Search Results: "spa"

15 April 2010

Biella Coleman: Cultural Cornucopia

Today all across America, many are experiencing a soft form of hell, anxiety, and constant cursing for it is tax day. Thankfully last night I squared those away (more or less). Today is also the last day to register forDebconf sponsored registration. Even if there is a chance you can t make it, it is worth filling out the form just in case. For those spending a little extra time in NYC or planning on sneaking out to take a whirl in the city, here are some more fun options. NYC is known to be a cultural cornucopia of sorts and one reason are the many museums. I just found a twitter list listing those museums with a feed. Probably one of my favorite museums is located in the far north of Manhattan, the Cloisters. It is a haven, an oasis with small beautiful gardens, as well large stone rooms and buildings filled with medieval art, tapestry, and manuscripts. If you need to get away from people, chatter, and computers, this might be a good place to visit. Museums are easy enough to find but there are other spots in NYC that may be a little harder to spot. If you want to hit Chinatown for dim sum, I would recommend Jing Fong, which is mind blowing largely because of its LARGE (like there are escalators that take you up) room, which gets pretty darn packed on the weekend. If you want something that involves not just food but involves sweat, water, food, sun, hot rocks, body scrubs, funny looking pink, orange and blue uniforms and all in a cross-cultural context, then Spa Castle is the place to go to. Just check out the website and you will see what I am talking about. It s family friendly, has a cornucopia of saunas (filled with jade, gold, ice, Tibetan bricks), some decent Korean food, among many other attractions. In general is one of the best deals in NY.

Biella Coleman: Cultural Cornucopia

Today all across America, many are experiencing a soft form of hell, anxiety, and constant cursing for it is tax day. Thankfully last night I squared those away (more or less). Today is also the last day to register forDebconf sponsored registration. Even if there is a chance you can t make it, it is worth filling out the form just in case. For those spending a little extra time in NYC or planning on sneaking out to take a whirl in the city, here are some more fun options. NYC is known to be a cultural cornucopia of sorts and one reason are the many museums. I just found a twitter list listing those museums with a feed. Probably one of my favorite museums is located in the far north of Manhattan, the Cloisters. It is a haven, an oasis with small beautiful gardens, as well large stone rooms and buildings filled with medieval art, tapestry, and manuscripts. If you need to get away from people, chatter, and computers, this might be a good place to visit. Museums are easy enough to find but there are other spots in NYC that may be a little harder to spot. If you want to hit Chinatown for dim sum, I would recommend Jing Fong, which is mind blowing largely because of its LARGE (like there are escalators that take you up) room, which gets pretty darn packed on the weekend. If you want something that involves not just food but involves sweat, water, food, sun, hot rocks, body scrubs, funny looking pink, orange and blue uniforms and all in a cross-cultural context, then Spa Castle is the place to go to. Just check out the website and you will see what I am talking about. It s family friendly, has a cornucopia of saunas (filled with jade, gold, ice, Tibetan bricks), some decent Korean food, among many other attractions. In general is one of the best deals in NY.

Mike Hommey: Re: git reflex

Joey Hess writes about putting snapshot.debian.org into git, which is something I already mentioned on this blog. It turns out I used the snapshot.debian.org data a few months ago to try the idea again, and while I haven t done the math yet with the data I got in the end, the data during the experiment tells me we shouldn t expect much more than a 50% space reduction. There are two main reasons for that: a few number of packages actually take a whole lot of the archive space, and a whole lot of packages are simply data that don t benefit from being put in a git repository.

14 April 2010

Joey Hess: git reflex

snapshot.debian.org launched
with all Debian packages produced in the past 5 years
6.5 terabytes first Wikipedia database dump in 4.5 years
5.6 terabytes (32 gigabytes compressed) My reflex on seeing both of these was to think about putting them into git repositories. For snapshot.debian.org, injecting source packages into git repositories is easy with git-import-dsc (and it can also use pristine-tar to make the original tarballs accessible with a miminal overhead). I hope the snapshot.debian.org admins find time & space to do that, because being able to easily access git annotate data spanning 5 years for any package in the archive would be very useful. To produce a usable git repository from the Wikipedia dump would probably involve writing a custom git-fast-import that processed the huge xml dump, and chunked it up into individual files, and commits changing those files. Frankly, I do prefer wikis that store data in git in that format natively and don't have multi-month dump procedures. ;) How big would the git repos be? My SWAG is well under 1 terabyte for snapshot.debian.org, and between 30 and 300 gigabytes for the wikipedia data.

Sandro Tosi: select count(bugs) in reportbug where status is open = 91

well, the actual select (against UDD) would be
udd=> select source, all_bugs from bugs_count where source = 'reportbug';
source all_bugs
----------+----------
reportbug 91
but the result is the same: less than 100 bugs against reportbug! Yay!

As you can see from the bugs graph, the Christmas and Easter holidays helped quite a lot to squash those bugs. When I first step into the reportbug world, the bugs count was around 250, and I first imagined in my mind to brake the 200 barrier, than the 150 and finally the less-than-100 one: while the first 2 limits where the hardest one (new to the codebase, other interest) the last one is the one I'm most proud of.
They seem quite nice-to-have stuff but recently I've tried to concentrate on reply fast to new report, fix as many reported crashes as possible and implement some of the long-awaited features.

Additionally, sometimes "No, sorry" is the proper reply to a bug and then it can be closed: it's hypocrite to keep bugs opened while internally you think it's a wontfix but you're not closing them because of a fear of possibly upset the reporters.

There will be more in the future, that's for sure, but I think this is the reportbug we'll see in squeeze, modulo some new crashes or very interesting feature we want it, so expect minor releases from now until squeeze+1

13 April 2010

Gunnar Wolf: Regarding the fatal cycling accident in Ciudad Universitaria

My blog is written in English, even though I sometimes post content relevant locally. Anyway, I want this to be as widely known as possible. We are about to launch a website/community for my University's cyclists, BiciUNAMonos. Please note the site I'm linking is still very preliminary in several ways. But that's the least relevant for now. I am translating here a message written by fellow cyclist (and researcher in the Institute of Astronomy of my University) Sergio Mendoza.
Regarding the fatal cycling accident in Ciudad Universitaria Yesterday night I got home, and was quite surprised to open my mailbox and find a considerable amount of messages under the subject Urgent: Fallen cyclist! I immediately noticed something was very wrong, and was surprised they were contacting me. When I decided to read the first such message, I realized what happened: Dr. Jorge Villanueva was run over by the Puma [internal University service] bus number 14, route 2, which was being driven over the speed limit. This happened last Sunday, April 11. On Sundays, all of Ciudad Universitaria becomes a cycling and running circuit. I was immediately brought back to the moment that, when I was leaving my office in the Astronomy Institute and heading towards Cerro del Agua avenue, a lady driving over the speed limit on the circuit that comes from Metro Universidad threw her car at me. I saw her at a few centimeters distance from her windshield... To the day I don't know how I pulled my bike away, as I was going to hit the windshield with my shoulder. Everything happened in slow motion, I just heard several cars honking at this imprudent lady. I didn't have a scratch, but got excessively close to getting a strong hit, and with the adrenaline raging I gave a kind caress with my closed fist to her brand new car. I had to free my adrenaline somehow... My legs were trembling when I tried to pedal. I told her, lady, I am excessively visible in my bike, why did you do this? , she didn't answer, she just looked despectively at me. This kind of accidents happen every day in the University and its main entries. Precisely today, a University professor threw his car at me entering the University via Cerro del Agua. When I reached him and confronted him, he told me completely sure of his words that I was invading the lane with my bike, and that it was my fault. Anybody would have thought a car-driving university professor is capable of reading the Metropolitant Transit Regulations that clearly states on its 1st article: The priority for using the public space, for the different transport modes will be according to the following priorization: I. Pedestrians; II. Cyclists; III. Users and providers of massive, collective or individual public transport service; IV. users of particular automotor transport; and V. users and providers of freight transport. We are now organizing to put up the first ghost bike in Ciudad Universitaria. This happens few days before the formal inauguration of BiciUNAMonos, the universitary association of urban cyclists; we will do this remembering our university mate. I see every day more people in the University hitting their bike pedals to get to their faculties, centers and research institutes, but what is striking is the lack of University infrastructure. The few cycleways we have are built to use a bycicle system that is open only until 16:00. It is good, but it is in no way useful for those of us who use the bike every day and at every hour, no matter the weather. The main problem lies at the communication points, when cyclists arrive from outside Ciudad Universitaria and have to take the regular circuits to reach the cycleways. The Transit Regulation, in the 1st article I quoted above, defines in an excellent way the priorities that must exist to allow human movility. In this regard we have to mention that:
  1. The pedestrians must be enormously protected with walkways and semaphores to allow them to safely walk. In Ciudad Unviersitaria there are many places that don't even have a walkway or semaphores, and drivers do not respect the pedestrian's preference. Also, now in the central area of Ciudad Universitaria we have the Pumabus system on a confined lane, providing an excellent service to the pedestrians to move within the campus.
  2. The cyclist comes next in this priorization, but there is nothing obvious for him. There are a couple of cyclist ways, usually invaded by pedestrians, and explicitly made to use the Bicipuma system. Cyclists need their own lane for circulation in the Universitary circuit; pedestrians have walkways, Pumab s has its confined lanes, but the cyclists still lack it. The third lane that remains is precisely for the IV and V entries in the Metropolitan Transport Regulations. They can perfectly share the remaining lane in the campus.
The last thing I wanted was to formally announce BiciUNAMonos reminding a fallen cyclist and dedicating a ghost bycicle to his memory in Ciudad Universtiaria, but we don't have a choice. We have to make it very clear to the University community that the bicycle is the best transport system, and that the drivers' imprudence inside Ciudad Universitaria must be strongly punished. Sergio Mendoza
President
http://www.biciunamonos.org
Coincidentally, today I also had a freightening experience. Taking one of my usual routes to work, going up from the sporting area in the Western half of the campus (just before where the map lists the highest point in my ride), just by Investigaciones Biom dicas, I heard a car hitting the breaks behind me and passing me (on my right side) quite narrowly. I was, as always, driving towards the center of the lane, to be able to respond to unforseen events (as this one, precisely). The Universitary authorities had the great(?) idea of placing round, small bumps before the Pumabus stations to avoid drivers parking in front of them. I have seen a strong accident caused by them, and was close to suffering one myself some months ago. I know that just after Biom dicas there are some such bumps, so I never ride too much to the right I don't know what was on this driver's head. Ciudad Universitaria has a 40 Km/h speed limit. Yes, it might seem too low - Circuits are wide and well planned. But there is a lot of cyclist and pedestrian transit, at all times, and I must recognize such a limit is well in place. I often take a longer route to my Institute, bordering the University along Av. Delf n Madrigal. People tell me I'm crazy, as this is an avenue that's often taken at high speed - Usually, cars pass me by between 60 and 80 Km/h. However, I even feel safer going that way than going inside the University. Contrary to the popular belief, Universitary people do not have better driving habits than the bulk of the population. And it's often much easier to drive along a way where the traffic even if it goes at three times my speed runs only in one direction, unlike the swarming of people going in every possible direction inside the main campus. Anyway, last Sunday we lost a University professor, we lost a cyclist. Some people lost a friend, a family member. We have to make this case well known, we have to speak with the authorities so they see the Bicipuma system is good, but not enough. Cycling is the only way to go for a city as complex as ours. A much needed first step is to allow proper vial connections linking the University and the many avenues that surround it. Another one is to make a campaign so the cyclists are not seen as Sergio regards as intruders in the streets The street belongs to us all. Cyclists should never drive on walkways or among pedestrians. Drivers need to learn to share the streets with us.

12 April 2010

Chris Lawrence: epcp for R

I finally have packaged up a very rough port of my epcp routine from Stata to R as part of a package unimaginatively called cnlmisc; you can download it here. In addition to the diagnostics that the Stata routine provides, the glm method includes a bunch of R-square-like measures from various sources (including Greene and Long). The only part I m sure works at the moment is the epcp for glm objects (including survey s and Zelig s wrappers thereof); the others that are coded (for polr and VGAM) are probably half-working or totally broken, and some wrappers aren t there yet at all. The error bounds suggested by Herron aren t there either. The print routines need a lot of work too; eventually it will have a nice toLatex() wrapper as well. But it beats having it sit on my hard drive gathering dust; plus I may eventually get motivated to write a JSS piece or something based on it. epcp for Stata is still available at my site. For more information on the measure, see Michael C. Herron (1999), Postestimation Uncertainty in Limited Dependent Variable Models Political Analysis 8(1): 83 98 or Moshe Ben-Akiva and Steven Lerman (1985), Discrete Choice Analysis, MIT Press.

11 April 2010

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2010/14

a short overview of my RC bug activities. more than usual, most of them in the debian perl group, some of them new bugs.

Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez: DudesConf 2010

Thanks GPUL (and Ghandalf!) for another perfect conference. Coru a, April 2011, Dudesconf 2010 (spanish)

Russell Coker: Debian/Testing and KDE4

I ve just upgraded my Thinkpad (which I use for most of my work) to Debian/testing with KDE4. Improvements Kde 3.5 (from Debian/Lenny) didn t properly display the applets in a vertical task bar. I want a vertical task bar because my screen resolution is 1680*1050 and I find that a less rectangular screen workspace is best for my usage patterns. In my previous post about my Thinkpad T61 I described how the sound controls weren t working [1]. These problems were fixed as part of the upgrade, KDE just does the right thing. Now when I press the buttons to increase or decrease the volume the ALSA settings are changed and a small window is briefly displayed in the center of the screen to show the new volume. Sounds are now made when I plug or unplug the power cable, this was configured in KDE 3.5 but just didn t work. Problems If I have a maximised Konqueror window and I use the middle mouse button to open a link in a new window then the new window will also be maximised. Previously when I did that the new window was not maximised. What sometimes happens is that I want to open several links from a web page in different windows, so if I can open them in non-maximised windows then I can click the title-bar or the bottom status-bar of the parent window to get it in the foreground again. Probably an ideal solution to this use-case would be to configure the middle mouse button to open a new window in the background or minimised. I can t figure out how to implement accelerator keys for window controls. In particular I like to use ALT-F9 to minimise a window (CUA89 standard). The upgrade from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4 lost this and I can t get it back. I want to have an icon on my panel to launch a Konqueror session. I don t want a large amount of space taken up for a launcher for several different Konqueror options, I just want a regular Konqueror for web browsing available at a single click. There didn t seem to be an option for this. KDE 3.5 has an option in the add widgets to toolbar dialogue to add icons for applications. I have just discovered that in KDE 4 the only way to do this is to go through the menu structure and then click the secondary mouse button. Having two ways to do something is often a good thing, particularly when the other way is the way that was most obvious in the previous version! It was annoying that the font choices for my Konsole session were lost on the KDE 4 upgrade, it s not a complex setting. Also the option to resize a Konsole session to a common size (such as 80*25) seems to have been lost. I had to spend at least 30 minutes configuring kmail to get it to display mail in much the same manner as it used to. You have to use the Select View Appearance (Theme) icon off at the right of the Search box and select Classic and then go to Select Aggregation Mode (immediately to the left) to select Flat Date View . I m happy for KDE 4 to default to new exciting things when run the first time, but when upgrading from KDE 3.5 it should try to act like KDE 3.5. I decided to use Kopete for Jabber just to preempt the GNOME people adding Mono support to Pidgin. I had to install the libqca2-plugin-ossl and qca-tls packages to enable SSL connection, missing either of those gives you an incomprehensible error condition that even strace doesn t clarify much. Given that it s generally agreed that sending passwords unencrypted over the Internet is a bad idea and that it s a configuration option in Jabber servers to reject non-SSL connections it seems to me that the Kopoete package should depend on the packages that are needed for SSL support. Failing that it would be good to have Kopete offer big visible warnings when you don t have them. I use the KDE 2 theme and the right side of the title bar of each window is a strange dappled pattern. Not sure why and I have more important problems to fix. Parts of KDE crash too often. I ll start filing bug reports soon. The management of the Desktop folder has changed. In previous versions of KDE the directory ~/Desktop had it s contents displayed in iconic form on the root window. Now by default it doesn t do that. It is possible to change it, but this is one of those things where the default in the case of an upgrade should be to act like previous versions. The way to enable the previous functionality is to go to the desktop settings (click the secondary mouse button on the background, select Desktop Settings and then under Desktop Activity change the Type: to the value Folder View and then specify the directory below. The facility to have different background colors or pictures for each of the virtual desktops seems to have been removed either that or the KDE configuration system doesn t have enough functionality to let me discover how to configure it. When the panel that I have on the left of the screen crashes everything that was next to the panel gets dragged to the left, this includes extending the width of maximised windows. Then when the panel starts again (which if lucky happens automatically) it pushes things back and if icons had been moved left it just obscures them. When using Konqueror to browse a directory full of pictures it doesn t generate thumbnail icons. When I middle-click on an icon for a picture it is opened with Konqueror not the image viewer that was used in KDE 3.5. The image viewer from KDE 3.5 had less options and therefore more screen space was used for the picture. Also the Konqueror window that is opened for this has a navigator panel at the left which I can t permanently remove. When I use Konqueror my common action is to perform a Google search and then use the middle button to open a search result in a new window. Most of my Google searches return pages that have more than one screen-full of data so shortly after opening a window with a search result I press PgDn to see the next page. That press of PgDn for some reason takes me back to the Google search. It seems that when a web page is opened in a new window the keyboard focus will be in the URL entry field, and pressing PgDn in that field takes you to the previous web page. This combination is really annoying for me. Conclusion Getting the sound working correctly is a great feature! Lots of little things are fancier and generally the upgrade is a benefit. The lack of thumbnails when displaying a folder of JPG files is really annoying though. The time taken to configure things is also annoying, I support four relatives who are just users so that probably means at least an hour of configuration work and training for each one so KDE 4 is going to cost me at least half a day because of this.

10 April 2010

John Goerzen: Jacob has a new computer and a favorite shell

Earlier today, I wrote about building a computer with Jacob, our 3.5-year-old, and setting him up with a Linux shell. We did that this evening, and wow he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for him. That was a lot of fun. But even more fun was had once the system was set up. I installed bsdgames and taught him how to use worm. worm is a simple snake-like game where you use the arrow keys to eat the numbers. That was a big hit, as Jacob likes numbers right now. He watched me play it a time or two, then tried it himself. Of course he crashed into the wall pretty quickly, which exits the game. I taught him how to type worm at the computer, then press Enter to start it again. Suffice it to say he now knows how to spell worm very well. Yes, that s right: Jacob s first ever Unix command was . worm. He d play the game, and cackle if he managed to eat a number. If he crashed into a wall, he d laugh much harder and run over to the other side of the room. Much as worm was a hit, the Linux shell was even more fun. He sometimes has a problem with the keyboard repeat, and one time typed worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm . I tried to pronounce that for him, which he thought was hilarious. He was about to backspace to fix it, when I asked, Jacob, what will happen if you press Enter without fixing it? He looked at me with this look of wonder and excitement, as if to say, Hey, I never thought of that. Let s see! And a second later, he pressed Enter. The result, of course, was: -bash: worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm: command not found Dad, what did it do? I read the text back, and told him it means that the computer doesn t know what worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm means. Much laughter. At that point, it became a game. He d bang at random letters, and finally press Enter. I d read what it said. Pretty soon he was recognizing the word bash , and I heard one time, Dad, it said BASH again!!! Sometimes if he d get semicolons at the right place, he d get two or three bashes . That was always an exciting surprise. He had more fun at the command line than he did with worm, and I think at least half of it was because the shell was called bash. He took somewhat of an interest in the hardware part earlier in the evening, though not quite as much. He was interested in opening up other computers to take parts out of them, but bored quickly. The fact that Terah was cooking supper probably had something to do with that. He really enjoyed the motherboard (and learned that word), and especially the CPU fan. He loved to spin it with his finger. He thought it interesting that there would be a fan inside his computer. When it came time to assign a hostname, I told Jacob he could name his computer. Initially he was confused. Terah suggested he could name it kitty , but he didn t go for it. After a minute s thought, he said, I will name it Grandma Marla. Confusion from us did he really understand what he was saying? You want to name your computer Grandma Marla? Yep. That will be silly! Sure you don t want to name it Thomas? That would be silly! No. I will name my computer Grandma Marla. " OK then. My DNS now has an entry for grandma-marla. I had wondered what he would come up with. You never know with a 3-year-old! It was a lot of fun to see that sense of wonder and experimentation at work. I remember it from the TRS-80 and DOS machine, when I would just try random things to see what they would do. It is lots of fun to watch it in Jacob too, and hear the laughter as he discovers something amusing. We let Jacob stay up 2 hours past his bedtime to enjoy all the excitement. Tomorrow the computer moves to his room. Should be loads of excitement then too.

9 April 2010

Phil Hands: Debian Tartan, in time for DebConf10

It looks like we have just enough interest for a second run of Debian Tartan. If we get it ordered in the next couple of weeks there will be time for kilts to be made in time be worn at DebConf10.The only issue at present is that it would be rather cheaper if more people were involved. For short runs the cloth costs 26.00 GBP per yard, and one also needs to find 400.00 GBP for the loom setup. Once you get to an order of 80 yards, the weavers will swallow the setup cost, and only charge 24.00 GBP per yard.In other words, if we're making only 46 yards (which seems like the current level) it's going to cost 10 GBP extra per yard, which is frustrating, as that then means that buying the remaining 36 yards to make it up to 80 yards will only cost another 365.00 GBP or a tenner a yard.If I wanted to make a profit out of this, I suppose I could speculate on the spare cloth, and then knock it out for 150% profit, but I have no desire to make money from my fellow developers, so while I'm chivying, and talking to the weavers, I'm not going to be underwriting the order like I did last time.So if you're even slightly tempted to join this cheerful clan then mail me now! Every extra kilt, skirt, tie, or other item ordered not only results in you owning a beautifully crafted item, but it also does your fellows good by making their orders cheaper too.At an order of 60 yards, the prices cross over, at which point there is no point in not making the full 80 yards, which can then be sold to late-comers to recoup costs for the early-birds.Go on -- you know you want one.Update: not sure what happened to the spam unfriendly mail link - use this: phil at hands dot com

David Welton: US Exports: "The Cloud"?

An Economist special report in last week's print edition talks about how the US will need focus more on savings and exports:

A special report on America's economy: Time to rebalance I've been thinking about that for a while too, especially after the dollar's recent weakness, although it has been strengthening some, lately, apparently due to the state of Greece's finances... I think that the computing industry is, in general, well poised to take advantage of that. For instance, what could be easier to export than computing power or "Software as a Service"? All it takes is a few minutes for someone in Europe to sign up to a US-based service with a credit card. For instance, compare Linode's prices and good service with most of their European competitors (gandi.net for instance, who are good people, and you have to love that they put "no bullshit" right on their front page). Not that they don't have good service in Europe, but it's very difficult to compete on price with the dollar being significantly cheaper. With the dollar where it is right now, gandi is almost, but not quite, competitive with Linode. If you don't include taxes. If the dollar weakens again, though, things could easily tilt far in Linode's favor. Besides a weak dollar, I think it will be important for companies in a position to do so in the US to focus on "the rest of the world". The US is a big, populous country where it's very easy to forget about far-off lands. Compare my home town of Eugene, Oregon to where I live in Padova. Google Maps says that it takes 7+ hours to drive to Vancouver, Canada (which, to tell the truth, isn't all that foreign in that they speak English with an accent much closer to mine than say, Alabama or Maine). Going south, Google says it's 15+ hours just to San Diego, although I think that's optimistic myself, given traffic in California. From Padova, I can be in France in 5 hours, according to Google, 3 hours to Switzerland, 4 to Innsbruck, in Austria, less than 3 hours to the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana, and around 3 hours to Croatia, too. And if you wanted to throw in another country, the Republic of San Marino is also less than 3 hours away, according to Google's driving time estimates. You could probably live your entire life in a place like Eugene and never really deal much with foreigners, whereas here, nearby borders are both a historic and an ever-present fact. The outcome of this is that, to some degree, people in the US have traditionally focused their businesses "inwards" until they got to a certain size. Which is, of course, a natural thing to do when you have such a big, homogenous market to deal with before you even start thinking about foreign languages, different laws, exchange rates and all the hassle those things entail. However, if exchange rates hold steady or favor the US further, and internal spending remains weaker, it appears as if it may be sensible for companies to invest some time and energy to attract clients in "the rest of the world". "Cloud" (anyone got a better term? this one's awfully vague, but I want to encompass both "computing power" like Linode or Amazon's EC2, as well as "software as a service") companies likely will have a much easier time of things: for many services, it's easy to just keep running things in the US for a while, and worry about having physical or legal infrastructure abroad later. Your service might not be quite as snappy as it may be with a local server, but it'll do, if it performs a useful function. Compare that with a more traditional business where you might have to do something like open a factory abroad, or at the very least figure out the details of how to ship physical products abroad and sell them, and do so in a way that you're somewhat insured against the large array of things that could go wrong between sending your products on their merry way, and someone buying them in Oslo, Lisbon or Prague. Since this barrier to entry is lower, it makes more sense to climb over it earlier on. As an example, Linode recently did a deal to provide VPS services from a London data center, to make their service more attractive to European customers. However, they still don't appear have marketing materials translated into various languages, and presumably they don't have support staff capable of speaking languages like Chinese, German or Russian either (well, at least not in an official capacity). This isn't to pick on them; they may have considered those things and found them too much of an expense/distraction/hassle for the time being - they certainly know their business better than I do - and that they simply are content to make do with English. Other businesses, however, may decide that a local touch is important to attracting clients. What do you need to look at to make your service more attractive to people in other countries? In no particular order:

There's certainly no lack of work there, but on the other hand, it's possible to do almost all of it from wherever you happen to be located, rather than spending lots of money and time flying around to remote corners of the globe, as is still common practice in many industries.

Gustavo Noronha Silva: Designing from the bottom up

Have you ever seen, while dealing in a support channel with a novice that just got in touch with the power of UNIX a conversation that goes like this?:
<novice> How can I process the output of a command, so that any number of spaces gets turned into a newline?
<seasoned> What are you trying to do?
<novice> I want to list the contents of a directory, but I want one per line.
<seasoned> ls -1
I have seen this numerous times, even as one of the actors. At times I was the novice, and many times in #debian-br I was the seasoned person trying to get the novice to focus on the problem they were trying to solve, not on the solution they thought was right. While reading M ir n Duffy s awesome paper about contributing to Free Software as a designer I couldn t help but get that image brought to my memory again, and again. Specially when I read this part:
This means the language and even the approach FLOSS projects take to solving problems tend to be focused on implementation and technology rather than starting with a real-life user problem to solve and determining appropriate implementation afterwards.
That does sound like us, and it does sound like many of the solutions we come up with. While I was reading her paper, there was a reference I got very interested in checking. It s a PDF with no links in it, so I only had the number of the reference. What I would have to do is I would have to scroll to the end of the paper, and find the reference, then somehow come back to the place I was looking at. My most immediate thought was you know, maybe evince should have tabs . Why? Because I could open a new tab, go to the place the reference was at, and to go back I just needed to close the new tab. Other options require much more effort - remembering the page I was at, or maybe the scroll offset more or less, and scan for the part of the text I was at. But those are not the only options! I could have the application set a marker on where I am, and have an easy command to go back to that marker, for instance, or evince could provide a way of looking ahead without throwing away the current state at all. I m pretty sure if I look around enough I will find tools that solve this problem in a fairly good way. Now, I think that is exactly how we ended up with tabs in so many places they do not make sense in, and with so many ad-hoc solutions that solve our problems in half-assed ways. Even in browsers, we tend to use tabs as ad-hoc solutions to real problems we have no real solution to handle yet, such as I want to check this other thing out real quick, but I do not want to lose any state of this page , or I want to check this out, but not right now, so let me open it, and then I ll come back to it , or maybe even I want to look at this now, but since it is going to take a while to load, I might as well let it load in the background, and when I finish reading this I can go look at it . These are the real problems we have, and I think we need better designs that solve them for real, instead of just patching them with the ad-hoc solution that tabs are. The other extreme of the spectrum is, of course, not doing something, or even anything for lack of the perfect solution. Using this is not a real solution as an excuse to not implement something that could serve as a temporary solution to a problem may cause more frustration than having to deal with the ad-hoc solution that is tested, and being applied to other applications for some time. After all, in many cases the ad-hoc solution can be later replaced with a proper one. I guess this is another instance of the very difficult problem of balancing different realities: proper design is not always available to start something up, specially if the application is backed by individuals and not by a company or a bigger project that could bring in designers to work on it from the start. In this case having something up and running is usually a very important first step in a free software project - usually required to get enough interest to make it worth designing for.

Uwe Hermann: coreboot / flashrom in GSOC 2010 -- student application deadline today!

GSoC 2010 logo As you may know there's a Google Summer of Code program again this year. The deadline for student applications is April 9th at 19:00 UTC, so if you're a student and you want to work on a coreboot (open-source BIOS / PC firmware) or flashrom (open-source BIOS chip flasher) project, please apply in time. The following coreboot/flashrom GSOC project ideas have been proposed so far (but you can also suggest your own ideas, of course): See this wiki page for why and how to apply for a coreboot/flashrom project.

8 April 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 26

RCBW - #26 RC bug count: 666 It is getting down, even though the current number is scary. My personal RC bug count is not so mystical and as low as 205 RC bugs to go, which is quite encouraging. Without any further ado, here are this week squashes: Random points:

7 April 2010

Patrick Schoenfeld: Ubuntu considering critical bugs an "invalid" bug?

I just discovered that bug report over at Ubuntu.
Short summary:
They have a script in upstart which is not meant to be run manually and if you do it will erase your whole file system. Additionally it seems that the fact that you shall not run that script is not communicated anywhere.

That alone isn't the most spectacular about it. Bugs happen. Whats spectacular about it is how a Canonical employee and member of the TechBoard (for people who don't know it: The people who decide about the technical direction Ubuntu takes) handles that bug. One quote of him to reflect it all:
Sorry, the only response here is "Don't Do That Then"

So what we have here is a classical case of bad programming. The problem in question is that the script expects a certain environment variable to be set. Fair enough. However it does not check if its set at all and instead of failing or using a sensible default it simply sticks to undefined behaviour. What we have here is a classical programming mistake every beginner tends to do. People who start programming often forget (or don't know) that every external value we rely on must be considered untrustworthy. Therefore a good practice is to check those values.In this case someone decided that this is useless because they suffer from the wrong assumption that nobody ever calls it manually and the other wrong assumption that caller of the scriptwill always set the environment variable correctly. This is a double-fail.
Now the developer in question does not accept that (someone else indicated why the behaviour of the script is dangerous), he simply says that the bug is invalid. Thats really a pity.

Jon Dowland: tesco

Tesco Car Insurance (and most likely their other financial products) operate a commercial email system which is populated by anyone who submits their address to them as part of searching for a car insurance quote. That's not particularly unusual. Each mail that Tesco sends includes unsubscribe instructions - standard industry practise. However Tesco's instructions do not work. I have followed them at least three times since January this year to no avail. Despite this I have continued to receive unsolicitied commercial email (spam) from Tesco. Tesco do not answer mail to their postmaster or abuse addresses, and do not accept mail for those local parts at many of their domains (they use more than one domain for their business: tescofinance.com, tesco.com, tescocompare.com, contact.tescocompare.com, tescoinsurance.com). I would advise that nobody ever submit their details to a Tesco-affiliated company for these reasons. I have given up and blacklisted them on the mail servers which I control. Based on the unrelated experiences of a friend of mine, I would have strong reservations regarding the quality of the services they offer, too - in particular their home insurance products.

Biella Coleman: Nameless, Freak, Phreak

So I tend to focus on the cultural present but during grad school it was hammered into my brain that to understand the contemporary moment, history matters, a lot.. The problem with hacking and related activities is that the history is a bit sparse and fragmented. Recently I have been working on a piece that examines some of the aesthetics similarities between phrakers, underground hackers, and trollers and it sort of hit me that I had no idea when the term phreak or freak came into being. So I dropped a note to Phil Lapsely who is writing (finally) a proper history of phreaking and he was thoughtful enough to pen down a genealogy of the term.

Biella Coleman: Nameless, Freak, Phreak

So I tend to focus on the cultural present but during grad school it was hammered into my brain that to understand the contemporary moment, history matters, a lot.. The problem with hacking and related activities is that the history is a bit sparse and fragmented. Recently I have been working on a piece that examines some of the aesthetics similarities between phrakers, underground hackers, and trollers and it sort of hit me that I had no idea when the term phreak or freak came into being. So I dropped a note to Phil Lapsely who is writing (finally) a proper history of phreaking and he was thoughtful enough to pen down a genealogy of the term.

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