I started learning japanese calligraphy a few months ago, with no prior experience with a brush and ink. It is an interesting endeavour. For various reasons, I had to skip class for a few weeks, but after the past ten days, I needed some stress relief on paper.

It is that time of the year again, Debian is electing the Project Leader for 2014/15. Whenever a Debian vote is in progress, I find myself rather happy to rediscover that Debian is providing text mode voting graphs. These are quite accessible to me as a braille user. It is rather unusual for me as a blind person to be able to access any graphs on the internet at all. All this has been made possible by gnuplots ability to generate text plots, and Manoj's willingness to implement it during his term as project secretary. Thanks to Gnuplot and Manoj, and thanks to the current secretary for keeping this feature, it is (at least to me) a very nice to have, and actually makes Debian rather unique. I personally don't know of any other major projects which provide text graphs. We are indeed setting a very good example here. It would be nice if other projects would adopt this as well. This is bridging the digital divide for me. For completeness sake I should probably mention that text graphs are not an universal solution for blind users. Those of us who do not use braille will probably have a very hard time extracting any meaningful information from this ASCII character salad. But to a braille user used to reading two dimensional information from the screen, it does actually work rather well. Some solutions from the 90s, when people didn't have graphical terminals readily available everywhere, are still very good accessibility workarounds. I am going to post another article about how I play chess on a computer, with newsgroup-style chessboard diagrams. Now that I think of it, these two topics are very related. There are some rather nifty solutions floating around from the good old text mode days which we need to revive before they finally get forgotten on the internet.

Zoe slept through last night, which was lovely. We had nothing really planned for today. The Bulimba Library has a story time thing at 10:30am on a Friday. I've never bothered to take Zoe because it would have been too much of a hustle to get her there after her Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, particularly by bike. Since today we didn't have a BJJ class, it made getting to story time much easier. So we had a nice lazy start to the day, and then Zoe just wanted to procrastinate anyway, so since we were in no particular rush, I let her play in her room for a bit and I read for a while. We eventually had teeth and hair brushed and biked over to the library. Not having been to the story time thing before, I assumed it was in the kids area, but it turned out it was downstairs in the general purpose room, which we only discovered after story time had started. I'm certainly glad I never busted a gut to get to the library in time for it, because it wasn't anything particularly exciting. They did give all the kids a colouring sheet and there was some colouring and a couple of songs, but really it was nothing to phone home about. I did run into Jacob and his mum Laura from Kindergarten. They live locally, and so I invited them over for lunch and a play date. They had some grocery shopping to do, and I had to go to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled, so we agreed to meet at our place in about an hour. We biked to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled and some more sunscreen for Zoe, and the pharmacist gave her a free Chupa Chups We biked home, and grabbed some balloons from the convenience store next door for our Science Friday activity. I was slightly more organised today, and figured out what I wanted to do in the morning while Zoe was watching TV. We did yeast and sugar and warm water in a bottle with a balloon on top and watched it inflate itself with all the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast eating the sugar. The only problem was the balloons we bought were total rubbish. They'd been on the shelf for too long and they'd all stuck to themselves and either popped when I tried to blow them up or had holes in them. So we marched back to the corner store in our lab coats to get some more, and the store keeper gave Zoe one of the little flashlights she keeps playing with in the bowl at the check out. It was a good day for freebies. We were able to complete our Science Friday activity before Laura and Jacob and his baby brother Ethan came over for lunch. Zoe didn't have a particularly good lunch, I think it was the distraction of having Jacob there as well. After lunch, they couldn't really agree on anything to play. Laura said Jacob just plays out in the yard at Kindergarten the whole day. The one thing they both managed to agree on briefly was bubbles. Ethan was getting tired and needed a nap by about 2pm, so they left. Zoe wanted to ride her scooter, but I had to clean up from lunch and the aftermath of the play date on the balcony first, so she went and played some games on her Nexus 7 while I did that, and then we headed out on the scooter. It was about 2:30pm by this point, and the Hawthorne Markets, which have now moved to a Friday "twilight" thing, were due to start at 4pm, so I figured we could just kill time on the scooter. It's funny how the scooter is now the in thing as of Tuesday. It's sat unused on the balcony for most of the year, but I'm glad she wants to use it now because it guarantees she moves faster than if she were to walk and want to be picked up every 5 minutes. We scootered around to the playground and she played there until about 3:45pm, when we headed around to the markets. We ran into Nicky Noo from the Ooniverse Family Cafe, who we'd met on Tuesday, and she made Zoe another dog balloon and she got her face painted. After that, it was the obligatory jumping castle for a while. It was getting time to get home for Sarah to pick her up, when I dropped the dog balloon on the ground and it popped. That made Zoe very sad. Then the lack of a decent lunch kicked in. Zoe wanted some poffertjes, but they would have taken too long, so I gave her a few of the free samples to tide her over, and we headed home. Sarah was waiting for her when we got home, so we parted ways at that point. I like how the days that have nothing planned often end up as full if not fuller than the days when I do have something planned.

I woke up to the news that, after a very short tenure, Brendan Eich steps down as the Mozilla CEO. Why? Because of the community outcry. Because some years ago, Eich pubilcly supported (and donated funds) the ban of any kind of marriages in California that were not between a man and a woman. The world has advanced enormously in this regard in the last years/decades, and so many individuals and organizations opposed and announced they would boycott Mozilla that either him or Mozilla could not stand the pressure anymore. So, of course, it's sad the person had to resign. Many people talked about freedom of speech, freedom of harbouring his own personal opinion But when it comes to the rights of minorities, particularly of minorities that have suffered such hard prejudice and abuse as the gay, lesbian and all the other non-orthodox sexual- and gender- orientations, righting a wrong is much more important than preserving an individual's freedom of opinion. Besides, it's not just thinking or talking about something The concrete proposition Eich supported (and eventually made him resign) is about bringing the life of thousands of people to a hellish state of uncertainty, and going back to not having a way for the society to legally recognize their way of being, their love, their lifes. But anyway What prompts me into writing this is that, once again, the Free Software (and related denominations) community has shown that a set of core values, seemingly shared by a very large amount of our own people with no coordination or correlation with what conforms us as a community (and thus, being emergent traits), are strong enough to create a critical mass, to achieve cohesion. And that ours is not just a technical community of people writing software at all layers of the stack, but first and foremost is a group of social activists, committed to making the world better. I will quote from Matthew Garrett's post on this topic, clearly more contundent and thorough that what I'm trying to come up with:

The Mozilla Manifesto discusses individual liberty in the context of use of the internet, not in a wider social context. Brendan's appointment was very much in line with the explicit aims of both the Foundation and the Corporation - whatever his views on marriage equality, nobody has seriously argued about his commitment to improving internet freedom. So, from that perspective, he should have been a fine choice. But that ignores the effect on the wider community. People don't attach themselves to communities merely because of explicitly stated goals - they do so because they feel that the community is aligned with their overall aims. The Mozilla community is one of the most diverse in free software, at least in part because Mozilla's stated goals and behaviour are fairly inspirational. People who identify themselves with other movements backing individual liberties are likely to identify with Mozilla. So, unsurprisingly, there's a large number of socially progressive individuals (LGBT or otherwise) in the Mozilla community, both inside and outside the Corporation. A CEO who's donated money to strip rights from a set of humans will not be trusted by many who believe that all humans should have those rights. It's not just limited to individuals directly affected by his actions - if someone's shown that they're willing to strip rights from another minority for political or religious reasons, what's to stop them attempting to do the same to you? Even if you personally feel safe, do you trust someone who's willing to do that to your friends? In a community that's made up of many who are either LGBT or identify themselves as allies, that loss of trust is inevitably going to cause community discomfort.

We are organizing a DrupalCamp in Mexico City! As a Drupal user, I have so far attended two DrupalCamps (one in Guadalajara, Mexico, and one in Guatemala, Guatemala). They are as Free Software conferences usually are great, informal settings where many like-minded users and developers meet and exchange all kinds of contacts, information, and have a good time. Torre de Ingenier a This year, I am a (minor) part of the organizing team. DrupalCamp will be held in Torre de Ingenier a, UNAM Just by Facultad de Ingenier a, where I teach. A modern, beautiful building in Ciudad Universitaria. Talks, tracks So, who is this for? You can go look at the accepted sessions, you will find there is a lot of ground. Starting from the very introduction to how Drupal is structured and some tips on how to work with it (delivered by yours truly), through workflows for specific needs, to strong development-oriented talks. The talks are structured along four tracks: "Training", "Theming", "Development", "Business" and "SymfonyDay". "SymfonyDay"? Yes. Drupal is a fast-evolving Free Software project. Most users are currently using versions 6 and 7, which are as different between each other as day and night... But the upcoming Drupal 8 brings even greater changes. One of the most interesting changes I can see is that Drupal will now be based on a full MVC framework, Symfony. One of the days of our DrupalCamp will be devoted to Symfony (dubbed the Symfony Day). ...And... Again, just look at the list of talks. You will find a great amount of speakers interested in coming here. Not just from Mexico City. Not just from Mexico. Not just from Latin America. I must say I am personally impressed. Sponsors! Of course, as with any volunteer-run conferences: We are still looking for sponsors. We believe being a DrupalCamp sponsor will greatly increase your brand visibility in the community you want to work with. There are still a lot of expenses to cover to make this into all that we want. And surely, you want to be a part of this great project. There are many sponsor levels Surely you can be part of it!

Attachment	Size
drupalcampmx.png	57.81 KB
torre_ing.jpg	90.22 KB
torre_ing_mini.jpg	21.64 KB

Back in 2007 I stumbled over the "Plus Fours Routefinder", an invention of the 1920's. It's worn on the wrist and allows the user to scroll through a map of the route they planned to take, rolled up on little wooden rollers. At that point I thought: that's awesome for long trips where you either dont want to take electronics with you or where you are without any electricity for a long time. And creating such rollable custom maps of your route automatically using openstreetmap data should be a breeze! Nevertheless it seems nobody picked up the idea. Years passed and in a few weeks I'll go on a biking trip along the Weser, a river in nothern Germany. For my last multi-day trip (which was through the Odenwald, an area in southern Germany) I printed a big map from openstreetmap data which contained the whole route. Openstreetmap data is fantastic for this because in contrast to commercial maps it doesnt only allow you to just print the area you need but also allows you to highlight your planned route and objects you would probably not find in most commercial maps like for example supermarkets to stock up on supplies or bicycle repair shops. Unfortunately such big maps have the disadvantage that to show everything in the amount of detail that you want along your route, they have to be pretty huge and thus easily become an inconvenience because the local plotter can't handle paper as large as DIN A0 or because it's a pain to repeatedly fold and unfold the whole thing every time you want to look at it. Strong winds are also no fun with a huge sheet of paper in your hands. One solution would be to print DIN A4 sized map regions in the desired scale. But that has the disadvantage that either you find yourself going back and forth between subsequent pages because you happen to be right at the border between two pages or you have to print sufficiently large overlaps, resulting in many duplicate map pieces and more pages of paper than you would like to carry with you. It was then that I remembered the "Plus Fours Routefinder" concept. Given a predefined route it only shows what's important to you: all things close to the route you plan to travel along. Since it's a long continuous roll of paper there is no problem with folding because as you travel along the route you unroll one end and roll up the other. And because it's a long continuous map there is also no need for flipping pages or large overlap regions. There is not even the problem of not finding a big enough sheet of paper because multiple DIN A4 sheets can easily be glued together at their ends to form a long roll. On the left you see the route we want to take: the bicycle route along the Weser river. If I wanted to print that map on a scale that allows me to see objects in sufficient detail along our route, then I would also see objects in Hamburg (upper right corner) in the same amount of detail. Clearly a waste of ink and paper as the route is never even close to Hamburg. As the first step, a smooth approximation of the route has to be found. It seems that the best way to do that is to calculate a B-Spline curve approximating the input data with a given smoothness. On the right you can see the approximated curve with a smoothing value of 6. The curve is sampled into 20 linear segments. I calculated the B-Spline using the FITPACK library to which scipy offers a Python binding. The next step is to expand each of the line segments into quadrilaterals. The distance between the vertices of the quadrilaterals and the ends of the line segment they belong to is the same along the whole path and obviously has to be big enough such that every point along the route falls into one quadrilateral. In this example, I draw only 20 quadrilaterals for visual clarity. In practice one wants many more for a smoother approximation. Using a simple transform, each point of the original map and the original path in each quadrilateral is then mapped to a point inside the corresponding "straight" rectangle. Each target rectangle has the height of the line segment it corresponds to. It can be seen that while the large scale curvature of the path is lost in the result, fine details remain perfectly visible. The assumption here is, that while travelling a path several hundred kilometers long, it does not matter that large scale curvature that one is not able to perceive anyways is not preserved. The transformation is done on a Mercator projection of the map itself as well as the data of the path. Therefore, this method probably doesnt work if you plan to travel to one of the poles. Currently I transform openstreetmap bitmap data. This is not quite optimal as it leads to text on the map being distorted. It would be just as easy to apply the necessary transformations to raw openstreetmap XML data but unfortunately I didnt find a way to render the resulting transformed map data as a raster image without setting up a database. I would've thought that it would be possible to have a standalone program reading openstreetmap XML and dumping out raster or svg images without a round trip through a database. Furthermore, tilemill, one of the programs that seem to be one of the least hasslesome to set up and produce raster images is stuck in an ITP and the existing packaging attempt fails to produce a non-empty binary package. Since I have no clue about nodejs packaging, I wrote about this to the pkg-javascript-devel list. Maybe I can find a kind soul to help me with it. Here a side by side overview that doesnt include the underlying map data but only the path. It shows how small details are preserved in the transformation. The code that produced the images in this post is very crude, unoptimized and kinda messy. If you dont care, then it can be accessed here

I'm an amateur photographer, although these days I tend to drop the amateur prefix, given that I shoot people for cash at least once a month. (It isn't my main job, and I'd never actually want it to be, because I'm certain I'd become unhappy hustling for jobs and doing the promotion thing.) Anyway over the years I've built up a large library of images, mostly organized in a hierarchy of directories beneath ~/Images. Unlike most photographers I don't use aperture, lighttable, or any similar library management. I shoot my images in RAW, convert to JPG via rawtherapee, and keep both versions of the images. In short I don't want to mix the "library management" functions with the "RAW conversion" because I do regard them as two separate steps. That said I'm reaching a point where I do want to start tagging images, and finding them more quickly. In the past I wrote a couple of simple tools to inject tags into the EXIF data of images, and then indexed them. But that didn't work so well in practise. I'm starting to think instead I should index images into sqlite:

• Size.
• date.
• Content hash.
• Tags.
• Path.

The downside is that this breaks utterly as soon as you move images around on-disk. Which is something my previous exif-manipulation was designed to avoid. Anyway I'm thinking at the moment, but I know that the existing tools such as F-Spot, shotwell, DigiKam, and similar aren't suitable. So I either need to go standalone and use EXIF tags, accepting the fact that the tags I enter won't be visible to other tools, or I cope with the file-rename issues by attempting to update an existing sqlite database via hash/size/etc.

A good friend just yesterday sent me a link to a one and a half hour lasting live concert of 2CELLOS. And wow, I was deeply impressed. Terrific! Even Sir Elton John approves. Have to share them with you, too. :)

• Highway To Hell featuring Steve Vai: Bloody hell yeah!
• Smooth Criminal: Forbidden good.
• With Or Without You: What can I say, I'm a sucker when it comes to ballads.

Enjoy! P.S.: I sooo love them also for their pun in their second album title, In2ition. :D

/music permanent link Comments: 2 Flattr this

For a while now I've been looking for ways to improve my photo workflow - to simplify and speed up the process. Now I've gotten a new toy to help that along - a Panasonic FlashAir SD card with WiFi connectivity. I was pretty sure that build-in workflows of some more automated solutions would not be a perfect fit for me, so I got this card which has a more manual workflow and a reasonable API, so I could write my own. Now I am trying to work out my requirements, the user stories if you will. I see two distinct workflows: live event and travel pictures. In both cases I want the images to retain the file names, Exif information and timing of the original photos and also have embedded GPS information from the phone synced to the time the photo was taken. And if I take a burst of very similar photos, I want the uploading process to only select and upload the "best" one (trivial heiristic being the file size) with an ability for me to later choose another one to replace it. There would need to be some way of syncing phone and camera time, especially considering that phones usually switch to local time zone when traveling and cameras do not, maybe the original time the photo was taken would need to be changed to local time zone, so that there are no photos that are taken during the day, but have a timestamp of 23:45 GMT. When I am in Live Event mode I would like the photos that I take to immediately start uploading to an event album that I create (or choose) at the start of the shoot with a preset privacy mode. This assumes that either I am willing to upload via 3G of my phone or that I have access to a stable WiFi network on-site. It might be good if I could upload a scaled down version of the pictures during the event and then later replace the image files with full-size images when the even is over and I am at home in my high-speed network. I probably don't need the full size files on my phone. When I am in Travel mode, I want to delay photo uploading until I am back at the hotel with its high speed Wifi, but also have an option to share some snapshots immediately over 3G or random cafe Wifi. I am likely to take more photos that there is memory in my phone, so I would like to clear original files from the phone while keeping them in the SD card and in the cloud, but still keeping enough metadata to allow re-uploading an image or choosing another image in a burst. Now I need to flesh out the technical requirements from the above and write an Android app to implement that. Or maybe start by writing this in Python as a cross-platform command-line/desktop app and only later porting it to Android when all the rought parts are ironed out. This will have an extra benefit of people being able to run the same workflow on a laptop instead of a phone or tablet. Let's assume that this is written in a pretty flexible way, allowing to plug in backends for different WiFi SD cards, cloud services, plug-in points for things like instant display of the latest photo on the laptop screen in full-screen mode and other custom actions, what else would people love to see in something like this? What other workflow am I completely overlooking?

Zoe slept pretty well last night. She only woke up briefly at 4am because Cowie had fallen out of bed and she couldn't find her. Today was the last Playgroup of the term. Megan, her little sister and her Dad came as well to check it out, which was nice, because Zoe then had someone to actively play with in addition to me. After Playgroup, we went to the adjacent Bulimba Memorial Park with Megan, and then had some lunch at Grill'd. Megan's Dad wanted to do some work on their house while Megan's little sister napped, so I offered to give Megan a play date at our place. The plan was to watch a movie and chill out. The girls picked Ratatouille and I made a batch of popcorn for them. Unfortunately Megan seemed to be less of a square eyes than Zoe, and she lost interest after a bit, so we stopped watching the movie and moved out to the balcony to do some craft. Zoe had been wanting to make a crown for Mummy's boss for a while, so we made a couple of crowns with the hot glue gun. I had bought this bag of mixed craft "jewels" and it's probably the best single craft thing I've bought. Zoe loves gluing them onto everything. After that, Zoe pulled out the bag of coloured foil confetti. If the gems were the best thing I've bought, this would have to be the worst. So far, all it's done is leak in the drawer it's been stored in, and I've been avoiding using it because it was going to be messy. Today, Zoe wanted to glue it onto the outside of her cardboard box, so I decided to give in and embrace the mess, and boy, did we make a mess. It probably ended up being the longest bit of cooperative play the girls did. They'd alternate between handing each other a fistful of confetti while I applied globs of glue where directed. Probably about 10 percent of each handful ended up stuck to the rocket, so the balcony looked like quite a mess by the end of it all, but at least it was a dry mess, so I could just vacuum it all up. I suspect I'll be encountering dregs for quite a while, because I doubt it's stuck to the cardboard particularly well. After that, the girls played indoors for a bit, and watched a bit more of the movie, but Megan seemed to be scared of Anton Ego, so I think that was why it wasn't holding her attention. The other activity that the girls seemed to thoroughly enjoy was tearing around the living room squealing while they took turns at throwing a grapefruit-sized beach ball at me, and I threw it back at them. Jason came back to pick up Megan, and I started dinner. Not that long after Megan left, Sarah arrived to watch Zoe for me so I could go visit my cousin in hospital. I had dinner on the table pretty much as soon as she walked in the door, and headed out.

"Take, for example, the opening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries: 'The twelve men congragated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met.' This is emphatically not the same as starting a novel with 'So there they were: a dozen men in the Crown Hotel, all together in the smoking-lounge, looking like they'd only met there by chance.' Yes, the explicit narrative data conveyed in the two are the same, but just as you wouldn't be happy with your publisher simply producing a sort of casual paraphrase of your writing and publishing that under your name, so your foreign-language publishers are hiring people to write exactly the same book as the one you've written. (Except for all the words, obviously.) Sound difficult? The reality is harder still. Every language is different. There's no single word in one language that maps perfectly onto a word in another - not one. And every language has things it can do, and things it can't."

[...]

"Once the contract is signed, the translator takes a deep breath and dives in. Their job is two-fold, and simple: they read you, then they write you.
They read you with more care than anybody else will, more demandigly, more inquiringly. Yes, your editor might take a moment to consider your punctuation if it doesn't work and needs rethinking, but translators have to think hard about it even - or especially - if it does."

A beautiful piece on translators: "The curious condition of being a translator" by Daniel Hahn via Paula G es on GV-Authors mailing list.

This post explains how to configure on a Linux server a second and totally independent network interface with its own connectivity. It can be useful to access the server when the regular connectivity is broken. This can happen thanks to network namespaces, a virtualization feature available in recent kernels. We need to create a simple script to be run at boot time which will create and configure the namespace. First, move in the new namespace the network interface which will be dedicated to it:

ip netns add oob
ip link set eth2 netns oob

And then configure it as usual with iproute, by executing it in the new namespace with ip netns exec:

ip netns exec oob ip link set lo up
ip netns exec oob ip link set eth2 up
ip netns exec oob ip addr add 192.168.1.2/24 dev eth2
ip netns exec oob ip route add default via 192.168.1.1

The interface must be configured manually because ifupdown does not support namespaces yet, and it would use the same /run/network/ifstate file which tracks the interfaces of the main namespace (this is also a good argument in favour of something persistent like Network Manager...). Now we can start any daemon in the namespace, just make sure that they will not interfere with the on-disk state of other instances:

ip netns exec oob /usr/sbin/sshd -o PidFile=/run/sshd-oob.pid

Netfilter is virtualized as well, so we can load a firewall configuration which will be applied only to the new namespace:

ip netns exec oob iptables-restore < /etc/network/firewall-oob-v4

As documented in ip-netns(8), iproute netns add will also create a mount namespace and bind mount in it the files in /etc/netns/$NAMESPACE/: this is very useful since some details of the configuration, like the name server IP, will be different in the new namespace:

mkdir -p /etc/netns/oob/
echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/netns/oob/resolv.conf

If we connect to the second SSH daemon, it will create a shell in the second namespace. To enter the main one, i.e. the one used by PID 1, we can use a simple script like:

#!/bin/sh -e
exec nsenter --net --mount --target 1 "$@"

To reach the out of band namespace from the main one we can use instead:

#!/bin/sh -e
exec nsenter --net --mount --target $(cat /var/run/sshd-oob.pid) "$@"

Scripts like these can also be used in fun ssh configurations like:

Host 10.2.1.*
 ProxyCommand ssh -q -a -x -N -T server-oob.example.net 'nsenter-main nc %h %p'

Late last year I compared the prices of mobile providers after Aldi started getting greedy [1]. Now Aldi have dramatically changed their offerings [2] so at least some of the phones I manage have to be switched to another provider. There are three types of use that are of interest to me. One is for significant use, that means hours of calls per month, lots of SMS, and at least 2G of data transfer. Another is for very light use, maybe a few minutes of calls per month where the aim is to have the lowest annual price for an almost unused phone. The third is somewhere in between and being able to easily switch between plans for moderate and significant use is a major benefit. Firstly please note that I have no plans to try and compare all telcos, I ll only compare ones that seem to have good offers. Ones with excessive penalty clauses or other potential traps are excluded. Sensible Plans The following table has the minimum costs for plans where the amount paid counts as credit for calls and data, this makes it easy to compare those plans.

Plan	Cost per min or SMS	Data	Minimum cost
AmaySIM As You Go [3]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$10 per 90 days
AmaySIM Flexi [4]	$0.09	500M included, free calls to other AmaySIM users, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$19.90 per 30 days
Aldi pre-paid [5]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $30 for 3G in 30 days	$15 per 365 days

Amaysim has a $39.90 Unlimited plan which doesn t have any specific limits on the number of calls and SMS (unlike Aldi Unlimited ) [6], that plan also offers 4G of data per month. The only down-side is that changing between plans is difficult enough to discourage people from doing so, but if you use your phone a lot every month then this would be OK. AmaySIM uses the Optus network. Lebara has a $29.90 National Unlimited plan that offers unlimited calls and SMS and 2G of data [7]. The Lebara web site doesn t seem to include details such as how long pre-paid credit lasts, the lack of such detail doesn t give me confidence in their service. Lebara uses the Vodafone network which used to have significant problems, hopefully they fixed it. My lack of confidence in the Vodafone network and in Lebara s operations makes me inclined to avoid them. Obscure Plans Telechoice has a $28 per month i28 plan that offers unlimited SMS, $650 of calls (which can be international) at a rate of over $1 per minute, unlimited SMS, unlimited calls to other Telechoice customers, and 2G of data [8]. According to the Whirlpool forum they use the Telstra network although the TeleChoice web site doesn t state this (one of many failings of a horrible site). The TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter plan costs $20 per month and includes unlimited calls to other TeleChoice customers, unlimited SMS, $500 of calls at a rate of over $1 per minute, and 1G of data [9]. Which One to Choose For my relatives who only rarely use their phones the best options are the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan which costs $40 per 360 days and the Aldi prepaid which costs $15 per year. Those relatives are already on Aldi and it seems that the best option for them is to keep using it. My wife typically uses slightly less than 1G of data per month and makes about 25 minutes of calls and SMS. For her use the best option is the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan which will cost her about $4 in calls per month and $99.90 for 10G of data which will last 10 months. That will average out to about $13 per month. It could end up being a bit less because the 10G of data that can be used in a year gives an incentive to reduce data use while previously with Aldi she had no reason to use less than 2G of data per month. Her average cost will be $11.30 per month if she can make 10G of data last a year. The TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter [9] plan is also appealing, but it is a little more expensive at $20 per month, it would be good value for someone who averages more than 83 minutes per month and also uses almost 1G of data. Some of my relatives use significantly less than 1G of data per month. For someone who uses less than 166MB of billable data per month then the Aldi pre-paid rate of $0.05 per meg [5] is the best, but with a modern phone that does so many things in the background and a plan that rounds up data use it seems almost impossible to be billed for less than 300MB/month. Even when you tell the phone not to use any mobile data some phones still do, on a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 5 I ve found that the only way to prevent being billed for 3G data transfer is to delete the APN from the phone s configuration. So it seems that the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan with a 10G annual data pack is the best option. One of my relatives needs less than 1G of data per month and not many calls, but needs to be on the Telstra network because their holiday home is out of range of Optus. For them the TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter [9] plan seems best. I have been averaging a bit less than 2G of data transfer per month. If I use the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan with the 10G data packs then I would probably average about $18 worth of data per month. If I could keep my average number of phone calls below $10 (83 minutes) then that would be the cheapest option. However I sometimes spend longer than that on the phone (one client with a difficult problem can involve an hour on the phone). So the TeleChoice i28 plan looks like the best option for me, it gives $650 of calls at a rate of $0.97 per minute + $0.40 connection (that s $58.60 for a hour long call I can do 11 of those calls in a month) and 2G of data. The Telstra coverage is an advantage for TeleChoice, I can run my phone as a Wifi access point so my wife can use the Internet when we are out of Optus range. Please let me know if there are any good Australian telcos you think I ve missed or if there are any problems with the above telcos that I m not aware of.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/11/10/aldi-changes/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/23/aldi-misleading/
• [3] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-as-you-go.html
• [4] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-flexi.html
• [5] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans
• [6] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-unlimited.html
• [7] http://www.lebara.com.au/national-unlimited
• [8] http://www.telechoice.com.au/about/news/mobile-plans/i28-global-sim-plan-for-your-iphone
• [9] http://www.telechoice.com.au/about/news/mobile-plans/global-liberty-starter-sim-plans

Earlier this year, on the fourth of February, Matthew Garrett posted an interesting tweet. The idea of porting Motif to Wayland sounded quite insane, which is right up my alley, so I've been pondering and preparing since. The result of that preparation is a fundraiser campaign, which, if successful, I'll dive deeper into the porting effort, to deliver a library that brings the Motif we used to love back in the days to a modern platform.The aim of the project is to create a library, available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (version 2.1 or later, the same license original Motif is under), ported to Wayland, with full API compatibility if at all possible. In the end, we want the result to feel like Motif, to look like Motif, so that any program that can be compiled against Motif, will also work with the ported library. I will start fresh, using modern tools and modern methodologies (including, but not limited to autotools and test-driven development, on GitHub) to develop the new library, instead of changing the existing code base. Whether the goal is fully achievable remains to be seen, but the API - and the look of the widgets, of course - will feel like Motif, even if in a Wayland context, and we will do our best to either make the API 100% compatible with Motif, or provide a compatibility library.Since I have a day job, in order to be able to spend enough time on the library, I will need funding that more or less matches my salary. The more raised, the more time will be allocated to the porting project. Would we exceed the funding goal, there are a few stretch goal ideas that can be added later (such as porting the Motif Window Manager, and turning it into a Wayland compositor, with a few modern bells and whistles).For further information, such as perks, updates and all, please see the campaign, or the project website!

parenting and a haircut with a spot of painting How's that for some alliteration? Today was a really good day. And that's before I started drinking red wine. I got up this morning and successfully banged out a 10km run. It wasn't pretty, but I did it in under an hour, so I was happy. I got home, and after breakfast I pretty much flopped on the couch with my laptop and procrastinated instead of doing my taxes. But it was productive procrastination. I:

• booked flights to the US for our trip in July
• sought some quotes for outsourcing the production of Zoe's birthday cake
• made some pizza dough for dinner with Anshu
• booked a haircut for Zoe and I
• Got taken hook, line and sinker by an April Fools joke
• found a couple of patent lawyers who will give me an initial consultation for free instead of charging me $250 plus GST (yay River City Labs)

I also (finally) got my taxes to a point where I'm ready to send them off to my US accountant and deal with the rest of it incrementally. So it was a productive day! I had a follow up appointment with my podiatrist in the afternoon to see how my orthotics were going. I biked to Kindergarten early, ditched the bike trailer, and then biked over to the podiatrist, and made it back to Kindergarten about 10 minutes before pick up time. Zoe was, unsurprisingly, fast asleep. I decided to try applying sunscreen to her while she was asleep as a way of killing two birds with one stone. I got as far as getting her legs done before she woke up and had a massive meltdown. Poor kid really doesn't deal well with being woken up. One of the teachers took pity on us and distracted Zoe by letting her cuddle one of the baby chicks, which snapped her out of it for the duration, but she had another meltdown once it was over. Another teacher gave her a cuddle for a bit, and she eventually calmed down enough for me to get sunscreen on her arms. I'd foolishly left the bike trailer separated from the bike, so I had to drag the trailer back to the bike, whilst carrying Zoe. Fortunately another teacher took sympathy on us and helped me with the trailer. Turns out trying to drag a single-wheeled trailer single-handed whilst carrying a toddler and having excess sunscreen on my hands is extremely difficult. We finally got the trailer on the bike, and Zoe in the trailer, and headed towards home. Zoe's ballerina pumps aren't great on the bike because the straps on the pedals cross the tops of her exposed feet and irritate her, so there were multiple meltdowns on the way home, culminating in needing to go to the toilet "right now" before we got home. I stopped at the health food shop on the way home, to see if they had a toilet we could use. Luckily I'm a customer and the naturopath let us use the toilet in the clinic. Zoe had another meltdown in there, announcing she "didn't like being woken up". Poor kid. It wasn't a good afternoon for her. I'm just glad I was in a sufficiently good mood to be able to deal with it all in a satisfactorily positive parenting way. We finally made it home, and I'd promised her we could have a big cuddle on the couch once we got home, so we did that and read a library book, and then it was time to head to the hairdressers for our haircuts. We started out on foot, and had made it one block from home, and she saw another kid on a scooter and announced she wanted to ride her scooter too. Initially tried saying we couldn't do it this time, because we'd be late, but she was on the verge of having another meltdown, so I capitulated, and we went back and grabbed it. I'm actually really glad I did, because she was as happy as Larry from that point on, and we were only a couple of minutes late at the hairdresser. We did her fringe trim first, and then she had a great play in the kid's corner while I got my haircut. She even cleaned up the corner better than she found it without argument. We then had plenty of time to scooter back home, so I decided to check out the 'OO'niverse Family Cafe, which is next door to the Hawthorne Cinemas. It's this thing I've never gotten around to checking out, and it was the second thing I was glad I did this afternoon. It's not a big place, and it was super quiet. There was just us and two twin Kindergarten-aged girls being babysat. Zoe had a banana milkshake and got a dolphin painted on her arm and a balloon dog made, and I had a coffee and we just chilled out for a bit while I chatted with the owner (who was babysitting the twins). By this stage Anshu was already at my place, and Sarah wasn't far off leaving work to pick up Zoe, so we made our way back home. Zoe had a great time playing with Anshu until Sarah arrived. So I was basically really happy that I managed to turn around a massively molten afternoon and give Zoe a really good afternoon instead. Anshu and I then proceeded to made a couple of really fantastic pizzas. I really love my Thermomix. I made the pizza dough earlier today, and tonight I made some pizza sauce, some pesto sauce and caramelized some onions in it, and we were still done with dinner by 8pm.

The scene: early one morning as the sun has just started to rise. Jacob and Oliver, ages 7 and 4, are the first people to wake up in the house their grandparents in California, where the four of us are visiting for the first time as a family. They have a conversation and decide that would be a good to go find a mystery. They decide to take their flashlights pink and blue, matching each boy s favorite color and slowly, but not very quietly, open their bedroom door and creep out. Brother, you forgot your flashlight! says Oliver. Oh, thanks brother! I ll get it! says Jacob. Meanwhile, Laura s mom wakes up, and notices two boys with flashlights creeping through the living room. Pretty soon they reach the kitchen, open the dishwasher, spy a suspicious-looking bowl, and decide that they have found the mystery a clean bowl! Or, at least that s the story that I pieced together based on what a 4-year-old and the grandma he awakened told me. We were on our first family trip to the Fresno, California area, to visit Laura s parents Jacob and Oliver s new grandparents. They ve played together before, but as this was our first visit to their place, there was quite the excitement. The boys had flown before, but it was several years ago and neither of them remember it well, so they were excited about that, too. The night before, Jacob woke up to tell me Dad, I am too excited to sleep. I think I will go downstairs and watch some TV. He didn t get too far with that plan. But he was excited. We went through security at the laid-back Wichita airport (where the TSA agents smile and there are often no security lines at all). We found our gate with enough time to grab lunch, which we did. The boys and I then did what we often do to kill time: explore. We explored the terminal, watching carpet-layers cut out carpet for the jetway, watching the construction of the new Terminal 3 out the window. And, of course, watching airplanes take off and land from the terminal s large windows. Finally it was our turn to board, and we all got on the plane: Jacob and Oliver with their backpacks of on-board activites, Laura and me with the rest of our carryon luggage, for the short trip to Denver. Jacob and Oliver s noses were pressed against the windows. Or, well, Jacob s was. Oliver s window was a little too high for him, but he was thrilled anyhow. They delighted in the airplane snacks, and the fact that they were allowed to drink pop on the plane. We packed books and some new art supplies for them (colored post-its, pages from a train-themed page-a-day calendar, a notebook, and a set of colored pens really seemed to do the trick.) We had a choice of 35 minutes or 4 hours between flights in Denver, and I had chosen 4 hours, thinking that would be a lot less stressful with boys. And it was. We found a nice corner of the mezzanine to sit for awhile they did art projects and played a game with Laura. Then I took them exploring Denver. We rode the moving sidewalks up and down the terminal, took a train ride to another terminal and back, ate supper all together, and flew to Fresno. We had stopped in the Wichita airport to buy them each a souvenir airplane, and these came out often during the rest of the trip. They enjoyed the mockups of the sequoias in Fresno Yosemite International Airport, enjoyed their beds and their room at the house, and did actually manage to fall asleep eventually. We had a few days there, where they played in a park, with bubbles on the patio, or croquet in the yard (I even discovered Jacob happily using the cast his broken arm is in as a hammer to pound the hoops into the ground!) There are a lot of miniatures in the house, and the boys enjoyed exploring the dollhouses and especially the N-gauge model train. Jacob enjoyed it so much he asked me to record a video of him playing with the trains. Evenings often brought book-reading, from the many children s books in the house. At home, Laura and I and both boys often scrunch onto an oversized chair and read a book and sing a song (one I make up on whatever topic they choose). Over there, we often had Laura, Jacob, Oliver, Laura s mom, and me scrunched up somewhere while the boys heard a story read to them by their grandma. That happened plenty of times other than bedtime, too. (Or Jacob would take his favorite books and read them to himself.) Laura s parents organized a reception Sunday for us, for the people from that area that couldn t make it to our wedding. Jacob and Oliver, predictably, had fun playing and even talked to some of the adults. The adults that didn t ask Jacob about his cast, anyhow (he dislikes talking about it). The boys discovered a live mic at the church where the reception was, and do I detect two future pastors in our midst? We had a great time at Laura s uncle and aunt s place. The boys were happy to discover an orange tree in their backyard, a tetherball post not far away, and an uncle ready to give them a demonstration of a swimming pool vacuum cleaner or sit at the piano with them. Jacob s favorite part, though, was when the hamburger buns his great uncle were toasting were left on the grill during the prayer before the meal, got a bit scorched, and the uncle remarked with a chuckle that I guess the Lord was tired of listening to me drone on! Jacob loved his meal, and cackled at the thought of a prayer causing buns to get scorched. But their highlight was the visit to the sequoias at Kings Canyon National Park the next day. The excitement had been building for that day all weekend. On the way out, we stopped at a fruit stand and bought some delicious strawberries the fresh, juicy, sweet and tasty kind that are red all the way through. We continued up through the foothills, stopping periodically to get out and stretch, look at the sights, take some photos, or borrow grandpa s binoculars. I knew we d be traveling in two cars, so I had the thought to pack some 2-way radios before we left. I gave one to the boys and one to the grandparents. All weekend long, whenever the six of us went somewhere, the boys (and especially Jacob) would give directions to the car that was following. Turn right! The light is green! Catch up, you re going too slow! So all the way into the mountains, Jacob would send back instructions on what to do. We saw Grant Grove, home to the worlds third-largest tree (267ft/81m tall and 3000 years old). It s quite the impressive tree the trunk s diameter near the ground is 29ft or almost 9m. As we walked the trails, their speed kept increasing as they were hunting for the tree tunnel I had told them about a tree that fell centuries ago and had been hollowed out to make a home. That trunk was easily 8ft or more in diameter, and I could stand up completely in places. We found it, to much delight from the boys So this is what it s like to be inside a tree! Our trip home brought a delay in Denver and a missed flight, which excited the boys when I told them now we get to eat supper in the airport! I wonder how long that tactic will work But Jacob was also excited because the plane we were put on in the end was bigger than the one we were scheduled on, so that was another piece of excitement. We got home, and I carried two sleeping boys in from the car, upstairs, tucked them in, pulled off their shoes, and put their favorite stuffed animals in their arms. They were happy to be home, and with memories to treasure for a long time.

Hello world Ten years ago today, I filed #241228, so I thought today would be a good day to restart pushing bits to planet Debian! In future they hopefully will be more relevant, today I'm just happy to have an easily updatable ikiwiki instance. Git push FTW. chown holger thinking was joyful to type too