Protx, a payment service, installed a major update on 1 August. They'd warned us about this in newsletters and we were prepared. We paid a bit towards another company's development of the protx_form module for OSCommerce to meet the updates and generally clean it up. This went slightly wrong in three ways. Firstly, protx went down for longer than expected, ultimately generating an apology from the MD. Not much we could do about that. Secondly, protx started rejecting commas in amounts. GB uses commas in between thousands, so this meant none of our British-localised shops could process orders over 1000. Ow. The Protx VSP Form docs still shows commas in the Amount examples, so I suspect that change was unintented. I've sent Protx Support an email to ask. I was offline, but Paul installed a fix before I got back. Finally, the mainline protx_form module has updated to v1.17 to include these changes and more (see Payment Modules forum threads), but our developer hasn't uploaded their work yet, so we're stuck up a branch and someone needs to merge. I hope it won't be us, as I can already see conflicting changes. What should I have done differently? Is it time to find a new payment provider? Should I insist that we publish paid developments ourselves as soon as possible? (2007-08-16: 1 comment)

I have just visited the eBox team room and I have discovered a really nice project they are working on. Jos Antonio Calvo (aka Josh) is creating a really cool suite of programs called ANSTE that allows a developer to define network scenarios and run tests easily on them. We are going to use it to perform continuous integration for eBox, running a test of suites nightly to ensure that every module works correctly, which includes stuff like setting up two separate networks, connect them with the OpenVPN eBox module and checking connectivity through the vpn interfaces or ensuring that the traffic shaping module really does its job. Josh’s work is not this far yet, but ANSTE is already able to read XML scenario definition files like this one and generate the Xen virtual machines as specified, with the appropiate software, virtual interfaces, routes, … as defined by the scenario file. It’s also able to run suites of tests which right now are simple scripts. The next steps are integrating Selenium to perform automatized eBox configuration through a browser (thus testing the GUI too), creating nice GUI tools to generate the scenario files and manage the test suites and writing powerful reporting tools. Of course, ANSTE is free software under the GPL license and you can follow (or contribute to) the development in ANSTE’s Trac.

Some weeks ago we started developing KTrace, a graphical KDE frontend for strace. We quickly managed to have something which worked, but development stalled after that. Today we are holding the first KTrace developers meeting to make some decisions about the next features that will be coded. If you want to propose a feature that you would like to see in KTrace (or just a better name proposal), feel free to write a comment

• Distributed SHA-1 code-cracking effort launched
• Even the hackers are nervous
• Nationwide Insurance
• The Seven Sins of Solutions
• A Gentlemen s Duel.
• Introducing jsfunfuzz

Today was a strange day. We are preparing our holiday trip to Sicily but had a full day at home, meant for packing and the like. Indeed, packing was done in a few hours this morning and I ended up....hacking on D-I. For whatever reason, I came back on the plans we have, among the D-I team, to switch to console-setup for console handling. Something already done in Ubuntu and which brings, for instance and if I'm correct, the benefit of having the same keyboard maps for X and the console. So, first, I summarized the floating ideas in a wiki page. Then I worked on a few possible modifications to "localechooser", the D-I component that allows users to choose their language/country/locale and which needs modifications for console-setup. That lead me to produce an experimental image of D-I netboot for i386 and asked translators for some testing. MJ Ray noticed the call for testing and asked Esperanto translators for some testing, which Serge Leblanc did...and reported a nasty bug, later confirmed by Damyan Ivanov, then investigated by Anton Zinoviev, then digged a little more by me again, then advised by Rapha l Hertzog and Julien Cristau on #debian-devel-fr...and lead to an RC bug reported against....perl base. All this, of course, was completely unplanned as of this morning. This is probably one of the reasons that make me enjoy free software development.

I have had, on occasion in the past, a reason to use the wonderful TortoiseSVN software. It is, by all standards, a really great solution for someone wanting to use SVN in a MS Windows environment, and uses the official svn client in order to leverage open source as much as possible. Recently I have been using it a bit more as I work at Honeywell as a programmer. I've come across a couple things that bug me about the interface.

The first is that some actions inexplicably lock the place that initiates that action. The best example I have of this is when I am looking at the window for an Update, and want to see what happened in the log, I click the button to open the log, and I can't use the window while the log downloads. Sometimes this can be an issue because the server is pretty slow at producing logs for some reason (it's beyond me, and NotMyProblem(tm) because I'm not in charge of the admin). This makes it irritating because I can't inspect other files while the log is downloading. Strangely, the server actually will return other requests quickly, like the request needed to see the diff between the working copy and the tree. It would be much better if the windows were separate - they're not related to each other in effect, so the locking of the initial window is completely useless. I could have called up the log from another action, that would leave the update window perfectly usable, so I know it's possible.

The second problem that I have run across more than once relates to the proximity of actions in the right click menu while committing a change. Take a look at the screenshot of this menu.

There have been many times when using this window that I realize that I forgot to add a file that I need to commit, so I right click on the file and move down to the "Add" menu item, only to miss and click on the "Delete" item. "Delete", when used on a unversioned file, performs a windows delete, causing me to curse at the (now missing) entry in the commit log and go running to the recycle bin to retrieve this temporarily lost file. These two options in the context menu are entirely too close to each other. The "Delete" and "Add" actions have completely opposite meanings and effects, and having the program do exactly the opposite of what you expect is what I consider to be a Very Bad Thing. I would move the "Add" action up to the top of the list (it is, by far, the most common reason for me to use the context menu), or at least place another menu item in between.

I'm feeling like I'm being very unhelpful here, complaining about these issues in an open source project and not producing a patch to fix these issues. I may produce one in the near future - unfortunately when I'm not at Honeywell, I don't really have a Windows development environment setup.

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1. JD: The reason diffs are quick is because svn keeps a copy of the original file in the checkout, so diffs and reverts don't need to hit the server.
   #1 2007-08-09 00:41 (Reply)

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A few weeks ago, Lisa and I were in Barnes&Noble, and I decided to buy a few photography books: The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby: This book is, as advertised, not a book about concepts and theories but rather about practical advice and tips. If you already know some of the theory, it’s pretty easy to see how it plays out in practice in this book. Composition Photo Workshop by Blue Fier: I love the name “Blue Fier”, even though I’m probably pronouncing “Fier” wrong (”Fire”). Anyway, this book started off a little slow for me because he covers things like aperture and depth of field and focus, and shutter speed and ISO and other things I’m already fairly familiar with. When he started getting into framing and rule-of-thirds type stuff it got more interesting. He also covered several different styles of photography (landscape, macro, portrait, etc.) and so it was a pretty good introductory book. Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick: I’m only half way through this book so far, and already it’s prompted me to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash, and gotten me thinking about getting lights and umbrellas and reflectors and setting up my own miniature studio. I’ve spent the past few days trying to take portraits of Pixel and Lisa and myself, and haven’t had much success, mainly due to poor lighting (hence the flash and the dreams of better lighting equipment). When taking self portraits I’ve had such trouble getting the camera placement and focus and lighting right that I haven’t even gotten to really working on posing much. Which is fine, since I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet anyway. There’s a portrait workshop being held in Los Gatos at the end of September that I think I’m going to enroll in, but I’m worried based on the description that I’ll have already heard most of it from the portrait book I bought. In the spring I may enroll for a photography class at the local community college as well.

Dear lazyweb, is this a bug? Should I fill this?

$ sh -x rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 grep -E '\'
+ alias 'rpmbuilder=rpmbuild --define "_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat"'
+ rpmbuild --define '_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat' -bs foo.spec
$ sh rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 grep -E '\'

$ bash -x rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 grep -E '\'
+ alias 'rpmbuilder=rpmbuild --define "_topdir /tmp/rpmbuildarea/foo/redhat"'
+ rpmbuilder -bs foo.spec
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found
$ bash rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 grep -E '\'
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found

$ rpm/build_latest_srpm foo 2>&1 grep -E '\'
rpm/build_latest_srpm: line 46: rpmbuilder: command not found

$ type sh
sh is hashed (/bin/sh)
$ type bash
bash is hashed (/bin/bash)
$ ll /bin/*sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 677184 2006-12-11 23:20 /bin/bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2006-08-17 21:05 /bin/csh -> /etc/alternatives/csh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80200 2007-02-02 09:34 /bin/dash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2006-12-19 15:02 /bin/rbash -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2006-12-19 15:02 /bin/sh -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2006-08-17 20:58 /bin/tcsh -> /usr/bin/tcsh


The script has /bin/bash in the shabang.

I tried to reproduce with another simpler script, and I observed that the issue happens when the script is processed by bash. With a /bin/sh shabang, it didn't since the command processing the script was sh, also all sh commands were ok.

I also suspect that it has to do with this paragraph from the bash manual:


Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless the expand_aliases shell option is set using
shopt (see the description of shopt under SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below).


... but different and (I would say) worse behaviour than the sh invocation should not happen.

The test script follows:

#!/bin/bash

alias rpm-build="echo \"I:\""
alias dpkg-select="dpkg --get-selections \"ls\*\""

echo "alias1:" && rpm-build test
echo "alias2:" && dpkg-select

Test and enjoy. Before you ask, yes, I use bash functionality.

Update: Also using set -i just before the alias definition and keeping it during the expansion does not help.

Well, yesterday I asked

"WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what?"

Not the most polite of questions(!), but it's what I was wondering at the time. I had some good replies in the comments and a reply by Pingback that I didn't like, but it turned out to be a very educational reply in the end. A comment from Filipus Klutiero included:

"Sometimes, it's not really possible to explain a bad opinion of someone, because we forget the reasons for that opinion. However, if you think that voting based on reputation is a bad idea, you probably can't understand these "cowards"."

I've mentioned before that I don't seem to fit the debian developers stereotype, so I guess it's not surprising if I don't understand them sometimes. If reputation is always going to be such a big factor, one problem I need to overcome in debian and SPI is that some other participants do make crap up about me. You can usually spot it by phrases like "seems to think" (there are not that many mind-readers out there), but eventually, mud sticks. How to overcome this? Patiently post corrections, or is that futile? Here are posts from Andrew Pollock and Matt Palmer which I think are wrong on several points:- First off, I haven't decided to call anyone cowards - it was a question, albeit a bit "nasty, british and short". The underlying sentiment was continued disappointment and puzzlement at why voters behave like that in a non-secret vote, not rage. It was not really an "outburst," coming a week after the results. I'm not unhappy with the results - I've congratulated the winners by several methods, including the last post, although I mentioned my mixed feelings. Isn't that usual? I think very few non-elected candidates express unbridled joy about the experience. After all, it's not an easy decision to stand, but I did it for two main reasons: shortage of other candidates I really liked, at the time I chose to stand (as I mentioned in my platform); and for practical experience of how Condorcet behaves. I'm not rabid - I've even written against the Rabid Right recently - and I'm not rabidly anti-Google. I had polite chats with various people from Sun, Microsoft and Google at debconf - I don't like those companies, but I don't feel a need to tell their workers that at every point. I think reasons to like and dislike Sun and Microsoft are old and well-known, but a few years ago, I got so bored of explaining why I don't agree that Google is God's Gift to our communities that I posted a FAQ-ish page about it, which I update as I look at its new developments. Let's politely disagree, until Google fix the bugs which brought me to that view. Andrew Pollock's point about debian-legal is vague and maybe fair comment. It's not often a fun or popular thing. But "precious ego"? Ha! Yes, a guy who humiliates himself with cheap stunts for environmental protests is clearly very precious about his ego(!) (Sorry if that's rude, but I find it hilarious.) I don't mind people having different opinions, but it would be nice if their opinions about me were mostly based on reality, instead of misunderstandings. One fair point from Matt Palmer's post and also, I discovered eventually, from Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho's site, is that SPI's elections apparently are meant to be secret, as far as I can tell from the starts of Article Five and Article Seven of the SPI by-laws. I tend to value practice more than theory and the current voting practice is merely confidential, not secret. I think that's part of why I didn't understand the approach taken by some voters - they were treating it as a secret ballot. That's fine and now that I realise it's meant to be secret, I've suggested making it a secret ballot. (2007-08-08: 1 comment)

I'm on the plane down from Vancouver to San Francisco this morning. My flight from Taipei hit Vancouver around 8PM last night, so I stayed at the Fairmont Hotel at the airport. It was definitely a special treat -- the Fairmont's pretty pricey -- but this trip has been really low-budget and I needed a lot of rest and recharge. I had a good room with a view of the airport and the city beyond. My flight over was uneventful -- sleep, eat, Spiderman 3 -- which was good since I'd had such a big last day in Taipei. In the morning, I'd gone out to see Taipei 101, which claims to be the tallest building in the world by some standards. I think there are lots of ways to slice the "tallest building" category -- the CN Tower has a strong claim, but that's only counting the huge antenna on top. And there's an unfinished tower in Dubai that's already close to, or taller than, Taipei 101. Regardless, Taipei 101 is a real interesting site. The elevators are the fastest in the world -- 38 seconds to go from floor 5 to floor 87. The windowed observation deck is interesting, and there's an outdoor deck two flights above it. The outdoor deck is racked by Taipei's scorching heat -- when I was there, it was 31C, up above the city's protective smog belt. The sun and empty sky make for an otherworldly experience. After 101, I took Taipei's local subway, the MRT, to the National Palace Museum. I've found the MRT easy to get around on -- most of the information was available in English as well as Chinese -- but I got a little lost looking for the museum. I was disappointed that the information booth in the Taiwan Main Station had so little tourism information, and all of it in Chinese. (Yeah, I forgot to print out the Wikitravel Taipei guide before leaving the hotel. My bad.) But I managed to wend my way out to Shilin Station and took a cab to the museum. It was worth the search. When the Chinese Nationalists left the mainland for Taiwan, they took with them many of the treasures of the Imperial Palace (much to the chagrin of the victorious Communists). These form the core of the museum's collection, and they're really quite amazing -- articles in bronze, ivory and gold from the Neolithic era to the modern day. While Western culture has gone through so many distinct and discontinuous phases -- Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Modern -- China's has varied much more smoothly and continuously. It's a little disconcerting to see artistic themes from 4000BC that are echoed in items for sale in the stores today. I had to get back to the Wikimania site -- by then almost empty -- to do a GChat conference with Niko. There were a passel of Wikimaniacs still around after the conference looking around Taiwan like I was, and after consulting Wikitravel we decided to go to Taipei's most famous restaurant, Din Something Something. It's got a short menu of delicious steamed dumplings -- pork, veggie, crab and shrimp. The shop's claim to fame is the elastic skin that keeps a pocket of hot broth inside the dumplings. Hey: if you do something well, why vary the menu? It was the best meal I've had in a long time. The dumplings themselves were incredibly good -- moist and rich with complex flavors. But the company was even better -- about 14 Wikimedians from all continents and walks of life, some of the most fascinating and important people on the planet. We were a big enough group to be stowed in our own party room, and with basket after basket of steamed dumplings piled onto the table, washed down with shared bottles of the ubiquitous Taiwan Beer, we had a crazy chaotic and fun time. I'm so glad I took an extra day after the conference to see a bit of the city. I think there's a lot more that I missed, but I'm glad that I got a taste. tags: taiwan taipei travel wikimania2007 taipei101 nationalpalacemuseum wiki

Wikimania 2008 Inevitably the conversation at Din Something Something turned to Wikimania 2008 and possible venues for it. Right now, the only serious bid is from Alexandria, Egypt, home of the Biblioteca Alexandrina. This is a modern reconstruction of the famous Library of Alexandria, centre of learning for the ancient world and repository of all of its knowledge. The bid is to use the sleek, glamourous conference centre attached to the Biblioteca -- offered to us free of charge. You couldn't put together a more powerful metaphor -- Wikimedia being itself a project to capture the world's knowledge and share it with all humanity. Having our event on the African continent would also send a great message about the Foundation's commitment to making free information accessible to the developing world. North Africa is definitely the most accessible part of the continent for Europeans and North Americans -- many of whom balked at the price and distance of travel to Taipei. The big problem with planning Wikimanias (Wikimaniae?) in the past has been the short time-frame. Typically bids for the event don't start until after the previous one, and the bidding process takes several months. By the time a venue is selected, there may be only 6-8 months of planning time available. For an international conference of several hundred people, this is a stressful, breakneck schedule. The idea was floated to do a little stutter-step and put Wikimania on a more long-term planning schedule. The event committee would short-circuit the bidding process this year, and declare Alexandria the site for Wikimania 2008 unless other groups insisted on bids for other cities. Then, bidding for Wikimania 2009 would start in September or October, with a decision made by the end of 2007. This would give 20 months for the Wikimania 2009 organizing team to prepare. Most importantly, they'd be able to shadow the 2008 team, learn how the job is done, attend the 2008 conference, and present about their venue for the next year. I think this is a really good idea. The Biblioteca conference centre staff will be able to provide us some professional services, making the shorter schedule (still about 11 months) a lot easier. There are some concerns about fairness of the process, or appearance of same, but my guess is that if the 2009 bid process starts soon after, people won't have a big beef. There are two major concerns with going to Alexandria, though. First is Egypt's worrying problem with human rights -- specifically gay rights. Homosexual Egyptian men are subject to arrest, and the laws are occasionally enforced. One foreigner was arrested in 2002. That's enough to put Egypt on a no-visit list with some gay-rights groups. Depressing as it is, I think it might be too much to hope for a venue in a country with an absolutely spotless human rights record. Maybe parts of Scandinavia...? There's a cruel calculus needed to evaluate which national human rights abuses can be reluctantly overlooked, and which are unacceptable. It's also clear that my personal judgment might be clouded, since this particular human rights issue is not one I would be directly targeted by. My hope is that an official statement by the Foundation would make it clear to the Egyptian government that this kind of policy is not conducive to attracting overseas business and tourism. The second concern is that Egypt and the Arab world in general have only embryonic local Wikimedian communities. While there are many people who contribute to Arabic Wikipedia, there is not a Wikimedia chapter in Egypt, nor are there regular meetups in the country or region. This might be a chicken-and-egg problem: choosing Alexandria would probably kick-start local groups. I hope that ar: Wikimedians pick up the mantle of leadership that the world Wikimedia community is offering them. tags: wikimania08 alexandria arabic wikipedia egypt

Having taken time out to go to the other side of the world to attend DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, and then after spending some time with my family, I have been somewhat distracted from things CalDAV for a wee while now. There are signs that I will be able to put a few more evenings and weekends into it in coming months. Current Status With the release of 0.8.0 I believe it is quite a usable application for shared group calendars. We use it at Catalyst for about 80 staff and, while we're not heavy calendar users, it manages without any noticeable performance problems. There have been an impressive number of downloads from Sourceforge, as well as substantial downloads from my Debian repository, and I believe that the program is in tens, if not hundreds, of installations. Future Plans In the immediate future I want to get the basic framework for querying properties about the owner of a calendar or a set of calendars. This will be used by Mozilla soon during their configuration of a new CalDAV source, and I think that Apple iCal probably uses them already. This is partly done, but it's implementation has been slowed by the necessity to refactor the handling of the REPORT method in general to make the code more modular and readable, and to support queries and properties in a more general manner. The refactoring of the REPORT method handling is in place now, so moving on to the handling of DAV:principal objects should become fairly straightforward. I may end up with a fair bit of quiet, undistracted time over the coming weekend so if I can get in the 'zone', it may get done, and we can start rolling towards a release 0.9. Release 0.9 will have a new name. One from the cast of thousands that have been submitted to me so far, or one that I will hastily think up in between, but the next released version will not be called RSCDS any longer. The main goals for further into the future are:

• Maintain interoperability with clients
• Improve specification compliance
• Extend coverage to related specifications
• Documentation improvements
• Configuration improvements
• Installation improvements

Interoperability I think that RSCDS does fairly well on the interoperability front. Unfortunately I have no access to the preview of OS 10.5, with it's native CalDAV client (though I have been told that it works with RSCDS). Likewise, other commercial CalDAV clients aren't available to me for testing either, so I have concentrated my efforts on supporting the featureset used by the various free CalDAV clients. My initial work focused around supporting Evolution, in particular, but with the recent effort put in by the Mozilla Calendar team the primary interoperability challenge is to enhance RSCDS to support their areas of development. If I could see how the OS 10.5 client behaves, too, I believe that would help identify a few points to extend, as well as suggesting some future directions. The best place to review interoperability would probably be at the CalConnect Roundtable 10 but I think that without some sponsorship for airfares I probably won't be able to make that. Maybe next time. Specifications Compliance As I read, and reread, the CalDAV (and DAV, and HTTP, and ...) RFCs the compliance with the various specifications improves. Recently I have put a lot of work into the calendar-query report, in particular, which means it now supports querying against arbitrary properties much more comprehensively. This is important because some of the client software is starting to do arbitrary queries also, and it is inevitable that queries for the classification of events, or the percentage completion of todo items will become more common. And now I notice that there is a new version of DAV in RFC4918, though not too many changes as far as I can see. The intent of this release is mostly to clarify, and slightly to extend, primarily in order to improve client interoperability. Coverage of Related Specifications In terms of general calendaring activities, the biggest hole in the CalDAV specification at present is standardisation around the location of other people's schedules. The current draft of the Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV appears to address that, and a lot more besides. I expect to start working on parts of this at some point, but perhaps not sooner than I see a client which starts using it, or when it is ratified, whichever occurs soonest. Documentation The documentation is OK. The wiki, in particular, is a reasonable resource for resolving problems (I believe), but it would be good to have some documentation of other things. One area that could do with enhancement is some documentation of how to check out a copy of the code, and how to provide patches back to me. Even better if other people can maintain their own trees which I could pull patches from, since we're using a distributed version control system (Git) to start with. Configuration The administration interface for RSCDS is OK, but could do with a few improvements to make it more usable. Really there are not a lot of reasons to be in the administrative interface, so these improvements should be relatively few, and relatively easy. This would be a good area for someone interested in helping out to become involved, because it does not entail reading large reams of RFCs, or watching tcpdumps scroll past for the debugging. Installation One thing that I have done right, I believe, was to provide the software from the beginning in a packaged form to make the installation easier. Although the software is packaged for Debian, however, it has not yet been uploaded to the archive because I have been waiting for the webapps-common package to enter Debian so I can use that for configuration. I think I have waited long enough though, so I will upload the next version to Debian for use by a wider audience. Security Security has always been a focus for me and I have had the code reviewed for any obvious security flaws. If any particular vulnerabilities are found they will be addressed with appropriate haste. Retrospective I've been working on this for a little over a year now, and I think I have largely met my goals for the project. It has certainly been an educational experience for me, and the effect of this work on other projects that I also participate in has also been valuable. Any new open-source project is always at risk of the developer losing energy and interest, but I believe this one has made it to a state where the bulk of the infrastructure effort has been done, and there are enough interesting challenges in the future to continue to keep me (at least) working on it into the future. The scope of this project is good, in that it is not at risk of expanding to take over the world. The intention behind this is simply to provide a back-end service for client software which should be very much Someone Else's Problem. In reality there have been times when I have had to get to grips with some of that client software in order to resolve problems, but those have by and large been good experiences.

I've been offline, but I think I've caught up now. Email if you think I missed you. Here's some of what I did before I went offline:

robmyers Seller's Remorse

Social Contract ten years on July 5 -- celebration?

Advertising Free Software Projects etbe

A Cambridge Co-operator: Great News

Michael

Cooperative? My Arse Web design and development techniques by Steve Tucker

Anti-DRM campaign, Apple Store, London.

Place Your Blog on a 'Busy Intersection'

Should Links from Your Blog Open in a New Window? Reader Opinions

Back

Co-opNet :: View topic - What Crisis

LWN: Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

The Problem with RSS

Property of a Lady Answers to Love Is Strange Trivia

Fairtrade Beer niq's soapbox

Co-opNet :: View topic - The Cooperative Tour de France

ITV response to Coverage Question... - Page 3 - ITV Message Boards

Why doesn't Online Main Stream Media link?

Property of a Lady Tuesday Trivia: Dance

Humor for Bond 22? Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

lamby :: blog :: Graduation

itv and Other Tours Coverage: Vuelta, ToB

Holidays-London-and-rain

Reflowd - Recentlog

Reflowd - Source code

Aaargh! niq's soapbox

I'm in the EVA Air Evergreen Lounge at the Taipei Airport. I got bumped up to first class again for no apparent reason -- they were going to stick me in a middle seat in economy, and I squawked, and the next thing I know I've got a first-class ticket and pass to the lounge. Cool. This has been a crazy week. As I mentioned before, we announced Wikitravel Press at Wikimania 2007. That was great: we even got mentioned in the China Times about it. The transliteration of my name in Chinese? : that's "Bulazhuomu" or cloth-Latin-eminent-wetnurse. (Thanks for the translation, Jani.) But my main focus of the conference was my talk -- Talks/Wikimania2007. I talked about Enhancing wiki with social networking tools -- by which I mean social software. We'd done a decent job with this with Wikitravel Extra, but I've been working on a new project called Keiki with some friends, and we decided it was the right time to demo the tool for people. So it was a lot of hacking and negotiating over IRC right up until the talk to get things right for our first debut. Per the Keiki About page: Keiki is a project to create a free, complete and reliable parenting guide covering all stages of development, from conception to college. It is written by people who care about kids and want them to thrive: parents, grandparents, and teachers and parenting professionals. The manual we create together is available under a liberal copyleft license to make it easy for people to get and share the guide. Keiki means "child" in Hawaiian. Since wiki is also a borrowed Hawaiian word, we thought it was a good fit. The project itself is the fruition of several years of work by myself and Maj and people we've met and like in the wiki world. When Wikitravel became my full-time work, we were just getting used to being new parents, and our needs for buying travel guides was far outweighed by our needs for good parenting books. Talking to other parents, we found out that there was a lot of great information out there, but it was hard to get in one place. So kei.ki was born: a source for great child-raising information, free as in freedom. I hope the site becomes as important as it should be: after all, we're creating the Free training manual for the hardest job there's ever been. tags: keiki wiki parenting wikimania2007

On Wikipedia Weekly I lucked out and got interviewed on the awesome podcast Wikipedia Weekly, too. Their http://wikipediaweekly.org/2007/08/05/interview-with-wikitravels-evan-prodromou/[ Interview with WikiTravel s Evan Prodromou] is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it. tags: wikipediaweekly wiki wikitravel keiki

As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Linbox for the past 3 years, on and off, part time and full time, depending on the time of the year. I won’t be working with Linbox anymore after Mandriva, which has bought Linbox back in June, decided Linbox wouldn’t go ahead in the Enterprise VoIP business. I have been, for the past 2 years, the architect of Linbox’ VoIP solution. This unfortunate and ill-advised decision of stopping the development of a successful product at its beginning will effectively leave the current customers out in the cold, as technical support will probably be erratic at best. Looking back in the mirror, I’ve done a lot of things, small and big, during these 3 years:

• [2004] Developed a web-managed multi-service turn-key solution for SMBs, of which the web interface served as a prototype for the Linbox Management Console (a web-based server management framework);
• [2004] Developed the product deployment system based on FAI; still in use today, obviously updated since then;
• [2004] Wrote an AD to LDAP account (including password) sync script (customer with a special need); that resulted in me hacking OpenLDAP to port the lanman password hash support to gcrypt (Debian #245341);
• [2004] Started the hosting business;
• [2005] Started the development of the Linbox IP Telephony Solution (LIPS), based on AMPortal (now called FreePBX); ended up forking AMPortal to fix the gazillion bugs and bring it to a more usable state;
• [2005] Hacked up OpenXchange to add a click’n'dial feature to the addressbook; eventually we decided to dump OpenXchange, mainly for being an underdocumented pile of crap full of security holes (nice SQL injections, eh) and, over all, a false free software (no upgrade path, no doc, some components not released, GPL patches added to the non-free version without agreement, among other things);
• [2006] Prototyped the cluster version of the VoIP solution; this cluster version meant the solution could scale up to support thousands of users on multiple sites with redundancy and failover;
• [2006] Wrote a migration tool to migrate mails away from a FirstClass groupware to anything IMAPv4-compliant, straight out of the on-disk FirstClass storage database;
• [2007] Integrated the VoIP solution into the Linbox Management Console; after 2 years of consolidating the AMPortal web interface, I’ve finally got rid of that horrible thing;
• [2007] Integrated the cluster support infrastructure into the solution;
• [2007] Added proper faxing (over PSTN) support, at last.

And, more importantly:

• [2007] Deployed client sites without any interruption in telephone service.

I’m especially proud of that; the solution was ready for that moment, and my deployment plan proved to be the right one and flexible enough to account for everything that wasn’t ready in time (missing network infrastructure, things that had been forgotten on the client side, things that didn’t go as planned and last minute changes to accommodate users’ needs). The customers were very happy and enthusiastic with regard to their new VoIP infrastructure - so much that there was more to come. And more to come means more business for a company that definitely needs it, and is now turning that business down. So it’s all over now, and overall I’ve had a good time working there with the technical team. They’re all very talented, and we were 3 DDs working there - that figure is now down to 1 (yes, one, as in 3 - 2 = 1). I’ve been able to produce a really great free (as in speech) Enterprise VoIP solution that I liked quite a lot. I had great plans for the LIPS, but couldn’t carry out much of that until it was integrated into the Linbox Management Console. In the last weeks, I’ve had confirmation that my plans were right and I was going the right way. That’s history now, and I’m looking at what I’ll be doing next. It’s good because I can look for a job that either involves VoIP or not; it’s good to change after a while. It sucks because looking for a job sucks.

I just released new version of Gammu. This release brings lots of bug fixes and should allow to compile Gammu using MSVC and CMake. Full list of changes:

• Huge gammu/gammu.c split to smaller files.
• Lot of fixes to allow compilation using MSVC + CMake.
• Support for push to talk ids (thanks to Pavel Kostromitinov).
• Fixed PPM parsing (thanks to Pavel Kostromitinov).

So, depending on who you talk to, we've got about 9 weeks to go, or maybe 8 weeks. It all depends on whether we can have our way and have a caesarean on the 8th of October. Of course, the baby may have other thoughts on the matter as well... We've had our last planned house guest until Sarah's Mum and Aunty arrive, so we've put the mattress in storage and donated the bed frame to Goodwill. We've acquired a crib (I keep wanting to call it a cot) and a changing table/chest of drawers and put them in place in the baby's room. Last night we bought a car seat. I think the only major item left to get is a stroller. Sarah's pregnancy is still going well. The baby's still extremely active, and has had the hiccups quite a few times in the last week. Apparently that's him trying to breathe. I'm somewhat surprised they don't drown in there trying to do that... Speaking of breathing, our overly cautious obstetrician wanted Sarah to have two shots of steroids, to aid in the baby's lung development "just in case" he was born (or had to be delivered) very early. We felt it was somewhat unnecessary, but thought we'd be kicking ourselves if something happened and we didn't do it. There didn't seem to be any outrageous adverse effects from doing so, so we went along with it. Twice in a week (the second time today) Sarah's had blurry vision followed by a headache, so she called up the hospital today when it happened, and they told her to come in and get checked out. We spent about 4 hours in labor and delivery this afternoon. It turns out the reason they wanted us to come in was because the symptoms could be a sign of preeclampsia. The tests proved otherwise, and they couldn't really offer an explanation for what was going on other than migraines, so they eventually sent us home again. It was nice to get a preview of hospital's labor and delivery ward.

This afternoon we had a Debian meeting in Melbourne (Australia) arranged through the Debian-Melb mailing list. We met under the clocks at Flinders St station, had lunch at a good Japanese restaurant, decided not to play LASER games (like paintball but with LASER guns instead of paint guns) due to the queue. The LASER games are at the Crown Casino, some people object to it on principle, but when you only use free tickets… One noteworthy thing about the casino is that they have a free cloak-room that stores bags (back-packs etc are not allowed on the gaming floor). I expect their cloak-room to be a little more secure than most places that you might stash your stuff (they have a reputation for security to uphold) so I felt safe leaving a back-pack containing a laptop in their care (it didn’t have any secret data and was a really old one). After leaving the casino we had Gelati/Gelato ice-cream (Gelati is the plural of Gelato and either word may be used to describe Italian style ice-cream). The general plan for the next meeting is to meet in the city at about 10AM on a weekend, play the LASER games, and then have lunch. Of course that would make it a greater requirement for people to arrive on time. ;) While at the meeting we discussed in concept the idea of a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). I can get a free venue for up to 12 people outside business hours which is not far from the center of Melbourne and which has good net access and a good supply of keyboards, monitors, and other misc computer bits (even possibly some PCs that can have their hard drives temporarily replaced to test Debian stuff). One guy who is rather keen on this idea asked if it would be possible to bring sleeping-bags and sleep on the floor. I hesitate to ask the guy who owns the office about that, it might make him reject the idea entirely. So probably starting at about 10AM and going to 10PM would be enough. We could do that both Saturday and Sunday on some weekend or maybe even start on Friday night. I’ve been planning to run a similar meeting to play Linux games which may end up as a games hacking party. I might get around to running that soon.

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Following many months of faff, today Katherine and I completed on a house in Castlerock. I say Katherine and I, but really I did very little. She started looking after she'd started at UU, before we knew Black Cat was going to be sold. My sole involvement was to be dragged round a few places (including this one) when I was back in April. The initial plan was that Norwich would remain our "home" and this would be somewhere that Katherine would be able to live during term time, that I could also work from now and then. Given recent events it'll no doubt become "home" and we'll leave Norwich. To that end I've been looking at the job market back in NI. I've found (and applied for) a few things in Belfast, all software development roles. I may even have an interview; had a phone call today that felt very much like a phone interview and ended with talk of getting a formal interview sorted for when I'm next over. All scary stuff. Belfast is a bit far for a commute, so I may end up living there during the week. Or I might not get anything in NI and have to look further afield. Anyone know anything going in Derry? That may be a more managable daily journey.