… to start the weekend than shopping for electronic junk? Local Unisys office had their annual flea market to raise some money for the charity. My loot: a Logitech trackball, a barcode scanner, and an old-style CD caddy. I don’t really need the latter (well, strictly speaking, I could live without either of the items =)), but they are getting somewhat hard to find, and the one I’ve got looks brand new, in the original packaging. With the total price of 3 bucks, I think it’s a steal…

Two weird languages join. I just wrote a interpreter for Brainfuck programs in Haskell, for the code, see the file bfi.hs. Interesting for Haskell-Newcomers might be how I define the datatype Tape for an infinite band of anything, and then use it as a Tape of Ints for the data, but also a Tape of function for the operators. These Functions take the Machine, the Brainfuck virtual machine so to say, and modify it, thus returning the new machine.It seems to work pretty well, at least after I found out that my three year old 13-lines Brainfuck interpreter written in perl, bfi.pl, has a bug (it enters a loop at least one time, even if the value is zero at the start). You can try the interpreter with this code. It takes a string as input and then outputs brainfuck code that itself outputs the input in reverse order:

let
    code = "++++++[>+++++++<-]>+[>+>+>+<<<-]>><<<
            ++++[>>>+++++<<<-]>>>->+++>>,[>,]<[[[<]<<<.>>>>[>]<-]<[<]<.<.>>>[>]<]"
    input = "Hello World"
in reverse input ==  run (run code input) ""
True

Thanks to Mako for introducing me to Brainfuck at DebConf 3

Wikimania is over now, and although I have to admit that I'm relieved in a lot of ways, since it's been a long week, I was still a little bummed to say goodbye to people at the closing event last night. I'm a big believer in the meaning and value of on-line communication, but there's something about being physically present with the people who are making wiki and Open Content happen that means a lot to me. Saturday's discussions were all pretty good -- I really liked hearing about The Internet Archive and the amazing amount of knowledge they're making available for future generations. 26 million books, 300,000 films, 3-4 million audio recordings... there is a lot of human culture that we can and should preserve in digital format. Brion's talk about future developments in MediaWiki was great, too. As usual, the hallway conversations were almost as productive as the sessions themselves. I talked to Ray and Mark about using WikiIndex as a clearinghouse for wp:Interwiki coordination. I talked to Ward, who's going to dig in deeper to the MediaWiki parser (impressive!). Maj and I talked with Gil Penchina, who's a real nice guy. And, as the event was wrapping up Saturday evening, I spent a half-hour talking with Kevin Scott, who's got some interesting ideas for launching a new wiki site (or cluster of sites). As I was getting ready to leave, I ran into a cluster of people around wp:Richard Stallman, who'd shown up more or less out of the blue. He was haranguing the crowd about the term intellectual property, and as Brad Patrick, interim CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation and an IP lawyer, was at the front of the line, I got the feeling that Brad had made the mistake of introducing himself. Whoops. I talked with Mako for a while; he had a t-shirt that said, "debian-legal stole my DFSG". Excellent! I also met Thomas Malone, and we talked a bit about how an information commons affects what we think of as "work" and "knowledge workers". Everyone was drifting off to eat before the party, and Professor Malone invited me to join him, but I had to get back and see Maj and Amita June. But, catching a familiar face nearby, I said, "Thomas, have you met wp:Ward Cunningham before...?" They headed off to dinner together, and since they were still hanging out when I saw them later at the party, I assume they hit it off. We had dinner Saturday night at Charlie's Kitchen, a misnamed bar with lots of good, fried crab items. I guess the burgers are good, too, but we enjoyed the seafood and the juke box. Poor Amita June -- growing up in juke joints across North America. She does love french fries, though... Saturday night we went to the Wikimania party at the MIT Museum, which had an amazing number of great exhibits of neat AI schtuff. I spent some time talking with Professor Malone and Ross Mayfield of SocialText. Ross had on a T-shirt from d-Camp, and as we talked about the BarCamp phenomenon Professor Malone decided to hold one at MIT. Cool. Ross had some questions about the recent launch of Wikicars, which has some configuration issues at launch time such that the license shown was incorrect. He was glad to hear it was fixed. I think Ross does a good job keeping an eye on the business aspect of wikis -- I don't think there's another blogger out there who's doing quite as good a job at it. We headed home early -- we've been dragging our poor baby around to too many parties lately -- and got a good night's sleep. tags: wikimania

Sunday Sunday's events were pretty good, although I was starting to feel pretty crispy. The discussion about the Wikimedia Foundation's board was really fascinating, but also a bit alarming. The Foundation has a huge job, and they're such a young organization -- like a colt just standing on its feet. Growing pains are inevitable, but it's impressive how committed the people on the board are. They love Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia as much as we all do. I saw a great discussion of wiki map editing (using SVG and Javascript to provide in-browser editing), something very near and dear to my heart, since we need it for Wikitravel. Sadly it was opposite Joseph Reagle's talk on neutrality, so I missed parts of both switching between events. The event ended with a big speech about the nature of knowledge by wp:Dave Weinberger. He started off with a hilarious send-up of Lawrence Lessig's presentation style, but got down to some fundamentals of semiotics in a very approachable way. It was a good finisher for the Wikimania event. Today we're going to stop in to see some people here in wt:Cambridge (Massachusetts), then it's off to wt:New Hampshire and back home. Where we'll be for all of 10 days before packing off for WikiSym. Man, what a month of wikis. tags: wikimania

The first day of Wikimania 2006 yesterday was fantastic. Jimmy Wales opened up with a great discussion of the achievements of Wikimedia in the last 12 months -- as well as the tough issues like the John Siegenthaler, Sr. problems last winter. I also caught Mako's discussion of his and Erik M ller's new Free Content Definition effort. Mako and Erik are both extremely smart, extremely passionate people and I think they've made a big step in getting this definition off the ground. It was great to hear Ward talk about his experience with the PPR and with Wikipedia. Lawrence Lessig's discussion of Free Culture was, as I've heard before, totally awe-inspiring. We chatted a bit after the talk, and he promised to add some info to Wikitravel's wt:Costa Rica page. tags: lawrence lessig wikimania jimmy wales wikimedia mako eloquence ward cunningham lawrence lessig

All you do to me is talk talk So, I finally got around to giving my presentation on Wiki and Open Content travel guides: past, present and future yesterday. It was kind of nerve-wracking (good to know that Dave Weinberger was having problem with his speech, too, though), and I was revising slides up until a few hours before the talk. Jack Herrick of [[$$vote for http://www.wikihow.com/ and I kept planning to sit down together and go over our slides, but we kept missing each other... or, we'd have time, and neither one of us felt ready to show the other how far we'd gotten. I saw Jack about 5 minutes before our talk, and asked how he felt, and he said, "I've only got a few more slides to finish..." His talk was great. The work he's done on wikiHow over the last few years -- expanding the idea of eHow into the wiki environment -- is awe-inspiring. The community there is great. I also liked that he talked about some of the mistakes he made with wikiHow -- kind of a brave thing to do. My talk went pretty OK, I think. The group that was watching was really receptive to the ideas of wiki and Open Content, so I could really concentrate on the importance of applying the ideas to travel guides. I had that great feeling of conveying my ideas and having them understood -- always a fine thing for a speaker. Chris Bronk from the State Department finished up with a discussion on Diplopedia, which I thought was pretty neat, too. It's an internal project of the State Dept to apply wiki-based knowledge management to the diplomatic corps. It's just launching and I hope it works out. The Q&A session went well -- one woman in particular grilled me about ideas on how to build personal opinion, reviews and ratings into the objective wiki platform. When I left the room at the end, one of her colleagues caught up with me. "I'm from the arch-enemy," he said, and pulled out his card from TripAdvisor. They started a wiki recently, although it's not Open Content, and they're here at Wikimania, too. tags: wikimania wikitravel presentation jack herrick open content wiki wikihow

Par-tay We also had our wt:Wikitravel:10K Party last night at Tommy Doyle's Irish Pub right off of Harvard Square. The food was good, and the beers were excellent, and all the bartenders had Irish accents, which made the whole experience worthwhile. It was great to have both Wikitravellers (those few of us who are at Wikimania) and non-WTers at the party. Amita June loved the venue because it was below street-level, and she could walk up the stairs and down the stairs (holding Mama or Papa's hands), up and down, up and down... She also enjoyed the pub food (quesadillas, stuffed mushrooms, potato skins, etc.) a little more than is probably healthy for a 1-year-old. I got to hang out with a lot of wiki people who are doing interesting things. Paul Youlton at Yellowikis.org was fun to talk to -- the business listings he's doing are fascinating. His site just got served notice by Yell, owner of the "Yellow Pages" trademark in the UK, for "passing off" as a Yellow Pages site. "Passing off" is a weaker charge than "trademark infringement", but it has the advantage for Yell that it doesn't put their trademark in jeopardy. (The "Yellow Pages" trademark in the US passed into the public domain at the breakup of AT&T.) The part was a good time, but it made me miss a lot of the great people who work on Wikitravel. I'd like to make a plan for a Wikitravel Getaway -- just a group trip to some cool part of the world with as many other Wikitravellers as can make it. It could be a lot of fun tags: wikitravel 10K party yellowikis

Wikimania bloggers One cool thing about being at Wikimania is that I'm finding all of the really active Wikimedia-related bloggers out there. Andrew Lih, better known as "Fuzheado", keeps a good blog on wiki and Wikipedia-related items. Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Foundation board member and exec at Wikia, also has a good blog about wiki-related items. tags: wikimania wikimedia wiki blogs andrew lih angela beesley

Busted! Dan Bricklin came up today and thanked me for my blog entry about meeting him (see Journal/15 Thermidor CCXIV. D'oh! Totally busted. But we had a lot of good talk about spreadsheets as a form of presentation, the parsability of MediaWiki wikitext, and SocialText's great work with the rest of the wiki community. Nice person with a lot of interesting things to say... I need to stop being intimidated by software and Internet superstars, I guess. tags: dan bricklin spreadsheet mediawiki socialtext

The results are in. Bruce was removed from the board, and Josh Berkus, Neil McGovern, and Michael Schultheiss were added. (Neither Mako nor I sought another term.)

Congratulations to the winners -- I'm sure you will go far. I'm glad to see enthusiastic people around SPI and I'm sure you'll do a great job.

What a couple of weeks.

So I went off to Europe. I had planned to meet up with Daniel Stone and many others in Paris, but fate decided to piss in my cornflakes and delay my flight out of Boston so that we missed the connecting flight to Paris. I spent the whole next day in Montreal's airport, and while I got a lot of reading about Norse mythology done, I didn't have nearly as much time in Paris and didn't get to meet up with anyone. Daniel and I will have to postpone drinking and bashing X in person until a latter date. The time that I did spend there, was great though, and I got to do some of the tourist things that I didn't get to do last time I was there. Nicole, my girlfriend, had never been to Europe, so she was thrilled to see things for the first time.

Then it was off to Munich, where I did get to spend some time with Michael Banck, who is even more awesome in person than on the internets. Michael was my sponsor in Debian for well over a year, as well as my advocate, and now we're both ops in #debian together, so it was a real thrill to finally meet up with him. He was too polite to let me buy him dinner or a drink as thanks, so I'm hoping he comes to visit so I can repay him. I also got to meet several others, including release manager extraordinare Andreas Barth, which was a lot of fun. We were in town when Germany was playing Sweden in the world cup, and Germany actually won, so the whole city was singing until dawn. Ever since I've been back I've been drinking lots of Hefeveisens and wishing that they were served in 1 liter form.

Surprisingly, since I've been back, I've had the opportunity to do some programming at work and push Free Software at the same time. A co-worker of mine recently did an experiment that got her a list of 900 genes, and she wanted to narrow that list by comparing them to another list or two, but had no idea how to get this done in a reasonable amount of time. So one afternoon I wrote a small ruby script to do this, and all of a sudden my boss is looking at me wondering what other sort of neat computer things I could whip up. I also had to start doing some statistics, and I found a test that I needed to do which Excel couldn't do, so I started learning and coding a bit of R, which is pretty nice so far. The co-worker of mine just invested $800 in a two day class on learning to use an add-on for R, which is cool because I've totally failed until now to get anyone to use Free Software in the lab. The whole thing is making my labmates look at me a little funny though, since this stuff is way out of their league for the most part.

The bad news is that a few days after I came back, I found that my laptop's hard drive started making some very bad noises. I moved my data to backup computer that I'd inherited but not really used, only to find that the backup machine was prone to weird random errors. That left me without a functional computer at home. I took the opportunity to order a new machine for myself, but for now I'm kind of stuck with a web browser at work. In the meanwhile, I've taken to teaching myself statistics, and in order to do that, I've been re-learning calculus. I find it a little weird that I'm going home at night and picking up a calculus text book in my free time.

As far as X work goes, not having a working computer has caused a bit of a problem. Luckily, just before my machine died, Andres Salomon had nearly finished work on backporting Xorg 7.1 to sarge. Afterwards, he decided that he wanted to join the XSF, so since then he's been spearheading getting 7.1 in to experimental. He's been continuing the work that I haven't been able to do lately, and I'm excited to work with him in the future. In addition, Jurij Smakov joined the team as sparc driver maintainer, and Drew Parsons is officially joining the team, bringing Xprint officially in to the XSF. So even though I haven't been able to do much, things are moving forward, which is wonderful to see. As soon as I can get set up, I'm going to keep working with Andres to get 7.1 ready to ship in December.

Surprisingly, I drink far more lately than when I had a working computer. I think something is wrong with me if working on Debian helps to keep me from seeking chemical modification.

So I went from this: To this: It’s not called the Halfway House for nothing. It’s been just a couple days over two weeks, and I’m doing awesome. Loving every minute, or close to it. I love the freedom of being out on my own, love having my own schedule, love dealing with getting my own food, even don’t mind doing my own laundry. Not to say I don’t love my friends and family too. But still. Unpacking was fun. Apparently the person I’m subletting from played a tap-dancing stormtrooper in a student-written Star Wars musical. And there were… fun things left in the closet. And I couldn’t resist, if just a little. It was beautiful for the first couple days of being down here, but lately it’s been not as good - muggy, hazy, too hot, etc. Though today was better than the last couple. Here’s Boston from Cambridge, two weeks ago: My house isn’t air-conditioned, but the Media Lab is — so it works out okay since I spend the middle part of my day there anyhow. I’ve been thinking about getting a window AC unit, but the trouble with relying solely on bike, public transport, and foot to get around is that it’s a pain in the ass to move around large objects. I love the Debian scene down here too. There are some great people, and since the rest of my college class doesn’t arrive until August, I’ve mostly been hanging out with them. There’s this bizarre feeling of connection with other Debian people. Not to mention I’d already met some of them when I was down in April. Last Friday I went out and biked around Boston with Boston’s Critical Mass. It was pretty exhilarating and fun. (This is before; I didn’t really feel like biking and taking pictures at the same time.) And afterward there was an Acetarium sushi party which involved meeting Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, who writes for Newsforge/Linux.com/etc. Yesterday I went out to visit the Boston Harbor Islands with Mako and Mika (nobody else showed up — too early or something). They were pretty damn nice, if I don’t say so myself. The weather held up as decent, and although the ferry out from Boston costs money, the inter-island shuttle is free for moochers who want to cruise from island to island around the harbor. The islands weren’t even that crowded, which was surprising considering their proximity to Boston and abundance of pretty nice beaches. Of course, come August it will probably become impossible for me to hang out with Debian people 5/7 days a week. So, gotta stock up… y’know, before they kick me out and stop feeding me awesome vegetarian food…

Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance. So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I've tried to come here with my most "just relax" mentality and it's working pretty well, I've also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I'm staying with Josep and Jes s in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it's a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There's a public bus service, but some days it's quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use. An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltr for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days. Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest. Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said "hey I have one of those!", which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montr al conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it's hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare. Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations. After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later. Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station. Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn't been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town. We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent's place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel "at home".

Don't dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebasti and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies. I took danilo and mako around the town's center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the gay streets . At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00. We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane. It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions! The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Pla a de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin's place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

Thanks to all of the helpful comments people left in response to my last post about hosting. I got some really helpful hints from them -- including the one I eventually followed, to VPSLink.

I wound up going with VPSLink. Their prices are amazing and the performance is good, too.

I have to admit -- I shot myself in the foot not once, not twice, but three times. The shorewall config I was using on my old VPS (which was hosted under UML) apparently doesn't work well under OpenVZ (used at VPSLink). By "doesn't work well", I mean "blocks all traffic to or from the host on startup".

So, I had rsynced over everything from my old host to the new, and rebooted the new. But it didn't come back up. I was pretty sure this was why. I dropped off a ticket to the VPSLink folks asking them to please rm /etc/init.d/shorewall for me.

60 minutes later, they had done it. (And it looks like a bug in their ticket system prevented it from being flagged as "emergency" -- they said they would have done it faster otherwise.)

I then tried to fix shorewall, and it looked like it was working, so I put the init script back and rebooted. Same problem! They fixed it again in about 60 minutes. (The ticket still had normal priority)

Finally, I deleted shorewall entirely, then rsynced my old host to the new one. Things looked good, so I rebooted.... and yes, guess what, that rsync brought back shorewall so it got hosed YET AGAIN. ARGH. This was now well into the overnight hours, but they still helped me out.

All in all, I am so far VERY impressed with VPSLink. I heartily recommend them. I'll be sure to post updates as time goes by.

Regarding Memset, my current provider: Really great company. I heartily recommend them, too. My needs for RAM just wouldn't be ecnomical under their current plans, but they are usually competitive. I also have experience with JohnCompanies. I used them way back when they only did FreeBSD VPSs, on through the Linux days, and we currently use their services at work. These are also great folks and I would recommend them to anyone. Like Mako's suggestion of Rimuhost, both memset and JohnCompanies are "quality first" providers -- not necessarily cheapest, but their systems work as advertised and are almost never down, and they support you with experienced Unix admins. BTW, Memset's current plans use Xen and JohnCompanies uses Virtuozzo.

It’s really a pity that in the rush of the modern fast-paced world we hardly have time to slow down and notice little details which make the life so much more enjoyable. I, for example, totally missed the end of Prairial. It’s good to know though that the same way summer follows the spring, Prairial is followed by Messidor, which, I’m sure, is going to bring us even more wonderful moments.

Well, we're back from the Usenix '06 Annual Technical Conference. Overall, a very nice conference. This is the first Linux/Unix conference I've been to since the old LinuxExpo (NOT LinuxWorld) events in the late 90s.

I must say it was quite fun to be around so many intelligent *nix folks. I learned quite a bit, and learned how much I had in common with some (and how little with others). A very nice social at the New England Aquarium Friday night.

Some very interesting speakers, too, with lots of experience to share. I'm glad I was there.

I have only one main complaint about Usenix -- they tried to cram too much into too few days. The conference sessions ran till as late at 6:45PM, with BoFs after that. That left almost no time to see anything of Boston and meant that very few people could actually stick around for all the BoFs. Next year, they should use more days and schedule fewer things in the evenings.

The highlight of the trip, though, wasn't Usenix at all, but instead getting to meet some Boston-area Debian folks Saturday night. Lots of fun, and Mako is as crazy in person as he looks online :-)

Our train trip in each direction was nice, too.

More to come...

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t ever actually blogged that yes, I accepted enrollment at MIT. Hence the preparing to move from Camillus, New York, a little suburb outside of Syracuse, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (I.e. the Cambridge where you get to pick your email!) Not only that, but I have a job. A job at the MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media Group. They use Gentoo (on cygwin…), but I forgive them at least for now since it’s a heck of a lot more interesting a job than the crap retail jobs that my friends are queueing up for the summer. Though it means that I won’t be able to party with them for the last summer before university, since I won’t be home. Why I have the job is mostly Mako’s fault. So, I was staying at him and Mika’s place when I was down visiting MIT, and I met him outside the Media Lab the night I arrived since it’s right across the road from East Campus, where my undergrad student host lives. I got an awesome tour, got to check out the shiny toys, and got introduced to a few people. A day after I get home, I have forwarded email from Mako in my inbox from one of the people I was introduced to (another grad student at the Lab), who’s looking for people to hire this summer. Zing, nifty. The position’s basically a temporary UROP, hence the post title. A month and a bit later, I’ve paid my June rent for my sublet in Cambridge and am making lists of stuff to go shopping for. If you want to be helpful, tell me something you took to college and never used. Though keeping in mind that I’m in a small, rented house for 2.5 months until I move into my dorm in late August. Or, point me to quick and easy recipes. I’ve never really done a lot of cooking before, so I’ll be using the kamikaze “cook or don’t eat!” method here. I have 9 days of high school left until classes let out for exams, and I’m pumped. I’ll only have one final exam this year since the only classes I’m taking that have ‘em are Economics and AP Physics, but I managed to cut through the numerous layers of red tape necessary to get out of taking the New York State physics regents exam since it’s given on the very last day of testing, and I am leaving before then. (I’m heading down on June 19th; it was supposed to be the 22nd.) Seriously, red tape. Talk to guidance counselor, talk to academic dean, talk to guidance counselor again, talk to admissions officer from MIT whom I’m acquainted with, give guidance counselor his phone number so she can fulfill the school politics requirement of having official confirmation of okay-ness, get the go-ahead from guidance counselor afterward. The economics exam is on the first day of tests, w00t (June 12th, IIRC). Commencement is June 17th. Walk across the stage (I’m giving a speech!), then drive across the Northeast to the rest of life.

If you are seriously into stream and trickle ponding, you really should make sure that there is at least some kind of water around. For example, here’s some ponding done right.

I was a bit lazy today and mostly attending nothing. Not saying that the talks were not interesting, but mostly I wanted to work on a few pending stuff such as this damn Xorg debconf templates rewrite and the subsequent French translation update (a huge one). Being in the hacklab most of the day lead me to good discussions with many people, out of which I'll keep a very long talk with Otavio Salvador. We could some day have a dedicated server for Grisu's work on the DDTP to be hosted while it is used y some translators as a testbed for a future infranstructure. I also attended the interesting "Debian in Latin America" BOF, even though it was in Spansih. It was good to get a picture of how building a community in Latin America is facing challenges. The discussion was animated and very nice with valuable interventions and good animations. Kudos to Anibal and Damog who animated it. Oh, I went assassinated during the day. I won't tell more, of course (except that now you are safe when meeting me, folks...I shouldn't even tell that, but anyway....). This sucks and I hate my murderer....:-)...I will find ways to revenge, believe me, pal. The day ended with the Wine and Cheese party. It was indeed added in the official schedule, so we felt in duty of organizing something nice. And, actually, I think it has been nice with something like 40 different cheese varieties around the table. It bringed a big crowd near the hacklab and triggerred a more than great moment, I think. So, it sounds like a Cheese Party is now becoming an official rendez-vous for all Deconfers, so see you in Debconf7 Cheese and Wine party, which will be huge. Mako, Hannah and Matt, we missed you on that one (Matt, where the hell were you?).

I was a bit lazy today and mostly attending nothing. Not saying that the talks were not interesting, but mostly I wanted to work on a few pending stuff such as this damn Xorg debconf templates rewrite and the subsequent French translation update (a huge one). Being in the hacklab most of the day lead me to good discussions with many people, out of which I'll keep a very long talk with Otavio Salvador. We could some day have a dedicated server for Grisu's work on the DDTP to be hosted while it is used y some translators as a testbed for a future infranstructure. I also attended the interesting "Debian in Latin America" BOF, even though it was in Spansih. It was good to get a picture of how building a community in Latin America is facing challenges. The discussion was animated and very nice with valuable interventions and good animations. Kudos to Anibal and Damog who animated it. Oh, I went assassinated during the day. I won't tell more, of course (except that now you are safe when meeting me, folks...I shouldn't even tell that, but anyway....). This sucks and I hate my murderer....:-)...I will find ways to revenge, believe me, pal. The day ended with the Wine and Cheese party. It was indeed added in the official schedule, so we felt in duty of organizing something nice. And, actually, I think it has been nice with something like 40 different cheese varieties around the table. It bringed a big crowd near the hacklab and triggerred a more than great moment, I think. So, it sounds like a Cheese Party is now becoming an official rendez-vous for all Deconfers, so see you in Debconf7 Cheese and Wine party, which will be huge. Mako, Hannah and Matt, we missed you on that one (Matt, where the hell were you?).

There will be celebrations. And incriminating photos if we can get them. We've batted around the idea of doing a bachelor party for mako, but I think it'd just wind up having everyone sit around the acetarium talking about copyright. If we had a stripper, she'd probably join in and possibly end up editing a wikipedia entry before the night was out. Bachelor party or no, merriment will be had!

Well, that’s it, folks. People who helped to make it happen are too numerous to mention here, but I would like to specially thank Joshua, Marc and Andres for guidance and mentoring, another Marc for being a great AM, and Joerg and James for doing awesome DAM work.

My name is Jurij and I’m a Pine user. I’ve been using it forever and got remarkably used to it. If previously there was no good reason to switch to anything else, lately two things where bugging me a bit: lack of PGP/MIME support, and lack of Mail-Followup-To handling. If the latter problem is not such a big deal, the former was seriously annoying me sometimes, because even if you save the PGP/MIME message in a file, checking the signature is sowewhat non-trivial. So, on Saturday I’ve decided that time has come to switch to mutt. Again. And failed. Again. It’s just so different that using it is painful, in spite of all the flexibility and configurability. So instead I’ve spent the better part of Sunday writing a PGP/MIME signature checker, which can be used from within Pine. The resulting script pgpmime.py just reads a PGP/MIME message from standard input and checks the signature (more features are planned in the future). From Pine one can just pipe the raw PGP/MIME signed message to it using the (pipe) command.

Horms, why not use gworldclock? Martin, I think you are after tra. Andrew, you do realise that you could do that with yum – which has been in Debian for a while now. You'd have probably heard about it earlier if Mako could be bothered to get Atom 1.0 support working on Planet Debian. Rodney, Nokia phones generally use Netfront as their default. If you want to use Opera you have to specify it. I'd be highly skepticle of KHTML being used anywhere memory footprint mattered. It looks like it might be WebCore (dervied from KHTML) instead. But that is only on very recent phones (first half of 2006). Oh, and that is likely to be Yahoo merchant crawler. Yahoo probably thinks you are a corporate whore or something ;-). Finally is it just me or does it strike anyone else as odd that the Mozilla Corporation, with all of its' money, is not able to get a crack group of hackers together so that Firefox 2.0 can render ACID2? At least two of the competitors can already so, what's the go, Joe? (or in this case Mitchell).