Today I have released a significant new version of my mail server benchmark Postal! The list of changes is below:

• Added new program bhm to listen on port 25 and send mail to /dev/null. This allows testing mail relay systems.
• Fixed a minor bug in reporting when compiled without SSL.
• Made postal write the date header in correct RFC2822 format.
• Removed the name-expansion feature, it confused many people and is not needed now that desktop machines typically have 1G of RAM. Now postal and rabid can have the same user-list file.
• Moved postal-list into the bin directory.
• Changed the thread stack size to 32K (used to be the default of 10M) to save virtual memory size (not that this makes much difference to anything other than the maximum number of threads on i386).
• Added a minimum message size option to Postal (now you can use fixed sizes).
• Added a Postal option to specify a list of sender addresses separately to the list of recipient addresses.
• Removed some unnecessary error messages.
• Handle EINTR to allow ^Z and "bg" from the command line. I probably don't handle all cases, but now that I agree that failure to handle ^Z is an error I expect bug reports.
• Made the test programs display output on the minute, previously they displayed once per minute (EG 11:10:35) while now it will be 11:10:00. This also means that the first minute reported will have something less than 60 seconds of data - this does not matter as a mail server takes longer than that to get up to speed.
• Added support for GNUTLS and made the Debian package build with it. Note that BHM doesn't yet work correctly with TLS.
• Made the programs exit cleanly.

Thanks to Inumbers for sponsoring the development of Postal.

I presented a paper on mail server performance at OSDC 2006 that was based on the now-released version of Postal.

I've been replying to a number of email messages in my Postal backlog, some dating back to 2001. Some of the people had changed email address during that time so I'll answer their questions in my blog instead.

/usr/include/openssl/kssl.h:72:18: krb5.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /usr/include/openssl/ssl.h:179

One problem reported by a couple of people is having the above error when compiling on an older Red Hat release (RHL or RHEL3). Running ./configure --disable-ssl should work-around that problem (at the cost
of losing SSL support). As RHEL3 is still in support I plan to fix this bug eventually.

There was a question about how to get detailed information on what Postal does. All three programs support the options -z and -Z to log details of what they do. This isn't convenient if you only want a small portion of the data but can be used to obtain any information you desire.

One user reported that options such as -p5 were not accepted. Apparently their system had a broken implementation of the getopt(3) library call used to parse command-line parameters.

The snow we got a couple of days ago hasn't abated here in Montreal. We had a cold snap right after the snowfall, so temperatures have been around -20C for the last couple of days. Last night Maj had her French classes at the Montreal YMCA, and Micaela had spent the day seeing art museums and visiting bookstores downtown. (She's a poetry nut -- loves finding books by Canadian poets, francophone and anglophone, that she can't get at home in Melbourne.) So Amita and I went to meet her about halfway from our local Metro station, at the Pizzad lic on Ave Mont Royal. I covered Amita in about 10 layers of clothing, then put her on her little purple sled and dragged her up towards Mont Royal. She kept wanting to get up and walk herself ("Up!" is her newest and most insistent word), but when she was standing she wouldn't walk at all. So it was a long time getting to the restaurant. When we got there, Micaela was leaning against the front door shivering. Apparently Pizzad lic is out of business (bummer!). A graver cause for concern, however, was Amita's face: the parts showing around her scarf were tomato red from the cold. Gah! We rushed her home (crying all the way), and when I got her undressed she had a red stripe across the middle of her face like the people in those frozen pizza ads. I bathed her cheeks in cold water, and then gave her a hot bath, and by the time she was out she was calm and regular-colored. We got pizza delivered at home, which she enjoyed a lot. No permanent damage, as far as I can tell, except to my self-confidence as a competent parent. When Maj got home later that night, she reminded me that for extremely cold weather you have to put Vaseline on babies' cheeks to protect their delicate skin from the cold. Amita and I went to Loblaw's this morning to do some grocery shopping (in the car), which was a much more reasonable experience. Tonight for dinner I made pat chinois, a plate with baked mashed potatoes and ground beef known to English-speakers as shepherd's pie. (I make it with mushrooms and veggie beef.) Here in Quebec it's called "Chinese casserole", for unknown reasons. The best guess is that French Canadian lumberjacks worked at sites in the USA where it was common to have Chinese immigrant cooks. Confronted with a potato dish they didn't recognize, they assumed it was a meal from the cooks' home country. I don't know if this origin is true or not, but it sure is a good story. Anyways, it's good stick-to-your-ribs food, which you need on a night like this. When it gets down to -28C (as it will tonight), you need a lot of carbs running your internal furnace for you. tags: montreal snow cold shepherds pie pat chinois quebec babies amitajune

Piknic lectronik The good snow we're having means that one of my favourite events of the year is going to be white and cold and fluffy and fun. For the last few years, Piknic lectronik, the group that produces weekend outdoor parties on le Ste H l ne on the site of Expo 67, has done a single, crazy outdoor party in the dead of winter. This year, the party, called "Igloofest", is happening in the Vieux Port on the Quai Jacques Cartier. It's going to be two nights, January 19-20 (that's 29-30 Niv se for you aficionados of the French Revolutionary Calendar), from 5 to 11PM. We're going out on Friday night -- our pals from Ninjatune are part of the party, and our friend DJ Ghost Beard is on that evening. It should be a great time; I'm really looking forward to dancing in the snow and having vin chaud afterwards. tags: montreal piknic lectronik party dancing ninjatune winter snow

BarCampMontreal II: Camp Harder Just got the news from my blogroll: Sylvain Carle notes that the second BarCampMontreal will take place April 28th. That's going to be close for us; we'll be at the Wikitravel Get-together in Puerto Rico up until the 22nd. And we plan to fly there from Miami. But, hey: stranger things have happened. Our BarCamp last year was an absolute blast (see my follow-up on Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV); lots of fun people doing interesting things in fun ways, and then talking about it. I'd really like to be there for this next one. tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal wikitravel puerto rico

Louisianne I'm happy to see that in an alternative history universe called Ill Bethisad, the French Revolutionary Calendar is used in the North American francophone nation of Louisianne. On the downside, my city of Ville-Marie is in the royalist enclave of New Francy, which uses the boring old calendar. Ill Bethisad is an impressive alternative-history project, and the wiki format seems to really be conducive to its further development. Great idea, and nice to see the ol' FRC included. tags: alternative history french revolutionary calendar ill bethisad north america

Baby Lessig Congrats to Lawrence Lessig and family on the birth of a new son. tags: baby lessig

Here's a mini-review of my new external storage arrangements for the Macbook Pro.Thanks to my music collection, an appetite for shooting photos in RAW format, and general untidiness I'm not exactly blessed with spare space. Something had to be done.
The solution I came up with was an IcyBox IB-360StUS-BL external SATA/USB2 enclosure, wired to a Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter.
Icybox IB-360StUS-BL enclosureEnclosure The IcyBox is such an affordable little box that it seems silly not to have one to hand as a precaution, especially given the cheapness of hard drives these days. The enclosure is convection cooled, so has no noisy fan, and is an a reasonably attractive alumnium package that fits in with the look of the Macbook Pro quite well. The blue LED is switchable, just in case you don't want that bling look on your desktop.Inside the enclosure there's both PATA and SATA connectors. I chose to use a SATA drive, a Samsung HD400LJ. There are two headers for connecting a SATA drive. One goes to the USB 2 adapter, one straight to the outside of the enclosure for wiring to a SATA port on the computer.Four screws secure the hard drive in its tray. The tray then slides into the frame and is secured by four screws in the base. I didn't find it that easy to get these in, but they seemed secure enough once screwed in.The IcyBox comes with plenty of cables, including a SATA-SATA cable, a bracket to relocate an internal SATA port to the PCI card cover on a regular PC, and a USB cable. The power supply is of the external brick sort. SATA adapterThe other half of the equation is the Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter. This fits into the Macbook Pro's Express Card port — you knew that something had to eventually, eh? The Tempo card features two eSATA ports, which are of a different design to the  SATA ports featured on the Icybox. This means you need to buy an eSATA-SATA cable. You can either spend $20 on one from Sonnet themselves, or get a cheaper unbranded one for about the tenth of the price: just make sure its reasonably well shielded.Once plugged in, the external drive shows up on the Mac as a SCSI device, and behaves like any removable media. As such, it needs to be unmounted from the desktop before you eject the Tempo card.The only bug with the Tempo card I've found is that things don't seem to work that well if you boot the machine with the card inserted. The very helpful people from Sonnet tell me this is an issue with the underlying Silicon Image chipset, and they're working on sorting it out. (I was very impressed with the technical knowledge, friendliness and speed of response from Sonnet's support department.)PerformanceI'm no benchmarking guru, but it's clear that the external Samsung HD400LJ outperforms my internal 7200rpm SATA drive on the Macbook Pro. Brief experiments with XBench suggested that this performance boost was probably between 20 and 40%. It's certainly vastly preferable to the performance hit you get when you use a USB or Firewire 400 drive with the MBP.ConclusionIt's early days yet, but I'm happy with my new setup. The extra port on the Tempo adapter allows for the connection of another drive, or if I use Sonnet's own products, up to 10 drives! I feel happier knowing the disk isn't competing for attention with all the other USB gadgets I have plugged in. The other big plus point for me is the quietness of the Icybox/Samsung combination.Links:

• Icybox 360
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34
  

 

I am keeping a close eye on the Wordpress 2.0.7 release. I am being cautious because:

1. no pings on their post. bit odd!
2. The mentioned vulnerability does not apply to Debian’s PHP
3. The diff between 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 has some considerable changes to the Akismet plugin which is not mentioned on the changelog/post
4. I would like to improve the Debian copyright file, though I would like to hear back from upstream first
5. There seems to be another minor security bug which I don’t think 2.0.7 addresses

I am also keeping an eye on Wordpress MU edition, to see how they handle these bugs, which has been version 1.0 for sometime. Update: Ryan informs me there will be a 2.0.8 fixing the last reported security bug.

I have returned from my travels (see yesterday s post, in Germany only, sorry) and will continue to work at the Kofi Annan Center this week before I return to Germany on the weekend. I must have made a relatively good impression here, as now the director, Dorothy Gordon, is looking for another interested geek that would be interested to come to Ghana for 6 to 12 month and help with the development of Free Software here. Not much is fixed yet, so you can propose your own project ideas, if you have one. Also, the issue of funding is open, as the centre s resources are limited. If any corporate sponsors would be willing to help, please stand up If you are interested, please send me an e-mail and I will give you the director s contact to discuss the idea.

I want a cell phone that runs Linux. I've been wanting one for a long time. Why should I care what OS it runs? Well, I have two main reasons: 1) because I want to support commercial ventures related to free software, and 2) I want to write applications for it, and I don't want to be beholden to some vendor to sell me a development kit, and tell me what I can and cannot write. I want to apt-get install the developer kit, write some code, and upload it to the phone. Rock. I've been paying only scant attention to the cell phone market since I got a Treo 600, which I like a lot. It is _not_ a Linux-based phone. It runs PalmOS, which is a pretty crufty OS, but I've been using it since 2001, so I have a lot of data in there. It should be pretty easy to get the data out, though, so I'm not worried. I really like the Treo's thumb-keyboard; It's qwerty, and I can type pretty fast on it. Numeric keypad based phones are lame. I hardly ever type in numbers anyway. Apple recently announced the iPhone, which I shouldn't even mention because it doesn't allow 3rd party applications, doesn't run on a free operating system, and is probably very buggy since they've never done anything like that before. Enough about Apple. As I poke around the intern-webs, I find that some stuff has been happening over the year when it comes to Linux-based phones, but I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what is happening. It's surprising how little information is out there. Despite this great list of starting places from linuxdevices.com, the rabbit trail never leads to a "buy this phone" button. Look! There's an open Linux-based phone platform called OpenMoko. At least, I think that's what I pieced together from the scant information available on their web site. Maybe OpenMoko is the phone and openembedded is the platform? I had a very nice conversation with some folks on freenode who explained a bit about this really cool project to me. It looks like they even have a phone that it sounds like is going to be released soon, and it's discussed on LinuxDevices.com. That phone looks pretty sweet. It has a GPS built in too. I like the touch-screen idea that I guess it has, based on the pictures, and it's not way too expensive. Maybe that's the phone I'll get. All it's missing is a "buy it now" button. Oh, and "apt-cache search openmoko" doesn't turn up anything. So on to the Green Phone by Trooktech. This looks pretty good, but not as a replacement for my Treo, since the primary interface is a numeric keypad instead of a qwerty keyboard. It looks like you can actually buy a development version of the phone, but it's not overly free; you cannot develop commercial applications on it without paying them a licensing fee. Lamers. According to some folks on freenode, this phone is just a prototype for vendors like this one. (But do you see a "buy this phone" button on that page?) There's a nice article that talks about several of these devices, including the Nokia N800, which is a Linux-based handheld computer / web appliance. I played with one the other day, and it's pretty sweet. Too bad it isn't a phone, or I'd buy one today. So it looks like there's no open, Linux-based, qwerty phone out there yet. If you know otherwise, let me know. Perhaps one is coming out next month. I think I can wait that long.

Gordon Haff: “Imagine, if you will, that it s the late Nineties. A certain software company based in Redmond, Washington has recently released Visual Studio 97 thereby bundling together many of its development tools for the first time. Now imagine that the company decided to release those tools for free. What do you think the general reaction would have been? Applause for Microsoft s generosity? Or widespread condemnation for using its market power to make such a transparently anti-competitive attack on other makers of development tools?” Thought provoking observations. Note, however, that “open source as competitive weapon” isn’t limited to large vendors—it works equally well (and, in many ways, better) for the upstarts (see Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc.). In fact, it works so well for the upstarts that even the upstarts have upstarts (see, e.g., Canonical). Can something that levels the playing field so dramatically be called predatory? Predatory has one-sided, unfair advantage connotations. In open source, it goes both ways. With Eclipse, it was IBM doing the disrupting; but with MySQL and JBoss, IBM is on the other end of it. At the end of the day, the real winner is all of us—after all, who can argue that the state of IDEs and middleware isn’t better today than it’s ever been?

The other week, I ordered a Microsoft Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon. It was actually sold by ComputerGeeks.com (I didn't realise until then that Amazon was acting as a front-man for other retailers for some items). I'd been eagerly awaiting its arrival, and thought that the FedEx package that arrived yesterday might have been it, but that turned out to be the iPod I'd ordered. So today I rummaged through my email and found the email that the Geeks.com people had sent me with a username and password for their website, so I could track the order, and lo and behold, according to the link to FedEx, it had been delivered on Wednesday and left on the front porch! I just popped down to the leasing office to check if it hadn't actually ended up there (they have a very nice package receiving service) but it hadn't. I'm totally miffed that they just left it on the front porch, when the tracking information shows they tried to deliver it at 7:58 PM the day before, and determined "customer not available or business closed" (the leasing office closes at 6:00 PM) and so retried the next day and went for leaving it on the front porch at 5:00 PM, when they could have left it at the leasing office. Anger. It sounds like this happens a lot, because Geeks.com's customer service page even has an FAQ item for it. You'd think that if it happens enough to warrant a FAQ item, and it reads like they have a good policy of reshipping items that go AWOL like this, that they'd just save themselves the time and money and use the shipping service that requires a signature. Pity it's a long weekend and Geeks.com don't operate (their call centre) on the weekends. Patience is a virtue.

I've been thinking lately about how to improve my process for making a release of one of the projects I work on. Actually, calling it a process is to glorify it. Each of my projects basically does things differently, but they do share some common steps:

• Commit all changes, after they've been tested.
• Update README, NEWS, and maybe other documentation files for the release.
• Create tarball.
• Put tarball somewhere under my public_html.
• If I have a Debian package of the project, update the packaging, and build and test new version of package. Put the resulting files also in public_html.
• Update the relevant web pages with version numbers, links to tarball, etc.
• Announce, possibly on a mailing list, in my web log, or on IRC.
• Maybe sign and upload the Debian packages to Debian.

That's a lot of tedious manual steps. I would like to automate everything so that I only need a single command, possibly excluding the upload to Debian. I have the beginnings of script that does most of this, but it is not very flexible. Actually, that's not true: I have several scripts that overlap, and together they most of the above. It's a bother to have to remember which script does what, and is suitable for which project. They're all horrible to improve upon. I use Bazaar (bzr) for version control in all of my own projects. A couple of days ago, I looked at the builddeb plugin for bzr, which creates a Debian package (source and binary) from within a bzr branch. It doesn't do more than that, however, and I'd like to do much more. While thinking about this some more, I realized that something tied to bzr isn't very appropriate. While I currently favor bzr, I'd really like to not tie my development processes too closely to it. If nothing else, one of the projects I'm involved in is piuparts, which is currently maintained in Subversion, and I'd like to use my automation for that as well. Further, sometimes I package other people's software for Debian. While most of the work is similar to when I package my own software, there are some subtle differences, and again, it'd be nice to use the same automation for this as well. And, finally, sometimes I work on fixing bugs in other people's Debian packages, and most of the automation is relevant to that work as well. I've decided that a single, atomic command is not acceptable. What I need is a suite of commands for each of the small tasks, plus one or more scripts to combine them together. The flexibility of combining small commands should make it easy to adapt things for different workflows and scenarios. After some hacking, I came up with Unperish. It's currently in its early stages, but I intend to keep using it and improving it, until it takes all the pain away from making a release. At least for me, but hopefully it will be of some use for other people.

First, don't get me wrong. The project is really interesting, i haven't played with a beta yet but so far it looks real good. I've some doubts about the UI, but it isn't what this post is about. I think that X0 will fail here in Brazil.

The Brazilian government doesn't want to buy the laptop to some children in public schools (the poor pay for it through taxes, the not so poor pay for private schools and the public ones through the same taxes). The gov't is going to give it to some teachers to motivate them and will try to add X0 in the daily routine of a school. The cons of this approach:

• X0 can be the next big thing, but if only teachers and children in public schools will use this, it won't have appeal here, it will be discarded and treated like a complicated toy. They want what's on TV, the TV ads here are really big. e.g: We don't have iPods ads, these children don't want them, they want some of the crap mp3 player models simple because there are ads on tv and people with some more money actually buy them
• Come on, people are talking about customize the shiny new X0 interface for teacher usage here. What's their problem? There's a lot of gadgets with similar set of features in a way that if the gov't cut the abusive taxes over the products, the teachers can benefit instantly. The X0 is for children, they want to buy tons of these to teachers, but it seems that the goal isn't "let the teachers own it and show the children how to use". It's more a "let us hack the toy for teacher daily usage"
• There's no clear plan on how to integrate this project with the current gov't telecentres one going on. I'm participating in a national telecentre project and some local ones. We're talking about kiosks with 20 thin-clients and one server and 5000 subscribed people on each (medium) - hours for free web navigation and reserved ones for classes. These telecentres are located on the areas with lower human development index. What's the appeal here? Well, PCs are on tv, orkut and youtube too. They want to be part and they're. I'm sure that using the money we're going to spend in X0's the way the gov't wants to use them, that's better spend this on telecentres and the current low priced PCs programs, including more people.

We've a huge cellphone market here, initiatives like OpenMoko would work way better than X0. The cell phone companies would sell the phones (eg.: Neo1973) to the people that can buy (just a few teachers in really poor areas haven't cell phones yet) and the gov't could give one for each children in the public schools. There's a gov't program that try to keep the children in the public schools giving the family (when it's really poor) some money. The same rules could be applied for the cell phone usage, if you leave the school, you loose the gadget. Let us give the kids something that's more than useful and they need. We can give them something they want. I want one X0, but the teachers and children here doesn't. I'm sorry, somebody should tell you about what's really going on here, sometimes it's much more about social aspects than tech specs.

Ruby's thread more "functional" than OCaml's I'm relaxing some of mine initial bad impressions on Ruby. This is mainly due to the fact that the Ruby book I ordered on Amazon finally arrived (after a lost shipment, the first of my whole customer story with Amazon, happily they refunded me completely). In the book I managed to find a rigorous (though not formal as I would have liked) description of Ruby's semantics and even some snippets of the grammar of the language (Rant: how the heck is possible that a modern language like Ruby lacks a complete description of its grammar????). Anyhow, now I'm feeling more comfortable with the language and I'm starting to put in the right setting some of what I believed to be its rough edges. Today, playing with Ruby's threads, I discovered a function in Ruby's Thread API that I can't help noticing is "more functional" than corresponding features in the Thread API of my beloved OCaml. Using Thread#value indeed the value returned by the last statement executed in a given thread can be retrieved (note that in Ruby every statement returns a value: yet another functional pearl). It's like a Thread#join on steroids. In OCaml the only way (that comes into my mind) to do the same is establishing a (typed) channel among the thread creator and the created thread, sending a return value from the thread, and having the creator block on the matching receive. Or (please don't) ... you can use a global variable ... Neat Ruby threads. To balance this, according to my first read of Ruby's threading capability, it's my impression that not only at most one thread can execute Ruby code at a time (limitation shared by OCaml, due to the non-distributed nature of mark and sweep garbage collectors), but also a thread blocked on a syscall will block all other threads to run. Dumb Ruby threads (but I still hope I'm wrong ...)

iPhone is cool in a lot of ways (except in the freedom side, but not too different than the current iPods). I wish to buy one until the xmas and replace my now obsolete looking LG model. I think if Apple is trying to promote this product as 'more an iPod than a phone' - as Steve Jobs said in an inteview. They give it the wrong name, it should be called: iPod Phone. Yes, same deal as they did with the iPod video thing until they 'merged' the feature on the iPod brand. Remember that it would save them from the current trouble with Cisco/Linksys too.

The multitouch screen on that thing looks promising. I'm sure that there are a lot of cooler screens in development out there right now, but if Apple (or the real manufacturer behind the screen) can manage to make larger ones, i can see some time in the next year the motto: "Do you remember where did the computer go?" "Where did the keyboard and mouse go now?". Ok, maybe a bit too optimistic (they could keep the keyboard and throw away the mouse), but i think the iMacs could be a interesting target for the multitouch thing. Considering they've iSight already in place, with a larger multitouch screen in a good position and shiny cool gestures software, there we've minority report ready desktops, some time after laptops. Can you hear chairs?

On a real cooking kick right now. For some reason I felt this strong urge to download and watch Iron Chef shows, which I'd not seen in years. In between watching those, I've been cooking quite a few things, nothing directly related to the shows except for mapo tofu. I've got untried dishes in the fridge, which is very unusual for me, but then I don't normally cook at 11 pm either.. So for the whatever's-available-in-Joey's-fridge battle, the menu is:

• mapo tofu
• frozen yogurt with clementine infused chocolate sauce
• rice salad with balsamic parsnip and carrot garnish
• paprika fried baby squash rings and green beans (planned)

Dear lazyweb,

• I've tried to avoid join or start flamewars in the Debian mailing lists. I think i managed this task very well.
• Based on my experience into pkg-perl, i had the idea to start a related Python project since there were a lot of Python modules out there and just a few packaged. I've founded python-modules with Guilherme Pastore (pkg-python name wasn't available) and we were joined by Raphael Hertzog some time later.
• I had the idea and talked with Otavio Salvador in Brasilia, Brazil during a cluster, linux and FOSS community gov't related event about the ltsp status in Debian and how it would be cool start a project in cooperation with Ubuntu. We've founded pkg-ltsp and had a online meeting at #ltsp were ogra and mdz (from Ubuntu fame) participated too. Since then, ltsp in Debian is way better than it was. I did technically way less than i could to the project itself, but i've an entire year to fix this. Thanks vagrantc and pere too for all the hard work and help.
• Merged debian-desktop development page, mailing list and alioth project in a focused thing with permission of the founders and was joined by pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago and tasksel members. The group did some great stuff together and it was just a restart.
• Worked very hard on Custom Debian Distributions camp, specially with Vagrant Cascardian on Simple-CDD for Etch.
• Joined pkg-gnome, tasksel and a lot (really) others projects that i did my best to help.
• I did my first security upload.

Looking back, what a insane year, but not due to the Debian related stuff that was fun to do, to say the least. Anyway, i hope to write similar stuff in the next year but with a even more exciting content. Thanks for those that helped me and those who did something for Debian in the past year. See you!

Long-ago San Francisco Cacophony Society leader and early Burning Man organizer John Law is calling for the release of the Burning Man trademark into the public domain. An interesting story and some interesting questions about process. Burning Man is an event and a culture dear to my heart; I wonder how this is going to work out. Thanks to Scott Beale for his story on the subject; he knows the principals much better than I do. tags: burning man john law trademark public domain

Dear Lazyweb So, I was trying to read some documentation on my little Toshiba Port g and also lie down on the couch and also drink a beer, and these three activities weren't mutually compatible and I spilled some beer on my keyboard (and lap). Doh. I dried it off as best I could, and turned it upside-down like a teepee to dry overnight so the booze and moisture and sugar would go out of the computer instead of further in. Which seems to have paid off: the computer's running fine now. Except that the 'R' and 'G' keys don't work. They're not particularly sticky, they just don't register any key events when pressed. So, my question: what's my next step? Is there some trick I can do? Or am I just going to have to get good at lipograms? Drop me a line at evan@prodromou.name if you have any ideas. tags: lazyweb r g toshiba laptop beer keyboard

Father-Daughter Night Maj started French classes at the fantastico Montreal YMCA Language School. (I'm taking classes in German at the Montreal Goethe Institute starting next week; we came up with the idea of taking language classes independently.) Since Mama was out of the house from 5PM to 9PM, I got to do most of the evening prep for the night. Which was fun. I made Amita June and myself some ravioli and ros sauce, and we put a bowl in the fridge for Maj, too. Then we watched about 20 minutes of Babe, which had lots of cows and ducks and chickens and stuff she likes watching, but I was too worried that someone was going to get killed and eaten to enjoy watching it with her. So we did a bath -- she figured out how to make her rubber duck squirt water into the air, and that was worth about 20 minutes of giggles right there. Then we read some books, and by that point she was really ready for bed, and fell right asleep. We've been doing really good this week with going to sleep. I mentioned before that she's weaning from night nursing, so I'm doing most of the putting-to-bed and keeping-asleep work around here. It's been fun and rewarding; sleeping babies are great. tags: amitajune ymca babe maj french language lessons

Snow! It snowed today in Montreal! Just a little bit, but still. Hooray for us. tags: montreal winter snow

Googie I also stumbled across the word Googie architecture this evening. Interesting term and comfort food for the California native's soul. tags: googie architecture california

yulblog Tomorrow night (20 Niv se or 10 January for those of you who still use that oppressive Gregorian calendar) we've got the misnomered First Wednesday Get-Together for yulblog. The date was moved back from the very first Wednesday of the month to the second Wednesday to give some space around New Year's Day. I think the novelty has got people interesting in attending; I've talked to more than one person who's going to go. So, I'm going too. At the Quincaillerie at 980 Rachel, 8PM. tags: yulblog first wednesday quincaillerie

Effin' MyBlogLog So, I signed up for that MyBlogLog a while ago (see Journal/29 Frimaire CCXV), just to see how it worked. But I disconnected it from my own site since I thought the click-tracking was a little invasive. But I must have some cookies still left around, because I keep looking at sites like Read/WriteWeb, which has a nice article about OpenID, and I'm reading along and then there's a picture of me right on the page. Inserted from the MyBlogLog script, but it scares the crap out of me when it happens. Effin' MyBlogLog! tags: mybloglog readwriteweb

One fascinating experience in parenthood is witnessing language acquisition. My daughter is just over twenty-one months old, and recently hit an asymptote in language development. One of my favorite phenomena probably has a name, although I don’t know what it is. When she wants to be carried, she says, “carry you?” If she wants me to sit next to her while she falls asleep, she says, “sit next to you?” Likewise, “pick you up?” And so on. On the one hand, she’s really getting it. On the other, there still seems to be a missing parsing module. Although I minored in linguistics, we almost never studied anything having to do with “real” language. The department was virtually 100% Chomskyan, and we spent much of our time trying to figure out what the heck the Minimalist Program was. As it turns out, the Minimalist Program did nothing to prepare me for the experience of watching my daughter acquire language.

I'm finally releasing version 0.1 of my Flickr library, flickrpc. The name is actually misleading, and I should change it for 1.0, as the class name is flickrest and the transport protocol is HTTP/REST, not XML-RPC (as was the original plan, thus the name). This library is written in Python and uses Twisted.

Why another Flickr library?

Because Postr required it. All of the existing libraries that I know of are blocking (I used to use Beej's flickrapi, which was based upon Michele Campeotto's flickrclient), which makes using them in GUI applications painful. Early versions of Postr used threads so that uploading could be done in the background without blocking the UI, but as Postr makes more calls to Flickr whilst being used interactively these threads will become a maintaince nightmare. By using Twisted all of the network operations are handled in the main loop, and I can write callback-based network code just like I write callback-based UI code.

Why Twisted?

Because it works, and is popular. If someone has a HTTP client library that integrated into the GLib mainloop and will expose callbacks when operations complete, please tell me. I love what Twisted gives me, but at the end of the day if there is a simplier solution, I'll consider it.

Sounds excellent! Where can I get it?

There is a tarball of 0.1 available here: flickrpc-0.1.tar.gz. If you want to track the latest development, or contribute patches, there is also a Bazaar archive.

Amita June is reaching a point in her life where it's time for us to start weaning her from breastfeeding. Most parents do this much earlier, if they breastfeed at all, but we've been devotees of attachment parenting for a while, and we wanted to give her as much time nursing as possible. But at 15 months, she's ready to start doing things like sleep through the night on her own, drink only cow's milk, and be a little more independent. So, this month we're starting to do some night weaning. What does this mean? First of all, Maj is no longer nursing the baby to bed. She now is doing the main pre-sleep prep work (a bath), does a short nursing period, and then hands the baby off to me for some reading, songs, and walking down to sleep. This will gradually move into fewer, shorter nursings before sleep, and ultimately to none. Once that connection has been broken, I think the main point of nursing will be occasional comfort nursing during the day. Gradually, that will fade out. And then there will be none. It's kind of exciting to be the Primary Sleep Guy for the baby. We're re-connecting in a way that we haven't in a while -- I was only putting her to bed occasionally for a quite a while. It's also been pretty successful so far, which has been good. tags: amitajune weaning sleep parenting babies

Souper Bruncher When Maj and I first moved to Montreal, we had help from some friends who we'd known from before. After we moved into our apartment, we invited them all over for dinner to say thanks. In order to get to know people in our new hometown, we also asked each person to bring someone we didn't know, so we could make new friends. The event was so successful, and we met so many new people, that we made it a regular occasion. For almost three years, every Tuesday night we invited friends over to our home for dinner (or souper in Quebecois French), with an open invitation to meet new friends and interesting people. It was a great way to meet interesting folks in Montreal, and most of our best friends here we met through these dinners. We were even profiled in Elle Quebec as a model for how to make new friends. But when the baby was born, we just couldn't manage to organize dinners any more every week. Cooking for 20+ people isn't that expensive, especially since we're pescevegetarians and that kind of food just isn't that costly. But it does take a lot of time and energy, and with a newborn baby we just didn't have either. Now, with Amita a little more than a year old, we're trying to start up our regular home parties on a more manageable scale. We're doing brunch at our house on Sunday afternoons around 3PM, with a much smaller list of invitees, requests for RSVPs, and a clear indication that the event only goes until bedtime. (Our Tuesday night dinners would occasionally stretch until dawn.) It seems to be working pretty well; we've had a lot of fun at the last couple of brunches we've had. And brunch is a much more laid-back meal than a dinner party, anyways. (Although John Usher asks incredulously, "By what stretch of the imagination is 3PM between breakfast and lunch?") I'm looking forward to our next brunch (tomorrow) a lot, and I hope to get many more friends over to our home in the next few months of Sundays. tags: brunch montreal making friends souper bruncher

(continuing with clearing the blogging backlog) Four days after returning home to the US from the trip to Australia, I was at it again, flying the other way around the world. In hindsight, this was totally insane, but I'd expressed interest in going much earlier in the year, I think before we'd organised to visit Australia. I flew to Madrid, via Philadelphia. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, Philadelphia International is a very nice airport. It's the first time I've flown across the United States, and it really is a long way. Just like Brisbane to Perth, it's a long time on a plane for staying in the same country. Arriving in Madrid, entering the country was extremely straightforward, as I've also said previously, the immigration guy barely looked at my passport long enough to open it and find a page to stamp. It was my first time in a country that didn't speak English and wasn't terribly bilingual. Fortunately the airport was signed in English as well as Spanish, and the information/assistance people all seemed to be able to speak English. I arrived in Terminal 1, and the European contingent were mostly arriving at Terminal 4, which is essentially a completely separate airport, a short shuttle bus ride away. My flight arrived in the morning, and I had about 4 or 5 hours to kill before the first of the European contingent rocked up. It was tempting to get a train or taxi into Madrid and have a bit of an explore, but I really didn't want to risk not getting back in time, so I just loitered around Terminal 4 for the time. The highlight of the waiting was I bumped into Doug Foster, who I used to work with a SecureNet in Canberra, disembarking a flight from London (where he's now working). It really is a small world. After everyone turned up, we got on a bus and headed for Badajoz, a mere 5 hour bus ride away. We didn't get away until about 7pm, so by the time we hit the road, it was dark, so there wasn't a lot to see. We arrived at Badajoz around midnight, and made a short walk to the hotel and had a late dinner and hit the sack. Unfortunately with all my travelling in the three weeks, I'd managed to come down with a cold, which started manifesting itself pretty much from the moment I got to Badajoz, so I started to feel increasingly suboptimal as the week wore on. Badajoz itself is an incredible little city. It's just like what I envisaged an old European city to be: narrow winding streets. It had a funny effect on me. I'd alternate between finding it really quaint, and incredibly claustrophobic (and I'm not usually the claustrophobic type). After doing a bit of self-analysis, I think the problem was the lack of sky. With so many buildings crammed in together and the narrow streets, the amount of sky you got to see was minimal. Definitely no horizon. I felt more comfortable at night, in fact the place looked really awesome at night. Everything was lit up, I think especially so for Christmas, and everyone came out and walked around and did shopping. The other thing that, well, I noticed about the city was that it was wall to wall concrete (or bricks, or bitumen). The buildings all connected up, there were no gaps between them, and the sidewalk basically ran from the front edge of the building, to the kerb, then there was the road, and then the reverse, so it was a real concrete jungle. That said, it was pretty clean. the sidewalks were all swept, there was no rubbish in the gutters. By about the second day, my cold had driven me crazy (my nose was running incessantly) and I just wanted some pseudoephedrine to dry it up. I didn't have a clue how pharmacies operated, but fortunately I was able to get Miriam to tag along with me, who spoke English as well as Spanish. She'd never heard of pseudoephedrine before, but as soon as she said it to the pharmacist, he knew what it was and came back with some form of Nurofen (ibuprofen) that also had pseudoephedrine in it. I didn't really want or need the ibuprofen, but when sick in Spain, beggars can't be choosers, so I took it. I didn't feel that it did a great deal for me anyway. Getting home again was fun. Due to various peoples' flights, the bus was leaving at 6:30am, and that wouldn't get me back to Madrid the ideal 3 hours before departure, so I took a taxi with a few people who needed to be there earlier. It left Badajoz at midnight, and arrived at Madrid at about 4am, where I had to wait for about 5 hours before I could check in for my flight. I had a bit of fun leaving, which I've already written about, and was happy to get home late on Sunday night. My cold had gone to my chest by this stage and I had bronchitis, so I was just glad to get home and see a doctor on Monday. So now I can say I've been to Europe. It was a shame I didn't get to see Madrid itself. Next time. Update Photos from the trip are here