity: if I have an account on a Web service, that is not any kind of endorsement of their service, and doesn't necessarily suggest that I use that service regularly (or at all). I'm going to see what I can do to get my account deleted from the prooveme servers to avoid any misunderstanding in the future. tags:

2 March 2007

Sune Vuorela: Linuxforum day 1

Today I was at the business day at linuxforum. The first exciting thing about the day was if it was possible to actually get there after violent criminals have been ruining Copenhagen all night long. My bus took a detour, but I ended up at the rigth place finally. Today there was talks and some companies have been running their booths. The most interesting talk today was Poul-Henning Kamps talk about varnish. Another interesting topic was how lego tried something new - work with the community around their mindstorms stuff with great success. Tomorrow it is a bit more techie-day where the local LUGs are having booths also, and with exiting talks about Qt programming and a spamfilter deathmatch.

21 February 2007

Eddy Petrișor: TDebs - still brainstorming

This is about TDebs.

Raphael Hertzog raised an important point about tdebs and mirror usage. Not sure how to deal with that yet.

OTOH, silent tdebs' selection doesn't sound bad at all. Thanks Filipus.


More info on TDebs issues: http://wiki.debian.org/I18n/TranslationDataDistribution

20 February 2007

Erich Schubert: Dell customer wishlist

Dell is collecting customer wishes. It's interesting to see that all the top wishes are software related: starting with Linux preinstalled, OpenOffice, no AOL software preinstalled but a plain Vista only, Firefox as default browser or no software installed at all. I'd strongly suggest Dell to consider bundling at least OpenOffice, Firefox, Inkscape, Gaim, Thunderbird, Gimp and some more of the great Opensource software available for Windows (remember: they're free - no extra cost, but some customers will be happy for having a good vector graphics program, or a free office suite...) And I'd definitely like to see Dell offering a "no windows" option; I don't want to pay the Microsoft tax. An OS-less PC is fine for me, but it should be really cheap for Dell to get e.g. Ubuntu preinstalled.

18 February 2007

Evan Prodromou: 28 Pluvi se CCXV

Ugh. I have some blogging catching-up to do, which I'm going to try to take at a fast clip. I tend to get bogged down in the daily details, which can make getting my info down electronically kind of difficult.

Trip to New York City Maj, Amita June and I drove down through upstate New York for LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. It was a good drive -- really pretty going through the Adirondacks in winter. There were icicles hanging dozens of meters from stone cliffs -- really dramatic. We spent Tuesday night with our friends Jen Bohner and Massoud Marzban. Jen is a friend of mine from high school, and Massoud is her husband. They live in Sunnyside, Queens now, after a year stint here in Montreal just before Amita was born. We miss having them around here, but they seem to have settled in well in NYC. Jen is working way too hard on a master's of education while teaching 5 classes during the day in New York public schools. Despite this, they found time to make us a great dinner, open a bottle of wine, and spend the evening chatting. Really decent people. tags:

LWOSS The next morning, Valentine's Day, I got up early to go into Manhattan for LWOSS. I called for a car service that Jen and Massoud use, but they failed to show up, and when I called back they hung up on me. Deborah's Car Service, there. Make sure to miss them if you're in the area. Anyways, I managed to flag down a cab and get into Manhattan anyways. It wasn't too much fun -- there'd been a big snowstorm the night before, and traffic was gnarled and bitter. Still, I got to the event hotel -- the New York Marriott Marquis on Times Square, got checked in, and registered for the event just fine. The keynote speaker was security expert Bruce Schneier, who gave an extremely insightful talk about economic laws as they apply to computer security. It was very interesting, if hard to follow at times -- it's not always easy to keep economic theories and security practices juggling in your brain at the same time. I met up with Don Marti, who'd invited me to participate at LWOSS, in the speakers' lounge. He had assembled a great team of interesting people who know a lot about Linux and Open Source: John Mark Walker, Jeremy Allison and Jerry Carter of the Samba project, and Jeremy Garcia of LinuxQuestions. Sadly, the snowstorm had canceled the flights of two more participants, Donald Becker and Sascha Chua. (Those weren't the only two people who couldn't come because of the flying problems. I overheard dozens of conversations on cell phones of people whose colleagues couldn't make it for the show. In retrospect, it's pretty surprising that we had the event at all. Schools and businesses were closed all across New York on the 14th and 15th.) Don's plan was simple: to hold an "unconference" at the heart of the conference. We took a section of the showroom floor, set up some chairs and a big monitor for demoing, plus a whiteboard, and just started some interesting conversations. I talked about Web APIs, since I wrote an article on Web APIs for LinuxWorld.com in December. Other people talked about their own projects, about Linux distros, about tools in the Open Source toolkit, about the process itself, and all kinds of things. It was really fun and productive. (I'm realizing now that I should put Don in touch with Ted Ernst, who's been instrumental in organizing three of the Open Space events I went to in the last year. It would be really interesting to have an Open Space event the day before or after the main conference... making mental note, here.) Otherwise, the event was really pretty good. I talked a lot with Jeremy Garcia, who started using MediaWiki about the same time we started using it for Wikitravel. LQ is a really great project, and a nice mix of different community platforms. I managed to luck into an LQ t-shirt, which I'll wear proudly. The other big news, for me, was getting a loaner Nokia N800 to use during the event. The N800 is an Internet tablet, about the size of a cell phone, but without phone features. I liked it so much that I asked the Nokia team to loan me the device for a long-term review, and they agreed. So I took it home with me. Meanwhile, Maj and Amita June had a nice time tooling around New York. They went to the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday, which was pretty great -- Amita loved looking at the animals. We had dinner on Wednesday at a pub off of Times Square called The Perfect Pint -- although the food was a little more upscale than pubby. Thursday night we got a babysitter through the hotel and had drinks at the Broadway Bar (in the hotel) and dinner at The View (also in the hotel). The View is a rotating restaurant at the top of the Marriott Marquis -- pretty fun to do. tags:

UbuCon On Friday, I went to the Google HQ in Manhattan for TheUbucon, another (!) unconference, this time about Ubuntu and the people who love it. I got to hear Mako talk about the Ubuntu community process, how it works, and how to get involved. It was pretty impressive. I also did some key-signings and talked to a lot of interesting people. Including Kevin Mark, who had lots of comments on my blog. Hi, Kevin! I had to take off just as the event was getting started, to go pick up Maj and Amita June at the hotel and check out. We took a cab back to Queens, where we'd stashed the car so we didn't have pay outrageous Manhattan parking fees. Sadly, someone had taken the opportunity to key our paint job. I love you back, New York. tags:

Drive home I wanted to drive back through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont on the way back, for variety, so we turned east and headed up through Westchester County. It turned out to be a real mistake -- traffic on a Friday afternoon out of New York is apparently pretty miserable. We took 4 hours to get to Hartford, by which time the baby was miserable and the rest of us were feeling pretty punked out, too. We ended up in the Motel 6 in Enfield (Connecticut) where we ordered pizza, took showers, and just got our heads back together. Today we got up early and had a nice drive through Western Mass and Vermont. The little northern New England towns were pretty beautiful in the snow, and we passed a lot of barns and farmhouses that looked like movie sets. We stopped in Burlington for lunch, and had a leisurely drive over the border and back home. When we got to our house, I had to shovel drifted snow -- about 3-4 feet deep -- out of our parking space so I can pull the car in. But otherwise the house is in good order. I'm glad to be back. tags:

22 January 2007

John Goerzen: We're Home

We had some wonderful weather yesterday. I've always said that I like snow. It can completely change the landscape in an instant. And it looks so beautiful.

Yesterday we had a nice snowstorm all day. Large, wet flakes. It was the most snow we've had at once in a few years right around here. It was beautiful just like always. It started early in the morning before we got up and continued until almost midnight. This morning, I went out into a big open area and measured the snow -- 7.5".

There are two problems with snow. One is that it's difficult to get anywhere. The other is that it blows into everything.

And guess what -- yesterday was our moving day.

Fortunately, on Friday evening, most of the furniture that needed to go in a pickup did. But we still had to wrap some things in plastic on Saturday. We didn't get everything moved that we wanted to. Between icy ground outside, travel at less than half the usual speed on the roads, and snow blowing everywhere, things were slow. But that's fine; we'll get the rest later.

This was the scene during the move:



Not long after that picture was taken, it was announced that church was canceled today. We kept moving things though.

Although we didn't get everything moved that we had hoped to, we got enough moved to consider ourselves moved in. We have one fully-functional bathroom. Jacob's bedroom and our bedroom are done. The kitchen will get its floor Monday and we'll get appliances Thursday. The only big thing left is guttering, plus there are still a few doorknobs and light fixtures pending. But it was enough that the three of us spent our first night here last night!

We're very appreciative of the help we got from family & friends, who helped us move and brought us food (since we don't have a fridge for the next few days).

Jacob doesn't like change very much (he cried when he noticed that some clutter in our apartment living room was gone). But he likes to learn about his environment. So today, he woke up at 6AM (and got us up at 6AM), spent an hour happily looking around, then promptly started fussing. That's how the day has been for him -- interest and crying.

At about 7:30AM, we were shocked to see a road maintainer plowing our road. Why shocked? Well, nobody else lives on this road for a couple of miles. It's not exactly a popular spot. And it hadn't been in all that great of shape before winter.

Later in the day, I went out to take some pictures. Here's one of our driveway:



Doesn't it look fun?

I decided to see if we could get out. The short answer is yes. The long answer is "yes, if you have patience." After rocking the car back and forth to get it turned around in the yard, I was able to keep up enough speed to get to the road and back. So Terah and I had lunch with my parents, then went into town to get another carload of stuff. There were children out playing everywhere, and well-worn sledding paths down hillsides. Too bad Jacob isn't old enough to enjoy this!

It was last April when we first started thinking about this. By June we had bought the property out here, and in October we moved to the apartment. It's been a long time feeling like we were living somewhere temporarily.

And, right now, it is great to be home.

21 January 2007

Enrico Zini: avoid-flamewars

Fourteen ways in which you can avoid starting a flame war on a Debian mailing list On an IRC brainstorming on what talk I should give at FOSDEM, liw suggested:
"Fourteen ways in which you can avoid starting a flame war on a Debian mailing list".
In the end I went for something more technical, but I've never stopped thinking about liw's challenge. I ended up writing talk notes about such a potential talk. Here they are. The classics The radicals The radicals, applied selectively The From tricks The naggers The conscience ticklers The subtle The subtle, 1 week later

19 January 2007

Thijs Kinkhorst: SUV's and Airbuses

Happy global warming...:-(... Please spread the word around: we are all responsible for this with our daily attitude with regards to the respect of our environment. Environment respect is no more (and has never been) a joke.
Says the guy blogging about booking flights from Paris to Edinburgh...

MJ Ray: The storm: how was it for you?

niq commented:
"FWIW, in the real westcountry (West Devon, near the cornish border) we've missed the storms. A bit of wind in the morning, and some drizzle, but nothing substantial."
Yes, seeing what happened further north - roofs ripped up in Manchester - and east - house collapse in King's Lynn (pic 9) - then it seems we got off lightly this time. I hear that Germany declared it a hurricane, but I haven't confirmed that online. Euronews coverage. As far as I can see, there's snapped aerials and all the windows look like someone has sneezed over them, but damage mostly stopped after the fences were ripped to bits. I heard that the sea overtopped the wall in Weston, but I can't find pictures. I'll see myself what town is like later today. Update: niq, you didn't get an email notice because your mailserver is cocked-up:
"550 Error: 23Your subject line looks like spam"
Damnit, it's your phrase in the subject line!

Meike Reichle: Storm's over

Kyrill crossed Hildesheim yesterday evening. Some parts of the city got hit rather badly with roofs being completely untiled and trees falling on buildings. It seems we were lucky to only lose a few tiles, since there have been reports of debris flying about in our street yesterday and the little park opposite our house looks not too good today. No disrooted trees though. However, in the next street a poplar tree was disrooted and fell on a car killing one man and injuring two others, one of them severely. Guess that explains the many ambulances going by yesterday :/ This morning, with daylight back most things seem back to normal. There's quite lot of stuff lying about and the river has really high water and also carries a lot of debris, mainly boughs and twigs though. PS: What bothers me most, ist that most news services today have headlines such as "Storm "Kyrill": The best Photos from our readers" and similar. I hate it when people have nothing better to do than to pull out their f***ing mobile phones and take pictures whenever something bad happens and this is not exactly helping!

Christian Perrier: Storm

Nothing really worth noticing here, the Paris area being southward enough and not hit by this major storm over northern Europe. Many people still remember Dec 26th 1999 and have been very careful, indeed. I'm just listening to the morning news and am Seeing that UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and a part of northern France have not been as lucky as us here (this doesn't seem to be finished and more Eastern parts are still to be hit). The damages seem to be pretty high and so is the number of casualties. I hope that all you people are safe and well with no damage to your lives or belongings. Happy global warming...:-(... Please spread the word around: we are all responsible for this with our daily attitude with regards to the respect of our environment. Environment respect is no more (and has never been) a joke. This is a matter of survival for us and our children. Do us a favor: break one SUV a day...:-)

18 January 2007

Simon Richter: This is Munich.

There's a storm outside, and people are securing everything they hold dear. This being Munich, and specifically a part of Munich that got parking meters just a week ago, the most valued possesion is parking space. At least that is the best explanation I can give.

Alexander Schmehl: Storm

Erich mentioned a storm warning for Germany and the recommendation at his university to not do any lectures. Well... Here in the north we have quite some wind blowing, believe me... the first time I actually saw roof tiles been blown off the roof. Makes you feel very comfortable when walking home ;) Interesting: All universities in the neighbourhood have been closed and schools closed at 11:00am. Only we needed to stay till 7:00pm for our math course :( Wish us luck: We live in a attic floor flat and already lost some roof tiles. And according to the forecast it might still become stronger...

Next.

Previous.