I've been very interested in the development of semantic markup in HTML pages over the last few years. I find it particularly interesting, since I've been invested a lot of time putting RDF features into MediaWiki, which has paid off with some interesting features on Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:RDF). I think further semantic markup could be very useful to Web users. Encapsulating semantic info into HTML is not a new idea, but it's picking up steam and I think it will 'tip' as major systems start using it, and with built-in browser tools like Flocktails. But I'm worried about competing efforts to make semantic-data-in-HTML work; I've written an essay on the subject in RDFa vs microformats.

Robert Love: “In Google’s calculation, the cost of a native port outweighed the benefit of a native [port] v s-a-v s a WINE-fueled Picasa. Is that really unexpected? Our development platform is no shining star. We have two toolkits, poor binary compatibility, and unclear direction. To be sure, vendors such as Novell are devoting increasing effort toward improving the Linux ISV and platform story. But the community must make it a priority as well, from the kernel up through the highest levels of the graphical desktop.” That’s part of it (and certainly an accurate assessment of the kind of thinking we need as a community to make Linux a better platform). I think there’s another part of it, though, and that’s that operating systems in general are fundamentally uninteresting to Google as platforms in themselves, as well they should be—after all, the web is Google’s platform, and they dominate there, so why should they promote an alternative where they are much weaker? In my view, the (fat) client bits merely exist to ease the transition from the current, predominantly desktop centric world to a new web centric world where Google naturally thrives. After all, such paradigm shifts are always gradual. There’s the offline question too—if all your data is in the cloud, how do you get to it when you’re not online?—though I suspect over time the browser will provide offline capabilities of some sort, so this is largely a temporary problem too. So, using Wine in ports not only minimizes the incremental cost of building out a foothold on the client (which, again, is a necessity for Google, given that Google’s biggest competitor is between them and 90% of their customers), but it raises the fat client platform up a level too. In other words, it builds a fat client platform with a consistent look and feel across desktop environments; and with this, the operating system underneath rapidly becomes irrelevant. The real question is when Google will hook Picasa into a photo sharing service of its own. I already keep my photos in the cloud, and I’d love to organize and edit them in Picasa (Organizr is nice, but nowhere near as nice as a desktop application, and it doesn’t have some basic functionality, like import from camera and red eye repair). Of course, this is just one example of Google having some platform thinking issues of its own, though that’ll have to be a rant for another day.

My Jetlag has gotten worse, up to the point where my day now starts at 7PM and goes until 1PM. That is, I sleep less than before, but at a time that is most unconvenient when you have a day job.

My dead-trees grokking is paying out I’m observing a lot of stuff here and there in the code that needs my love…

• Hmmm… Sendpage::Device has code that is unsurprisingly similar to Sendpage::Modem. It would be nice if I can combine these together into just one module, then let users import the objects via export tags.
• A lot of variables get made inside the various functions (again, look at Sendpage::Device) that are actually just aliases to hash entries (taken from args to the functions.) I suppose this made the code a bit clearer, but nontheless there’s still a lot of scratchpad pollution going on there :-/
• Docs are lacking… but this is hardly unknown.
• The usual Perl metagoofs: no use warnings and use strict.

There’s still more, soon to come.

Yesterday was the 2006 edition of the JP Morgan Chase Corp. Challenge -- in its 30th year overall, and for the 25th time in Chicago. 19000 runners, and I didn't pay attention to securing a good starting spot, so I spend one mile running around slower runners and walkers. Hand-stopped finishing time of 23:09 (about 6:37 min/mile), a minute slower than last year's rather decent time, but still better than 2004, 2003, and 2002.

I have the impression that OpenOffice is still busy with cleaning up the code inherited (and e.g. porting to GTK2 and such things). Given the screenshots posted in the much respected Office UI blog by Jensen Harris, I think OpenOffice will run into trouble when Microsoft actually releases their new Office. Microsoft seems to have a really neat and productive UI there - there is only one thing really wrong with it: it's completely different than anything else people are used to (and people have learned to use). While there will obviously be migration issues, companies will probably delay switching to the new office to save licensing costs and such things, marketing people will be all crazy about the new features in there. You might remember the research with the aggressive title "PowerPoint makes you stupid"... actually this will become even more true with the new Office, I fear. It comes with default styles for common diagrams used in presentations, like a flow sequence or a circle sequence. While these aren't particularly smart things, they'll be presented even more prominently (because the gfx is so great), and the actual contents will probably be pushed back even further... Anyway, these new styles look really hip, so people will be eager to use them. And use them. And use them again. And use them really big (eventually forgetting about the contents behind them)... and OpenOffice can't keep up with that so far. Maybe OpenOffice needs a huge scale UI contest. Maybe with some abstraction scheme to be able to run different UIs on the same engine. OpenOffice in particular should try to become a technology leader, and not just try to copy Microsoft as much as possible... the UI changes in Impress are said to be pretty similar to what people expected when they think PowerPoint. There are good reasons to stick with the established UI standards (even when that might mean 'cloning' the UI) since that keeps migration costs low. But I think it's a pity OpenOffice can't show many large technological improvements to put more pressure on Microsoft. Ah, and yes, I guess many people at OOo are well aware of that, and like so many projects (commercial ones probably even more than FLOSS) they're just short on development resources...

Xen-tools now correctly installs CentOS4 installations, complete with OpenSSH access. I’ve not fiddled around with rpmstrap enough to cache intelligently, but otherwise it works. (What this means is that each new installation re-fetches each .rpm package from the network, rather than caching them locally.) This new work does bring my “design decision” into focus though. Originally xen-create-image was a simple system which did two things:

1. Install a clean version of sid/sarge/etch using debootstrap.
2. Run a series of shell scripts aftwarwards to customize the new environment install networking, and install openssh. The “hook scripts”.

Hooks were implemented as a directory of shell scripts run in order, much like you’d expect from run-parts. Simple? Neat? Yes. And no. Because each script was based around the idea of tweaking Debian they had a lot of Debian-specific knowlege in them, and so they didn’t do the right thing for CentOS4. There are two (or more!) solutions to this problem:

1. Have per-distribution hooks: hook.d/debian, hook.d/centos4, etc.
2. Have each script decide which environment it has and do the right thing.

The first has the advantage that it is simple to understand and adding additional distributions becomes simpler to approach. The second avoids proliferation, and seems neater to me. Anyway the decision is made for the moment to use this approach. I could be swayed the other direction when it comes to time to setup SuSE, Mandriva, etc. However in all honesty I don’t actually expect to do that work myself. If you need those distros you can help, capishe? Now to backport rpmstrap to Sarge, and make a new release…

Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.

Next up: a SUSE 10.1 install. It's been a few years since I touched a SUSE distribution (it was something like SUSE Linux 5.3 or so), a lot has happened since then... Here's a rough sketch of the installation and a few superficial remarks and facts related to security. Install

1. First, I downloaded a SUSE 10.1 CD image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
2. The installer that showed up is graphical, and you can choose between a normal installation, booting a rescue system, or running a memory test (uses memtest86, I presume).
3. While the installer runs it merely shows a rotating logo, but you can switch to other consoles (ALT+F1, ALT+F3, ALT+F4) for watching log messages passing by.
4. You can choose the language used in the installer, later also your timezone and keyboard layout. You can also check the installation medium, which verifies the checksum of the CD, I guess.
5. Next, you'll be asked to accept a license agreement (yeeaah, whatever).
6. Your hardware will be automatically detected (worked quite well for me), and after that you can choose between a new install or a system upgrade.
7. As for the desktop, you can use GNOME, KDE, text-mode (no desktop), or a "minimal graphical system" (it turns out that means fvwm, at least that's what I think).
8. The graphical partitioning tool feels a bit awkward at first, I needed several tries until I figured out how to make it use the layout I wanted it to. The default file system suggested by the tool is ReiserFS.
9. There's an explicit option which lets you choose the default run-level for the system (run-level 5 is pre-configured).
10. The bootloader, GRUB, recognized the other partitions (Debian stable + unstable), added an entry for SUSE Linux, and created a working setup. Nice, although more control over the process (e.g. naming of the boot options) would be nice.
11. Reboot.
12. I'm asked to insert CDs 2 and 3, which I don't have (or want), as I only burned CD 1. Clicking "abort" a few times does the trick, and I can continue by choosing a hostname and domain name for the box (hydra + local.domain).
13. Now I must enter the root password. Very nice: I have the choice between DES, MD5, or Blowfish (SUSE default) for the hashing/encryption of user passwords.
14. Afterwards, the network is configured (automatically, via DHCP). You can enable a firewall at this point, and enable/disable access to the ssh port explicitly. It's also possible to enable "VNC remote administration" (default: off), or configure a proxy.
15. Authentication methods for users, available from the installer: local (/etc/passwd), LDAP, NIS, Windows Domain.
16. When adding a new user, there are some options. Per default, the user is in the groups "users" (no per-user groups, it seems), "dialout" and "video", but that can be configured. Password expiration is disabled. The default shell is bash.
17. And now... another registration message (in the release notes, actually). May I quote (from my head): The registration procedure transfers zmd's unique device identifier to Novell's registration web service. The information sent may also include OS, version, architecture, and the output of uname and hwinfo, according to that text. More on that later, maybe...
18. Of course, SUSE Linux comes with SUSE's/Novell's AppArmor enabled by default, but I haven't looked into it, yet.
19. Now some problems appeared. More hardware discovery took place, it seems, then the screen turned black (with only a non-blinking cursor in the upper left), no reaction to any input -> I performed a hard reboot.
20. After booting, I'm dropped into fvwm (although I chose GNOME in the installer), the reason probably being the forced reboot. After looking around a bit in the menus and stuff, I wanted to start sax2 (to find out what it does), but the screen turned black again -> another hard reboot. Could it be that I don't have enough RAM for this (256 MB)?
21. Anyways, at this point I lost interest in playing with the system any further, and gathered the below information for comparison reasons...

Security

• Portscan from another box:
  

  PORT     STATE    SERVICE
  22/tcp   open     ssh
  135/tcp  filtered msrpc
  137/tcp  filtered netbios-ns
  138/tcp  filtered netbios-dgm
  139/tcp  filtered netbios-ssn
  445/tcp  filtered microsoft-ds
  1433/tcp filtered ms-sql-s
  1434/tcp filtered ms-sql-m
  

  Not good. A default install should not have any ports open, IMHO. Quite a bunch of Windows ports, eh? To be fair, if the firewall is enabled, none of those will be reachable.
• Some permissions:
  

  drwx------  2 root root  168 2006-05-25 01:50 /.gnupg
  drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   72 2006-05-25 00:58 /home
  drwx------  8 root root  432 2006-05-25 01:56 /root
  drwxrwxrwt  9 root root  504 2006-05-25 01:55 /tmp
  crw-------  1 root video  10, 175 May 25 04:58 /dev/agpgart
  crw-r-----+ 1 root root    5,   1 May  2 08:45 /dev/console
  drwxr-xr-x  6 root root       120 May 25 04:58 /dev/disk
  crw-rw----  1 root video  29,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/fb0
  brw-rw----+ 1 uwe  disk    2,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/fd0
  crw--w--w-  1 root root    1,   7 May 25 04:58 /dev/full
  brw-r-----  1 root disk    3,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/hda*
  brw-rw----+ 1 uwe  disk   22,  64 May 25 04:58 /dev/hdd
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem    1,   2 May 25 04:58 /dev/kmem
  crw-rw----  1 root root    1,  11 May  2 08:45 /dev/kmsg
  srw-rw-rw-  1 root root         0 May 25 04:58 /dev/log
  crw-rw----  1 root lp      6,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/lp0
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem    1,   1 May 25 04:58 /dev/mem
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root    1,   3 May  2 08:45 /dev/null
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem    1,   4 May 25 04:58 /dev/port
  crw-rw----  1 root root   10,   1 May 25 04:58 /dev/psaux
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty     2,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/ptyp*
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root    1,   8 May 25 04:58 /dev/random
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty     5,   0 May  2 08:45 /dev/tty
  crw--w----  1 root root    4,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/tty0
  crw-rw----  1 root tty     4,   2 May 25 04:58 /dev/tty[1-6]
  crw--w----  1 uwe  tty     4,   7 May 25 04:58 /dev/tty[7-9]
  crw-rw----  1 root uucp    4,  64 May  2 08:45 /dev/ttyS[0-4]
  crw-------  1 root uucp    4,  68 May  2 08:45 /dev/ttyS[4-7]
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty     3,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/ttyp0
  crw-r--r--  1 root root    1,   9 May 25 04:58 /dev/urandom
  crw--w----  1 root tty     7,   0 May 25 04:58 /dev/vcs
  crw-rw----  1 root tty     7,   1 May 25 04:58 /dev/vcs1
  crw-rw----  1 root tty     7, 129 May 25 04:58 /dev/vcsa1
  crw--w----  1 root tty     7, 130 May 25 04:58 /dev/vcsa2
  pr--------  1 uwe  tty          0 May 25 05:01 /dev/xconsole
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root    1,   5 May  2 08:45 /dev/zero
  

  Nice: /root has mode 700. Um, /dev/fd0, /dev/hdd, and a few others are owned by me (user "uwe")? Why?
• Default users and shells:
  

  at:x:25:25:Batch jobs daemon:/var/spool/atjobs:/bin/bash
  bin:x:1:1:bin:/bin:/bin/bash
  daemon:x:2:2:Daemon:/sbin:/bin/bash
  ftp:x:40:49:FTP account:/srv/ftp:/bin/bash
  games:x:12:100:Games account:/var/games:/bin/bash
  haldaemon:x:101:102:User for haldaemon:/var/run/hal:/bin/false
  lp:x:4:7:Printing daemon:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/bash
  mail:x:8:12:Mailer daemon:/var/spool/clientmqueue:/bin/false
  man:x:13:62:Manual pages viewer:/var/cache/man:/bin/bash
  mdnsd:x:78:65534:mDNSResponder runtime user:/var/lib/mdnsd:/bin/false
  messagebus:x:100:101:User for D-BUS:/var/run/dbus:/bin/false
  news:x:9:13:News system:/etc/news:/bin/bash
  nobody:x:65534:65533:nobody:/var/lib/nobody:/bin/bash
  ntp:x:74:103:NTP daemon:/var/lib/ntp:/bin/false
  postfix:x:51:51:Postfix Daemon:/var/spool/postfix:/bin/false
  root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
  sshd:x:71:65:SSH daemon:/var/lib/sshd:/bin/false
  suse-ncc:x:102:104:Novell Customer Center User:/var/lib/YaST2/suse-ncc-fakehome:/bin/bash
  uucp:x:10:14:Unix-to-Unix CoPy system:/etc/uucp:/bin/bash
  wwwrun:x:30:8:WWW daemon apache:/var/lib/wwwrun:/bin/false
  uwe:x:1000:100::/home/uwe:/bin/bash
  

  Quite a random mix of /bin/bash and /bin/false as shells, it seems. Notice the absence of /bin/sh.
• Setuid/setgid files:
  

  # find / -type f \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 \) -exec ls -ld ' ' \;
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 31668 Apr 23 08:48 /bin/su
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 35520 Apr 23 03:53 /bin/ping
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root audio 20252 Apr 23 04:21 /bin/eject
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 321981 May  2 08:50 /bin/mount
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 31696 Apr 23 03:53 /bin/ping6
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 117887 May  2 08:50 /bin/umount
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 5056 May  2 11:14 /opt/kde3/bin/artswrapper
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 6696 May  2 12:02 /opt/kde3/bin/kpac_dhcp_helper
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root trusted 43940 May  2 09:47 /usr/bin/at
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 836524 May  2 10:28 /usr/bin/gpg
  -rwsr-xr-x 2 root root 4880 Apr 23 05:09 /usr/bin/man
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 18720 Apr 23 04:32 /usr/bin/rcp
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 9340 Apr 23 04:32 /usr/bin/rsh
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 73284 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/chfn
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 68992 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/chsh
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 105084 May  2 09:47 /usr/bin/sudo
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root tty 10312 May  2 08:50 /usr/bin/wall
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 lp sys 10400 Apr 25 19:15 /usr/bin/lppasswd
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root trusted 33260 Apr 23 04:36 /usr/bin/crontab
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 59980 May  2 16:38 /usr/bin/fileshareset
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 75692 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/chage
  -rwsr-xr-x 2 root root 4880 Apr 23 05:09 /usr/bin/mandb
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root tty 8936 May  2 08:50 /usr/bin/write
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 13388 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/expiry
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 15532 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/newgrp
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 72836 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/passwd
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root shadow 74528 May  2 10:50 /usr/bin/gpasswd
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 12900 Apr 23 04:32 /usr/bin/rlogin
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 23990 Apr 29 01:08 /usr/lib/pt_chown
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root maildrop 10440 May  2 09:36 /usr/sbin/postdrop
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root maildrop 10444 May  2 09:36 /usr/sbin/postqueue
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root tty 7288 Apr 23 03:40 /usr/sbin/utempter
  -rws--x--x 1 root root 1832764 May  2 09:26 /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root shadow 20136 Apr 23 03:54 /sbin/unix_chkpwd
  -rwsr-x--- 1 root dialout 31700 May  2 09:56 /sbin/isdnctrl
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root shadow 6624 Apr 23 04:35 /sbin/unix2_chkpwd
  

  Quite a bunch... I sure hope those "rsh", "rcp", "rlogin", and so on, are ssh aliases in reality (didn't check)...
• World-writable files:
  

  # find / -not -type l -perm -o+w -exec ls -ld ' ' \;
  srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /dev/log
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 5 May  2 08:45 /dev/zero
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 May  2 08:45 /dev/tty
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 2 May 26 00:02 /dev/ptmx
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 May  2 08:45 /dev/null
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 2, 0 May 25 23:54 /dev/ptyp*
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 3, 0 May 25 23:54 /dev/ttyp*
  crw--w--w- 1 root root 1, 7 May 25 23:54 /dev/full
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 May 25 23:54 /dev/random
  drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 60 May 25 23:54 /dev/shm
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 May  2 08:45 /lib/udev/devices/tty
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 May  2 08:45 /lib/udev/devices/null
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 2 May  2 08:45 /lib/udev/devices/ptmx
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 5 May  2 08:45 /lib/udev/devices/zero
  drwxrwxrwt 10 root root 672 May 26 00:02 /tmp
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 03:51 /tmp/.ICE-unix
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 72 May 25 23:54 /tmp/.X11-unix
  srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0
  srw-r--rw- 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/zmd/zmd-web.socket
  srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/zmd/zmd-remoting.socket
  srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket
  srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/nscd/socket
  srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/mdnsd
  srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 May 25 23:54 /var/run/.resmgr_socket
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 May 25 23:54 /var/run/uscreens
  drwxrwxrwt 11 root root 416 May 25 23:55 /var/tmp
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 03:51 /var/tmp/vi.recover
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 03:51 /var/cache/fonts
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 03:51 /var/spool/mail
  prw--w--w- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:59 /var/spool/postfix/public/qmgr
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/public/flush
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/public/showq
  prw--w--w- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 26 00:02 /var/spool/postfix/public/pickup
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/public/cleanup
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/lmtp
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/smtp
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/uucp
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/rewrite
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/discard
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/anvil
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/bsmtp
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/defer
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/cyrus
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/error
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/local
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/relay
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/trace
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/maildrop
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/bounce
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/ifmail
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/scache
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/verify
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/virtual
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/procmail
  srw-rw-rw- 1 postfix postfix 0 May 25 23:54 /var/spool/postfix/private/proxymap
  drwxrwxrwt 8 root root 192 May 25 00:06 /usr/src/packages/RPMS
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i486
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i686
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/athlon
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/RPMS/noarch
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/BUILD
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/SPECS
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/SRPMS
  drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 48 Apr 23 02:28 /usr/src/packages/SOURCES
  

  No real files actually, only sockets, device files, and directories. Still, it's quite a lot of them. Do they all really need to be world-writable?

That's it. Comments, suggestions, flames?

I had been an Enlightenment user for a long time—halfway the Summer of 2000 up to the early fall of 2004—before someone finally decided to pick up the pieces where they were left somewhere around 2000 and restart its development. Unfortunately, that also meant causing #219925, which was irritating me more and more each day. Eventually, in the early fall of 2004 (almost a year after I filed that bug), I gave up and started looking for something else. The problem, of course, was that I'd grown so accustomed to using Enlightenment and its way of doing things that I felt at a loss. I wanted to be able to move windows above the upper edge of my screen again. I needed focus-follows-mouse. I was having a hard time without edge-flipping. Eventually I found that there was functionality for all of the above, but it wasn't flawless. Especially not the edge flipping—GNOME implements that in a truly horrible way¹. Not to mention the fact that brightside, the application which implements edge-flipping for GNOME, segfaulted on me an annoyingly high number of times, sometimes even taking away my entire session with it. Even Enlightenment never did that; it would just misbehave instead. Apart from that, of course GNOME also had some extra annoyances that I didn't get rid of. The fact that it insists on mucking with my keyboard settings, to name just one example. Even so, I used it for about nine months. Then, slightly after DebConf5 in Helsinki, I realized what the true horror of GNOME is: not the fact that they hide away features or try to make the desktop void of superfluous options; the fact that they remove features that are critical to some of its users. I know I was horrified to find out that something I really used a lot had been removed in that new release. I kept using it for three more months before I threw in the towel and tried something totally different. Ion3. After coming from the mostly mouse-oriented interfaces that GNOME and Enlightenment were, ion3 was truly different. I liked it at first; it was a welcome change from what I'd previously been doing. Eventually, though, I found that the ion way of doing things just wasn't my way. The fact that, by default, it puts new windows right in front of the window you're working on was rather offputting. Any serious attempt at configuring the thing involves learning lua which, though supposedly not hard to do, is not something I ever found the time for. In the end, I discovered that I disliked working with ion, as I often felt that it gave me a fragmented and tunneled view on the world, and that it was working with me instead of the other way around. In short, it was getting the fun out of computing for me. Which wasn't good, at all. So that's when I started looking for something else again. When I'd made the decision to move way from ion3, I didn't want to keep using that "until I'd found something else"; instead, I quickly installed IceWM instead—which I still knew from back when I had a Yopy YP3000—and used that until I had found something better. Little did I know the beaty of IceWM. I've decided, by now, that it does all I need, and more: By default, it tries the best it can to put a window on your screen so that it overlaps with as little other windows as possible. I can have it not focus a new window by default. I does focus-follows-mouse, if enabled. It even does edge-flipping. Of course it's not perfect—the edge-flipping, though not as horrible as the GNOME implementation, can still use some improvement. As if to prove my point, I accidentally closed the window in which I was writing this very post before it had been written to disk, the cause of which could be described as an interface problem in IceWM (though it's more likely an example of PEBMAC (Problem Exists Between Mouse And Chair). But, all in all, using IceWM feels like finally coming home. Thanks, Marko and Mathias, for a truly wonderful piece of software. ¹ I know that there are a lot of people who dislike edge-flipping. I am 99% sure that this is because they've never seen it implemented right. Edge-flipping is great, if done right; it's nightmare if done wrong. GNOME does it horribly wrong. IceWM does it better, though not perfect. The implementation in Enlightenment is perfect. I'll discuss the details in another post.

Well, I've finally got back from DebConf6 and am quite nackered, especially considering I've just done a full day at work.

I could amuse you with the usual 'lists-of-memorable-dc6-events', or a 'review-of-each-day', or even a 'bits-from-the-orga-team', but there's pleanty of other posts on planet.d.o about that, so instead, I'll recount my experiences of the return trip, starting in Oaxtepec.

I'm also putting up all my photos, but it'll take a while. They'll be appearing over the next few days at my Fotopic site.

I wake up fairly early-ish (10am. It's early for me, ok? I'm not German :P) and pack my suitcase. I take the padlock keys out of the case and lock it. Except I got the wrong keys. So, the keys are now inside the locked case. Fortunately, I'd already taken everything out of the case I'd needed and put it in my rucksack.

Next, it comes to time to check out. I find out that we need out room checking to ensure that we haven't stolen a wall or ceiling or something. One of the cleaners has a look around and spots a missing lampshade. We (me + Fil Hands) try to explain in broken Spanish that it was missing when we arrived in the room, but she doesn't seem to be having any of it. Mind you, there is the vague possibility that "Si","Fruta","Cafe" and "Hola" isn't quite enough knowledge to explain the situation. Feh.
So, we manage to accost the lovely Amaya to do some translation for us. The cleaner lady calls her boss, who tells us it'll cost 860 pesos (£43). We politely decline. So, she then calls her boss. This all takes some time. Eventually, she opens a huge book, looks inside and sees that the shade was taken away by maintainance. Why this wasn't done before, I don't know.

Anyway, our bus was leaving at 2:00pm, so we had to rush to the reception. The journey was quite pleasent, and we eventually arrived at the airport at 4:20pm. There was a small altercation with the Taxi driver over the tip, as it was already included in the fair, and he said it wasn't. We then pointed out that tolls were also included in the fair, and the driver didn't take a toll road. At this point, he seemed to dissapear quite satified.

I approached the Air France desk, and was told I coudn't check in until 7:30pm (my flight dind't leave until 11:30pm). Bugger. So after waiting around quite a while, and getting something to eat, I went to check in. There was a huge queue, but it didn't really matter, as I was flying under a Flying Blue - Silver level card, so I could use the express queue. They did, however, want to check my luggage. Broken Spanish did work this time, as I wildly gestated towards my suitcase, making key symbols.

So, after another long wait, we (me and Daniel Baumann, we're on the same flight, and indeed sitting next to each other by some freak coincidence) wander off through to the gate. I manage to find some free wireless (ESSID: co_admeralty_club) and surf for a bit. Flight ends up being delayed for 30 mins, but it didn't matter too much.

Then, I hear an annoucement over the intercom, that a group of passengers should contact the gate staff, and my name is mentioned. A little worried, I approach.
"Hello, I'm Mr McGovern. My name was called on the intercom."
"Can I have your boarding pass please?"
"Sure..." *worry*
"Thank you.... ok, we'd like to invite you to fly business class with us today sir."
"Thank you very much"
I then proceed to whistle the 'Kill Bill' tune, as for some reason, it's following me everywhere I go in the airport, be it a cleaner, or another passenger. I think it's like some sort of virus, infecting one person and moving on to the next host.

We still had a little while, so we popped back to the waiting area to, well, wait. We saw some of the Brixen gang, and one of them had his laptop stolen : That's the second laptop down then. The first was run over by a car in Oaxtepec.

So, I board the plane, and am immediately offered lots of alcohol and other free things^tm. Which was nice. Unfortunately, the plane was further delayed. This means that on arriving in CDG, my connecting flight was already boarding. It was at this point that I had dounts about my luggage arriving in MAN at the same time as me.

So, I board the plane in Paris, and it's a straightforward flight. But lo and behold, at the other end, no baggage. No suprises there then.

Today, my luggage arrived at 8:00pm, just after I've got home from work. I'd also got a nice letter from the Inland Revenue, with a £215.67 tax rebate \o/

As my subject: S^HWings and Roundabouts.

I'm writing an application in Ruby that makes heavy use of XMLRPC (the application of XMLRPC-over-Unix-socket fame), and so I'm using Mock Objects to mock out the XMLRPC client proxy and provide an interface that doesn't involve having a whole other infrastructure running on my laptop so I can run my test suite. For those who don't know, mock objects are objects which look and superficially act like the real objects you might use to communicate with an external service, but don't actually do the communication -- instead, they return canned responses to your calls. Why is this useful? Well, imagine that the real object talks to a SOAP service on the 'net (such as the Google search API). It means that every time you run your test suite, you need access to the Internet. The external service may also cost something everytime you talk to it -- or it may be impossible to use to test, since there's statistics generation or something going on that means that hammering it for test purposes is just impractical. In addition to returning values to your application, mock objects will usually record what has been called, so that after your test run is complete, you can also verify that all of the methods you wanted called have actually been called. This means that you can have a good idea that what you wanted to happen to the service actually would have been done. Handy. Some people have a (justified) ditrust of Mocks, because it's easy to make a mock object that doesn't perform like the real one (and hence invalidate your tests), but they provide a necessary evil in cases where you just can't use the real object when running your test suite. The XMLRPC proxy I'm using has a bit of a quirk. Everything runs through one method on that object -- XMLRPC::Client#call(). This seems really limiting, especially in a wonderfully dynamic language like Ruby. In reality, it's not too bad -- it makes the object interface easier to mock, and you couldn't emulate the whole thing with method_missing anyway, because you can have various Ruby-illegal characters in XMLRPC method names. The downside to this all-in-one-method thing, though, is that simply verifying that #call() has been invoked a dozen times doesn't really tell me much about whether the mock was used the way I wanted it to be used. My chosen mock object suite, Test::Unit::MockObject, whilst otherwise excellent, is (or rather, was) missing the ability to verify the arguments that are passed to your calls -- you can say "I need methods x(), y(), and z() called", but you couldn't say "I need the call y('foo', 'bar', 42) made". Of course, this change the mock object class is non-trivial, and needs to be tested itself (it'd be pretty lame if a class intended to facilitate automated testing lacked a test suite of it's own). I added a bunch of tests to the test suite, and got some good results. I had a couple of false starts, where I wasn't checking most of the corner cases (where bugs lurk in the shadows), but eventually I got a test suite that was fairly complete, which drove the new features I needed to a good place. So I carted my newly enhanced mock object class across to my production project, and off I went. Except that I was getting some downright weird failure messages when my code wasn't invoking the mock object the right way. Why? Because I hadn't tested that my failure messages were appropriate. Why was that? Because the assert_raise assertion in Test::Unit doesn't have a facility to make sure that you're passing back the right exception message, only that you're passing back the right exception class. Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot? Over. (This space intentionally left blank for me to insert the correction to this claim that the lazyweb is sure to provide) So I had to write a new assertion (assert_exception_message) which checked that both the right class and the right message came back. This code, of course, needs to be tested too, because otherwise you can't be sure that your test code is performing right. At this point, I was writing test code to test a new assertion I'd written so I could test the mock object class I had modified so I could test my application. At this point, things got a bit "meta". It got a bit difficult to separate out the tests from the tests' tests. But I fought through the brain melt, and shortly thereafter came out the other end with a properly working piece of actual application, and all was well in the world. By now, a certain Mr. Tendys is probably rubbing his hands with glee, as he gets ready to espouse at length about how this whole post just proves how utterly useless test-first programming (or even testing in general) is for producing economically-viable software. Let me analyse what I "spent" on getting all this functionality, though -- about 3 train trips home -- maybe 4 hours of time total, including writing the extra tests in my application to use the wonderful new features I'd made. That's not much, in the grand scheme of things. I've wasted that much time in a day skiving off work in the past because I was frustrated with what I was trying (and failing) to program, usually because I was swamped with bugs. What did that four hours of my time buy me? Heaps. I can now better verify my software works as anticipated. I have confidence that my software is a lot more robust than it was before. My tests identified several issues that passed my eyeball check, but blew up when I tried to actually use them in a particular way. But with the help of my tests, I identified the problems quickly and went on my way. Since I was working in a localised area of the application, I was immediately familiar with the code, and could stomp the bug almost immediately. If I'd only done end-to-end testing at the end of development (or worse, released it with the bugs still in there), the debugging would have been much harder because I'd forgotten little details about the code. I reckon that benefit, alone, has probably saved me 4 hours already, since I've spent whole days hunting down little bugs in an ad-hoc fashion in the past. I'm fairly sure most any programmer can empathise with me there.

I am one of the unfortunate hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers who eagerly ran out to buy the Motorola v710 Bluetooth phone when it first came out a couple of years ago. (For a short period of time, I could really turn heads with my wireless earpiece—now you look like an antiquarian if you don’t have a Bluetooth headset). It turns out that Verizon disabled all of the most useful Bluetooth features on the phone, and a class action lawsuit ensued, which predictably settled on terms quite beneficial to counsel, but less so to the affected class. The settlement provided several options for Verizon subscribers who had purchased the v710, only one of which had a substantial monetary value—namely, a $200 credit toward a new phone (or whatever the actual price we paid for the phone, assuming we still have receipts). The settlement period expires at the end of the month, so tonight I finally got around to cashing in on the victory. I was quickly reminded of how much I hate shopping for cell phone technology. Verizon provides more than a dozen options for cell phones, each of them mediocre in its own different way. (I should also mention that the Verizon Wireless website is, itself, mediocre in many different ways.) Cell phones have been around for long enough that it ought to be fairly mature technology; instead, you have to figure out which annoying shortcoming bothers you the least. The most expensive of the non-Pocket PC models, the Samsung SCH-a630, despite having a 2 megapixel built-in camera, has a lower image quality than the cheaper “LG the V” (better known as the LG VX9800), as well as crippled Bluetooth like the v710. I ended up settling on “LG the V,” despite its silly name and hefty form factor, because it seems to be the one model that Verizon decided not to cripple Bluetooth on. Apparently, it has complete OBEX support, and works quite well with Linux. It gets worse shopping for Bluetooth headsets. None of the top headsets recommended by cnet are even offered by Verizon. So instead you’re stuck perusing endless message board postings for threads with names like Which Bluetooth Headset is best for VX9800? trying to figure out which, in fact, is the best Bluetooth Headset for the VX9800. While some aspects of a Bluetooth headset are obviously personal preferences based on, for example, the shape of your earlobe, how often you drive in a convertible with the top down while talking on your cell, and whether you like to wear your headset to bed, I would really appreciate some objective metrics and brand uniformity. There’s no way to predict, for example, whether a particular model of Motorola, Jabra, or Logitech headset will be any good—some seem to be well received, while others have glaring design flaws. As a trademark lawyer, I’m disappointed by this state of affairs. I’d like to be able to identify a brand that I can trust and just go with it. This is especially true where it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of an item on first inspection (or over the Internet) and it’s an item you’ll keep for at least a while (two or three years for cell equipment). As things stand, there seem to be few real winners, and the search costs are inordinately high. Hopefully the invisible hand will eventually fix this situation, but I’m not going to bet on it.

So, I am back home. After a 24 hour journey we arrived at Tolimar's place Sunday night, after a journey that sadly was not as nice as the one to .mx. First we departed about 1/2hr late from Oaxtepec since the backpack of a fellow traveler was ridden over by a car. Than our taxi driver charged us 900MXN for the trip to the airport, although we had agreed on 800 before we left.
Once in the airplane our machine had an engine problem and could not take off. We waited for about 2.5hrs while the inside of the plane steadily got hotter and hotter. Due to this we also missed our connecting flight at Heathrow and were rebooked on a later flight. Probably due to this Tolimar's luggage didn't make it on the same flight and had to be delivered to his house on the next day. Once we had finally reached Frankfurt we went to bed and slept for 16hrs straight. Got back up at about 5pm today, took the train to Hildesheim and am now finally home! No DebConf6 conclusions yet. I am in full EndOfEvent/jet lag mode and feel deader than the frozen chicken (Chicken! Of all things!) I just dug out the icebox of my otherwise totally cleared out fridge. At the moment the predominant feeling is a mixture of "Wow, that was a trip!", profound tiredness and regret about all the things I had planned to do but found no time then. PS: Bubulle, flattery won't help you. I'll get you for this! PPS: Time to write postcards. ;) PPPS: I'm freezing!!

xen-tools can now create images of centos, and other RPM based distributions:

xen-create-iamge --hostname=test.my.flat \
  --ip=192.168.1.123 --dist=centos4 --rpmstrap

There are two outstanding problems: rpmstrap doesn’t seem to install the RPM of centos-release so you must either manually fetch it, or edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file before “yum install foo” works correctly. (The rpmstrap command line handling is broken (#368648) so –include=centos4-release doesn’t help. Plus it wouldn’t work for the other distributions.) OpenSSH is not installed automatically because of the first problem. Anybody who is wishing to test other targets supported by rpmstrap such as mandriva, suse, etc, or is capable of helping me fix this yum problem should look at the xen-tools CVS repository or homepage. With a bit of feedback there could be a 1.5 release early next week.

I’ve just finished recovering from an unexpected few days away to York. Unexpected because I had only intended to spend one night there, but there was some work being carried out on the trainlines over the weekend so in the end I spent three nights there, and barely staggered home on Monday morning in time to start work at 9:30. Still nice to spend three days with my sister, her husband, and their new cat Nero. Once I got back I uploaded a new revision of xen-tools, so the Debian package is now bugfree. There might be more movement in that software soon. I’m currently experimenting with rpmstrap which can be used to install non-Debian distributions. Nifty. In other news, despite valuable suggestions, I’ve managed to install cfengine on 69 hosts and do useful things with it. So far I’m mostly copying files around, restarting services, and running simple jobs from it. (e.g. installing nullmailer, setting up syslog-ng to log to a central host, etc.) Still it is all going well.

Yesterday night, without all the stares and ceremony I would have liked for such an important moment (but, hell, it was ~500m away of the Oaxtepec entrance!), I gave the three-finger-salute and rebooted moe.mexico.debconf.org. After some seconds, I started unplugging the six Ethernet cables that this noble machine held together forming Debconf6's connection to the world (thanks, Punk0 and Jyr, for working with this bunch of crazy and nervous people, five days nonstop until the wireless link between homer and moe worked fine and reliably, and still talking to us!) and ran back to the hacklab to finish packing the van with the lent equipment.
Ok, so now moe is back in its place, my office (believe it or not, yes, today I came back to work). Its identity has been restored to mosca.iiec.unam.mx, and moe's ancient but still working hard drive now sits idly where it belongs, in my desktop drawer. I am back in my place again, tired as I can be, but really happy of having ~250 of my closest friends visit my country. Besides, I am very happy that, AFAIK, this Debconf is the one that most people spend some time on an after-trip.
I am really happy with what we did at Debconf, even given all the problems we originally had. And... Well, I eagerly wait for Debconf7, where I expect to spend much more time attending talks - but most importantly, hanging out with you, having nice, fun talks/mao/whatnot.
PS: Alfie, you are severly mentally disturbed!

Half a year ago yesterday, I stepped off a plane in the United States. It's been an eventful 6 months, as can be seen from reviewing my blog, and I thought I'd summarise the top 10 things I like and dislike about living in this country as opposed to Australia. Ten things I like about living in California:

1. Plenty of sunshine Love the sunshine. It was a bit wet in winter and early spring, but I'm told that it should be pretty much rain (and cloud) free for the rest of the year. Daylight saving also helps make enjoying the copious amounts of sunshine easier, it doesn't get dark until well after 8pm.
2. The public transport options, particularly in San Francisco are vast Particularly in San Francisco, your options for getting around the city are huge. You've got the BART, the Muni (which covers about three distinct forms of public transport in itself), and the VTA overhead electric and petrol powered buses. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, you've got the Caltrain, and VTA light rail and buses.
3. Petrol pumps You need never darken the door of a petrol station. Everywhere has pay at the pump (with plastic of course), and the pumps all have the automatic latch, so you don't even need to stand at the side of the car holding the handle while it fills up.
4. Free parking This was a big change, coming from Canberra, which has a love affair with pay and display parking. Even the multi-storey and underground carparks in the downtown areas are free.
5. Pedestrian crossings that countdown No excuse to get skittled because you thought you could make it in time. You known exactly how long you've got before you'll get mowed down before you step off the side of the road.
6. The postal system Saturday delivery. Every mailbox is an outgoing mailbox (just put the little flag up).
7. Right turns on red This is a real time saver. I can't see why Australia couldn't adopt this for left turns. The only downside is you can spend so much time looking to your left for a break in the traffic to dart out in, that you miss your green arrow (but that's what the guy behind you and his horn is for).
8. Corporately run rental apartment complexes Instead of having an apartment complex where individual landlords own each apartment, the entire complex (and they tend to be larger) is owned by a mega-corporation that employs half a dozen people to maintain it and run it as a business. The upside is they tend to have better facilities, an onsite office (great for receipting packages delivered during the week), onsite maintenance (some places even have a service-level agreement). This offers some economies of scale that you wouldn't otherwise have.
9. At least the perception of a low cost of living I haven't done the sums, and it's probably partially because the bills come monthly instead of quarterly, but all the utility bills seem fairly low and reasonable. Dollar for dollar, petrol is also cheaper, even though it's jumped a dollar a gallon in the time we've been here.

Of course, one must take a balanced look at these things... Ten things I don't like about living in the United States:

1. The currency Not a big fan of the notes. I miss the one and two dollar coins, and the distinctiveness between each denomination. I figure that vending machines over here must be so much more expensive because they have to have a note reader, and even then, the treasury decides to produce some new oddball note that half of the readers don't recognise... I blame tipping. If there were no tipping, the utility of one dollar bills would diminish enormously.
2. The government bureaucracy As my blog records, I haven't exactly had a smooth run with the system over here...
3. The banking system The banking system in general is woeful by comparison. The cheque (or check) still reigns supreme, whereas it's nearly obsolete in Australia. There's no such animal as BPay (and oh how I miss it). In fact, the equivalent system here often involves the bank cutting a cheque on your behalf and mailing it to the biller. How ridiculously antediluvian is that? Oh, and I miss vaguely decently authenticated electronic payments. I've been at cafes were I've paid by credit card, and haven't even had to provide a signature. Given that the credit card is actually a debit card, it's pretty disturbing how easily someone can clean out your bank account.
4. Ex-tax pricing I'm so glad that when they introduced the GST in Australia, they required by law that all prices include it. Most prices here don't, but the occasional food outlet does (like Subway for example), so it's sufficiently confusing that you can't budget for how much you're going to actually fork out.
5. ATM fees The ATM fees are more in your face. Instead of the bank charging you a fee at the end of the month for every transaction conducted at an ATM that isn't theirs, the ATM itself tacks on an extra amount to the withdrawal and effectively skims the money. I've seen fees as high as $5 a transaction, but $2 is fairly common. It's kind of weird seeing an ATM withdrawal of $42 on your bank statement... So having a bank account that doesn't charge you feeds for non-bank ATM withdrawals is all well and good, but it doesn't stop the ATM from charging you.
6. Inaudible pedestrian crossings Oh, the number of times I haven't been paying attention and missed the walk light at a pedestrian crossing... In some places, they do make noises like birds, or talk to you when you can walk, but they're definitely not the norm.
7. The road surface For the highways, they seem to have gone for quantity and not quality, or they're too busy to take offline to resurface. Either way, the road surface quality is pretty poor.
8. Sugar Everything is loaded with sugar. Absolutely everything.
9. Alcohol labelling Light beer is low calorie, not low alcohol. I miss Australia's concept of "standard drinks". Makes it very hard to drink and drive responsibly.

So, really, here's now the full story of that 6th day of Debconf. It indeed began as early as usual, like 7:30 wake-up after being to bed at 02:30. It's amazing to see how I didn't yet burned out. I had to run a 2nd BOF about i18n infrastructure, which main point was indeed to begin summarizing all the ideas we exchanged during the first one, then later during the various private discussions. We had the very good suprise to finally see Javier Sola showing up at the meeting. For those who don't know about him, Javier is member and one of the heads of the Wordforge project, a project that attempts to simplify the process of localisation of Software and is developed with Free and Open Source software in mind. Wordforge is the project that now covers the development of Pootle and related tools such as the Translate Toolkit. Javier came especially for TWO days at Debconf, from Cambodia, where he lives, just to meet us. I tried, during this second BOF to summarize ideas we had already prepared, along with other people, the night before. It is really good to see people actually pusshing you up to achieve things you wouldn't have any idea being able to do when coming. Javier then improvised a general presentation of Wordforge, which has hopefully been taped along with the BOF so that interested people will be able to see it. I have to confess that I ended up this very long session (about 2h50) absolutely enthusiast about the idea of collaborating with Wordforge and this is the way to go if we want our i18n infrastructure. Just don't ask me why, I just know this...:-) The day then went at the speed of light. First, Javier (Fernandez Sanguino, that time) and I finally began to synchronize our thoughts for the talk of the next day. This quickly lead us to...the lunch time where we continued discussing together (not much occasions to talk with Javier during that Debconf even though we wrote a 25 pages paper together...). Too bad I missed the part about NM process by Christoph Berg which would have been deeply interesting to participate. Post lunch continued with still slides work with Javier, missing our fellow Josselin talking about shared libraries (I'm afraid I wouldn't have got a clue about this, but anyway....). My award for the "best Debconf6 talk" goes, this time, to Meike (who would have guessed?) for this so great talk about talks. And, no, you're not *that* jamming from one leg to another. The group photo and the keysigning are of course traditional events of a Debconf and both were one after the other...pretty tiring, but as usual good fun. I very slightly regretted that several of the usuall participants of the keysignings I've already been in weren't actually participating in that one. For sure, many of us have already exchanged keys but I see this also as a kind of "bienvenidos" to all participants in Latin America in this Debconf. For the same reason, I would also have, like Damog, been glad to see Anthony attend the Debian Latin America community BOF but I tend to believe that being in all the place people would like to see him and talk with everybody who wants to talk with him, is simply not humanly possible. Finally, after lunch, we i18n dudes continued with a huge discussion, again, to continue drawing ideas for that damn i18n infrastructure stuff. I ended up the "day" completely enthusiast (and, no, without any chemical help) and finishing my mail. Finally, at 02:00 the day finished liked a dream by a nice online chat with Elizabeth (my beloved wife, dudes) who was actually waking up to drive our daughter to the high school. To bed at 03:45...a bit crazy. I have a talk tomorrow...

A recent debian-curiosa thread made my day: # Subject: looking for someone?
# From: "Mitch"
Hi there locvely,
aThis kind aof opportucnity comes ones in a life. I don't want
to miss it. Do you? I am coming to your place in few days
and I thoughc may be we can meet each other. If cyou don't mind
I can send you my pcicturea. I am a girl.
You can bcorrespond with me using my email cpael@popmailme.com

# From: 'Mash
Sorry I prefer a women who isn't so keen on placing random letters
in her words. Apparently they are rubbish in bed.
I mean what the hell is a "pcicturea," something from the
Anne-summers Jurassic collection? 'Mash

# From: Shawn McMahon
I prefer women who aren't named "Mitch".