[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] Arrived at Ko Phuket a few days ago, I'm off the ship and at a hotel. In Bintan, we saw an interesting looking resort with plenty of coconut trees, logs and other stuff floating in the harbour, a snake oil merchant (with a live cobra), barges and transformer ferries, pouring rain and bad drainage. We left Bintan, went south for Selat Durian, then north past Singapore Straits, into the infamous Straits of Malacca and north past Malaysia and to the tourist island of Phuket. Along the way, we saw the coals of sunset, massive jellyfish in the dark green water, huge queues of massive ships covering the horizon as we passed the entrance to the Straits of Singapore, lights from Singapore in the distance, the pirate-free Straits of Malacca, where many large cargo and other ships passed us, the fleet of lights/boats that sprung up as if from nowhere some 50 miles off Phukey, the last sunrise on the ship (in a bay near Phuket) and an awesome NYE party on the ship. Leaving the Heraclitus has been hard, I'm gonna miss that black and red ship and the awesome crew who got us the 3000 or so nautical miles from Cairns to Phuket. Now it is time to visit some Thai Linux developers and return to Australia.

I'm pretty happy about the way the 'Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use' episode of the LinuxCast came out so well. I'm not very used to talking for recording, and like everyone I don't particularly enjoy hearing my own voice recorded (do I really sound like that?), but it was fun to do, and I think it's a nice adjunct to the Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use article itself. tags: api podcast linuxcast linuxworld

Tijuana We're on a trip in Southern California this week, so we decided yesterday to go to Tijuana for the day. Maj, Amita June and I got out of the condo we're staying at in Encinitas early in the morning -- well, early for a vacation day -- and headed down to downtown San Diego. It's a trip of about 25 miles, with one tricky turnoff at highway 805 that seems to get me every time I visit this part of the world. Going into Mexico with a car can be a bit of a hassle. Many American insurers don't cover cars going into Mexico, and you'll often get asked about insurance when you cross over. There are some quick-and-dirty insurers on the border that can give you one-day insurance or other short-term coverage, but we have a rental car right now, and most (all?) rental car companies forbid with bitter, mouth-foaming forbiddance driving the car across the border. Fortunately for us, San Diego has a great way around this problem. Their trolley system goes from downtown San Diego right up to the border in San Ysidro. So, we picked it up in the Civic Center downtown, after a brief stop at the Downtown San Diego Vistors Center (to get tourist material), a shopping foray at a stall outside of the downtown Macy's (to get Amita June a pair of purple Crocs), and a side trip into the Westin for a bathroom break. Man, the Westin in San Diego has nice bathrooms! I'd heard about these trolleys in the past, and I guess I'd expected a kind of fancy tourist train, but it's really just the Blue Line for typical light-rail trains for San Diego and its suburbs. The seats were comfortable, but the train right-of-way went through some of the least scenic parts of Southern California I've ever seen. There's something about this corner of the United States of America that's depressing and end-of-the-world; I get the same feeling about other borderlands, like around Plattsburgh and Laredo. The end of the line for the trolley is completely opaque as to how get into Mexico. We wandered around past some ugly strip malls until Maj spotted a tiny oblique walkway that said "US PROPERTY SUBJECT TO SEARCH AND FINE" and in much smaller letters "a Mexico - to Mexico". We went through a wiggly walkway and across the no-man's land between the scary metal fence at the US border and the actual Mexican customs area. Nobody was there, but we got the feeling we were being watched. At the end of this weird walk was a very nice tourist info center, where we got some maps and brochures and such. Another 10 minutes walk through the streets up against the fence, we got to Avenida Revolucion, the central way through the Tijuana/Zona Centro. It had been a while since we'd been to a city with aggressive touts, so getting yelled at by people in shop doorways or in the street was a bit of a jolt. I hate the invasion of my anonymity, and I'm pretty reflexive about saying "NO NO NO NO NO" to everyone, but Maj is a little more practical. "If everything is run by aggressive sideshow barkers, you're going to miss out on everything," she points out. "Sometimes, you have to say 'yes', even if you don't like the way the question was asked." By the time we hit av. Revolution, we were pretty tired, so we stumbled into the first restaurant we found -- El Torito, a big nightclub with go-go cages, a mechanical bull, and a tattoo parlour on premises. I was attracted by the racy Absinth Mexico posters. "Family restaurant, family place," said the touts, seeing the baby in the stroller. Sure. The food wasn't bad -- I made the mistake of ordering the fish Vera Cruz, but the waiter made a smelly-face and suggested I get the shrimp instead -- and the cocktails at 1PM were generous and inexpensive. Probably the nicest part was a guy with a guitar who came over and asked to sing. "We've got enough music," said Maj, pointing at the ceiling where loud disco tunes were booming. But he was insistent, so we let him play, and he sang a loud Besa Me Mucho that drowned out the Ricky Martin and had us, the waiter, and nearby diners singing along by the end. Amita June was fascinated by the sounds, and clapped along when he was done. After lunch we walked down av. Revolucion, which had a dense layer of souvenir shops and discount pharmacies offering Viagra and Cipro without a prescription. One weird repeated theme was donkeys painted as zebras, hooked up to carts where you could sit and get your picture taken for $2. Some of the donkeys looked pretty good in their zebra stripes, but most looked pretty bummed out. I'm not sure why tourists would expect to get their picture taken with a zebra while in northern Mexico. It got a lot nicer as we got down to the end of the block, and we kicked ourselves for being so lazy when we passed Chiki Jai, a charming little restaurant with tiled walls and rough wood furniture. Much more to our tastes than El Torito. We stopped at the monumental Jai Alai courts, with a beautiful facade and a nice statue out front. Ducking into the Tia Juana's next door, we did a diaper-change break and had some chips and salsa and pineapple juice (and Dos Equis Dark on tap for Papa). Then we started walking back to the border. On our way back, we got off of Revolucion and walked over to the city's Cathedral. It was a much more realistic part of the town -- shopping and bars and restaurants, true, but less ridiculous touristy crap. When we got to the cathedral, there was a holiday street fair going outside, with games and food stalls and people laughing and walking around with kids. It felt a little more human than the pressure-tactics-dense world of Revolucion. On our way back to the border crossing, we dipped briefly into the red light district at the head of av. Constitucion (who knew?), then made the long slog back to the USA. We didn't get much in the way of souvenirs, but Maj bought a nice set of luchador dolls for her brother, complete with a tiny wrestling ring. The line at the border was huge, and we had to wait at the trolley station for another 30 minutes before one left for SD again. By the time we got back downtown, around 5:30, we really weren't up for a dinner in the San Diego/Gaslamp Quarter like we'd originally planned. So we piled into the car, paid the $20 parking to get out, and headed right into rush-hour traffic that led to the over-populated and under-networked North County (San Diego County). Would I take the trolley to Tijuana again? Maybe. Next time, I'd probably go to one of the stops between San Diego and San Ysidro, where there are free parking lots and a little less hassle. tags: tijuana san diego travel san ysidro

Hazards of vacation homes I was just rifling through the fridge here at the condo in Encinitas and found what I thought was a delicious Abita beer, the fine drink you have when you can't handle another hurricane in New Orleans. But it turned out to be an Abita Purple Haze, a gross raspberry-wheat beverage. Unfair! It has probably been stuck in the back of the fridge of this condo for years. Fortunately there was still another Stone Pale Ale, from the North County local microbrewery, to satisfy my lunchtime beer needs. tags: stone brewing abita beer

On Friday night I followed up on Matthew’s ITP and attended his and Daf’s party. This was the first time I had seen the OLPC prototypes and woah, they’re pretty small . Daf and I decided to make flapjack which went down really well. On Sunday^WSaturday Daniel, Rob (Kendrick) and Lesley came over to Cambridge and we went to the Free Press for lunch with Rob (McQueen) and Daf and two of my friends from college. That was followed by more flapjack and very tasty coffee at the Collabora office. At popular request (ONE!) the recipe for my flapjack is: Melt 125g of butter with 150g of dark brown sugar and two tablespoons of oozy golden syrup over a low heat. Stir it. When melted add two teaspoons of ground ginger and remove from the heat. Add 200g of porridge oats (for a more crumbly less toffee flapjack use 250g). Stir in a handful raisins (or sultanas, or both). Dollop into a greased baking tin (use the wrapper from the butter) and bake for around 20 minutes at 180 C. Score whilst still warm to ensure that it can be broken.

Dusk is getting pretty early this time of the year; a picture taken at 15:39 already has a low sun, with the sky getting kinda red around 16:28. Oh well. Two days ago, I had forgotten my laptop's battery charger at home. So when it was empty, I didn't stay at the office; instead, I took the train home. At that specific time. I did have my camera with me, though, and taking pictures on the train is fun. It's not easy to do well; most of the pictures taken on the train are bad, but there are some exceptions. Before I left, there was a nice light from the sun playing on the station platform. It took me a few attempts to get the exposure right (the first few were simply too dark), but this one has nice colors. While the train was waiting in Antwerp Central station, I was playing with the camera's settings a bit; amongst others, I had totally miscalibrated the white balance setting. When it left again, I forgot to set the white balance back to what it was supposed to be, so the next few pictures were blue and ugly. Except this one—that is, it's blue, but not ugly. When arriving home, I was greeted by this magnificent sky. I love this picture. I did take some more pictures on the train; but like I said, it's pretty hard to do that well; and while I didn't throw all of them away, I don't think most of them were well suited to be put online. click on any of the picture thumbnails to get larger versions.

Fun day today. Maj, Amita and I went up to the Christmas tree lot at Parc Lahaie on St. Joseph and St. Laurent. It was packed with people there for No l dans le Parc, a month-long Christmas festival held in two parks in Montreal. Of course, we had no idea it was going on before we got there. Christmas tree lots in Quebec are a lot more festive than the businesslike lots in, say, California. There is often a pen full of farm animals -- like the Christmas manger, eh? -- that kids can look at and pet. Since it's often ass-cold, there's also usually a fireplace or a barrel fire. For some weird reason, all the lots in our neighborhood are in public parks, but that might have to do with a dearth of big parking lots in the Plateau. But No l dans le Parc was even bigger than all that. When we arrived, there were two blues players in separate giant plastic globes hovering in the trees above the campfire. In two other (terrestrial) booths, a Quebec traditional music band was playing silently behind a glass window while a radio crew in the other booth broadcast them live. There was a concession stand serving bi re and vin chaud (of which we ordered two), and an open-air museum with fun stuff for kids. We ended up hanging out for more than an hour. Amita June developed an intense fascination with the sheep in the petting zoo, and even after Papa had bought an 8' tree and tied it to the roof, she insisted on going back to the pen and saying goodbye one more time. The tree looks great in our living room -- it's almost scraping the ceiling, but it fills up its corner nicely. tags: christmas tree montreal noel dans le parc quebec christmas amitajune

Lina and Jeremy's Xmas party Even better tonight was our friends Lina and Jeremy's Christmas Party, at their house. Maj whipped up some steamed artichokes to take over, and I put together mixins for hot buttered rums, and we headed over to their great place in Little Italy. We got there early and Lina had made mulled wine -- a big pot of it, based on the recipe from Clarence the Angel. Amita June headed off with Clea and Sylvie, two girls much older than her, and although she couldn't really communicate with them she followed along with what they were doing just fine. The under-10 crowd eventually settled around the TV, which was originally on Hockey Night in Canada but eventually switched over to a tape of Zoboomafoo. So her Mama and I got to hang out with grownups for a change, which I at least was ill-equipped to do, but made a game attempt. Lots of nice people, including L and J's upstairs neighbor Annabelle, whose band The Wailin Jennys is doing pretty darn good lately. They're up for a couple slots in the Canadian Folk Music Awards tomorrow. Good for them. I made a big batch of HBRs and they were quite a hit. It's such an easy recipe, I'll share it right here:

• 1 oz dark rum
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp butter
• 8 oz boiling water

Mix it all together in a coffee mug and serve when the butter's melted. Keeps you warm when you need it. We came home early, of course -- the baby's getting independent, but not that independent -- and now we're rresting from a long day. tags: lina jeremy xmas party annabelle the wailin jennys

Wikitravel RSS So, I know this sounds crazy, but we've never really had much of an RSS presence for Wikitravel. We've got an RSS feed for Recent Changes, of course, as does every MediaWiki site, but never anything else. But I was talking to Jack Herrick of wikiHow recently, and he was telling me that their Daily Howto RSS feed is one of their biggest vectors of people coming into the site. Wikitravellers make updated news and information on our Main Page all the time, so I figure it'd be useful to make an RSS feed of new stuff from Wikitravel, too. So I've started scraping the frequently-updated parts of the site to make them available through a Wikitravel News feed. It includes the strange-travel trivia from Wikitravel:Discover and the Travel news info, too. There's been a lot of work in it -- making feeds out of wiki pages requires some assumptions and creative markup. But I'm getting closer, and I think the lessons I'm learning with our English version will help making RSS feeds for the other language versions easier. I'll be adding in more features for English, too, as I learn how to scrape them better. tags: wikitravel rss wikihow travel news trivia daily howto

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

Oh. My. God.

One of my tasks for today was to upgrade to the new versions of the JanRain OpenID libraries for Wikitravel. However, since those libraries implement the draft OpenID 2.0 standard, which includes support for i-names, I had to do some i-names playing today. i-names is a distributed system, with different "i-brokers" (yes, they're really called that) providing naming services. Unfortunately, the service that I used for registering my i-name, 2idi, isn't compatible with the JanRain Open Source libraries I'm using. JanRain's implementation depends on the very latest version of the OpenID 2.0 draft, and 2idi doesn't support it yet. So testing with my current i-name, =evan.prodromou, doesn't work. So, I had to register a new i-name with an i-broker that supports the new draft standard, which, y'know, it's the whole point of this stuff not to have to register all over the place. But whatever. JanRain folks in #openid, the OpenID channel, let me know that i-brokers that use EZ iBroker, a kind of i-broker-in-a-box package, would work with their library. The best one I could come up with is LinkSafe, which works OK. Now, rather than spend another US$20 and register a variant on my given name, I decided to spend the US$55 get an organizational i-name so I could make as many different testing names as I needed. And rather than register an i-name for a real organization, I registered just a bogus one, @gratis, so I could give them away to whoever wanted an i-name. My new i-name, @gratis*evan.prodromou, works great. If you'd like an i-name to play around with, please drop me a line using the Web form at @gratis, and I'll set one up for you. I've toyed around with it, and it seems to work for sites that support i-names. tags: i-names 2idi janrain openid ibroker linksafe gratis

La ka I met my friend Nicolas Ritoux at La ka, the wireless-enabled lounge on St. Laurent. We hung out at the bar and had a beer or so, which was a nice way to spend the early evening -- of course, it was an hour after dark when I met him, but just 5PM... We talked a lot about his projects working on a new version of Hyst rie, the classic Quebec Web zine, formerly hand-coded in HTML but soon to be implemented in a CMS. He's using SPIP, a cool-looking French jobby that seems to have a lot of features. He's really getting into the XHTML+CSS aspect of it... a sure sign of madness. I like La ka, but it didn't dawn on me until today that it's named after Laika, the Soviet cosmo-dog that was the first living thing intentionally launched into space by humans. Good dog! tags: laika niko montreal

Movie night I had to rush back to the house pretty quick, though -- our friends Patti and Meg offered to babysit Amita tonight so Maj and I could go see a movie. Awww! Of course, given that opportunity to have a romantic evening with my beautiful wife, what did I decide to go see? Borat, of course. We were pretty worried about the baby -- she's been kind of feverish and cranky for the last few days -- but when we came home, she and Meg and Patti were dancing and twirling around the room. Good girl! tags: amitajune meg patti borat movie night

(For those who just turned in: I m currently in Ghana, doing some Free Software advocating. Read the rest of the blog for more)I just came home from a nice day trip to Ada (see my next German post on that), wanting to load my pictures on my laptop. My laptop was already running, as I m mirroring the debian archive to my external hard drive, as I need that for my work at the Kofi Annan Center in Accra. So I plugged in my camera to the second USB port and copied the files onto my laptop. Fine so far.I happen to have a second hard drive with, among other things, has a copy of my picture website. I then generate and update the thumbnails and web pages there, before I upload the changes with rsync. But when I plugged in the cable (I don t think I plugged the hard drive in already), my laptop, an IBM ThinkPad 41p, suddenly goes off. It took a few seconds and the removal of the battery to turn it back on again.Now it seem that my USB is broken. The system logs says it detects the internal hub all right, but shows no reaction to any devices (hard drive, camera, mouse) that I plug in. The disks get power and spin up, the optical mouse stays dark. Same thing if I use the port replicator. The internal Bluetooth device powers on (according to the LED) but is not detected as well by the sytem. So looks like my laptop now has no USB support any more.This is a bummer. I m in the middle of the so called forgotten continent, and I need my laptop with out it as a tool, I could not do my work at KACE, and I could just fly home so sending it in is not an option. On the other hand, I also somewhat need the USB port: I can t publish my pictures without it, I can t do backups and I can t have the debian mirror that I need for my DeCaf project that I want to work on at KACE. I only have two hopes: That it will work after the next reboot or that I can find a reasonably priced PCMCIA-USB2-Adaptor in Accra. Wish me luck.

Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, was (quoting from Wikipedia) the god of the night, the north, temptation, sorcery, beauty and war. He was known by other descriptive names, such as Titlacauan (We His Slaves), Ipalnemoani (He by whom we live), Necocyaotl (Sower of Discord on Both Sides) and Tloque Nahuaque (Lord of the Near and Nigh) and Yohualli ecatl (Night, Wind). And today, I strongly feel as being born his servant. Why? Because today I took courage and started working on the integration of our ~20 print servers into a single, smarter scheme, with user control and printer assignment done by a central server. I cannot, of course, say that in the course of a day my troubles are over - No, no, quite far from it... But at least, I managed to grasp how to send the CUPS generic Postscript driver as the default driver for W2K/XP clients (no, I haven't worked on older ones yet - and yes, we still have many W98 machines around). I'm quite used to the fact that things in a Unix system are just easy to understand. Yes, sometimes it takes some time, sometimes you have to dig into the manuals, but all in all things can be finally understood. Today, after a couple of hours sticking my nose into the extremely extensive Official Samba HOWTO and Reference guide (chapters 21 and 22) and having my attention drift over the quite interesting Implementing CIFS book in a vain attempt to fully understand what goes on behind the curtains, after trying to debug my Windows-Linux communication issues by grokking what Wireshark finds over the wire... I can only understand that CUPS is pure black magic, although quite well documented. Samba is elegant and feels nice and easy, but really begs to be debugged with the Malleus Maleficarum at hand. CIFS (also here) is the subtle utterance of a dark spell pronounced by a stuttering sorcerer. And the way Windows integrates with it all is... Bah.

Via mariuss’ weblog (discovered accidentally, provides an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio for a random blog), this Canadian article entitled Coping with Climate Dread. Read it. Then read Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, “The Darkening Sea: Carbon Emissions and the Ocean” in last week’s New Yorker Magazine. (Sadly, the content does not appear to be online — if the New Yorker put only one article online, it should have been that one. As a consolation, there’s a short excerpt here, and a related article is available from last year.) It’s become a lot harder to think about this problem since I had a kid.

My camera has a video function. Nothing special, but it works okay. Actually the image quality maybe is even better than a typical PAL or NTSC camera. There are other drawbacks - tiny microphone, and I can't zoom while recording or handle light changes. So it can't replace a real camera, but it's okay for some limited use cases. Last weekend there was a Balboa workshop in Munich, with excellent teachers. At the end of the days we recorded the teachers repeating the moves they tought us during the day. A perfect situation to use my camera: good lighting, no lighting changes, no zoom changing needed. These videos are quite big, due to the limited compression capabilities of the camera. (the video codec they used is MJPG, i.e. the camera just saves 30 jpg images per second). So I decided to recompress them. I tried transcode first, but it messed up the audio (which played back at double speed). Mencoder worked like a charm. Size savings of a factor of 8-12 are easily possible (well, depending on your camera, YMMV) without much tuning or serious loss in image quality. Here's the commandline I used:

mkdir out
for nam in *.avi; do
  mencoder "$nam" -ovc lavc -oac lavc -vf hqdn3d \
  -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=48:vb_strategy=1:vbitrate=600 \
  -o "out/$nam"
done

Notice that I also enabled a noise filter. Due to the nature of MJPEG, there is a certain amount of noise in dark areas, which I don't really care about. Filtering noise both improves compression and image quality IMHO. Depending on your video, of course. Here the dancers are well-lit, just the background isn't; I don't want to see noise in the background amplified by a compression trying to adopt to it. :-)

Thanks to Don Armstrong's improvements to the performance of version-tracking in the BTS and Anthony Towns's tweaks to dak, as of the middle of last week, all NMUs uploaded to Debian unstable will cause the bugs mentioned in their changelogs to be marked as closed in that version, instead of just being marked as fixed. This is a great benefit to the release process, since previously, bugfixes in NMUs were still falling off the radar as soon as they were uploaded, with no automatable way to check whether a given update stuck in unstable fixed release-critical bugs that we needed to have in testing for the release. So these guys get a big thank you from me for helping to ensure etch only ships with the bugs we want it to ship with. ;) The new setup also has the advantage that bug submitters finally get the same, real email for bugs closed in NMU as they do for bugs closed in MU, instead of being left in the dark as they were before. But that only takes care of bugs closed in NMUs that happen between now and the release -- it does nothing for the roughly 1200 RC bugs that were already fixed in prior NMUs that haven't been acknowledged by the maintainer. Who knows if any (or how many) of those are still open in etch right now? Rather hard to tell when we don't know what version closed them, isn't it? So with a lot of help from Adam Barratt this weekend, we've marked about 800 (egads) of these RC bugs as closed in the corresponding NMU versions, with a brief note to the submitters. In the next couple of days, we should find our way to the end of the list, at which point we can think about ignoring the 'fixed' tag over on turmzimmer.net. Also fixed now is bug #388431, so people should be able to stop worrying now about their users chewing up the CPU with real-time scheduling. Nothing like a maintainer upload of a base package one year in the making, being uploaded after it's been frozen. So make that... 801 bugs closed?

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

For a few years, the probably most intrepid group of triathletes in my club have been doing cycling tours during the long weekend of the 9 d'Octubre in Val ncia. We once did a good chunk of the Ruta del Cid, covering around 550 kilometres in 3 days and a half, carrying aproximately 25 kilograms of sleeping bag, food and clothes on our bikes, and going from Teruel to Albarrac n, back to Teruel, then to Morella and back to Alboc sser and through the Serra d'Espad . The next year, we started the trip in La S nia, and crossed the Valencian Country all the way to Requena, through Linares and Rubielos de Mora. This year, we intended to cycle across the Pyrinees, from the Basque Country to Catalonia, but in the end my travelmates have to work on Monday, so we had to quickly settle on a one day alternative. As this is the 9 d'Octubre, the trip had to be a bit crazy, so we've decided to get the last train up to Teruel, arriving there at 21:30 or so, have a very good dinner around El Torico and soon after, start our way down to Val ncia, under the full moon.

Our itinerary for tonight We'll be carrying a few forehead lights and a bicycle light, and will really hope that the sky isn't cloudy at all. We're really going to need the moonlight. The route follows the national road from Sagunt to Teruel, through an old train track which was turned into a cycling path. Most of the trip will be descending, so covering the 150 kilometres shouldn't be too hard, except that neither of us are specially trained now, unlike 3 years ago. If we end up having to stop and sleep, that's going to be a problem as we are carrying no sleepingbags or anything, just our winter cycling clothes. We pretend to take our time, aka most of the night, to get to our destination, as we obviously won't be able to cycle fast in the dark. But we'll manage. This is just crazy, not impossible. :)

So according to Peter Lee, an execute from Disney, we have almost won against Digital Restriction Management (DRM). Interestingly five out of six quotes on that page give good arguments against DRM, even though three of them are from those people who want to restrict our means to share culture.

Please spread the word, why DRM is bad. This website, http://drm.info was launched today, on the global day against DRM.

Unfortunatly winning a battle doesn't mean winning the war. (Sorry for the military metaphor.) So I'm not surprised software patents are back on the agenda in Brussels (linked article in german only) and I do expect the fight against DRM to be a long one.

Some random thoughts:

• Some days suck more than others. But everyday someone is missing. And some days someone leaves. Enjoy your way back, Sam.
• Lars: my rockbox looks quite pretty
• Uwe: if you want added security for your laptop, get a smartkey. Your laptop gets locked when you extract the key from the usb port, and you can only get it to work again if you put the password with the smartkey inserted again… otherwise you have to reboot, and reboot means encryption password. So it is a win-win situation

Tato, Raquel and me headed to Cat Power’s concert last Wednesday. Luckily, I won two tickets for the concert on a morning radio show (it was around 6 am, so when the speaker asked a question, I had plenty of time to open my notebook, confirm the answer on Wikipedia and call the station; because of the time, the call entered quite quickly, on the 3rd try). It was a double, so Tato had to buy his own ticket. Chan Marshall, Cat Power’s real name, is quite interesting. She asked previously that people people should be quiet while performing because of her stage fright (!). She also likes to cut her songs abruptly complaining on the sound of the piano, tunes on the guitar, her voice, the accoustics on the place, etc. We also realized that her live performance is completely depressive, and the ambient of people (quiet, clapping to support her, proposals to marry her from girls) makes an outstanding and not common at all atmosphere. She played for like two hours in complete absense of noise (except when people clapped or shouted to ask for some songs, or to laugh at her jokes -like the one asking people what would be a better place to live, Mexico or Japan, guess the answer of people-). You could even hear beer bottles rolling in the halls and people doing like “shhhh”: the silence was terrific. She also played the day after, but that date was announced like one week before and didn’t get much people. No pics since from previous experiences, photos of my cell phone are completely sucky in darkness. Other concerts I’ve gone in the last weeks: The Strokes and Babas nicos. Next concerts I’ll be going: Yeah Yeah Yeahs (that’ll be fucking awesome, can’t wait for it). MiG and his girlfriend went yesterday to watch the Kung Fu Monkeys, a nice ska-punk band from Tijuana, but we were too tired to show up in the place. The day before, on Thursday, he also invited us to watch some surf bands, which scene is awesome in Mexico City, it was really nice and we had the chance to dance a bit.

Well, I got the house. No problems at closing, lots of work to do before I can move in. I was a bit worried that it would be too dark, but now that all the frumpy old-person blinds and stuff are taken out, and we've done some cleaning (thanks, Maggie!) it's reasonably light and is starting to feel like a place I can live. Closing on a house is to me feels a lot like flying to Europe alone -- get up early, make sure you have all your documentation in order, make sure you're on time, say hi to someone at the desk, and to someone who's your inadvertent companion in all this, then some pain, and then everything is different.