I just got back from taking Zach Copley to the airport, and for the first time in a few days I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer again, trying to get back on track. I think it's probably a good idea to get my notes about RoCoCoCamp down on electronic paper while the experience is still fresh in my mind. (I wrote about the first day in Journal/29 Flor al CCXV). Saturday morning I got up considerably later than I had the day before, and I took my time getting to SAT. Which was OK, since things went much smoother in the morning. The only really annoying thing about Saturday was that I had to wash about 50 cups by hand -- we'd run out of clean cups, and I couldn't figure out how to run the dishwasher. It didn't take long, but it meant that I had my head down in the sink as people came in and didn't get to spend as much time talking to them. I was glad to hear that people had a good time going to L'Utopik on Friday night. Apparently a few people who'd flown in late on Friday got a chance to meet up with the experienced crew at L'Utopik, so they were well-prepped for Saturday. Probably the biggest buzz of the pre-sessions was SJ Klein's pair of functional OLPC laptops. They were cute and fun -- I got a few minutes to play with them, and I enjoyed the interface tremendously -- although it took me a few tries to open it. People were fiddling with them throughout the day -- including Amita June, who came late in the afternoon -- and Tristan P loquin even blogged about them. My first session was about wiki and other technologies, which I titled Wiki And.... (I borrowed the name from Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which it seems no-one eats anything but "coffee and".) My main point was that a) wiki people tend to overuse wiki where other software tools may be more appropriate and b) we need to be careful with impedance mismatches when using wiki with technologies with other cultures behind them. Wikis and blogs mismatch; wikis and forums mismatch. You need to work out ways to make them work culturally. As a proof-of-concept that there are ridiculous applications for wiki, I created in about 3 minutes before the session the wikiclock. It's a computer clock that runs on wiki technology: the time is kept up-to-date by human beings editing the page, rather than with software. I was so pleased with myself that I twittered about it, and from there it's taken on a life of its own. The clock is implemented on the amazing minimalist system pageoftext.com. I heard about p.o.t. from Liz Henry's April report from Palo Alto Wiki Wednesday, and I think it's totally great. It's a cross between a pastebin and a wiki -- like an open-edited ImageShack for text. Brilliant. The second session I did was a hyper-focused one on a particular Semantic Web problem. Both Wikitravel and Open Guides have tons of information on "places" in various cities. (That is, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels, museums, parks, etc.). It would be good to export our data on these places to each other, so we could possibly keep them in sync. For example, if a restaurant changes its hours , that info could be updated on The Open Guide to London and automatically synched to the Wikitravel page on London. So we went over some ways to do this kind of interchange; we'd brainstormed before about it on the Open Guides' RDF Workshop, but it was good to sit down with Earle Martin and do some face-to-face hacking on the idea. We don't yet have a vocabulary for it, but we'll get something going on the new wikirdf.org site (which also emerged from this session). I had a great lunch with a lot of people from RoCoCo on the terrace at the Bar St. Sulpice, about 8 blocks away on rue St. Denis. The sun was out, it was cool, and we had a very nice time. It was especially nice to see Marcus Bornfreund and Tina Pipers of Creative Commons Canada, who'd come to talk about the PDwiki, a project to collaboratively document Canadian works in the public domain (see Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced). We talked quite a bit about the social challenges of getting a community excited about such a dry subject, but I think we got some good ideas about it. In the afternoon I led a session on MediaWiki. We were lucky enough to have Tim Starling sit in, and he told everyone about the new developments going on with MW. He's refactoring some very deep parts of the storage and rendering sections of the code, which will result in considerably better reliability, performance, and flexibility. I think it sounds great. I had to work the registration desk for the last session of the day, which was pretty great because I ended up baby-sitting Anoushka Jaroski-Biava for most of the time. But I missed Robin Millette's cool talk about BuzzyBee, which looks to be really fun to play with. We rounded out the evening with music, pizza, and beer at the SAT. tobias.dj played some great dance music, and we had some wiki-collaborative VJ-ing using the SAT's fancy screen systems. All the kids were there -- Mark and Allegra's daughter No ma as well as Amita June. Fun. Sunday morning I didn't have to start coffee until 9AM -- luxury! We had a great Open Space Technology convergence -- a way to turn the discussions of the previous few days into action items for going forward. I did a convergence session on the future of RecentChangesCamp. We had most of the interested parties available (except for the RCC Portland organizers, who had to fly out early that morning). We made some decisions about future RCCs, and we made some plans for next year's RCC -- in the Bay Area (California). Last night we brought back the Keiki gang to our house, since it was great to have them all in Montreal for the event. We did a big brainstorming session on next steps to launching the project, and we also did some graphic design review of potential logos. We have some great designs coming; I'm really happy we got Sarven Capadisli and Bridget to work on the site. I had to crash out at 10:30PM -- Amita and I fell asleep together -- but others were up late talking and thinking. I don't know how they did it -- I was all talked out by the end of RoCoCo. All in all I had a fantastic time -- the event far surpassed my expectations. It was hard -- too hard. I bit off far more than I could chew. But I think we did a good job of establishing Montreal as a technology city -- Wiki City Canada -- in the international mind, and I think we also brought together some really interesting people for some fruitful and productive work. You can see some of the projects that came directly out of RoCoCo on the FutureChanges page -- an ingenious name courtesy of Pm. And there are some indirect ones that we can expect soon. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp wiki open space montreal barcampmontreal keiki wikiclock pageoftext

Cause and solution So, Technorati has a good listing for rocococamp items, but I especially liked Steve Faguy's post: Wiki: The cause of, and solution to, all of life s problems. Steve was an extremely game participant in the event, which I think was pretty incredible. He wrote a good overview of wikis in the Montreal Gazette this year. A funny thing happened on Friday evening during the daily wrap-up known as "Evening News". We had Open Space's minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space's "four principles" is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, "In the spirit of wiki, I'm going to correct it right now!" And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the "is" to "are". This stimulated an interesting discussion. One person noted that the "is" is there because possibly only one person could show up for a session, and that's OK. Finally, Brandon CS Sanders stood up and said, "I like 'is' because when we come together like this, we form a cohesive group, however temporary -- 'a people'. So I'm going to change it back." And he did -- to lots of applause, again. Steve came up to me at the end of the night, laughing. "I got reverted! I should have started an edit war!" It was a hoot; he's got a good sense of humour. tags: stevefaguy rocococamp wiki openspace brandoncssanders

I've got a new desktop system, after going two years without a desktop at all. My last desktop, which served me well for about five years, was one that I built myself from parts. This time, though, I was feeling a little lazy, and I decided to order a computer from System 76, one of the few companies that will assemble and ship a computer to you with Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) preinstalled.



The cats were curious about something new appearing in our apartment. They were even more excited when they found out it was full of cat toys! Sadly for them, though, I confiscated all the styrofoam peanuts and stuck them in a cat-proof trash can.



The usual box of random CDs still exists when you have preloaded Linux. I was surprised to discover that it did not include an Ubuntu CD or five, which seems to me like a no-brainer.



Of course, this post wouldn't be complete without a picture of the actual box. It looks just like it did on the system76 web site; no surprise there.



I used the included Ubuntu install for a little while, and it looked like everything was configured reasonably well. The one piece of weirdness was that Ubuntu uses a program called network-manager to configure the network; while it has some nice features (like doing network discovery for wireless, letting programs easily get notifications when network devices go down or come up, etc), these are offset, at least for me, by the fact that it likes to randomly break the computer's network access. This isn't exclusively an Ubuntu problem, of course; etch also installs and configures network-manager by default, and I had the same problems on etch until I purged it. I assume that network-manager works for someone, so probably something to do with the network environment here breaks it.

The system is currently running Debian etch, with Xen domains booting testing and unstable that I use for development. Even without the NVidia graphics drivers and with one of the Xen domains running a computationally intensive job, it's quite snappy; a lot snappier than any other desktop system I've owned recently. And while it's doing this, it's one of the quietest computers I own.

So, in summary, I'm quite happy with this system and I'd suggest System 76 as an option for anyone who wants a Windows-free computer.

I ve got my first real rails application working correctly a simple online bookmark system, which is scuttle-lookalike. (This is part of my master-plan to remove PHP utterly from the few remaining places where it exists upon my server(s), so it isn t as pointless a project as it appears to be!) It is pretty neat, and it handles most of the things you d expect. Fetch it from CVS and install it with the following recipe:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvsrepository.org:/home/cvs login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvsrepository.org:/home/cvs co bookmarks
cd bookmarks/
mysql --user=root -p -e "CREATE DATABASE Books_development" 
rake db:migrate
ruby script/server

Once that is done point a browser at http://localhost:3000/ and you should see something like this. (If there is no admin user setup it will display a signup link, once there is an admin defined this will go away. When you re an admin you can view/edit/modify all the bookmarks which are set to private .) I m new to rails, and ruby for that matter, so if this is packaged badly, or is missing something to make it work please do let me know. Updated: Changed from download to the CVS repository. I also have a collection of tools for exporting from Insipid & Scuttle if they are useful let me know.

6 weeks since my last post here, which I guess sums up how busy I am with things, primarily off-line but with a reasonable amount of development work coming out too. Thanks to Radu Spineanu xen-shell made it into the archive, and work has restarted on a multi-dom0 Xen control panel. So far there is a node daemon, a central server, and a shell-based admin tool, all written in Ruby. Coming soon a web-based control panel, implemented in Ruby on Rails. Exciting times.

Busy day yesterday; the first day of RoCoCoCamp, and the first day seeing a lot of friends and friendly faces from out of town. I was out of bed at 6AM yesterday. I stopped at St. Viateur Bagel on Mont Royal and got 10 dozen bagels -- enough for our expected crowd. I got to SAT at about 8AM, just in time to start the coffee machines. The big percolators I rented for the event require about an hour to make coffee, so if people were going to be coming in at 9AM, I really wanted to get them started by 8. Alain Bernardeau from computation.to got there soon after, and set up the spare computers his organization is lending us. Brandon Sanders, Mark Dilley and Nathan R also came in early, looking for work to do. I got them all into the job of setting up the food for breakfast. By 9AM we were trucking along, and I figured I'd go try a cup of joe, which should be ready. But all I got from the carafe was cold water. The percolators draw so much current that they'd blown a circuit. Guillaume, the SAT tech, and I tried about 8 different ways to keep them running, but nothing worked. Finally he put them on the 220V industrial circuit, which they didn't blow. Awesome, but at 9:30AM, with almost everyone there, we had no expectation of coffee for another hour. Yikes! But by the time people started filtering into the circle for starting the event proper, coffee was rolling and I was much relieved. Our facilitator, Deborah Hartmann, gave a great bilingual introduction to Open Space Technology and got the ball rolling. I always have a moment of dread during the beginning of a Open Space event: what if this is the time that Open Space doesn't work? But it did, again, which is great. The first session I went to was Zach Copley's, about consensus-supporting software features. Brandon Sanders had some great cases from AboutUs's adult content policy. We shared a lot of Wikitravel's culture, too. I also stopped in to talk about Wikitravel:RDF with Reini Urban, who was demoing Semantic MediaWiki. It's a neat project, and it's a different tack than I've taken with Wikitravel. I'd like to see the two approaches harmonized at some time in the future. Lunch came quickly, and we had far too much to eat. I spent a lot of time talking to Simon Law about possibly using Open Space in some way for BarCampMontreal. I think it's a good idea -- it's growing to a point where our current format is straining under the load. We also talked about ubiquitous wikis and the cool browser Amaya, where Web pages are in edit mode by default. It's a good idea. After lunch I had a chance to hang out with Earle Martin of Open Guides and talk about wiki and the geospatial web. Mark Jarowski of Wikevent was there, and together we've decided to hammer out a RDF vocabulary for exchanging RDF data about business listings. It's the kind of productive talk I like having. I also spent some time with Jack Herrick talking about wiki entrepreneurship. Jack had a prepared presentation about wikiHow's business experience, which was really great, and provided a great case study for talking about commercialization of wikis in general. With Angela Beesley and Ray King around us, we had most of the interesting wiki content businesses represented. Pretty neat. It was a really productive first day, but by the time we got around to 5PM I was exhausted. Maj, Zach, Mark, Niko and I all went to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac to meet Allegra and their two daughters, No ma and baby Anoushka. We got pizza and had beers and sat on our new couch and had a good old time. Technorati's rocococamp tag shows a lot of other positive responses on the Web: Matt Forsythe's sketches from RoCoCoCamp, NathanR's continuing paranoia, CITIZENShift (which quotes me, when I was talking about wiki entrepreneurship), and Patrick Tanguay.

I'm off to SAT again this morning. Should be a fun one, and I hope to get a little more time to myself before the event starts today. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp wiki wikitravel

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...

Today, MJRay asks how to make MakeMaker (no redundancy!) do what he wants. Incidentally, I faced this issue just yesterday, preparing an application for internal use in my job. As sysadmin, I want all the homebrew software to be Debian-packaged, even if they're not the most policy abiding packages. I was installing some modules for mod_perl2, some utility modules and a couple of scripts. Of course, it also needed accesory files, like images for the web or templates for HTML, and configuration too. After reading the reply to this post, written by Randal Shwartz himself, I got convinced that there wasn't any frigging way to make the thing do it. So my solution was far from ideal, as I wanted to put everything in the Makefile, but it wasn't so ugly, considering that it was only meant for use in a Debian package:

• mod_perl and regular modules, using the standard method: put them under lib/ and MakeMaker takes care of them. As I didn't wanted site-wide modules, I changed INSTALLVENDORLIB in the debian/rules to point to /usr/share/pkgname/lib
• for scripts, perl or not: you list them in EXE_FILES, and then point INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT to where you want them. In my case it was /usr/share/pkgname/bin, but if you need to install CGIs, it would be valid to point to /usr/lib/cgi-bin.
• For support files, at first I put them under PMLIBDIRS control (as the rest of the modules), but I didn't like the resulting directory layout. So I processed them, along with configuration files, and stuff with debhelper tools.

In a nutshell, if you only want to process modules and CGIs, you can do it with MakeMaker

Tomorrow is the beginning of RoCoCoCamp 2007, a three-day unconference held right here in Montr al. It starts at 9:30 on Friday at the SAT and runs until Sunday evening. It's for all who are interested in wikis, weblogs, and creators interested in collaborating in on-line spaces. RoCoCoCamp is organized with OpenSpace Technology, where we collectively decide on an agenda where everybody has a chance to speak. There's no artifical divide between speakers and audience, so you can lead your own session if you have something to say. Think of RoCoCoCamp as a real-life wiki, where anybody can contribute. A detailed explaination of what RoCoCoCamp is about can be found on this invitation. I'm inviting you because I'm flying out on Saturday and can't make the whole conference, but I really hope you come. There will be discussions on:

• What projects people are doing around the world
• Development of collaborative tools like wikis, free wifi networks, content management systems, etc.
• Techniques for building collaborative communities
• Best practises for inspiring self-managment and self-policing
• Starting up new projects
• Plans for future collaborations

So how can you attend? I thought you'd never ask! See you there!

It's been a busy week here and I've been lax in updating my blog. It's probably a good thing to put on the chopping block -- of all the possible things going on in my life -- but I'm regretting not keeping up with it. We had a good weekend last weekend. Maj's Mother's Day present request was to clean out all our closets in the house and take extra clothes to the Petits Fr res up the street. It took most of the day Saturday, and we finished with twelve garbage bags full of clothes for the Fr res. Check out Maj's photo of the pile of clothes. Sunday morning Amita June and I made Mama a nice breakfast of waffles and (tofu) sausage. Amita's job was to stir the batter (which she did a good job at) and not to touch anything hot (not so good). That afternoon, Maj went to get a haircut at the salon down the street, and I took the opportunity to give Amita June her first haircut. I think she looks like Twiggy. This week has been a maelstrom of activity. We have RoCoCoCamp coming up on Friday, and we're still tying all the loose ends together. I had most of my tasks done yesterday, so at the organizational meeting last night I saddled myself with more. D'oh! I think my main work this week is going to be encouraging local Montreal tech scenesters to come. I especially want to make sure that important women in the local Internet scene are present, so I'm going to copy Hugh McGuire's invite for BarCampMontreal2 and do some link-baiting:

• Martine Page, filmmaker and journalist who's an anchor of the local blogging community
• V ro B., vodcaster and blogger and general communicator
• m-c turgeon, podcaster and blogger and founder of Stars of the Web
• Marie-Joe, who provides a crucial link between the local blogging and game communities and is obsessed with Wikipedia

tags: mothersday amitajune rocococamp barcampmontreal montreal women

Interview There's a really good interview with me and Maj on the Internet Brands Developer Blog. It's gotten into the short list of interviews I point press to when they want background about Wikitravel -- along with the Creative Commons interview. I'm really glad that IB has started this blog to give the outside world a peek at what's happening out there in El Segundo. And it's also a great way for IB to highlight some of the Open Source work they're doing, like the neat-o new AJAX tool kit IBDOM. tags: interview ib ibdom ibbydev

Not to be missed: well-known enfant terrible James Grimmelmann is guest-blogging on PrawfsBlawg. His opening commentary on the relationship between law practice and computer science:

Practicing lawyers, like practicing programmers, are professional pragmatists. Both must make their cases (and case mods) out of the materials they have available; both starve or eat steak depending on whether their creations work. The day-to-day practice of law is unlikely ever to require much high theory. We can mourn that fact because it means that they look at us with suspicion, or celebrate it because it frees us to chase Truth and Beauty and it will remain a fact either way.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat steak, I think this is correct. Via a commenter on James’ entry, I learned that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is implementing a wiki (the entry page could surely use some more content). Surprisingly, it was not Posner but Easterbrook who spearheaded the effort. This is a very interesting development, but I expect it will be quite a while before any other circuit takes up the idea. Finally, I have been meaning to write about this New York Times story describing Jonathan Coulton’s success as a musician breaking with the traditional distribution /promotional channels (via 43 folders, a productivity blog that is still on my “probation” list). Unfortunately, slashdot beat me to it. I first re-discovered Jonathan Coulton during his guest episode of the Show with Ze Frank. In any event, the article is well worth reading:

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as a reasonable middle-class living between $3,000 and $5,000 a month by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140 . In total, 41 percent of Coulton s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online

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I'm irritated with myself that I hadn't found this before. If you aren't using it now on your rails sites, you need to install it right away: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/exception_notifier Indeed, if it were up to me, I would include it as part of the standard distribution. It's small, quick to set up, and a huge help in tracking down and eliminating problems.

Just after having made the 1.1.0 release I discovered an annoying bug in that version that meant using caption files made it fail in new and interesting ways, I've now fixed the bug and released bpgallery 1.1.1 which fixes this.

I finaly got some time to do development. I decided to use this for extending cdebootstrap. And it got several new features and cleanups. Most notable change is the support to check Release files against the pgp-signature. This feature is enabled by default and uses the keyring supplied by debian-archive-keyring. It now also includes definitions for newer Ubuntu releases and it works in my testcases. The keyring needs to be supplied manualy. The rest are usual cleanups on the codebase and deprecation of some not longer used features.

Sound Juicer "Nikki's Growing A Patch Out In The Backyard" 2.19.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This is the first release in the 2.19.x development series, after I failed to do anything useful in 2.17.x...

• Attempt to repair brain-dead FreeDB encoding (Ka-Hing Cheung)
• Fix memory leaks in musicbrainz object (Cristian Persch)
• Follow the preferred sound device (Bastien Nocera)
• Use xdg-user-dirs (BN)
• Use gst_element_make_from_uri instead of hardcoding cdparanoia (James Livingstone)
• Display a better message after extracting (Adam Petaccia)
• Fix detection of FreeDB albums (David Mandelberg)
• Accessibility fixes (Rich Burridge, Patrick Wade)
• Don't crash if libnautilus-burn doens't know of a device (Pascal Terjan)
• Initialise threading earlier
• Convert strerror() output to UTF-8 for display (PT)
• Remove "Application" category from desktop file
• Fix srcdir!=builddir builds (Loic Minier)
• Internal refactor of extractor and metadata objects

I've taken over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, it's now hosted at http://xmms-scrobbler.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ and has a public readonly git repository for the code. Since taking over development I've dropped a lot of the tag parsing code and replaced it with taglib, found some "interesting" locking issues and am now looking at making it so that we don't need to restart it when adding username/password. It'd also be good to get it to actually report a username/password breakage at least once rather than being totally silent about it! In other news, I've just released a new version of bpgallery, this version adds in medium sized pages - i.e. you can have the index page, the index page links to pages that have a resized image on the page, and has next/previous links. If you also generate full sized pages then the link from the image on the medium sized page goes to the full sized page, otherwise it'll go straight to the origional image. Also thinking about making a last.fm "client" for xmms so that I can keep all my music playing in the one place (lastfmproxy appears to have stopped working for me :/)

Apparently, it is fine by him if others flood planet debian with repeats because they screwed an upgrade, post questionable career advice or misleading documentation links, make fun of unrelated computer companies, or discuss the weather or traffic, but I posted about Eurovision and Martin Zobel-Helas unlinked my entries and sent me a rude email. Isn't planet debian a planet of debian developers, not just a planet of debian development? Even if you only write about debian, please don't force that on everyone else. I like reading about the other stuff developers do - even the loony political views that I don't agree with... Didn't someone put up a Planet Debian Tech a while ago? Maybe that's what Martin Zobel-Helas should read. Whatever happened to it?

More developments on cycling and the Highway Code: There was a written answer in parliament about the Highway Code which completely avoided the question - cyclists are voting 'no' to its 'Does this answer the above question?' poll. I have. bikeuser wrote about the Highway Code with excerpts and links to me and also linked Eleanor Blair - More Highway Code which mentions the Early Day Motion in parliament with a suggestion that you write to your MP and ask them to sign it. In a comment, Anonymous asked:

"I agree with you that cyclists should have the right to decide that a cycling road seems too hazardous. However, other than that, any reason why cyclists should get to use roads when cycle paths exist?"

Yes. The most important reason is that most cycle paths are built to a very low standard (design speed of 18mph on an unladen hybrid bike) which is unsuitable for commercial carriers and even ordinary road bicycles (what I used to call racers). Even national government suggests to use the road if you want to exceed the design parameters of cycle paths.

"As a general rule, if you want to cycle quickly, say in excess of 18 mph/30 kph, then you should be riding on the road."

Also, cycle paths usually get the lowest priority of all highways at every junction (contrary to national guidance) and are hopelessly badly signposted. Would you choose a bumpy-road that gives way at every piddling side road when you have the choice of a flat, smooth A road? I doubt it - that's the basic form of traffic calming in bypassed villages like Blisworth. There are some cycle tracks I use, but even those are so badly signed, it's taken me weeks to figure them out - and I've been visiting family in this area for years! For example, I don't enjoy riding on the exposed Somerset Avenue dual carriageway and the adjacent purpose-built shared-use path is segregated, with few junctions or pedestrians, but consider the junction complex at West Wick (the aerial picture shows the cycle path, but the roads on the bottom right have changed). It's faster to use the underpasses, cross Churchlands Way into Yew Tree Drive and then use the Summer Lane underpass to reach North Worle, but which way do the cycle route signs send you? Yep, round to the left, across four sets of traffic lights where the cyclists get the lowest priority (and a 'Cyclists Dismount' sign for good measure) and then along a path that level-crosses an estate road completely blind (under construction in the aerial pic, above the roundabout). Oh, and the cycle route map's wrong for that area, just to make it even more confusing. Because of the bad signposts and maps, it's also very difficult to report any problems with cycle paths and tracks to the highways maintenance team. Cycle paths often don't have names and I've sometimes had reports come back with "there is no fault" when it turns out they've looked at the nearby road, not the cycleway. Forcing cyclists to use cycle paths will probably always be the wrong choice, but there's a lot of improvements needed before you can expect many cyclists to use them by choice. Doing so now would be like directing all cars onto unsigned B-roads instead of motorways that exist for the same journey, just because vans and lorries have a bigger need for the motorways. I like having B-roads available for journeys which would be much longer otherwise, but I wouldn't want to be forced off the motorways just because they exist. Even if you're a car driver, write to your MP and object to directing classes of traffic off of roads that are safer than alternatives. Else, if you tolerate this... The bigger question is "why is so much money spent on the cycling equivalent of B-roads?" and I don't know the answer to that. We would do much better to widen roads to add cycle lanes (or allow safe in-lane overtaking by cars), instead of widening the adjacent paths and painting them as shared use.

When I first saw UltraStar (a PC conversion of the famous karaoke game Singstar), I decided I wanted it in Debian, but I found it quite difficult to port it (even being GPL), as it was programmed in Kylix/Delphi. There are lots of songs around there for UltraStar, and it is also possible to import them from SingStar. UltraStar-NG (the NG stand for Next Generation) is based on UltraStar, but it’s being recoded in C++. It allows you to add your own songs in the forms of mp3s along with a song text and a music video file. The game allows a computer to evaluate how good you are when you sing by analyzing your voice pitch. We‘ve already finished packaging UltraStar-NG for Debian yesterday, and it is now waiting in the NEW queue for the FTP-Masters approval. Lets hope it’ll be available soon SingStar is a karaoke video game for the PlayStation 2, published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and developed by SCEE and London Studio. It is popular karaoke game in which players sing to music videos in order to score points. Players interface with their PS2 via SingStar USB microphones while a music video plays on screen. Lyrics are shown at the bottom of the screen. SingStar matches a player’s song voice to the original track, with players scoring points according to how accurate their singing is. Usually, two players compete simultaneously.