Incredible day here in Montreal. The temperature got over 31C today -- about 88 F -- which made for a steamy, jungly day. Remember how I said we had predictions of snow flurries two weeks ago? Things change quickly. Of course, hot weather and high humidity are a recipe for smog. Add on top of that the fact that Montreal is in the middle of a public transit strike, and you've got a serious air quality problem. Fortunately we should have some rain this weekend to shake that out. tags: weather montreal hot smog

EC2 I spent a big part of my day twiddling around getting a nice Ubuntu server running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon's EC2 is an innovative server-provisioning API; beta testers for EC2 can build or tear down servers for any purpose in a few minutes using EC2 and Amazon S3. I wrote a few years ago, in a widely-reproduced email, a reply making fun of Jeff Bezos and Amazon's supposed innovations. But let me be frank: Amazon Web Services are a shithouse crazy idea. I think that Jeff Bezos must have been a complete nutjob to bet the company on these zany technologies; I also think it's brilliant, and it's going to change the way we think about using computers. I included EC2 in Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. I think that decision was really justified. My EC2 instances now run Ubuntu Feisty Fawn; lighty, MySQL and PHP. It seems to be a winning combination; I'm looking forward to using EC2 for a production Web or database server. tags: ec2 amazonwebservices amazon jeffbezos oneeyedman

rel-edit I mentioned already the great work that AboutUs.org is doing to organize a Universal Wiki Edit Button. I decided to kick in on the machine-readable side and proposed a rel-edit microformat. So far the microformats-discuss mailing list has been pretty positive on the idea, but I'm going to wait a few days before posting a draft on the microformats wiki. tags: rel-edit microformats uweb mailinglist microformats-discuss

Salt I just finished reading Salt: A World History, a nice non-fiction book by researcher extraordinaire Mark Kurlansky. The book covers this important mineral, its importance to human life, and the many ways to extract it to make it available for us. The book covers mummification in ancient Egypt, salt taxes in China, fish sauce in Vietnam, and Mahatma Gandhi's great salt march in India. It's so comprehensive that it can really make your head spin; but it's also exciting to see world history refracted through these whitish crystals. I think it's a great book, and I'm looking forward to reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by the same author. But we just got Everything is Miscellaneous from Amazon this week, so I think I'll be digging through that before I get to Cod. tags: salt markkurlansky nonfiction nacl cod

reCAPTCHA I heard about recaptcha via Hugh's article about same. Brilliant idea; why didn't someone think of this before? (Update: it was about 5 minutes after I posted this that I realized, "Hey! That can't work!" So I went back and re-read the docs on reCAPTCHA again. Now I'm even more impressed.) tags: recaptcha ingenious ocr

I want to ride my I've been thinking of picking up a bicycle for a few weeks now, as the weather has cleared here in town. So today I went up to Garantie Bicycle on rue Marie-Anne and bought the cheapest damn bike they had that wasn't made specifically for pre-pubescent children. Woohoo! The last time I had I bike, I lived in San Francisco. It was a beautiful cherry-red Cannondale hybrid -- with that great fat Cannondale tube, but light enough that I could lift it with one finger. I rode it around SF a lot, and took it out for trail biking on weekends in Marin County and the Peninsula and even the Sierra Nevada. It was a tough bike to ride, but once you got used to it it was a dream to take up hills. But that bike was stolen at Burning Man 2001, during the actual Burn. It's a classic mistake: professional bike thieves go to Burning Man each year to snag bikes left unlocked by tired and idealistic Burners, especially at times when camps are left empty, like during the Burn. To be honest, it was kind of a relief: I'd already moved out of my apartment and was planning a trip around North America, and I didn't have room in my Citro n DS for a bike. Nor in my storage locker at the weird and wonderful Sunshine Storage in Oakland. But it was too nice a bike to throw away or give to one of my no-good friends, who were mostly too short for it anyways. So bicycle theft was the best solution. Sam Phillips had his bike stolen at the same time. The bike thieves left a lot of cheapo bikes around our camp. They liked mine and Sam's, though. Anyways, my new bike was quite inexpensive, and it weighs a metric ton. It's built like you're supposed to drive trains over it. I could never, ever carry it up a steep and muddy hill, and I wouldn't bother. Fortunately for me Montreal is really, really flat, so I don't really need to worry about riding this thing up hills. It will look pretty good with a baby seat on the back, though. tags: montreal garantiebicycle burningman bicycle theft samphillips sunshinestorage oakland cannondale

$ 5000 medical bill (that insurance won’t pay for)
$ 450 water bill in Puerto Rico
$ 150 library fine for one lost book that normally costs under 20 dollars Anxiety and rage from dealing with these ludicrous bills: priceless. Ok seriously I am now dealing with these three things and it has been really really really unpleasant. I sometimes wonder if I was once a bad as* Roman tax collector by the name of Biella Plebius and now, reincarnated as Biella Coleman, I am suffering the karmic consequences of extorting people in the 3rd century A.D. Other times I take a lighter approach to all of this and console myself that if nothing else, I am learning a lot. For example, as I had mentioned awhile back, Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon of New Jersey is stalling and denying health insurance bills for my mole surgery. Because I had a pre-existing clause in my contract, they are trying to squirrel out of it. However, since I never had a pre-existing issue with moles, I am pretty sure they are required to pony up the cash but getting them to do this has been a Herculean, no Sisyphean task. Since it was clear they were not going to pay if I alone was applying pressure, I was about to file a claim in Special Civil court (the bill is too high for small claims court) but I wanted to see if I had any other options. So hours and hours after diligent web research, I finally found on lawyers.com that I can file a complaint against my health insurance via the Department of Banking and Insurance. I am amazed that NO ONE in the doctor’s office, including those whose only job is to deal with health insurance, had a clue about this option. And even when you go to the Dept of Insurance website it is not totally obvious that you can file a complaint (it is under the “file for assistance” category). But once I got in touch with them, they have been incredibly helpful. Now, my detailed complaint letter is with them, and some other documentation and apparently they have an investigator on the case. I am not sure if this route will be enough pressure to get the job done but at least by the time this is over, I will be in the greater NY area so that I can move to the court option. The take away lesson here is that if you are having any trouble with claims and health insurance, do do do do file a complaint with your state Department of Banking and Insurance. This is a great first option to use.

In the last two weeks, life has been jam packed, full of movement and travel and a bit of sensory overload. I went to San Francisco to visit friends from the past but also took a trip to NYC to help set things up for the future. Logistically, it certainly was not enjoyable to travel from Edmonton to SF to NYC and back to SF before heading back to Edmonton, which was only made worse by the fact that I was sick flying back from NYC to SF. But taken from an aesthetic point of view, there was something that made sense about going back and forth between cities that in reality connect my past with my future. For it was my time in SF when I did my research that more or less made possible my future life in NYC. I had not been back to SF since I had left in the summer of 2003. My mom’s illness kept me away from the west, pulled instead toward the east. In fact, right before I left SF was also the time when my mother’s condition took a turn for the worse and I started to travel only for work or to visit my mom PR (or Debconf, which is, well, somewhere in between work and play). Because of my relatively long absence and the many memories of the area, my return hit vividly. You may leave a place, but when you return you are reminded of how much a place always leaves some imprint in your body and soul, which resurface upon your return. Feelings and memories of the past flickered to consciousness when my eyes first absorbed the stunningly beautiful (but also vulnerable) geography of the Bay Area: the pale blue sky, the colorful bridges and houses, the ridiculously steep hills, the wispy and thick fog. San Francisco is a city, it seems to me, that has made a Faustian pact with nature. Nature and the geography have not been completely conquered. They seep right into the man-made environment, which is why it is so beautiful here. But it comes at a price measured in ways small and large. Daily battle with the hills is a small reminder and the larger reminders come in the form of terrifying earthquakes. It was really great to see many friends, many of whom I have stayed in constant touch with on IRC, but of course, from time to time, a little flesh and blood goes a lot further than the bits and bytes. While SF does not have a high retention rate (apparently 30% of the population changes every 2 years), many of my techie friends have faithfully remained and other techie friends have since made their way to Bay Area. As much as I find this city amazing, I was reminded of how much I find San Francisco’s weather completely objectionable, disliking it even more than the cold Canadian north (really).The damp cold and constant wind are impossible to escape, only made worse by lousy indoor heating like the cozy heater I already blogged about (and apparently, this is how you can fix it). I am staying in the outer Mission district, which is where I lived for a while, and I do love the slightly warmer temperatures, flatness of the streets, and very colorful murals. While Valencia street has moved up a few notches on the gentrification scale, it does not seem out of control. And of course, the city is brimming with a particular mixture of youth and tech. In the many coffee shops, youthful faces are illuminated by Shiny New Laptops and it seems like at least every third person you meet works in the technology industry. I had not planned on heading out to the east coast but since I was given the option of seeing a couple of apartments courtesy of NYU housing, I decided it was well worth my while to make the cross country trip, given that it may be my future home for many years. Spring in NYC is one of its more flattering incarnations for there is a slight touch of nature that drapes the city, a touch that is absent during the height of the summer when the hot concrete jungle overtakes the flowers and trees. Heading to NYC briefly also reminded me that moving to NYC feels like a really BIG move. And not because the distance between Edmonton and NYC is 3900 KM but because of what it represents. It sort of dawned on me recently that becoming an assistant professor is not unlike the grueling period real doctors go through once they graduate medical school: residency. Even though by the time you start your job, you have been bequeathed with the title of a doctor, and are prepared to teach, advise, etc., in reality you are only half-baked and there is more cooking for you to go under. You need to go through a few more years of somewhat intense training to seal the deal and that is what is awaiting me starting this fall.

If you bought one of those cheap WLAN-routers which provides a DHCP server but no DNS (why again?), you probably miss the feature to access your hosts in the LAN by their name, right? If you’re running a fairly recent Linux distribution (yes, Etch works too), just try to ping them with the .local DNS suffix, like phoibe.local or hades.local. If that doesn’t work, check if avahi-daemon is installed on the machines you want to resolve. If not (which is unlikely on recent desktop machines), just install it and your machine will be available via hostname.local. I wasn’t aware that I would ever need this “zeroconf crap” until I replaced my rusty old Dell Optiplex GXa router with a less energy consuming and much more silent Linksys WRT54G. Unfortunately I bought Version 7 which only comes with 2MB flash and is therefore not supported by openwrt. So without my precious dnsmasq on my router, I was suddenly blind in my own LAN — and very thankful to find out that zeroconf already took care of my problem.

I keep having what I've started to think of as the "calendar conversation" with various people. I start by outlining what I think are some fairly reasonable requirements. I'd like to have multiple calenders viewable by different sets of people. So Simon would be able to view my work calendar, while Katherine could see my personal calender (and possibly small bits of work calender where I was going to be away from home). I also want to be able to view my calenders from a variety of devices. My desktop, my phone and my laptop, for example. A web interface might be nice too, though less important to me. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask. My general hope is that whoever I'm boring about this will then say "Oh, you need to look at foo and maybe bar". After all, that's the case with most software related things I need - it's already been done, and there's a good solution available. What actually happens is the person I'm talking to nods in agreement and says they'd like the same sort of things but don't know of anything that manages it. I think the problem comes down to syncing. Sharing my calendars with other people is effectively allowing them to sync their calendar(s) with mine, with some sort of filtering so we each see only what the other wants to see. Likewise, multiple devices is all about syncing. Changes made via one method need to be visible on all of them (ideally as soon as possible). Decent syncing also brings another advantage; client independence. If I can reliably sync my information to a variety of devices/clients then I can try a different client with little risk. We have this already for mail - anything that can talk POP3, IMAP and/or mbox is easy to try out and if you don't like it then you can just change back to what you had before or try something else. Calendaring doesn't seem to have that. I don't think that the interface a client exposes needs to be complex. At a basic level what you need is a way to find out what the client thinks has been added, removed or changed. You also need to present this information in a standard format. Unfortunately iCal (RFC2445) appears to be what we've got here. I think it's a bit overly inclusive, which seems to lead to incomplete implementations. Is there a complete iCal parser library out there? The best hope for syncing that I'm aware of is OpenSync. And I haven't been that impressed; while I managed to get it to move the contacts from my SonyEricsson v600i to my Nokia E70 some of the details got mangled on the way. And lack of things like recurring event support in some of the plugins (eg the Google Calendar syncing adaptor) or warnings about data loss in the Sunbird plugin aren't encouraging. Speaking of Sunbird, I'm not impressed. Last time I looked (and it doesn't appear to have moved very far since then) it didn't make any attempt to support syncing. I'm sorry, WebDAV isn't a syncing system. It's a way of storing files remotely. Sure, I found the interface ok, but I need to make my calendaring data accessible for it to be useful. The Windows approach to all of this seems to be ActiveSync and the use of Outlook. I don't believe that it really handles more than the desktop client and a remote device though? And group calendar sharing requires an Exchange server? Not exactly the flexible solution I'm looking for. I think a key point is that all of this needs to be reliable. I didn't spend time debugging my OpenSync contact syncing issues partly because I didn't notice straight away that there was a problem (it was with additional details like email addresses rather than names/numbers IIRC), but also because it was a lot of work to delve into the code and find out just what on earth was going on. A while back I started looking at writing some calendar syncing code (called Pony) and hit a problem with complete inconsistency in handling time zones between clients that put me right off. If it's not reliable it's not useful. If it's not useful people won't test it and fix it. I think a starting point is a reliable iCal implementation that can handle everything in the spec. From there you can write plugins that will take whatever bastardised variant your device/client supports and translate to and from it. The syncing tool will need to keep a master copy of all the data, because there's no guarantee anything else will be able to support all the fields. A local complete copy should enable appropriate frobbing of data to/from any device/client without losing the information if a new device/client that can handle the data is added. Of course almost all the above applies to contacts as well; I have work contacts, personal contacts, boring house contacts (plumber, garage etc). vCard is the appropriate interchange format for that (why did vCalendar become iCalendar, but vCard not change?), but contacts feature similar issues to calendars I believe. Does this seem reasonable? Please tell me someone has already done it. Point me at Debian packages that will let me sync my phone, my Google Calendar and a local client and make me very happy. I have visions of a suite of tools all chatting over DBus; a little client that looks for my phone to appear over bluetooth and then syncs when it does, a little client that monitors Google Calendar for changes. Sunbird reporting when something changes (and accepting notification of changes). Some other client ([Dates http://www.pimlico-project.org/dates.html]?) doing the same. Another sending the data over WebDAV or SFTP so that my laptop can pick up the info when I'm on the move. I don't think I'm the only person looking for this sort of stuff. Where is it?

Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress. It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief. Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

• monospace font
• remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style. That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much? It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document. But wait ... how can I solve my problem now? I see only two awful ways:

1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text
2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

Steve, I know that caching usually helps. But from all test I've made with MediaWiki installation on phpMyAdmin wiki, I can see that enabling any caching slows things down quite a lot. With memcached based caching, each request takes about 15 seconds, if I add XCache backend for variables, it slows down things to 10 seconds and I receive same results with file based caching. So it doesn't seem to be problem with memcached, but rather MediaWiki issue. Unfortunately it's quite a lot of PHP code to investigate and I didn't find anything obvious in low level caching interface. So say good bye to variable caching, opcode cache is enough for now and MySQL seems to handle the load quite well.

A while back I set up a d-i test lab, a kind of automated mechanical computer torture rack, which has been trying (and frequently failing) to automatically install Debian onto a half-dozen varied machines every day for a couple of years. Problem is that hardware sucks, even when it's tucked away in a friend's basement and so not blaring at you with its combined total of 100 fans and 50 disk drives. It has an annoying habit of dying, especially if it's oddball machines for different architectures. Cords have a habit of getting unplugged. It's hard to automate booting from installation media. And so on. A while ago I decided to go virtual. Now, thanks to Dann and Matt and HP, I've gone from this: to this: HP donated hydra, a maxed out 8-way Xeon with 4 (soon 8) disks. The idea is that it can run 7 or so virtual machines, all doing test installs, in parallel. Fast. I'm using kvm for the amd64 and i386 tests. Since Debian has mips and mipsel kernels specially built for running under qemu, I'm able to test the installer for both those arches. Hercules will cover s390, once the kernel gets fixed. This leaves some architectures still todo:

• arm should be supported by qemu, but Debian doesn't yet have a kernel for it. Please, please kernel team, add an arm qemu flavour!
• sparc's qemu support seems very rough. I haven't tried to get it working yet.
• powerpc probably has an emulator I can use. Any suggestions? I need something that can run headless. Qemu would work, if we had an appropriate special kernel for it.
• m68k I have not researched emulators for yet.
• hppa, ia64, and alpha all lack a usable emulator, AFAIK. Luckily I have machines for all of these, so I can pare the physical hardware down to just those 3 boxes.

I also still have to write enough installation test cases to keep this monster machine firing on all 8 cores all day long. It can probably handle around 300-400 installation tests per day. Since hydra has the disk space, and these emulators are generating lots of disk images with Debian pre-installed, I have also set it up to retain the disk images. I imagine that some of these disk images will eventually be useful for devleopment, since it's much easier to boot a disk image rather than sit through a slow qemu install on an arch like mips. I haven't worked out how to make these images publically available yet, but hydra is located on the name network as gluck.debian.org, if anyone wants to get access to them. Update: I also have qemu doing a 'savevm 1' before shutting down, so you can even restore the running system from the disk images. Especially useful if the install failed somewhere in d-i! :-) BTW, I can give out accounts on hydra to any Debian developers who need a fast machine to run kvm/qemu on, or to anyone who is interested in setting up their own installation tests.

I just spent the bigger part of the day trying to find a memory corruption issue in a Win32 DLL. The pendant to valgrind would be Rational Purify, which costs almost 1000 Euros per seat, but fortunately there is a trial version. So far, I'm not entirely convinced the software is useful. I found a bunch of leaks and uninitialised variables, but I knew about those already (they all showed up as warnings during compilation). The bug I am hunting for, a place where it overwrites the allocator's structures, goes undetected, and the debugging exception thrown by the runtime is acknowledged silently. I shall now pester their support.

The machine (formerly) hosting this blog was a dedicated server. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the hosting company, but it had the usual pitfalls of dedicated hosting. It was very expensive, which is why I split the service with two friends. We underutilized it. They didn’t provide backup services, so I ran my own using rdiff-backup - I won’t tell you how long I ran it before I bothered to set that up, though. And when something went wrong it could take quite a while to get the machine fixed and running again. Fortunately that only happened twice in all the time we were there. Anyway, our contract with them was up in February, and we decided not to renew. Since all of us were insanely busy at the time we decided to pay the higher monthly rate for three months to give us some time to migrate off. Which of course I left to the last minute. This blog is one of the first services I’ve moved to my new hosting at Slicehost. I don’t have a lot to say about these guys yet, since I haven’t had any trouble. The only downside was catching them at a somewhat turbulent and resource-starved time as they dealt with a wait list for orders, so it took a month for me to get one. They’re working on that problem, though. Towards the end I was checking every two days or so how long it said I’d have to wait. Note to everyone, progress bars that don’t progress are just infuriating. But I happened to check one day during the five minute window between when they sent me confirmation and when my mail client checked for new mail, and poof there it was. This is virtual hosting - Etch on Xen - thus the “slice” naming. They’re a heavy on automation shop, which fits right in with my style. And there is something so viscerally awesome about entering your credit card number, clicking OK, having their software allocate and create a virtualized disk, bootstrapping Etch onto it, and showing you its IP and root password. It doesn’t get much better than that. So far I’m happy. I took the opportunity to move to WordPress, away from my old hacked up Blosxom installation. WordPress imported entries easily, although I had to manually fudge the RSS file to prevent it from inserting a log of bogus <br> tags that I didn’t want in the middle of my paragraphs. I probably could have gotten comments imported too, but I didn’t bother - sorry folks, well, it’s not like there were a whole lot of them. The Debian WordPress packages work fine, although the configuration is a bit messy; my biggest complaints were the centralized upload and themes directories so that I had to mess around with symlinks in /usr to get everything going. Maybe I’ll actually use it more I hacked up the GUIDs a bit by hand, so this shouldn’t flood planet, but here’s hoping. Next step: migrating email service to the new system. Always a joy.

Has anyone seen a recent poll for Galway West? (In the Irish General Election, that is). The last poll was March 26th, which is way out-of-date : long prior to the election being called, before the Cryptosporidium Crisis, etc. The result is, I'm in the unusual position of having to make a decision. Ordinarily I'd vote Number 1 for Niall O'Brolch in (Green) and 2. Micheal D. Higgins (Labour). Ireland uses the unusual Single Transferable Vote system, with multi-member constituencies. Galway West is a 5-seat constituency, and Micheal D. is a long-sitting TD, who most would have expected to be automatically returned. Niall O'Brolch in is fairly new; he's a member of the City Council and current Mayor of Galway (thats a relatively powerless post in the Irish local council scheme of things, though). Unfortunately news from the Labour camp appears that too many people assume he will be automatically returned; the word they are getting on the street is "Yes, you'll be getting my no.2 ". But in the STV system, this could mean he wouldn't be in the running. Those votes for the Greens and others will perhaps stay with the Greens and won't transfer to him. So the choice, Vote 1. Greens, which is my natural preference, or 1. Labour, in the hope of getting both Micheal D. and Niall elected? a poll of the current situation would help. BTW, for voting geeks, following the link and reading about STV is worth it. It makes Irish election counts the most fun election counts in the World. One of the main arguments against electronic voting in Ireland has been that it would take all the fun out of the count, which would be over too soon ... Tags politics, galway

Well, theres a General Election here in Ireland on the 24 May, and the politicans are well and truly on the last lap of the campaign trail. We're a bit rural to see them all, for those who don't make it to the door, here's something to think about. In Moycullen we are on the edge of the Gaeltacht. Various institutions, such as the main primary school, have been struggling to retain that status with the encroachment of the B arla 'burbs (suburbs of the Gaeltacht where English dominates). Our children go to Baile Nua, the villages' gaelscoil. To hold standards, the school has a policy of capping its current enrollment (to 84, I think), to keep class sizes small, until the potential intake is large enough to justify another teacher. Fair enough. However this has the side-effect that, in an area supposedly set aside to protect the Irish language, students are necessarily turned away from the only Irish-language school in the Village. Any comments? Tags irish, politics, schools, galway

playing german lotto update: sorry for the broken feed, I hope I ve kicked this piece of php hard enough so it works as it s supposed to work. Tomorrow I ll replace it by something maintainable, written in python. Stefano, I have no clue how the lottery in Italy works, but I ll play the numbers generated by this little program on Wednesday and Saturday:

#!/usr/bin/python
 
numbers = ["09", "F9", "11", "02", "9D", "74", "E3", "5B",
           "D8", "41", "56", "C5", "63", "56", "88", "C0"]
 
#in germany all lotto numbers x must be 1 <= x <= 49
numbers_int = [ (int(num, 16) % 49) + 1 for num in numbers ]
 
#unfortunately 16 numbers are not enough for 3 fields in
#the german lottery, so let's add the current year
#(of course, you can add 2 other numbers, if you don't like this year)
numbers_int += [20, 07]
 
print "your numbers for the german lotto:"
print numbers_int[0:6], numbers_int[6:12], numbers_int[12:18]

1 Pack of mixed BBQ meat: 5,90
1 Bottle of 2005 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo: 1,99
1 Throw away grill: 3,50

The fun that is an indoor BBQ party: Priceless! With the weather being so great and everyone having nice barbecues, we wanted to have one too. Unfortunatelly we don't have a balcony or a (nice) garden. (We do have a grassy patch in front of our house but it's not exactly a place you want to sit at and have dinner.) Also do not have a proper barbecue to take somewhere nice and somehow when we travel to friends we always bring bad weather with us. This weekend however, we decided to go for it. We got ourselfs one of those disposable grills, put it on the largest window sill, strategically placed a fan and a bucket of water and declared the indoor barbecue season officially opened.
Our experiences in short Good:

• Comfortable! Toilet, fridge, heating and electric light nearby
• Easy and low cost. You basically just light the only flammable bit on the whole thing, wait until the nasty accelerant is all burned up and the coals glow nicely
• No carrying around of stuff. Fridge, kitchen table etc near by
• That tiny thing really holds a long time. We both were absolutely stuffed, while the grill was still well hot
• BIG FUN!

Bad:

• SMOKE. The fan helps but doesn't solve the problem entirely
• Grill does not get very hot, large stuff takes a while. Bad when you are hungry, good towards the end though
• Throw away grill manual is only in Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Dutch. I wonder what "Grilli saa k ytt ainoastaan ulkona!" means ...
• Worried looks from people walking by the house at the column of smoke rising from a window at the fourth floor. Help to stand in the window and smile in a relaxed way.
• Running down four floors just because your darling dropped the aluminium foil
• SMOKE! (You don't appreciate the full odeur until you come back into the kitchen the next morning.)

PS: How do you extinguish a throw away grill once you're done? PPS: Shower! PPPS: Kids, do not try this at home!

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <h1><a name="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic" id="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic">hi, planet // iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic</a></h1> <p> <em><strong>Hi, Planet!</strong> <br/> Welcome to my blog, and thanks to <a href="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" title="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" rel="nofollow">Martin</a> 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 <a href="http://freenode.net/" title="http://freenode.net/" rel="nofollow">freenode</a> or <a href="http://www.oftc.net/" title="http://www.oftc.net/" rel="nofollow">oftc</a> (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).</em> <br/> <br/> After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at <a href="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" title="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" rel="nofollow">work</a>: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">UTF-8</a> for file names instead of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15">ISO8859-15</a>. 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. <br/> In theory this is easy, as <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" title="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" rel="nofollow">convmv</a> 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 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol">Apple_Filing_Protocol</a>) 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 OSX<a href="#fn__1" name="fnt__1" id="fnt__1">1)</a>. 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:<br/> Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" rel="nofollow">CAP encoding</a>. So we had to find a way to </p> <ul> <li> convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 </li> <li> replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character </li> </ul> <p> Luckily netatalk ships the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" rel="nofollow">uniconv(1)</a> util<a href="#fn__2" name="fnt__2" id="fnt__2">2)</a> which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID<a href="#fn__3" name="fnt__3" id="fnt__3">3)</a> Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" rel="nofollow">CNID backend</a>: </p> <ul> <li> uniconv assumes that <em>cnid_metad</em> is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time! </li> <li> If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your <em>AppleVolumes.default</em> (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. </li> </ul> <p> 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 <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_wink.gif" alt=";-)" /> </p> <p> 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! <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":-D" /> </p> <p> <strong>update:</strong> full html in the feed. </p> <div class="tags"><span> <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/debian" class="wikilink1" title="tags:debian" rel="tag">debian</a>, <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/linux" class="wikilink1" title="tags:linux" rel="tag">linux</a> </span></div> <a href="#fnt__1" id="fn__1" name="fn__1">1)</a> and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X">UTF-8#Mac_OS_X</a>), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms <a href="#fnt__2" id="fn__2" name="fn__2">2)</a> it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with <a href="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" title="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" rel="nofollow">netatalk</a> <a href="#fnt__3" id="fn__3" name="fn__3">3)</a> Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac <acronym title="Operating System">OS</acronym> versions </div>

* As Jaldhar announced at Debian-IN mailing list, Ikiwiki has been setup (obvious, by him only!) on Debian-IN Page. Still some minor issue need to be solved (Unfortunately, I know only very basic of perl!). You can login with your Alioth username and can change relevant things there. Today, I updated aspell-bn,or,pa,ta,te packages (upload due), And made it Lintian-Free for Debian-IN Packages (And yes, Thanks to Soumyadip) Update: Jaldhar’s mail hit to mailing-list after my blog post. Here it is.

In a perfect world, software would work perfectly. Unfortunately... well, you know the drill. Since GCC 4.2 is upcoming, our resident GCC guy doko asked me to find someone to have a look at updating the Debian patches for GCC 4.1 so that they'd apply. Since I need to learn about GCC anyway for the Debian/ColdFire project (which nobody seems to be working on except for me), I started looking into it myself. The procedure is simple enough: uncomment lines in debian/rules.patch, and fix those m68k-specific patches that break. The first one was easy. debian/patches/m68k-gc.dpatch has been integrated upstream, so is no longer necessary. The second one was slightly more involved. But only slightly so; the patch tried to change libffi/src/m68k/sysv.S, which had received some three extra lines that conditionally add a .note.GNU-stack section. These three lines weren't there at first; but the .S file was otherwise entirely unchanged, so fixing this was rather easy. The next one is, uh, pretty hard. gcc/config/m68k/m68k.md is a file of 7k LOC in the GCC-specific "RTL" pseudo-assembly language, which I'm not at all familiar with. Yet, anyway. As a bonus, the first hunk in this file which fails to apply does so because that bit of this code has been changed rather significantly from GCC 4.1 to 4.2. Meaning:

1. I need to figure out how this RTL code works
2. I need to figure out what this particular RTL code block does
3. I need to figure out what the point of this particular patch was
4. I need to figure out how to write a patch (in RTL) which semantically does the same thing as what the original patch was doing. Without breaking the changes between 4.1 and 4.2

Wish me luck. At least the first two parts are almost finished; after skimming through chapters 12 and 14 of gccint.info, this hugging code almost makes sense to me. (oh, and if that last link doesn't make any sense to you, ask me for my fortune file at debconf) (which is in less than a month! whee! excitement!)

Since I never got managed to reemit my credit card, I was forced to reserve my plane ticket to DebConf7 via phone.

The good news is that, this time I was able to find e-car.ro which apparently has some better search engine since I still found some cheaper (not much) flights than I did in January (I have a printout of the flight I thought of initially).

The price now is NOT a lot bigger than the one I found in January. Back then it was about 400 , now I'll have to pay around 425 [*]. Is not the same set of flights, but I don't mind.

So, now I have these flights:

• BUH - EDI, 16th of June :
• KL1358 OTP, 06:00 - AMS, 07:50
• KL1279 AMS , 09:25 - EDI, 09:55
• EDI - BUH, 24th of June:
• KL1276 EDI, 06:00 - AMS, 08:35
• KL1389 AMS, 09:35 - OTP, 13:20

I would have liked to have a wider window at return, between the flights, but, although there was some flight that left from AMS at 13:00, it was not possible to couple with that flight and keep a low fare :-( . So, my visit to Amsterdam must wait for another occasion.

So,

1. if anybody else will be on any of these flights, I would welcome company.
2. Helooooo, DebConf

Now I'll just have to have the confirmation mail and go myself to do the payment at e-car. Fortunately e-car is somewhere in the center of Bucharest, in the Roman Plaza (Pia a Roman ).

[*] If this sounds like a contradiction with the previous, is not. Now I found some of the previousely found flights and some new cheaper ones (all "now" prices), but since the booking is done later, all "now" prices are bigger than "January" prices. So if I had done the same booking back in January, I would have payed less; but back then I didn't found the flights I booked now.

I've been smashing my head against this brick wall for a while and can't decide: is it possible to use MakeMaker or one of the other perl installers to install some modules and some cgi-bin scripts in one action? How? Update: Tincho writes in How to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away: About installing a complex perl web application

"In a nutshell, if you only want to process modules and CGIs, you can do it with MakeMaker"

Unfortunately, I think I have lots of templates and images, so I guess I really do need to do something sick and twisted if I want to use MakeMaker. Is there some web application that does this already? What's long, red, has four wheels and eats grass?

A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...