In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France. 6nergies This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl... Xin c m n, ng Mai! I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations... Saaks mie puhuu suomee siin videoesittelyzz ? Eik ha? H ? The Food From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap! The Book Heaven France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French. Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura r ussi assimiler la langue de Moli re avant Debconf7? The People Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say? The Crossroad Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so... Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la r gion parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte exp rience de la gestion de produits bas s sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: le ons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak! The Paradox Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish). Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

This week, following the announce of the freeze, I upgraded most of my home cluster to Etch. The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly, although I had a bit of a scare when the kernel upgrade pulled in a bunch of dependencies that resulted in the forced removal of all previous kernels. This minor scare asides, kudos to everyone who made this new Debian release possible! My only disappointment about Etch is that we're stuck with Firefox 1.5.0.7 instead of 2.0.1 or Iceweasel. Then again, speaking of Iceweasel: Forget it! Breakages it introduces have been marked as pending or patched for a number of weeks and yet there's still no updated package. At this rate, better wait until Etch r1 or Lenny to introduce it, rather than release Etch with a browser fork that has not undergone several months of thorough testing! This got me thinking about life after Etch, or more specifically, about what I'm gonna do with the packages I maintain. The Dunc Tank debacle and similar other unfortunate events that overtook Debian this year have prompted me to reevaluate my motivation. Another unrelated issue is, I've been working in software development for more than 10 years and my guts are telling me that it's time to move on so, while my computers will still run on Debian or Ubuntu, I don't intend on doing any more development per-se. Thus, I have already taken the initiative of soliciting co-maintainers for most of my packages. The Debian GNOME team agreed to be added for Planner, which is nice given the sheer number of bugs that are regularly found against this package. CUPS-PDF, Gaim-IRChelper and NumlockX haven't seen a meaningful bug in ages and can be rebuilt using bin-NMU magic, so they're pretty much taken care of. This leaves the issue of the Estonian and Russian dictionaries (plus a large patch in my personal repository that would upgrade Aigars' Latvian dictionary to generate the Aspell wordlist from his MySpell wordlist) open. For these, native speakers that develop for Debian or Ubuntu would be welcome to join me. What next? I have a couple of interesting offers, one on the Business side of computer hardware manufacturing in Estonia and another one as the manager of a western company's Latvian office. The tricky part in either case would be the immigration process: despite close to 9 years of living right here in Europe, I am still perceived as foreign labor whose hiring must be thoroughly justified (in the case of Estonia, I even need to request an explicit exemption to the immigration quotas), whereas if I had been granted EC Long-Term Resident status or Finnish citizenship, I could just sign the contract and notify the local authorities of my change of address. Instead, 9 years later, I'm stuck at the passport control queues for non-EU citizens with its disgustingly suspicious border guards. Sigh! Thus, while I indeed have shares in Linutop (yes, we are finally shipping - stay tuned for details) that might eventually turn into gold, I also have close to zero motivation left in my personal life, because lingering European bureaucrazy prevents my talent from reaching its customers - turning all my attempts at having a career into a neverending series of bitter disappointments. Is it any wonder that I'm so adamant about getting out of the Rat Race to return to more gratifying creative activities like composing and photography, then? Post Scriptum Actually, there is a second disappointment about Etch: we are stuck with Evince 0.4.0, at a time where upstream just released 0.7.0 with strong recommendations that everyone upgrade to that. Heck, even Ubuntu has 0.6.0 already. I find the Evince situation way more annoying than the Firefox one, because, from a user's perspective, Evince 0.4.0 fails to display several PDF documents that more recent releases handle just fine.

Kenshi sent the following GPG-signed message to the Debian CUPS mailing list today:

Hi folks, As you know, there are many bugs about CUPS including Release-critical and I haven't an enough time to fix them. My primary motivation was to internationalize/localize it. Now it is already implemented by upstream. Unfortunately CUPS is too complex for me to maintain. I haven't a time to track bugs, I haven't an enough knowledge about Postscript or printer specific codes, and I haven't any testbed of user's printers. If you'd like to become primary CUPS maintainer instead of me, I pass a baton happily :) Of course I'll support you such as uploading. Thanks,

Interested parties should contact kmuto directly to manifest their intention.

Well, my colo box lives again. Ish. It's now running under a Xen instance until the new hardware arrives that'll fix it's blown up PSU. So I can now be contacted via the usual methods again :)

In other news, it seems that the new 2012 logo has been announced. It's really quite foul. Fortunately, others have come up with alternate designs. See image 5. If it gets pulled (very likely) see my mirror.

hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic Hi, Planet!
Welcome to my blog, and thanks to Martin for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on freenode or oftc (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).

After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at work: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and UTF-8 for file names instead of ISO8859-15. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way.
In theory this is easy, as convmv happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (Apple_Filing_Protocol) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX1). Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:
Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the CAP encoding. So we had to find a way to

• convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8
• replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character

Luckily netatalk ships the uniconv(1) util2) which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID3) Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd CNID backend:

• uniconv assumes that cnid_metad is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time!
• If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your AppleVolumes.default (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished.

Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! 1) and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (UTF-8#Mac_OS_X), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms 2) it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with netatalk 3) Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac OS versions

Copy of a mail I sent to debian-www earlier today. I don't think it warrants posting to -devel-announce, but I post it here to make it visible to people not usually following debian-www. Since I seem to sense an increased stream of offers to help out with packages.d.o coming my way (but maybe that is just wishful thinking ;) I wanted to give a short update on the development of the current code and the status of the infrastructure so that nobody can claim he wanted to help but failed due to lack of information.

• The code in the CVS is seriously lacking in many regards, especially update and CGI speed. It runs pretty stable though and since we excluded robots from using the CGI scripts it seems to run with at least enough speed to keep any big complaints from rising. (If anyone is interested, packages.d.o currently has about 200,000 page hits a day, with a notable decrease – up to 50,000 – during the etch freeze and a similar increase after release)
• packages.d.o is currently run on puccini.d.o, this host is exclusivly used for this purpose. Adminstration is be done by group pkg_maint, current members are Martin 'Joey' Schulze and me.
• The same code is also used to create the page packages.ubuntu.com, see branch ubuntu in CVS. packages.ubuntu.com is run a private server of mine and only administrated by me.
• Everybody with write access to the website has also write access to this part of the CVS. The code run on packages.d.o is updated once a day during the update cron job. Since there is no staging ground for changes, any commits should be made with extreme care...
• Last year Jeroen van Wolffelaar and I started to develop a new version with the goal to make dynamic page generation possible which allows for faster update of information and more flexible presentation. We coordinated our work by using a SVN repository located at svn.wolffelaar.nl.
• This development was stalled several times when he and/or I had no time to actively pursue it.
• In April 2007 I decided to revive the development to get the code in a state ready for deployment. Since I was by then inititated in the wonders of distributed scm, I decided to move the code to yet another repository, namely git (for cloning use git://source.djpig.de/git/packages.git) There is also a ubuntu branch there but it is in a rather sorry state atm regarding site layout.
• I think the new code is currently in a state where it could be safely deployed to packages.d.o but I'm currently waiting for an etch upgrade of the host since the code has grown some dependencies on stuff only available in etch. The next possibility for this to happen is probably during Debconf.
• I don't know yet how to handle the SCM stuff when the code is to be deployed.
• You can try out this new code base at packages.debian.net (Might be slightly out-of-date sometimes since I don't run the cronjob as often as possible to give packages.ubuntu.com more ressources)
• Bug reports and patches against this version are very much welcome, please send them directly to me (but feel free to CC debian-www if you want to have an open discussion on the matter in question).
• Bug reports and patches against the version currently in use should be directed to the BTS as usual.
• If there is interest we can make a little improvised BoF about packages.d.o at Debconf.

This thread on the Sun initiative to produce a more Linux-like distribution of OpenSolaris is interesting not so much for the technical goals, but as an insight into the community. The immediate response to the proposal? A set of complaints that it hasn't followed the correct process.

Now, to be fair, there have been other threads discussing the technical and social desirability of such a distribution already and some are still ongoing - it's not like the OpenSolaris community has ignored it entirely in favour of process fetishising. However, it's indicative of a community that's more concerned with procedure than it is with producing high quality software. What I suspect has happened is that Sun felt it was important to ensure that procedures were put in place before creating a community in order to avoid the problem of it immediately turning into low-grade anarchy. The problem with this is that if you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.

Sun's clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place here. They don't want to be seen to be directing the community too strongly, or they'd end up like Red Hat did with Fedora - you alienate your community by giving them the impression that they have no influence over the direction of the distribution. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the Ubuntu community strongly suggests that having a strong leader can ensure that people don't get too bogged down in procedure at the cost of technical progress.

I suspect that Sun made the wrong call here. Having more corporate influence to begin with might have put off some contributors, but it would also have allowed the development of a functional community at an earlier stage. Sun could then gradually withdraw (as Red Hat have been doing with Fedora) and let the community play a larger role. Perhaps that way we'd hear more about the technical contributions coming out of OpenSolaris and they wouldn't be left with just the same two cards they've been playing for a couple of years now - dtrace and ZFS.

On something of a tangent, I don't think their choice of license has helped a great deal here. Two of the areas where OpenSolaris is most behind Linux are hardware support and desktop/kernel integration. The choice of a GPL-incompatible license strongly discourages any Linux developers from working with the low-level code of OpenSolaris due to the perceived risk of contaminating the Linux codebase at some later point. That rules out a huge pool of skilled developers (I'm going to be potentially controversial here and say that I suspect Linux has a larger skillset here than all the BSDs put together, and quite possibly Solaris added to that) who are writing a good deal of advanced code. Meanwhile we're left with OpenSolaris having even worse laptop support than FreeBSD. These are people who could have added to the community socially as well as technically. Instead you've got a community led by a set of Sun staff who are paranoid about doing anything that might make it look like Sun controls the community. Score.

I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic. So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale version to meet the requirements of that locale. That allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed.

monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179

Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (~sans-serif) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Though DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, another thing I’m interested in. Unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly. Ouch. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free, sigh…. My friend also writes:

sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts...

I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some core fonts instead dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic and learn from the lazyweb. :) So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale to have it’s own Webconverger i18n version. I hope this approach allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale well is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed.

monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179

Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (actually they are the same, thnks Panthera!) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Update: Mike Day informs me this is what Red Hat are doing, developing a set of fonts that are metrically equivalent to the key Microsoft fonts. DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, though unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly, as it was designed with some other proprietary font in mind. Ouch! Web designers please use ‘em’ units and this problem such as over lapping text could be avoided. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free theft, sigh…. My friend also writes:

sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts…

I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. Update: Henri Sivonen wisely points out that “in the case of DejaVu, adding glyphs to Vera as an open source project seems to work”. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some cultural core fonts for their locality instead of being dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

I'm a bit late to this party, but the NSLU2—affectionately known as the 'slug'—is a piece of kit you can't afford to be without on your home or small office network. Not much bigger than the palm of my hand, and cheaper than a ticket for a Test at Lord's, the NSLU2 is a small fileserver that serves files from attached USB disks. What makes it particularly special is the large amount of alternative firmwares built by Linux open source developers, which allow you to extend the functionality of the NSLU2 beyond merely serving out files via SMB (the Windows file serving protocol.) Cheap NFS serving  So what's the big deal for me? Well, like most laptop-slinging folks whose home network is predominantly wireless, I want my backup disks to sit on the network, available when needed. It turns out it's very difficult to find a standalone network disk that properly supports Unix file system semantics such as symbolic links. Most just support SMB file sharing, with attendant limits such as no links and no files over 2GB. (I found this out the hard way with Apple's Airport Extreme.) With the NSLU2 I was able to install the "Unslung" alternative firmware, and install good old NFS, making my backup disks available in a normal way to Linux and OS X machines alike. (How we used to complain about NFS back in the early 90s, but Windows file sharing still makes it look good!) In the great tradition of open source there are multiple choices of Linux distributions you can install. As it was my first time round, I went for Unslung, which preserves as much as possible of the official Linksys interface, but lets you extend it. Next time, with a better idea of what I'd use the box for, I'd probably plump for Debian.  Constraints breed creativity Inside the case, the NSLU2 is in fact a tiny Linux machine with 32MB of RAM and an Intel XScale CPU. This turns out to be plenty enough resources to serve files on a small network. Aside from my prosaic needs, the NSLU2 has been put to several more innovative uses, such as a music server for Apple ITunes and a 4-line home telephone exchange. I've been astounded at the applications people have devised for this little box. Being fairly cheap makes it a great candidate for home automation projects. It's a great example of how limiting resources fosters innovation. Remember how games on 8-bit microcomputers were so much more ingenious than those on their more well-resourced successors?
So, I may be a little slow in finding this little hardware gem, but I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Debconf is coming. And I fully agree with Amaya regarding the much needed battery recharge that brings to people (and me in particular.
And to the contrary to the information two posts ago, thanks to getting an unexpected side income from the nice folks of FFII, I did manage to buy myself a Canon 400D instead of my old camera that was stolen from me recently. Unfortunately, I do not earn well enough to also buy a good lens, so I will have to document this Debconf with the kit lens :P. If you want something better, then I beg you to lend me some better Canon (EF or EF-S) lens for the time of the Debconf. Canon EF 17-40 f/4 L (like the one that I took the last years group photos) would really be great!
This year I am thinking of doing both the group photo and the mugshots. Any other ideas for the paparazzi?

My first day at LinuxTag is over. I’m a bit tired, but the day was nice. We had many visitors at our booth and some nice conversations. We sold a few t-shirts and gave a way a lot of Debian DVDs. Unfortunately there was also a high demand on Live CDs which we couldn’t fulfill since we still don’t have official Live images. Last but not least, it was very nice to meet some other Debian Developers. Unfortunately I can’t attend at our booth tomorrow, but I’m already looking forward to Friday (Debian Day!).

In a Heartbeat cluster installation it may not be possible to have one STONITH device be used to reboot all nodes. To support this it is possible to have multiple STONITH devices configured that will each be used to reboot different nodes in the cluster. In the following code section there is an example of how to configure STONITH for two separate ssh instances. Of course this is not useful apart from as an example of how to configure STONITH. It would be quite easy to change one of those ssh configuration entries to use IPMI or some more effective method of managing machines. My previous post on this topic has an example of a simpler ssh STONITH configuration. It is convenient that the ssh method for rebooting nodes is available both as a shared object (which is used by the following example XML) and as a shell script (type external/ssh). The shell script can be used to give the same functionality as the shared object (with reduced performance) but the benefit is as an example of how to write external plugins. For a client I have just written an IPMI module that works with machines that have two Ethernet ports. When a server has two Ethernet ports you want to send an IPMI reset command to both of them in case the failure which requires a STONITH was triggered by a broken Ethernet cable. Unfortunately I can’t release the IPMI code at this time (more…)

Yesterday I wrote in Planet Debian requesting information on how to copy binary files to a Linux-based Axesstel modem. Meanwhile, I wrote Axesstel Customer Service with a friendly thank you for making a great product and kindly asking them for pointers. I’ve had some degree of satisfaction when writing to the Customer Services of several enterprises, and I really hoped this would be another one. 48 hours later, they replied with this message: Dear Customer,
First, thank you very much for purchasing Axesstel product and your kind feedback.
Unfortunately, we cannot released requested information because it is against security policy. We hope for your understanding.
Also, we recommend that you refrain yourself from accessing internal commands of the unit because it may violated service agreement enforced by your local service provider.
Once again, thank you for your understanding.
Axesstel Support So, if you have an Axesstel modem or if you are interested on having a free OS in your Axesstel, you may join the Laxative project in BerliOS or just make some noise in your blog, webpages or mailing lists with your Axesstel-related projects. If you happen to work at a place where you export your Security Policy to any aspect of your relationship with your customesr and where you tell them to refrain themselves of trying to improve your products for free, please read on about Open Source Hardware and its business models. It might be the time to start sharing information and sleeping without guilt :)

Sven Mueller wrote a nice blog about how important it is to donate blood. To cite him: Please donate blood if you can. If you are uncomfortable with the choice you made on your first donation, check out other options for donations. I agree wholeheartedly! I heard from a Lady, who can't donate blood herself, since she doesn't feel comfortable with it -- I can understand it, I hate needles and don't like to see my own blood neither. But she wants to help nonetheless, so she volunteered to help during blood drives: She sits by the people donating blood, talks to them, helps them walk around when they still feel dizzy, give out food and drinks, etc.

Hi. Recently, on planet.debian.org, there were quite a few posts relating to blood donations. I must say that I really only live thanks to people donating blood. As many might know, I had a freaking motorcycle accident about 9 years ago. Well, apart from loosing my right leg in the weeks following the accident (irreparable damages to tissues led to amputation), I also lost a lot of blood after the accident. In the six hours following the accident, I got no less than 65 blood infusions (approximately 24-30 litres or 6-8 US gallons). As you can imagine, this is about 3-4 times as much blood as my body normally carries around. At least I can say that I didn’t receive blood without giving some before, though certainly I wasn’t able to give that much blood (I donated about 10 times, approx. 0.45 litres each time). However, due to the medication I now need, I can’t donate blood anymore. Anyhow, I strongly suggest to anyone who is capable of donating blood to do so. And regarding Thijs comment about the frequency of donation and payment: This is highly depending on the area you live in and the organisation who manages the donations. For example, while I donated blood in Dortmund, Germany, I had two options to donate blood: German Red Cross, who would accept a donation every 6 weeks, with free sandwiches, drinks and chocolate but without payment and the city-owned hospital’s blood bank, which allowed a donation every 3 month, with free drinks and a 50DEM (approx. 25EUR/30USD) payment. This sounds as if the city-owned blood bank could attract homeless and junkies who were in for the money, but from my experience, the blood bank did far stricter pre-donation tests (I can’t tell what they did after donation for either organisation) than the red cross. And knowing how much money can be earned with the blood donated, I certainly think that payment is fair, though not strictly necessary. And the blood bank people did a much better job when applying the needle than the red cross people did, which might be because they were used to taking blood from people with bad veins (mostly patients donating blood for themselves for use in a later, planned surgery). But to be fair: I know from other people who had very good experiences with the red cross staff in this respect. Once again: Please donate blood if you can. If you are uncomfortable with the choice you made on your first donation, check out other options for donations. For example, if you almost collapsed when donating blood, try out the plasma donation if it is offered. They usually take the plasma, but give back an equal volume of a substitution, so your circulation isn’t disturbed as much as by taking approx. 0.5 litres from it within an hour. If you feel that the person who applied the needle did a bad job, ask for someone else next time or try a different organisation altogether. cu,
Sven

One of my current projects involves setting up a website that is translated to at least two languages. For various reasons I wanted to use IkiWiki as the backend, even though the site is static, and does not need the wiki functionality. IkiWiki is, in principle, a wiki engine, but with a difference: it is run off-line, and creates a set of static HTML pages, rather than running every time a page is accessed. This makes it suitable for static websites. For the translation, I wanted to have the following setup: Each page is available in each language, so the pages are named foo.xx.html, with xx being the ISO language code. This also allows HTTP content negotiation to work, if the client asks for the page without the .html suffix. IkiWiki itself does not currently have support for translations. Doing translations by manually editing each page in each language is tiresome and error prone. I wanted to use the gettext approach, where the translations are maintained using .po files. The po4a tool makes this possible: it supports many file formats. English is declared as the original language for this project: all other languages are generated via po4a from the English ones. The page content gets put into foo.xx.mdwn. po4a generates all other language files than English, and these are then fed as input to IkiWiki, which generates the HTML. In summary and horrible ad hoc pseudo-notation:

• po4a: foo.en.mdwn -> foo.pot
• cp: foo.pot -> foo.xx.po
• $EDITOR: update translation in foo.xx.po
• po4a: foo.en.mdwn + foo.xx.po -> foo.xx.mdwn
• IkiWiki: foo.*.mdwn -> foo.*.html

This works pretty well, but only for the part of the page that gets put into the content section in the IkiWiki page template (<TMPL_VAR CONTENT>). The page design we have calls for a couple of elements with translatable content outside the content: a logo and a menu/navigation bar. To deal with these, I made a little IkiWiki plugin. The plugin sets a couple of Perl HTML::Template variables, LANG and BASENAME, based on the input file name. If the input name is foo.en.mdwn, the variable get set to en and foo, respectively. The IkiWiki page template then uses the variables to load the right logo for the language of the page being generated. The navigation bar needs further work. Unfortunately, the po4a tools have trouble with the IkiWiki page templates, and can't extract just the menu entries. I ended up doing the navigation bar translation directly in the page template, since it is only a few words anyway.

<li><a href="index.<TMPL_VAR LANG>.html">
<TMPL_IF EN>Home
<TMPL_ELSE FI>Etusivu
</TMPL_IF></a></li>


The "this page in other languages" part of the navigation part looks like this:

<li><a href="<TMPL_VAR BASENAME>.fi.html">suomeksi</a></li>

I made the plugin (my first Perl ever!) available in case anyone else finds it useful. Note that the plugin isn't of much help if you want to maintain a translated wiki, since this all need some Makefile magic to make things smooth. I'm not sure the Makefile is at all optimal, though. We haven't yet gone public with the website, so this setup of mine may well get improvements still.

Well, the people have spoken, now the airwaves are full of puzzled politicans and pundits trying to decide what they said. The outcome was a suprise, especially in Galway West (where I live), for which I'm annoyed; as I said before, a poll would have been useful. Niall O'Brolch in, said in the last poll in March to be likely to take a seat, came fairly off the mark, unfortunately. Quick summary: The Irish Parliament (the D il) has 166 seats, so the majority is 83 (I seat goes to the Chair or Ceann Comhairle). In recent years, majorities of one or two seats are normal, so we all wait for the final seats to be decided before really knowing the outcome: The Bookmakers paid out for Bertie Ahern being the next Taoiseach by 9.30 AM yesterday, though technically the numbers could still add up for the alternative, Enda Kenny. We might not know until next week.

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Tags politics, galway, greens

Yesterday I did something, I should have done a long time ago. I donated blood. I donated blood several times already, especially when I was in army service and a nearby University hospital called for help, when they where running low. I must confess it wasn't only the feel good factor that motivated me back then; you could donate blood during your duty hours, got some money, something to eat a way better than the normal food we got and additionally you where freed from heavy duty for two days. Even after I got out of military service, I went a couple of times to donate blood. But for some reason -- I don't know why -- I stopped for a couple of years. Well; the funny thing is, that the German red Cross has often these collect blood sessions in a nearby school, which is on my way back to university, but even that didn't worked. I always had something else in mind or planed for that evening. However, the other day we found a flier of one of those collect blood sessions yesterday evening. And so we went there... and where surprised how many people wanted to donate blood! I can't remember that I ever had to wait to donate blood, but this time they said they had many first time donors, which need special care. Rest of the story is easy: After some interesting conversation (You know how that works? -- Yes, I look away, and you do the rest and tell me nothing!), Meike and myself had half a liter less, and enjoyed a very nice meal. As I already said: I don't understand, why I didn't did it for such a long time; nice atmosphere, nice things to eat, nice people taking care of you... I'm going to donate more often. Perhaps you want to try it, too?

Note: tested to work at least on Thinkpad X60, Debian unstable, recent 2.6 kernel.

# apt-get install hibernate
# hibernate-ram

Done. I thought a lot of people knew this already… PS. You might need to set IbmAcpi yes in /etc/hibernate/common.conf. Edit: thanks to Evgeni Golov for the even shorter command.