Sometimes it happens, that items that are handeled by the German Mail (Deutsche Post) get damaged by their technical installations. When this happens, the item is put into a transparent plastic bag, together with a letter excusing the accident and telling the recipient how to file a request for investigation. So far so good. Unfortunately the envelope that got ripped in that case included two pendants that fell out and got lost. I didn't expect this to be much of a problem, but when I tried to file my request at the mail office it turned out, that there is no form for that kind of incident. The regular form used for requests for investigation assumes that the whole shipment got lost. There is no way to indicate, that it is not an envelope that is missing but merely its content. Trying to exlpain that to the lady there also wasn't successful. Except for repeatedly telling me that I had no right to claim compensation when posting things via regular mail (I know!!) she wasn't of much help. In the end I filled out the form as good as possiblei, gave comments where necessary and the lady promised me I would at least get a confirmation from the service centre. So today, after waiting for more then two weeks I finally got a letter from the service centre. Guess what it said:

"Dear Mister(!) Reichle.
The investigation can not be carried out at the moment, since the information you provided is not complete. Please complete and correct the information according the missing item ..."

And now, guess how I got it. Ripped, in a transparent plastic bag.

DemoCamp Montr al 1
Tuesday 27 February 2007
18:30 20:30
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Upcoming.org Google Maps ) Just a reminder that Montr al's first DemoCamp is happening this evening! We've got five excellent demonstrations lined up, so do sign up and join the fun. You can just come and watch people talk, but it's also a great opportunity to meet people who are interesting and do exciting things. For more information, please see my original post.

I'm excited to see that wikiHow now lets people log in with OpenID, and also provides identities to all wikiHow users. (I'm not sure what wikiHow project members are called -- my best guess is "wikiHowards", but I'm pretty sure that's not right.) wikiHow is a great company, and the people I know there -- Jack and Travis -- are personable and smart. I think wikiHow is a great example of a conscientious company participating well in Open Content and the wiki world; I think implementing OpenID is one example of their good wikizenship. One of the things I really wanted with implementing the MediaWiki OpenID extension was that we'd get really portable identity across wikis; that someone who'd established a reputation on Wikipedia could expect some respect for that reputation on Wikevent or Wikioutdoors or whatever. I think there's some danger to that model -- so many wikis today are implemented on wiki farms like Wikia or Pbwiki. I think some wiki farm companies see value in corraling their users into only using wikis on their servers, rather than in participating in the larger wikisphere. (You can occasionally even see this attitude in the Wikimedia community, although obviously that community is more self-governing and evolved about Free Culture and peer-to-peer processes.) That attitude is short-sighted, and wiki hosting companies that insist on maintaining identity silos are probably going to pay for it in the future. It's a competitive market; people have a lot of choice, and nobody wants to be fenced in. If there's been one lesson of Web 2.0, it's that openness is a competitive advantage. Good karma pays off in intense customer loyalty. And, yes, I'll stop using wiki-prefixed neologisms now. Sorry about that. Anyways, I'm really glad to hear that wikiHow is joining the OpenID network. I hope it continues to work well for them. tags: wikihow openid wikisphere wikizenship wikineologism

Rands in Repose I continue to find it mind-boggling that this gay alien is also a well-known blogger about software. Yeah, I know, I know, Jerkcity guys: they're just cartoon characters. They're not people. But still. In ancient times, I did an interview with Rands for Pigdog Journal. I guess that's a long time ago, though. tags: rands jerkcity interview pigdogjournal

Not quite spongeworthy So, there was an article in Slate about Wikipedia biographies over the weekend about how saddy-sad it is when your biography is deleted from Wikipedia (and how writing an article about Wikipedia can save that biography quite well). I've seen a lot of such breast-beating in blogs and such lately. I think it's important for folks to remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a wiki-about-everything. Some people, places, and things meet an encyclopedia's requirements for notability (see Wikipedia:Notability (people)); others don't. That's just the way it is. But just because your bio isn't on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you can't have an Open Content, wiki bio preserved for posterity. I've written about WikiBios before, but I have to insist that it's one of the most awe-inspiring projects I've seen: a biography for every human. Every human. That's all they do. Yeah, their sample text is a little bit trivial, but I think looking beyond that, you can see a pretty amazing possibility for a project. Maybe Timothy Noah and all the other people who are teetering on the edge of being spongeworthy for Wikipedia should take some time to build out their WikiBios page. Get friends, colleagues and family to contribute, and really build out a high-quality bio. If at some period in the future WP deigns to include them, then the bio is right there -- GFDL-licensed, no less. Anyways, here's Evan Prodromou's WikiBio. Feel free to fill it out. tags: slate wikipedia timothy noah wikibios

BarCampAustin While I'm thinking about BarCamps -- I'm a little nervous about my presentation at DemoCampMontreal1 -- I'm finding out that BarCampAustin is going to be the same week as South-by-Southwest Interactive 2007. Which, really, makes a lot of sense. I'm going to try to show up for Friday morning -- it'll be interesting to bounce back and forth between SxSW and a BarCamp. tags: sxsw barcamp barcampaustin

A while ago I signed up to a petition against software patents on the Prime Minister's e-petitions website.

I received a email today, with the Government's reponse:

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK. [snip]

This was certainly a welcome surprise.

Version 0.4.0 of QuantLib was released a few days ago (and Debian packages for QuantLib are waiting to be added by the ftpmaster). This required some minor changes by Dominick in the Bermudan pricer, and we made some small updates in other place. All in all just a regular maintenance release. The new version 0.2.6 has now been uploaded to both R's master CRAN host and Debian, and is also available locally here.

One step beyond. This is the madness that happens when uncoordinated uploads are done. This time, this has been an old dbmail upload that was rotting in NEW for two months and had been resurrected from there. So, my target is moving again, the very exact day where I intended to announce that French has reached 100%. We're now again in a call for translations for this package, just the same day I had gotten rid with debsecan, the former target mover. Today's uploads: tvtime, amavisd-new, openslp, smsclient (by its maintainer), gpsd, fdutils, apmd.

A few days from now is the first BarCamp we've had in a while: DemoCampMontreal1. DemoCamp is a BarCamp variation with a much shorter time frame (a couple of hours, rather than all day) and strict rules about presenting. Demo-ers cannot use Powerpoint slides (or even OpenOffice Impress slides!); they have to demo working code. I'm going to be doing the first demo of the first DemoCamp, which should be pretty fun. What will I be demoing? The OpenID extension for MediaWiki, of course. I'd like to show folks who have MW installs how to get OpenID enabled on their sites, and I'd like to show other developers how to (easily) integrate OpenID into their existing software. I don't think it's necessarily that hard. DemoCampMontreal1 is on Tuesday, Feb 27 2007 at 6:30PM at the SAT. Everybody's invited, and as an extra bonus, t-shirts from BarCampMontreal1 will be there, for attendees. Cool! tags: democampmontreal1 democamp montreal barcamp democampmontreal barcampmontreal openid mediawiki wiki sat

MLUG now has OpenID Lurking in #mlug (Montreal Linux Users Group) on Freenode, I caught a cross-discussion about OpenID being enabled on http://mlug.ca/ . Which is great news -- I'm excited to be able to use OpenID on some of my favorite sites. tags: mlug openid lug

Creative Commons 3.0 I'm excited to see the announcement that the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses have been released. The 3.0 licenses were in part the product of the Debian-Creative Commons Workgroup, which tried to smoothe the rough edges of the CC licenses that made them incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. See the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report for more info. We didn't get everything we wanted from the negotiations, but we did get the essential problems out of the way. I think that the 3.0 licenses are compatible with the DFSG, and that works licensed solely under CC 3.0 should be allowed into Debian main. But we probably have some discussion on debian-legal ahead of us on the subject. tags: cc cc3.0 debian

Dead tablet walking So, I think I mentioned that I borrowed a Nokia N800 tablet last week at the LWOSS. I took it to bed two nights ago -- it's a really good computer for reading in bed -- and the battery died on the nightstand overnight. When I plugged it in in the morning, it went into some kind of zombie fugue. It booted up, spun in place for a little bit, then shut itself down and rebooted again automatically. I couldn't get it to stop with the normal power button, so I eventually pulled the battery to make it stop. But if I put the battery back in, it went into its Roomba-bumping-into-a-wall loop again. Frustrated, I ended up re-flashing the entire system. That solved the problem, but I have to admit some regret at losing all my settings. It won't take that much work, but I'm going to backup to a mini-SD once it's done. tags: nokia n800 reboot loop

There's less than a week before Montr al's next little technology un-conference. DemoCamp Montreal 1 (Fran ais) follows in the footsteps of Toronto's DemoCamp, bringing neat demonstrations to the spotlight. What is DemoCamp? It's a mini-conference where you show up and get to see people present the cool things that they're doing. Be it some software they wrote, a robot they built, or even a live tutorial, there's always something interesting happening. And you need to know. All you have to do is show up. We'll be at the Societ des arts technologiques which has been cool enough to donate their space for us. Just show up on Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 18:30, after putting your name down on the registration list. Don't be shy, it's free! Demonstrations are short, sweet, and PowerPoint slides are forbidden. You get to actually see something happen, which is a much more exciting than your usual conference lecture. In addition, we'll hang out afterwards to shoot the breeze and discuss what we saw. I'll be there with my camera, helping my friends gorbash_dragon and peaceful_dragon run the show. Jonathan Kopanas, who went to Concordia, is coming up to introduce the presenters and Austin Hill is drumming up publicity. DemoCamp Montr al 1
Tuesday 27 February 2007
18:30 20:30
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Upcoming.org Google Maps ) I'll see you there!

I was up late last night upgrading Wikitravel from MediaWiki 1.8.3 to the new 1.9.3. It took a long while, since the 404-handler caching extension that I built for MediaWiki a couple of years ago (which keeps Wikitravel running on a single, albeit quite big, server) is pretty invasive, and a lot of things had changed with the way users and stuff worked, so I had a lot of hacking to do. But it's stable now, even if some watchlist stuff is a little funky. Doing major upgrades is a real bear for me, but I'm happy when it's over. tags: mediawiki wikitravel caching extension 404 handler

Home people Maj had her final oral exam in her French class tonight, which left me and Amita June home alone to fend for ourselves. We had a lot of fun. First, I had to do the day's dishes (lunch and breakfast) that were sitting in the sink. I brought the footstool around to the sink from our laundry room, and she stood on it and helped me with the dishes. After I'd finished washing a dish, she'd carefully fill it up with water, dump it out, then put the dish in the dishrack next to her. Pretty good for 18 months old. That went so well that I moved the stool over to the kitchen table where I cut tofu and vegetables for dinner. I gave her pieces of pepper, cabbage, and carrot while I was working, and she nibbled on them a bit and then practiced chopping them... with the handle of her mother's toothbrush, which she'd stolen out of the bathroom earlier in the day. After dinner, we had a bath, then we read some books, and then she went to sleep on my shoulder while I walked around her room and sang, like she's been doing for the last 2 months. It was another good night. tags: home amita june dishes home with papa

Soft launch We launched two new Wikitravel versions overnight, too: Catalan Wikitravel and Finnish Wikitravel. Catalan recently, uh, catalyzed from a blog post by Carme Pla . Readers and the Catalan-speaking community rallied to our Catalan Wikitravel Expedition and got the project rolling. I got the site set up last night and they've started translating key help, style manual and policy guidelines already. Mean, Finnish had been simmering on the back burner for a while, so we got it launched at the same time. My friend and colleague Jani Patokallio is a Finn and a longtime and well-respected Wikitraveller; I'm glad he's taking leadership of the project. Finns have such disproportionate contributions to Free Software and Free Culture; I'm glad to have that Freedom Powerhouse Country all working together on Wikitravel now. And, y'know, I'm going to totally rack up a ton of HugAFinn points off of this. Actually, now that I think of it, I have no idea if "Carme Pla" is a real name or even a plausible personal name in Catalan. It sounds like it to me, though. tags: fi ca expedition finnish catalan wikitravel

coComment A couple of months ago Don Marti recommended that I check out coComment, and I made a mental note and then forgot to follow up. But I started using the system a few days ago, and now I wonder how I ever lived without it. coComment is a Firefox plugin that keeps track of when you post a comment on a blog or some other comment-handling system. It then keeps track of the conversation that happens after you comment. I have a lot of standing keyword searches on Technorati and Google Blog Search, and if people are talking about a subject I'm interested in, I'll usually jump in and talk about it. But sometimes I'll go back months later and see that people asked me questions and continued the conversation without me. So coComment is exactly the kind of cross-the-Internet aggregation service I need. tags: cocomment comment blogs firefox

Sage Speaking of keeping up with blogs, I've realized in the last week that I've outgrown Live Bookmarks for following RSS feeds. Rather than going with a Web-based RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, I opted instead for the in-browser reader, Sage. It's simple, it does what I need it to do, and it supports OPML so I can move my subscriptions somewhere else if something better comes along. Good piece of software. My best candidate for something better coming along? Probably if I get my Netvibes home page customized well enough to handle my 50-60 feeds. And maybe when Netvibes gets smart and becomes and OpenID identity provider (or at least figures out a way that you can log into your ID when you start a browser session). tags: sage rss feed firefox netvibes

I just submitted my talk proposal for YAPC::EU, which will be held in Vienna in late August. The topic? Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group.
I took part in YAPC::NA (Yet Another Perl Conference - North America) in 2001, in Montreal, and YAPC::EU (you guessed right: Europe) in 2002, in Munich. While in Munich, I met Debian's Erich, Weasel and the late Jens. It is a very nice conference with all kinds of Perl-heads, apt for different experience levels. the talk I am proposing will be about what do we work for in Debian, how can we get a better synergy from our upstream group and (oh, this point is quite itchy - specially in strongly opinioned communities such as Ruby's! Perl people are quite nice to play with, however, but still...) what do we (as Debian maintainers) request from them in order for life to be smoother.
Of course, I only submitted the talk. The CFP has just been launched, and so far, mine is the fourth talk offered - It can still be rejected (as it is not really related to Perl development, the heart of YAPC), but I guess it will be deemed interesting by the Perl monks reviewing them.
In any case, hope to see you in Vienna as well!

Looks like Yahoo! Finance changed their server layout. Data scraping via tools like my Finance::YahooQuote, and those that use it such as my Beancounter toolkit, are therefore inoperational. As a first quick fix, apply the following patch to YahooQuote.pm:

--- YahooQuote.pm.orig  2005-07-17 13:10:20.000000000 -0500
+++ YahooQuote.pm       2007-02-22 18:50:07.000000000 -0600
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
 $VERSION = '0.21';
 ## these variables govern what type of quote the modules is retrieving
-$QURLbase = "http://quote.yahoo.com/d?f=";
+$QURLbase = "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csvr?e=.csv&f=";
 $QURLformat = "snl1d1t1c1p2va2bapomwerr1dyj1x";        # default up to 0.19
 $QURLextended = "s7t8e7e8e9r6r7r5b4p6p5j4m3m4";        # new in 0.20
 $QURLrealtime = "b2b3k2k1c6m2j3"; # also new in 0.20

I will hope to have a first new package out later.

Since this year is the year we do the east coast, for the President's Day weekend, we made the (freakin' long) trek over to New York to scope it out. I have to say that I liked it a whole lot more than I thought I would. I thought it'd be really big and overbearing and crowded. Maybe because it was a holiday weekend, and insanely cold, it wasn't that crowded. It also didn't come across as being that big and scary. The grid layout makes it easy to figure out where you are in relation to where you want to be, but for someone like me, who's terrible at remembering numbers, remembering any given address is a nightmare. We flew out from San Jose on Friday night, and arrived at 6 the next morning in Newark. My mate Andrew Calman, who's in the US for 5 weeks, tagged along and was spending the entire week in New York for work, so he had accommodation in the corporate apartment. We all headed to there and had showers and then caught up with my friend Franko, an ex-Asia Online crony, who's now living in New York. Andrew's friend Lisa flew in from London for the weekend as well, so there was quite the merry band of tourists. First impression: extremely cold. I don't think it broke over 0 degrees Celsius much of the time. This was the first time I'd been in a city with snow, although it didn't snow while we were there. It was different to see piles of dirty snow in the gutters, and how filthy all the cars were from the snow and the salt on the roads. Crossing streets often involved negotiating a big pile of snow. No alleys. Nowhere for rubbish but on the footpath, where it seemed to get collected very frequently. So you walk along and there's just bags and bags of crap lying around everywhere until it's picked up. Way small apartments. Franko lives in a studio in Chelsea, the mattress is on an elevated "shelf" that you have to climb up a ladder to get to. The entire apartment is just the living room with the "loft" suspended on one side, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom off the other side. All this for about $1500 a month. Franko magnanimously slept on the couch and gave us the bed. If I had have known the apartment was that small, I wouldn't have let him put us up, or I would have insisted we brought our inflatable mattress. After we had breakfast, we went to MoMA, which I felt was a bit expensive, at $20. At least they didn't try and charge for the cloakroom service. Highlight of that outing was seeing Jonathan Price wandering around. I recognised him instantly from Ronin, but couldn't remember either his name nor his character's name. Turns out he's been in a few other recent movies as well but I didn't recognise him. After MoMA, we had a late lunch at a Korean place that Franko liked, and then Sarah and I took the subway to Brooklyn so Sarah could catch up with a long lost school friend she hadn't seen since high school. After that, we went to 7B for a drink, and then Room Service for dinner. The food was great, the service less so. I think we were dead on feet by this stage, so went back to Franko's and crashed. On Sunday morning, we went and visited Sarah's boss, who had had an emergency appendectomy the previous week (instead of speaking at LinuxWorld) and was laid up in the Marriott Marquis, right on Times Square. Times Square was insane. I can't imagine what it must be like there for New Year's Eve. We grabbed a hot dog and a slice of pizza there for lunch, and then trekked down to Wall Street briefly. Checked out Ground Zero. That made me feel sad. Manhattan's not that big. I can appreciate how much September 11 must have rocked everybody living there. I think we then had a power nap. Good idea that was. We hit an underground bar somewhere I can't remember, that you really had to know about to find, and then had some dinner at a random Italian restaurant in Little Italy. Then we hit the Empire State building. I think that cost about as much (if not more) than MoMA just to go up to the lower of the two observation decks. It was 11:30pm by this stage, and it was absolutely freezing up there. The view was pretty impressive though. We had a drink at another fairly hard-to-find-unless-you-knew-it-was-there bar (I think it was called 3rd Floor) and called it a night. On Monday, we headed off to Liberty Island to check out the Statue of Liberty up close and personal. As much security as the airport, just to get on the ferry. Absolutely freezing out on the island as well. We only stayed out there long enough to get on the next ferry back. Overall, we had an excellent weekend there, and I definitely like the place. It was great having a local guide, so we got to eat and drink at some places we'd never have found otherwise. The subway system is fantastic, at $2 a ride, no matter where you go. Taxis are also a bit of a must, and didn't seem outrageously expensive. The NJ Transit train seemed like a good way to get between Manhattan and Newark airport. I felt like it was pretty expensive city though. Everything added up, and it seemed like we were spending money hand over fist at times. It also took a lot longer to do stuff than I'd anticipated, so we got a lot less done than we'd hoped. We were already planning on having to make at least a second trip to see the place properly. At least it'll be warmer next time. Photos from the weekend are here.

Many people assume that Linux is a system written by a few geeks. Well, it's not just a few, as a recent statistic by LWN.net shows. It lists a mere 1961 developers being credited as authors of contributions to the Linux kernel over the last year. So if some 2000 people have actually got contributions into the Linux kernel (which in turn can be cooperative work, and many changes have been rejected), you can safely assume that the development community looking at the Linux kernel source code is a lot larger. Over 2000 developers. Thats quite some manpower, you know... and we're talking just kernel here. There are thousands of contributors to GNOME, KDE, Firefox, Openoffice.org, Gimp, ... and all the other, smaller opensource applications. The kernel is probably one of the opensource applications harderst to work with: you're working on the very guts of the operating system. Change something bad and your computer won't boot. It might lose some of your data etc. - if you are e.g. developing for firefox, the worst that can happen is pretty much that your browser crashes or you lose your bookmarks copy. Also these 2000 aren't just your random geeks. Many of them are working for large companies such as IBM, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, HP, SGI, Broadcom, just to name a few of the big contributing companies who are not known as being a "pure Linux company". But they're working hand in hand across company borders and also with small developers. This is how Linux development happens: distributed, global, across borders: open and with free speech.

What happened so far: Pretty much one year ago, Xara released a Linux port of there XaraX vector graphics suite under the GPL, and everyone was happy, as it is a pretty good piece of software. A small portition of the program, the drawing library CDraw, was still distributed as a non-free binary blob with the prospect of freeing it later. to prepare for that, I created a debian package in non-free. About half a year ago, development as slowed down as the company s team was tight into other tasks and outside contributions were still few.Last thursday someone asked on the mailing list for news on the freeing of the CDraw library, starting an unseen surge of new posts on the list, from Xara employees, free-time developers and outstanders. Besides some unnecessarily rude messages, it was an interesting discussion on how a small non-free part of a program seems to scare of a lot of developers from working at the otherwise free program at all. It also became clear that Xara, recently being bough by MAGIX, will not release the CDraw library any time soon, being afraid that others might use the code to compete their commercial Windows version of XaraX.The solution, it seems, will be an internal fork that uses Cairo to render if the CDraw binary is not available. This will, at least for a while, cripple XaraLX, it will most likely be slower than the supposedly very fast CDraw, but it will be fully free software. At least the Xara guys don t oppose the plan, so there is hope that it will succeed. And who knows, maybe they will release CDraw when they see that a real free software does attrackt outside contributions.

These last weeks, Enrico and me have worked on a GUI frontend for pmnew. At the moment, the prototype is limited to the task of finding new packages to install. The goal of pmnew-gui is to have every little detail designed to be as smart as possible: for example, the list of packages shows at the top the packages that the system thinks you are interested in having comparing your system to thousands other systems. Screenshots http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-startup.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-audio.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-games.png Get it

bzr branch \
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/pmnew-gui/

Setup The README gives some details about the setup. In short you will have to do the following steps:

apt-get install python-debian python-deb822 python-xapian \
python-apt python-glade2 python-gtk2
./update-data
./pmnew-gui

It works better if you have a network connection, and if you have popularity-contest installed and running. Feel free to send us feedbacks about the GUI. Links

• "The original brain dump"
• "The commandline draft"
• "Various ideas on improving package managers"

The Weston Mercury - Tropicana vote - where was your councillor?

Fantastic work by Archant's local newspaper, actually calling councillors and asking them to account for the way they voted on a controversial seafront development. I'm surprised so many of the Worle councillors failed to vote for various reasons. I also think it's a bit poor that the vote was so late at night.

BBC NEWS England Cornwall Row over response to overcrowding

An amazingly brutal and probably honest answer about the local rail company's approach to commuter trains.

BBC NEWS England Train company says sorry to users

Train company admits "too much capacity was removed from the timetable".

Sustainable Building Sourcebook Contents

A book about green building in Texas USA. The whole thing seems to be online (sponsored) and it has some useful explanations about things like thermal mass.

The Weston Mercury - Town centre demolition

Dolphin Square is ugly, but I think it's actually one of the better examples of 60s rectangular town centre building. It's not listed or anything and it's so near the beach, I don't doubt it will be demolished. What will happen to our supermarket there? I hope there will still be one in the town centre area.

RADBURN, NJ

A recent planning process commented that my part of the village is a 'Radburn-style' development and that's why some parts have parking problems at the moment. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up. It means that the main access to our houses are footpaths and cars are left in cul-de-sacs around the edge of the development. That explains some of the apparently-confusing naming/numbering decisions. This is the site of the original Radburn.

Top 10 annoying commuting issues

Martyn in top form, ranting about his trip to work. I'm so glad my commutes are mostly cycling across countryside now.

Everyday Cycling - British Cycling Confirms Major Cyclosportive

Want to ride the TdF London-Kent route on 1st July?

Bagel Belly Blog: Travel trouble

Savs's long lane to Leicester. My comment: don't ever believe the route planners. Every one I've seen so far optimises for theoretical speed or distance, when what we really need is resilience and fuel economy too. The A47 vs A11/A14 choice is an extreme example: A11/A14 has far more free-flowing junctions and dual-carriageway than the A47.

On January 13, I sent a mail to debian-private saying I'd be on a semi-vacation until around February 10 - And yes, for over a month I've basically not touched my packaging, and for around three months my general profile in Debian has been really low. I sent this message because the Institute I work at moved, and I got the task of taking care of everything related with electrons flows carrying information (namely, voice and data networks).
It's not that I'm really-really-back now - Work is still too absorbing, users still come too often to me expecting me to solve their problems. I can often try to do so on the data network, but I'm far from even having access to the voice equipment (I've done my hardest effort not to get such access, because that'd instantly turn me into the phone operator for life). However, for the first time in many weeks, today I had some quiet time, I catched up with some mailing lists, and... Well, I expect to work on my QA page.
Boy, team-maintainership rules! pkg-perl friends, thanks for saving me from the creepy bugs sometimes too often. I expect to pick up work I haven't even looked at since I committed to doing so with the pkg-ruby-extras team as well, specifically, getting mongrel in shape and into Debian, despite our deep differences with its author. This will make Rails roll smoother and faster in Debian. And of course, there is Debconf. After last year's burnout, I think I recovered - I'm not a core organizator anymore, but I'm back to work my way to Edimburgh ;-)
As for my local activities (Mexican Free Software conferences, meetings and people): Partly because so I decided and partly because so it happened, I've been off the hook with the local community since before Debconf 6. Before, because I was too busy to think about anything besides it, and after, because I was burnt out and somewhat bitter at several facts. I've been to few regional or local conferences, also because I knew that between last October and today I'd be too tied up at work. But last week we had both CONSOL and BarCamp Mexico. Somehow I managed to be at both (well, at CONSOL I was only enough time to do my two talks, for which I miraculously managed to get prepared, and BarCamp was during the weekend). Both were very positive for me, and I'm willing again to find some time to devote to promoting and developing Free Software in our country.
Oh! One more note: Thanks to Sergio Mendoza for pushing me and for co-discussing on the subject, we are getting small but tangible results pointing to a Debian-UNAM project. Not much to see yet, besides having received the domain authority, which for now just means a nicer name for Nisamox, Mexico's main (and only long-running) full Debian mirror.

I have been approved as Committer for the <a href=”http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Linux_Distributions_Project”>Eclipse Linux Distributions Project</a>. This project aims to improve <a href=”http://www.eclipse.org”>Eclipse</a> on Linux distrubutions, make it work better on the the system and make development for Linux easier. Main distributions working in this project are Debian, Fedora, Novell/SuSE and Ubuntu. Other Linux distributions are welcome.

Not happy with my plumbing. I got up this noon to find that I didn't have any hot water pressure. My washer's cold water spigot was also dry, and that's on the same pipe as the hot water heater, and so it seemed to be related to the earlier problems I'd had with that same pipe. Perhaps it froze? But last night was not a record low.. And it was still not working at 1 pm. But it's working fine now at 3:30. Hrm. I hope my plumber has an idea of how to debug this. If it were me, I'd have to wait and get some more data on whether it's reproducible after another cold night, or try to put in a preventative fix like improving the insulation on that pipe.

There was an interesting read the other week on LKML where someone or other was trying to say that no kernel config options should be hidden, and any that are should be turned into options that are linked, so that you can "see what you are doing". At the time Linus posted an excellent rant straight back, saying that more options should be hidden, and that the knobs and twiddles that people see should be obvious. I thought at the time that Linus response on this was extremely appropriate, but I didn't expect to be bitten by the opposite approach quite so immediately! I have been trying to build 2.6.20 for the last few days and wondering where in hell has the "Software Suspend" option gone. Well, today I found out that if you disable "Hot Pluggable CPUs" the option will never appear. If Linus has his way this problem would not happen, because the two knobs that people might want to twiddle, which appear superficially unrelated would actually have three settings in truth:

• CONFIG_USER_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND

The first setting would be a user-selectable knob, which would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU was enabled, regardless of the state of software suspend. The last one would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU and CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND were enabled. The current approach is that iff I enable software suspend, then the hotplug CPU option disappears, and OTOH if I disable hotplug CPUs the software suspend option disappears. What I did was to start with a clean, unconfigured 2.6.20 kernel and go through all of the options starting at the top, which is something I tend to do with new hardware. The idea of hot plug CPUs seemed like something I didn't need, so I disabled it. With Linus' approach I would then have enabled Software Suspend a couple of minutes later, and the hidden config option would have been re-enabled behind the scenes. With the way things are at present, I built a good number of kernels and went through quite a bit of hardware blaming before I grepped .Kconfig for SUSPEND and found out what had happened, and which option I needed to enable. It is nice to know that their is such deep sanity at the heart of the kernel development process! Hopefully someone in a position to do so will notice this particular little gotcha and fix it soon, or perhaps someone wanting an "in" to start kernel hacking could go through the kernel configuration and clean up such gotchas. It certainly seems to me that Linus would accept patches for this as being rational.