I’ve just reviewed my web stats from last month. Here are what appear to be the most popular posts:

1. Committing Data to Disk - about how RPM and DPKG don’t use fsync() the way I believe that they should. Surprisingly popular (more than twice as popular as #2), maybe the developers of both RPM forks and dpkg were repeatedly checking for comments.


2. Terrorism Foolishness - found by StumbleUpon.com and got lots of traffic from there. More than twice as popular as #3.


3. Prius vs Small Non-Hybrid Car - a little contentious as some Prius owners think I should compare the Prius to a Camry. I will visit a Toyota dealer soon to investigate this matter in more depth. Note that this is a post from June that was one of the most popular reads for July!


4. Tevion MP4 Player Model M6 - a Review - review of an MP4 player that didn’t satisfy me.


5. Installing Xen DomU on Debian Etch - from January but still getting read!


6. A Support Guide to Xen


7. Buying a Laptop From Another Country


8. Xen and Heartbeat - another from June.

It seems that most readers of my blog come from Planet Debian. So the above seems like an indication of what people on that planet want to read.

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I really appreciated your last Bits of the DPL. I discover a DPL taking position on hot topics of the moment. I’m glad to have a DPL who is trying to fulfill his duty of leading discussions amongst developers. He gave his opinion on the current vote about “endorsing the concept of Debian Maintainers” (he’s in favor because it dilutes power) and also about Apt’s change to install Recommends by default. I’m glad to hear the encouraging news concerning volunteers for ftpmasters. By the way, if you have voted for Sam, and if Sam’s opinion bears any importance for you, you still have until saturday midnight (UTC) to change your vote if you wish so (like Russ did). Right now, only 289 DD have voted.

I just uploaded the 0.5 release of the newsbeuter RSS feed reader to unstable.
Apart from improvements in HTML rendering and lock file handling the new release:

• adds unicode compatibility


• a new filter language


• support for notifications

and finally you are also able to freely configure all key bindings.

The new filter language is pretty cool, you can now filter feeds for title, url, author etc. (see the documentation for all fields) using regular expressions like:
rssurl =~ "^http:\/\/nion\.modprobe.*", you can use the comparison operators and you are able to logical connect them.

The regexp support also enables you to killfile certain articles using the new ignore-article option, ignore-article "*" "title =~ \"SuSE\"" for example ;-P (press F to try it out)

With the notification support you are allowed to execute a specified program if a new article arrives, easy and useful for blog junkies.

Hopefully newsbeuter will become a good alternative for raggle and snownews users now as the snownews author is not really working on it anymore and raggle seems to have a stalled development as well.

I am subscribed to the Google news alerts for the keyword Debian, and usually this means that I am notified of every security upgrade at least three or four times (needlessly, since I'm subscribed to Debian's security announcements anyway...) But today, two headlines sparked my interest: One, Carla Schroeder wrote an introductory article into building Custom Linux kernels with Debian and Fedora (though why somebody would want to do this is beyond me...), showing how easy the process is (I may be biased, but I find Debian's way is easier. On the other hand, it within the -- rpm -- package framework instead of a custom command -- make-kpkg in Debian -- feels more consistent and logical. Without reading documentation you won't get anywhere on both systems, so it probably doesn't matter...) One down for Carla, however, for not doing enough basic research: “The new naming convention [linux-* instead of kernel-* packages] opens the door to using other kernels with Debian, which I don't know what those would be, but Debian is ready for them.” Or one down for us, the Debian project, for not making enough noise around the various non-Linux ports. Though that will come when GNU/kFreeBSD is released with lenny... Two, Debian derivative SimplyMEPIS, which switched to Ubuntu as a base operating system a year ago, is now returning to Debian GNU/Linux as its base system. The main reason seems to be long term stability and upgradeability - which is a key strength of Debian for many other users as well (me, for one.) The reason for switching to Ubuntu in the first place has been newer application versions and predictable upgrade schedules (and that Warren Woodford misunderstood how Ubuntu LTS was to be maintained, apparently) -- both issues are being addressed within Debian as we get better release management and faster integration of new application versions (the big pieces of software I use regularly are the Linux kernel, X.org, KDE and OpenOffice.org, all of which I find are integrated in unstable fast enough, and much faster than 2 years ago. That the testing migration sometimes takes time is not a problem since mixing etch, lenny and sid is usually possible without problems even in a production (desktop) environment.) So, if we take a step back from the day-to-day squabbling between developers working at cross purposes and look at the output we produce, I believe we're still doing some things right.

I've been busy doing various things, so I've not had a chance to blog much lately. Time for a quick catch-up... We've had a bit of a development panic at work, so I've been working longer hours than normal. The scary thing is (and I've noticed this in the past too), I seem to enjoy the job more when there's real pressure involved. That's not to say I want it to always be stressful, but we've had more fun with a small group of us really concentrating on a single project, working well together. Outside of work, I've been really quite relieved to take a bit of a break from Debian stuff since Debconf has finished. Debconf (as always) was a really good way to be re-enthused about working on Debian, but it has taken me several weeks to get over it physically. I've finally finished upgrading all of my machines at home to Etch. In most cases it was easy, but the final one left was lump, the firewall/mail/web/foo server. I'd chickened out of upgrading it for quite a while due to the sheer number of services it hosts, and also the substantial amount of local config it therefore holds. In the end, things were thankfully mostly painless. The nice thing about doing the upgrade was that finally lots of new software has suddenly become readily available. Amongst other things, I've added iodine and openvpn, and now I'm looking into playing with voice over IP (probably Asterisk). My Nokia E70 has a VOIP client and wifi, so in theory I should be able to use my regular mobile phone as a voip handset on my wireless network at home and just get cheaper outbound calls. Yay! I visited my friend Matthew a couple of weeks ago, and also helped him upgrade/install his network of Debian machines. Unfortunately, his main workstation (dual AMD64 goodness) is still left just running Windows. BIOS/SATA RAID - just say NO! No matter what we did on that machine, we could not make it dual-boot XP and Debian without forcing him to reinstall it all from scratch. :-( The SPI board elections have just finished. Congratulations to the new mugs^H^H^H^Hmembers of the board, and best of luck in doing a good job. And comiserations to the people who lost - I'm sure most of you would have been good, useful board members too. We're having a final Debconf 7 wrapup meeting next weekend in York, where we're hoping to get the final conference report finished. There are a few more T-shirts to get finished and delivered to people and the sponsorship bags to go out, then it's all done for this year. It'll be good to meet up with people again anyway. Oh, and not long now until the big BBQ at my place. I've started getting some supplies in already, and I'm looking forwards to a bunch of geeks coming round to wreck my house again. Or something... *grin* Last but not least - I'm changing ISPs shortly. Noodles and Huggie have provided excellent service for nearly 3 years, but are exiting the business and moving on to other things. So I'll be moving my home ADSL back to UKFSN shortly. Hopefully the disruption will be minimal.

Being in any reasonably large free software project one tends to be confronted with endless little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns. Often it happens that these little things keep growing in our perception the longer they last and the more they trouble us. In these times it is good to be reminded that the actual thing we invest so much time and energy in is not those little issues that often annoy us so much, but the overlying ideal of free software which is still a great thing, even in view of all the little frustrations that we have to deal with when working on it. Yesterday I had one of these little experiences that just remind you, just how good a thing free software is:

• At Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:38:49 I filed a whishlist bug against a software I recently started using.
• At Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:04:35 the bug had been passed on to the software's upstream and I got an email from the upstream author telling me that the feature I wanted was already in the current development version of the software, where I could download the tar.bz2 and how to contact him on jabber.
• At about half to ten I downloaded the code, rolled it into a package and tried it, but couldn't get the new feature to work, so I wrote another email.
• An half hour later I got an answer telling me what I'd done wrong. I fixed my mistake, tested the new feature and found that it did right what I wanted. However, there was one more option I thought would be useful so I contacted the author via jabber.
• In the following 2.5 hours he implemented the additional option that I had asked for, renamed a button I found a bit unintuitive and fixed two bugs I discovered in the process of testing the new feature, sending me new code versions to test after every change.
• I am now using the software with the new feature I asked for and with all the options I wanted from a homemade package but expect the proper Debian package to show up in the archive any day.
• The whole process took three days.

... and this is exactly why free software (and the people in it) is so great. Because if there is something you'd think would be useful, all you have to do is ask and maybe lend a little help in testing and you got it. And this is why it's worth to put up with all the little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns that working with humans brings with it. Even if they sometimes seem to be overwhelming. PS: I know that there are also enough examples where things didn't go as smooth as this one. But this just makes it more worth and important to highlight and appreciate these examples where everything just worked out perfectly and not just take them as granted. So, inbetween posting rants and fuming at all the things that tick you off, how about if you think of a nice FLOSS experience you had and share it with the rest of the world?

Hey folks, we released some minutes ago finally Debian-Edu/Skolelinux 3.0r0 ?Terra? which is based on Debian 4.0 with some modifications to work out-of-the box. Here are the releasenotes: Oslo - July 22., 2007 Skolelinux 3.0 is ready. This is an community release with comprehensive support from regional and national projects in Germany, Spain, France, Greece and Norway. The Skolelinux project is now a part of Debian under the name Debian-Edu. Several other projects have made additional functionality to Skolelinux tailored for national needs. Skolelinux now supports more than 50 countries. whats new in skolelinux 3.0: based on Debian 4.0 ?etch? and therefore compatible to LSB 3.1, using kernel 2.6.18 and KDE 3.5.5 Full support for networked Thin clients, ?LowFat (diskless) clients, Workstations and Laptops. With the ?LowFat clients users got full PC functionality with extremely low maintenance cost. The use of ?LowFat clients gives full support for sound, video, USB memory stick?s and DVDs without the need for a local installation. Skolelinux now got more than 80 applications selected for pedagogic uses, supporting more than 50 languages. Many new applications are introduced in addition to popular classic as GCompris, KDE-Edu, Iceweasel (unbranded version of Firefox) and ?OpenOffice.org. Installation is a breeze: Both the installation and source code for all software are now distributed on a single DVD now supporting three different processor platforms as i386, PowerPC and AMD64. This makes it more easy to choose hardware, and to study the recipes behind the software. Those interested can exercise their freedom to learn, participate and share knowledge more easily. Installation CDs are also available, but requires a working Internet connection for installation. about skolelinux Skolelinux is a complete tailored software solution for the needs of any educational institution or school. It is a ready computer system were the school does not need to piece together the components. Skolelinux is the result of the work of the Debian Edu project and Debian Edu is an official Debian subproject. It is installed in a great number of schools in Norway, Germany, France and other countries. Municipalities and Commercial Service Providers run Skolelinux across multiple schools, operated and maintained centrally. Service providers report that the ?lowfat clients? require half the maintenance cost of other desktop alternatives. The next milestone of Skolelinux development will be to merge the Debian-based ?LinEx distro into Debian Edu. Currently ?LinEx is used by more than 250,000 students and public employees in the region of Extremadura in Spain. in depth Lowfat clients is also known as Diskless workstations. They run applications locally on the client. All software comes from the server instead of locally from the client hard drive. Recommended minimum requirement for client machines is > 256 MB RAM and 800 MHz CPU. Skolelinux now got improved tools for system surveillance and maintenance. Roadmap for next merging of ?LinEx and Debian-Edu: * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/LinEx2DebianEdu-Roadmap Please note that the documentation for the 3.0 Terra release is only available in English at the moment and contains some rough edges. We have considered releasing before the end of the summer holidays more important and we will fix those rough edges in the coming weeks, when we also expect more translations to show up. Those fixes will be included in the upcoming 3.0 r1 release.

Some people reading this blog know that I'm growing a special link with the isolated kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. This link is born with the DzongkhaLinux lanuch back in 2006 and the connections that were established then with the people working over there on their national Linux distribution at the Department of Information Technology. And more particularly with their lead developer in this, Pema Geyleg. In parallel to this, I developed a good "vibration" with that country and I realy plan to come back there in the future and visit it more deeply, including all friends I made there in very few days. The country is currently not what we, in the so-called western world, would call democratic. This is a monarchy and not, yet, a constitutional one. However, the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, (who has been ranked among the 100 people who have more influence in the world, last year, by Time magazine) decided long ago that he would bring the country to democracy by following a long but probably needed process. He first resigned last year, surprising everybody in the country, in the favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is currently the youngest head of state in the world. Democratic parliament elections are programmed for 2008. And, yesterday, as another step in this democratic process, the Prime Minister resigned along with 6 other ministers, to "enter politics" in preparation of these national elections in February/March 2008. Again, it's very interesting to watch this process from far and see whether the country will succeed in achieving this transition (Pema told me several times that, indeed, the majority of people in Bhutan are not particularly eager waiting for this transition, given the very special relation they have with the king (the buddhist religion playing of course a great role there). And, well, let's anyway hope that the future government and parliament will keep the push they're giving to the development of free software, currently.

Matthew Garrett

A lot of background on the state of laptop support in Linux. It worked reasonably well in the 90s, but with the migration to ACPI, has become much more complicated and less reliable in general, especially with suspend/resume and video.

Emporer Linux and System 76 produce Linux supported laptops.

I wanted some more in-depth technical information and found Matthew later on at the Intel booth. Here's what I learned:

s2ram is little more than a wrapper around standard ACPI sleep that has options to do video mode save/restore

I asked him about all the many, many different userland laptop management tools. He recommends simple acpi-utils with the ondemand governor. laptop-mode-tools tries to do way too much, and there is little point to using a userland governor anymore.

I've been having a problem with my MacBook Pro (Core Duo) hanging on suspend about 10% of the time. I explained the symptoms and asked him how to go about debugging it. He suggested disabling console suspend and enabling PM debug in the kernel. I will give that a try and see what I get.

We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.

• vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
• Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
• Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
• Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
• DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
• DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
• Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
• Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bient t d voil . What a drama queen.
• Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.

All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though! tags: blogs vinismo

DemoCampMontreal3 report So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.

• Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCit is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
• The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
• The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
• Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
• Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!

All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me! tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo

About the recent blogs on planet debian about debian maintainers, I guess I have a couple of comments also. About me: I am currently in "waiting for DAM" stage. I have been 10 months getting there and has now waiting for 6 weeks there. Looking at the DAM queue, people have been waiting in more than 6 months. What would make the process faster for me ? Getting processed by the DAM - and then the keyring maintainer is the obvious answer. A thing that would have made my 10 months at AM stage shorter would be if the "reward" for getting the AM stage done wouldn’t have been queueing in maybe to 6 months. It wasn’t like the most motivating factor for answering my AM. The fact that it took 10 months is mostly my own fault. So what am I trying to say here? Fix it it at the DAM stage (and maybe at the keyring stage also) and see people becoming DDs faster. Without lowering the barriers - except the barriers for the ability to stand in a queue. Debian Maintainers seems mostly like a ugly hackaround this. And I kind of find my self being in the target group for some of the use of Debian Maintainers. - and I am eagerly waiting getting processed in the DAM queue. And back to development Who wants to test & fix kdm on sparc ? (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=433801)

You may have noticed that my frequency of posting has increased significantly recently, and that my posts are generally at 7AM and 7PM. I am using the scheduled posting feature of Wordpress and writing my posts in advance (currently I have 8 posts in the queue including this one). Generally readers of my blog (particularly those who read Planet syndication pages) don’t want to read 5+ posts in one go. In the past I would write one post at a time and sometimes a couple of days would pass between feeling inspired to write. I had been writing text files and uploading them, but having a text file that’s 95% done is not the same as having a complete post scheduled to be released while I’m doing something else. This technique works for me, I encourage other people who have things to say but don’t seem to get around to blogging on some days to give it a go. Incidentally I chose the times 7AM and 7PM because the traffic to my site seems to peak between 7PM and 11PM local time (I haven’t analysed the logs in enough detail to determine whether this is Australians reading blogs after work or people in other countries doing it at work). To release two posts per day it seems most appropriate to space them 12 hours apart (and means that people in the same time zone as me can read a post before going to work).

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Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell

Nat Torkington, program chair, started off the day. He commented that one of the most interesting trends these days is the expansion of the Open Source ideals beyond software.

Tim O'Reilly commented about the FSF's four freedoms, and asked how we maintain them. We have to think about preserving freedoms -- questions such as Free Software that relies on proprietary services, data, or business processes. It's important to remember to pay attention to freedom and not just to the success of businesses. But businesses matter and have enormous power and will always be related.

Tim really pushed expanding the boundaries of Open Source and thinking ahead: wikipedia, OpenID, etc. He also asked: does Congress need a version control system?

He suggested there are four open source success factors: frictionless software distribution, collaborative development, freedom to build/adapt/extend, freedom to fork.

Hadoop is an interesting FLOSS project to build some infrastructure like Google has. Apparently Yahoo is very interested.

Back to Nat... hardware is cheap and everyone keeps buying more of it.

James Reinders from Intel talking about multi-core parallelism. Saying that parallelism is going to be more and more important. Intel released threading building blocks, a series of templates for C++, as GPL'd software at the conference this week. I'm not all that excited about a C++ project, though, since I think languages like Haskell have more promise here anyway.

The other Intel guy mentioned Intel's open source involvement: intellinuxgraphics.org, intellinuxwireless.org, linuxpowertop.org, kernel,org, moblin.org. Linux laptops have the longest runtimes compared to other laptops.

"It's amazing how many people you can make paranoid by showing up with a tie and a suit to do a keynote at OSCON." -- James Reinders

Simon Peyton-Jones is up now, and Nat says he will "stretch your brain until only tiny bits are left."

State of the art in parallelism is really 30 years old with locks and condition variables -- like building a skyscraper out of bananas.

Locks are difficult to do right and have "diabolical error recovery".

Let's do transactions against memory instead of against a database. Implementation can even be similar to databases. The idea is transactional memory, and it sounds very, very slick.

Mark Shuttleworth and Tim for an interview...

Mark was fine, but I wish Tim had more interesting questions for him.

I went up to the front a few minutes after the event to talk to Simon PJ. He was talking to someone, who saw my nametag, and said, "Hi John, nice to meet you." He looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him, so I asked who he was. "Mark Shuttleworth." Yep, I was sitting just far enough back from the stage that I wasn't behind one of the large TV screens and couldn't make out faces real well, and I didn't recognize him. Erg..

At DemoCampMontreal3 last night, I quoted Ward Cunningham, who once said that making a wiki link is a great way to ask a question. A year or so ago, I got interested in citizens arrests. What are those, anyways? How do you do it? Is it even really legal? So I started How to Make a Citizen's Arrest on wikiHow. Just a little while ago, it became a featured article on wikiHow. And just a few days ago, it was quoted in an article on Time Magazine's blogs: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges. Interesting to see how these memes gather momentum. tags: wiki wikihow citizensarrest time

24 July 2007 is the fourth birthday of Wikitravel, the free travel guide that I and my wife Michele Ann Jenkins started on July 24, 2003. It's been a long and complicated road, but I'm really proud of all the work Wikitravellers have done over these last four years. The project has gone from being a pretty-good idea to being one of the definitive travel resources on the Web. Winning the Webby Award for Best Travel Site this year was a real recognition of that trajectory. I'm wondering what 24 July 2008 will bring... it will be interesting to see. tags: wikitravel wiki travel wikiversary 24july2007

Vinismo It's only partly a coincidence, then, that today I'm launching, with my friend Niko, a new Open Content project dedicated to demystifying an even more complex and byzantine world: wine. Tonight we're demoing the site at DemoCampMontreal3, so it's as good a time as any to throw open the doors:

        http://vinismo.com/

We don't pretend to be wine experts or even connoisseurs. We're just two guys who like to drink wine and want to learn more about it. Ward Cunningham once said that wiki link is a great way to ask a question. We want to share the learning experience with people of all levels of expertise. We think that working together with our friends and family, with other Internet users, and with the public at large, we can create a detailed, readable, useful wine guide for people at any level of expertise. Our liberal Creative Commons license means that the guide is Free -- free for anyone to copy, modify, or publish in any medium. I need your help to make this project a success. If you can, I'd really appreciate if you could help us out with one or more of the following tasks:

• Please sign up to use our site at, and create a user page describing yourself.
• Drop us a note in the Wine Bar letting us know what you like and don't like about the site.
• Try adding some information about your favorite wines, wineries, wine regions or wine styles! It doesn't have to be perfect -- every little bit counts!
• Please forward this info to people you know who might be interested in Vinismo. They don't have to be experts to be interested in wine.
• If you have a blog, please post a link to our new site on it!
• If you use a social bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us, please add us to your list!
• If you use digg.com, please vote for our site there: http://digg.com/software/Open_Content_wine_guide_launches
• If you use reddit.com, please vote for our site there: http://freeculture.reddit.com/info/296au/comments

tags: wiki wine vinismo

I was in New York this past week meeting with a bunch of Sun customers and speaking at several Solaris related events. On Wednesday, just before 6pm, we were on a conference call in the Sun office at 101 Park Ave. when we heard a noise that sounded like thunder, and the whole building shook. When the noise didn’t stop, we stepped into the hallway and looked out the window to see 41st St. filled with what appeared to be smoke, debris hitting and nearly breaking the window, and people running down the street en masse. We filed down the stairwell and emerged into a scene straight from 9/11—shocked looking men in suits covered in a layer of brown debris, masses of people hurrying down 40th St. as fast as they could dashing across streets without regard for the traffic, cars honking their horns trying to get away through the throng, sirens blaring, cell phones not working, policemen doing their best to maintain control, people crying and holding each other, necks craning to see a plume of “smoke” rising into the sky high enough to obscure the Chrysler Buidling, and that awful roar that just wouldn’t stop. Of course, the “smoke” turned out to be steam, and the roar was the steam blasting out of an enormous crater on 41st that turned out to be just outside that window. But at the time, no one had any idea what was going on, and with lack of information comes speculation: It’s rush hour, they’ve blown up Grand Central Station, what’s next and when? It took a good hour before anyone knew it was just a steam pipe and nothing sinister. All in all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience that’s going to stick with me for a long time.

DemoCamp Montr al 3 is happening tomorrow. We're going to be at the SAT from 18:30 to 20:30, holding demonstrations on a whole range of different topics. Why DemoCamp? Well, Montrealers are some of the most creative people I know and they've got plenty of things to show and tell. DemoCamp is like a big gathering of creative minds who get to watch fifteen-minute presentations on anything. And since all you can do is demo: no slides, no gimmicks, then you actually get to see real stuff doing real things. I'm going to be there to show you how to make a counterclock. You know, the opposite of a clock that goes clockwise. Along the way, I'll do a little explaining of electricity, timekeeping, and motors. I just have to remember to buy a clock today. :P Come on, it'll be fun! DmoCamp Montr al 3
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
18:30 20:30
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Facebook Upcoming Google Maps )

Today we've released DOMjudge 2.0 after nine months of hard work. We've named it 2.0 because we think this is a major jump in the development of DOMjudge. There are many smaller changes, but the most notable improvements are the vastly enhanced jury interface, much more and better documentation and a dropped requirement on a shared filesystem between judgehosts. DOMjudge is a programming contest jury system for use in contests such as the ACM ICPC. We are using it for the upcoming Northwestern European Programming contest, and it has been used at several other universities aswell. It's nice to hear that someone is also using it as a base for their Google Summer of Code project to develop an automated assignment grading system.