Search Results: "xam"

26 April 2006

Wouter Verhelst: GCC 4.1

The m68k port has been having issues with GCC 4.0 since its inclusion in the archive. Although many of the bugs that spawned from that update have since been fixed, there are still a lot of them; I suspect the high number of GCC 4.0 ICEs is the main reason the m68k port still hasn't made it back as a release candidate architecture. Many of the issues with GCC 4.0 seem fixed in GCC 4.1. The most recent example is QT4, which did not build with G++ 4.0, but did build with G++ 4.1. Another particularly problematic example is some KDE-related thing (the name of which I can't remember offhand) that didn't build with GCC 4.0 due to an ICE, and didn't build with GCC 3.4 either, due to a different ICE. However, it's hard to say for sure whether GCC4.1 really is an improvement if you haven't tried using it on an autobuilder. For that reason, I just installed gcc 4.1 in the buildd chroots on jazz and quickstep, the experimental autobuilders, and made them the default compilers. Hopefully that'll work better than GCC 4.0.

Alexander Schmehl: [DebConf] Sometimes I like my job

It is for example fun to be one of the first who heard about a new award Debian got, and add it to our website (should be up there soon, thanks again to Cyril Brulebois from the french language team for translating). The not fun part of my job seems to be to try to write polite mails, asking people for something without stepping on their toes. Well, let's not talk about that; after having spend several hours on writing an other mail I just feld like blow my stack but deleted the stuff I just wrote... so let's go one. Another not that funny part of my work were the proceedings I just finished. After I lost somehow last years work (I had a very nice system of texing all those papers, creating a big PDF for printing and several small ones for download), I needed to do a complete rewrite, which got complicated by people submitting their papers in neither LaTeX nor plain text as we asked to do. Some could be fixed by some sed magic, but I'm impressed what ugly code some automated conversion tools can create. But that's done, too, and we even had the great idea of adding a credits section for all the volunteers helping to make DebConf become reality. Having that done, I couldn't resist and added a small joke. One of those insiders not everyone will get... Forgive me :) While talking about jokes: Did anyone noticed our quite new DebConf fortunes section? Feel free to submitt new ones. Some other news: No, Gustavo, we didn't decided yet where DebConf7 will take place, but one thing is for sure: Since DebConf6 will be in Latin America the next one won't. We have several offers, including (but maybe not limited to, I might have forgot one or the other) Edinburgh, Brixen, somewhere in Greece, Sarajevo and... uhm... some people would like to have one in Germany but don't think we could afford that, so it's quite sure DebConf7 won't be here. But as said, decision has not been made (but it looks like it will be in Europe ;) and currently we don't have the time to think much about that. Let's try to get DebConf6 done first ;) PS: Civilization has reached me! But they marked the wrong house! It is the one to the south east, the one with the empty parking lot.

PPS: No, this blog entry has no deeper meaning; I just feld like bloging.

John Goerzen: Small-Town Banks

Last year, I wrote about a small town funeral home.

Today it's time to write about small town banks.

So last Saturday, Terah and I went to the bank in the town we're going to be closest to (population 590, compared population 3500 town we live close to now). We were discussing financing for the house and renovations.

The loan officer at the bank is also the city mayor. She's lived in the area for years. I don't know her well, but I know of her and she has heard of me too.

So some of the questions we got were:

"Are you still working the same place I heard about awhile ago?"

"Now should the seller's copy of this example contract go to your aunt or your dad?"

"So the place you're buying -- just a couple of miles from your great uncle then, right?"

Unlike the large nationwide bank we talked to, we were NOT asked:

The person at the small-town bank also actually returned my calls, answered my e-mails, and kept appointments. She also provided all sorts of help for us along the way. It's as if the bank would actually like to have our business and would work to get it.

Guess which bank we're going to use.

25 April 2006

Erich Schubert: More thoughts on XML differencing

Last year, I gave a talk on XML differencing at the Extreme Markup Languages 2005 conference in Montr al. Since then I didn't have much time to work on that project. The prototype app is opensource, and available at ssddiff.alioth.debian.org. The slides are there, too, and so is a link to the article. XML differencing is actually a two phase process; I've been mostly working on the first phase. Traditional approaches intertwine the two phases. In the first phase, you build a mapping between the two documents. I called this a "nodeset correspondence" in the slides. Basically you decide which node from the first document corresponds to which node in the second document. When you have found this mapping (the "marked" output writer of ssddiff will output this information in form of two XML documents marked with numbers in a certain attribute), the actual differencing is done. But much of the work remains. When doing a diff, the output (format) is just as important as the actual result. While the "marked" output explained above is very precise, it doesn't give the user an overview of what has changed in the document. That's why I added two more output writers, the "xupdate" writer and the "merged" writer. The "xupdate" writer does obviously produce an XUpdate script. It goes a long way to optimizing the output (read: minimizing the number of operations), and employs a longest-common-subsequence algorithm for that (LCS is what regular diff uses on lines!). Fortunately we already have a 1:1 mapping, so this boils down to a longest-increasing-subsequence which can be computed very efficiently. Then the writer employs some XUpdate tricks to do real moves (by storing parts of the tree in variables to be inserted later), and avoids collapsing of text nodes (it will eventually insert dummy nodes for that). But all this gives just a glimpse of the complexity I've encountered in what I considered to be a "remote" part of my project. It isn't even described in the paper, because I just hacked this code together to work somewhat (attribute handling is incomplete IIRC). The "merged" writer turned out to be much more powerful than I had imagined and actually rather easy. After "merging" two version of an HTML document, I could add some CSS rules and have a visual presentation of the changes in my browser. Very cool. I'd love to add this html merge functionality to the prototype, but I didn't have enough time yet (you'll find some refactoring of the merged writer in SVN though to get there someday). But let me get back to the difficulties in the "XUpdate" writer. Not all of these difficulties are actually of technical nature. It is (like with the semantics of differencing) a matter of the intended data model and use. When you are doing a diff to be applied by a computer (e.g. via XUpdate), you may have the requirement, that the resulting document is identical to the original document. In that case, the diff is likely to have to restore whitespace. If you are interested in analyzing the differences, you will want to skip any irrelevant information. Let's assume we have an address book: 
<abook><entry name="tom" /><entry name="jerry" /></abook>
Ordering of the entry nodes is likely to be irrelevant. You address book applications will sort the entries on demand. So a "semantic diff" shouldn't include any changes to the ordering of "entry" nodes, should it? The XUpdate writer doesn't have any functionality in place to skip such changes from being written to the output file. This will likely be not possible without some DTD magic and extra user information. However, to have the benefits of the "-u" context option of good old "diffutils" - fuzzy matches, and somewhat reliable merging of changes without having all revisions available - such semantics are needed, too. But this will even further increase complexity of the output writer, which for example would need to detect somehow that the "name" attribute in my address book is a unique key, and therefore xpath expressions like /abook/entry[@name='tom'] are preferrable to expressions such as /abook/entry[1], which will easily break when merging. The specification of an "XUpdate-replacement with context information" is probably a whole thesis in itself, I guess. P.S. I'm occasionally asked about a Java version of ssddiff. Sorry that I have to disappoint you there. First of all, I'm very short of time. Then I'm not too comfortable in Java, and I estimated that the Java version would need at least twice as much memory, because of certain optimizations I can't easily access in Java that I can just hide in a template in C++. And memory is the key limiting factor at least in exact mode.

24 April 2006

Junichi Uekawa: manpage and their encoding.

I've had a brief review of manpage and their encoding.Although it is possible to have a manpage coded in UTF-8,it is currently somewhat impractical to do so.man-db searches for files based on the locale string, in the order of ja_JP.UTF-8, ja_JP, ja (if you take Japanese as an example), which means that the locale string really needs sanitization (case-sensitiveness is required here),and files coded in different codesets than the current one will not be searched for.What 'ja' means is defined in src/encodings.c of man-db.Some good documentation is in order.UPDATE: According to GyrosGeier, the encoding-specific directories are there only for cases where the manpage fails to be transcoded (as in iconv with transcode option).Usually, the manpages should be installed in /usr/share/man/ja/ directory, to allow man-db to do the transcoding.UPDATE: After discussion in debian-users@jp: considering the current situations where Fedora Core et al are converting to UTF-8 for manpages, and warning on 'legacy encodings', Debian may need to start considering shipping utf-8 manpages, or have to go through the hassle of having to convert every manpage to the 'legacy encodings'.

Erich Schubert: RSS needs threading.

Please correct me if any of RSS/Atom/etc. do already have threading. On a mailinglist I'm on (large number of subscribers, and often threads become quite long but only interesting for like 1% of subscribers, but with days with now new mails inbetween) there is a discussion every now and then by people who'd prefer a forum. A forum however is a totally non-working solution. First of all, web UIs (even Ajax, Web 2.0) suck. None offers threading as comfortable and smooth as a real email reader such as Evolution or Thunderbird (Outlook seems to have quite bad threading, or disabled by default, thats why many novice users think forums do better threading...). Secondly, a forum requires you to frequently visit it, whereas email will patiently sit in your email folder waiting to be read, just like your regular email. That is much more workeable with an increasing number of lists/forums. You can easily be subscribed to 20 mailing lists. Can you imagine visiting 20 forums every day? Even with smart browser (e.g. Galeon that can open a bookmark folder into tabs, did I mention IE sucks?) this is quite a pain. Now imagine that some of these forums are inactive for weeks. Visit the forum just to see that there are no new posts? Now RSS comes into mind. But for a Forum? Should it list every post? No, it needs to have thread support, so I can easily kill whole threads. Or I'll just stick with email and tell everyone who wants a forum to fishing. Or write a forum with reasonable email support. Oh, and RSS doesn't solve the writing problem either. No, RSS is not the answer. Email is. Update: A couple of people have send me emails about NNTP/Usenet/News. While there are excellent clients for it available, and the distributed nature is also a nice feature, it also has drawbacks. For example, you basically need to setup a separate service (especially if it's a private newsfeed, and you can't use gmane), which is much more difficult that running a mailing list or a RSS feed. You can run a RSS feed with basically any provider. You can get a private mailing list with many. Then you usually need to setup a new profile for each NNTP server, because it's designed totally around the server model, not single groups. Furthermore, while you can usually access RSS feeds with your regular web browser (in form of their HTML counterparts, or some built-in filter), and mailing list with your email program, users need separate software for using News at all. (Granted, many email clients can do news) Oh, and then people seem to be afraid of NNTP, unfortunately.

22 April 2006

Joey Hess: re: automating debconf setup

Steve: 
joey@dragon:~>sudo debconf-get-selections  grep debconf/
debconf debconf/priority        select  high
debconf debconf/frontend        select  Readline
debconf-get-selections is the tool you are looking for. If it doesn't seem to work, might I suggest a bug report or email, or at least some example of how it doesn't work rather than a vague, hard to reply to blog post about it? Argh.

David Pashley: Empty elements in XSLT

I recently wanted to deal with docbook <ulink> elements that didn't have any contents by displaying the url as the link text. I wanted to convert: 
<ulink url="http://www.example.com">Example.com<ulink>
<ulink url="http://www.example.com"/>
to 
<a href="http://www.example.com">Example.com<a>
<a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com<a>
I originally had: 
<xsl:template match="ulink">
   <xsl:element name="a">
      <xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="@url"/></xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
This sucessfully dealt with the first form of <ulink> that had content, but not with the second example with an empty element. The solution is the use an <xsl:choose> element with a test to see if the current node has any child nodes. Using child::node() we can get any child nodes. We can then test if the node has any children using the count() function. The resulting xslt is: 
<xsl:template match="ulink">
   <xsl:element name="a">
      <xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="@url"/></xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:choose>
         <xsl:when test="count(child::node())">
            <xsl:apply-templates/>
         </xsl:when>
         <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="@url"/>
         </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
   </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

Erich Schubert: Debian quality assurance

Some time ago I blogged about what I think sets Debian apart from other distributions. Here's another posting of that sort: Debian goes a long way to ensure quality of packages. I don't know what other distributions do to keep packaging quality high, but Debian does lots of stuff. (Well, Ubuntu probably uses the same tools ;-)) For example, meet lintian and linda. These two tools run a set of sanity checks on any package (usually the maintainer runs lintian when building the package, but they are independently checked, too). The sanity checks include Debian policy checks, checks for missing manpages, some linking tests all the way to testing for common spelling mistakes. Getting a package "lintian-clean" usually requires some extra efforts by the maintainer - cdbs, debhelper and other build tools can't just do everything automatically. So it is good to have lintian run some final checks.

21 April 2006

Ross Burton: The Good Stuff

This arrived in the post today: Has Bean coffee Brazil Sitio Boa Sorte coffee, freshly ground yesterday. It won Cup Of Excellence last year and Has Bean bought the entire supply. It's good. At £4.99 a packet it's not really expensive, but it's not cheap. I must avoid buying the other Cup Of Excellence winners, for example El Salvador San Roberto which is fourteen pounds a bag. I'm probably going to buy most of my coffee from Has Bean in the future: the coffee is good and the delivery is fast. They freshly grind on demand so it's always fresh, and it comes in airtight re-sealable bags (none of that fold it over and sticky bit of plastic nonsense) that sit nicely in the fridge. All in all: heavily recommended. NP: Buena Vista Social Club

Erich Schubert: More on Rockbox on my iAudio X5

So after a using rockbox on my iAudio X5 I must say that I am impressed, and I'll likely stick with the Opensource Firmware, instead of the Vendors'. Battery life with Rockbox is slightly over 6 hours. On a one year old X5, so not on the L version with extra battery life. I obtained this value using the battery bench plugin, and playing shuffle over my whole collection. I've heard that for "vendor benchmarks" they usually choose 128 kbit mp3; my collection is mostly higher bitrate, and Ogg Vorbis is also more CPU intensive AFAIK. Crossfading also takes extra CPU cycles, for a fair benchmark I would turn that off, but I wanted to know this value for my everyday use. This very likely is less than with the original firmware, but enough for me. In fact, I even forgot turning off my player in the afternoon, and the battery still held until I got home. And like one extra hour. Sound quality is excellent, but I'm no audiophile. It's just that I really like the way it sounds. Although I couldn't hear any difference with the EQ turned on or off (is it already implemented?). But I don't care. ;-) I managed however to crash the firmware once or twice these days in the menus. Can't really say when, only that it was when going to the system settings from some file properties or so. But it's still beta, so maybe this is already fixed. ;-) Guess the crash did cost me a few extra minutes of battery life. There is some oddness in the navigation due to the wide range of platforms supported. For example the battery benchmark app claims you need to press "play" to start, but that is in fact clicking the stick, not pressing the real play button on the side of the display. Having the player display the next track in queue also was nice: when I didn't want to listen to a certain track I could sometimes skip the next one, too. Display poweroff is also nicer with rockbox - the Cowon firmware used to low-light the display first, then turn it off completely. That seems pointless to me, and annoyed me a couple of times, actually.

20 April 2006

MJ Ray: Google Summer of Spin

Google runs a "Summer of Code" scheme which buys some projects a student worker for the summer. My view is that we should note Google "aren't a particularly good example, but if you can get money out of them to improve debian and the web search tools it contains, good luck!" [generally tidied the Google Bugs page too]

John Goerzen: Debian From Scratch 0.99.0 Is Out

At long last, I've finally updated Debian From Scratch (DFS). For those of you not familiar with DFS, it's a single, full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel. The DFS ISO images also contain a small Debian mirror subset that lets you use cdebootstrap, along with the other utilities on the CD, to perform a manual, "Gentoo-like" installation. It also serves as an excellent rescue CD, with a full compliment of filesystem tools, backup/restore software, and a development environment complete enough to build your own kernels.

DFS also refers to dfsbuild, the tool that generates DFS images. dfsbuild is available as a Debian package. dfsbuild is designed to make it trivial to build your own custom DFS images. You can have your own set of Debian packages on your images, your own kernels, etc. Unlike many other systems, you can go from the example dfs.cfg to a customized DFS build in just a few minutes, even if you've never used dfsbuild before.

Version 0.99.0 is a from-scratch rewrite and port to Haskell. You can read the full list of new features in the announcement, but the biggest is that it now supports standard Debian initramfs kernels in addition to ones that have enough drivers statically linked to be able to read the CD-ROM.

You can also download my DFS images or browse the docs online.

18 April 2006

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Nuclear Power?

Why not? It actually never went away, as most of the existing nuclear power plants are still being operated at full level to produce electricity, not only in countries like France, in which about 78% of the electicity is produced by nuclear power plants, but also in other countries as Spain, UK, or the United States (20% of the electricity produced at nuclear powerplants). Asian developing countries are nowadays building several nuclear power plants, as they have an increasing demand that cannot be only satisfied by fuel, coal or natural gas, leaving apart the also crucial problem of the cost of those commodities. For example, India, having 15 nuclear plants in use right now is building 8 more. With a population of 1100 million people, they need those watts. As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, says:
Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.
Of course we have to think also in wind and solar power. And not only for generating electricity to put on the net, but also as a way to reduce home energy consumption. For example, in Madrid, local goverment is forcing that every flat building designed from 2007 have solar panels on top for generating hot water. This will mean a lot of fuel saving. But it is only a local measure (not country wide) and at the same time it cames a bit late: there have been a construction boom during last 10 years and the cycle is somehow reaching an end. And also wind or solar energies have other environmental problems. Wind mills require elevated zones, with good winds, to be placed. And those will affect landscape and birds. But solar and wind energies cannot be promoted and think at the same time that they will not have any impact. Will have to deploy in not a far future (perhaps we are late now) every non fossil baseload sources of energy we have. This includes solar, wind and also nuclear. There are environmental, economical and also polical and estrategical issues that must be considered when a range from 60% to 80% of our energy is produced using coal, fuel or natural gas coming from always conflictive world areas, and at even higher prices, as more demand from developing countries enter in the market and resources end and other more expensive locations have to be used. At the same time, we can not leave apart those problems that nuclear power has, including accidents, but we have to consider them from a neutral scientific and technical point of view. Or we can shut down our computers and chat around a table with a light candle.

Jacobo Tarr&#237;o Barreiro: Vocabulary helper

Every time Manoj writes an e-mail in a mailing list you read, you pick up a unexampled word. Nowadays, if you desire to amend your English lexicon, you needn’t wait until Manoj writes a new electronic mail: merely employ Manojize. Manojize brings together link-grammar and Princeton WordNet to alter some of your nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs into some of their synonyms! Instant vocabulary, quick and painless! Make it look like you conceive really firmly of your messages, when it’s precisely Manojize helping you behind the scenes! Download Manojize today with darcs get http://darcs.tarrio.org/manojize

16 April 2006

Erich Schubert: More on brands

In this weekends newspaper was an article on brands in fashion. That the big brands are going down, and instead smaller brands are coming up. This was explained with people wanting to be "hip" and faster than the trend. "Cutting edge". This is very interesting, since Google basically defied this trend. Google started as this "insider tip" for search engines, back when everybody was using Altavista, Yahoo, Hotbot and such. Back then, Google was "hip" because of it's simplistic interface and quality, and meta searchengines such as MetaGer. Many of these search engines from back then have gone away. And Google has become a really big brand. Using Google is not "hip", everbody does use it. So what is it keeping people this loyal to the Google brand, and not going for new "hip" stuff like ExaLead. Another counterexample are iPods. I didn't buy one, because everybody does (and it doesn't play my .ogg files, and doesn't do gapless playback) - but millions of people did. So iPod is another "old-style brand" that just popped up a few years ago. Will the same thing happen on the net that has been happening in fashion? The next big thing, will it be an influx of "lifestyle search engines"? Maybe built around top blogs like BoingBoing? Should companies try to buy their way into the top blog sites? Or are they actually more likely to kill them that way? Or is the net actually ahead, and big brands are coming back? But given that one of the key features of so-called "Web 2.0" is the social interaction thing, isn't the net just changing right now to add more "community"? Will it happen to operating systems and software, too? Apple OSX is doing well in becoming a "lifestyle OS". Windows can't. But how about the Linux UIs? KDE has tons of features, some people say it's overloaded. GNOME is going the other way, keeping things simple and easy - too simple and easy for others. What if we'd "lifestyle" user interfaces, and do the next step past "theming" - offering desktop OS styles like "power user", "hip and quick", "just let me get the work done quickly" and "less is more". I guess we don't have to workforce for that. Yet.

Kenshi Muto: CUPS 1.2rc2 aka cupsys 1.1.99.rc2-0exp1 is uploaded

After long time working together with Martin Pitt, I uploaded CUPS 1.2rc2 to experimental archive. This version introduces and improves many features; IPv6, LDAP, localized PPD, hardware detection, etc. Plus, it may make an another bunch of bugs :) For example I noticed KDE-control-center complained by ABI incompatibility around IPP. CUPS 1.2 provides better i18n support. If you're interested in the translation, see upstream's document. (AFAIK Swedish translation is been working by Daniel Nylander.)

15 April 2006

Andrew Pollock: [life/americania] Taking separation of Church and State to new levels of silliness

It's always surprised me how for such a supposedly puritanical country, America seems very wrapped up in political correctness when it comes to observing holidays (gee, what's the derivation of that word?) based on Christian events. It's not "Merry Christmas", it's "Happy Holidays". There's no public holidays for Easter, for example. They get right into Halloween, which is a very pagan event. Today I tried to call a utility company, and got a recorded message, and it turns out that some employers to give their employees Good Friday off. They just call it the "Spring Holiday".

14 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Wet in Chiang Mai

We got up early this morning to catch our flight to Chiang Mai from Sukhothai Airport, the most beautiful airport I have ever seen: it's not a cement brick with squared floors, but rather a group of traditional Thai hut houses, one for ticketing and checking, one for departure, and one for arrival, and all set in a beautiful surrounding -- no wonder this airport won the Thai environmental award every year since it was first given. If you ever consider visiting Sukhothai from Chiang Mai, fly there! I can imagine arriving at that airport to be a very special experience! Following the touchdown few minutes after takeoff, we sought out a couple of guest houses and finally settled at the Awana Guesthouse, which also offered a pool, although on seeing it, it's more like a bath tub for 5 people. Whatever... I used the morning hours, during which the Thai appeared to be still sleeping to run two most important errands: first, getting my ear unclogged, and second, picking up the bag with clothing from the train station. Our guesthouse referred me to the Chiang Mai Ram hospital, a privately run clinic, and once I got there (still dry), I didn't get to read as much as a single page in my new book (The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon) until I was lying flat and had an English-speaking doctor examine me. He told me that the Thai put some sort of stuff (I did not understand the name of the substance) into their pools, which causes European ears to clog up frequently, and after 15 minutes of routine, I was able to hear again on my left ear. I paid just short of 20 EUR for the cure and felt so good about it and the hospital that I talked my way up to the management to make a donation -- in the amount of the estimated difference between those 20 EUR and the amount I would have had to pay in Switzerland. They said that I was the first person to ever make a donation to the clinic, the other foreigners usually only complain about the high prices. Go figure about the kind of tourist who frequents Chiang Mai. Speaking of tourists, unfortunately, this place is crowded with Europeans, and not just any of them, but the worst kind. For me, dress code means a lot, and when I see Europeans without shirts, or women in bikinis in a Bhuddist city, I sometimes wonder why these people don't simply stay home. Of course, tourism is the number one source of income for about 70% of the Thai, so it's just as well that they come, but then they should not be complaining about medical care for 20 EUR, or bargain to the minimum price for handicrafts, or annoy themselves that the tuk tuk driver just "ripped them off" by charging 60 instead of 40 Bhat (again, around 1 EUR). Cured, I made my way for the station and almost made it there dry, if it hadn't been for that damned pickup van closing in from behind and hunting my taxi for several hundred metres, just to get a shot. At the station, I took some detours to find the cargo terminal, but was then surprised at how easy it was to claim the bag, even without the receipt (which, if you will remember, was in the wallet I had lost a couple of days ago). I am really relieved, once for the clothing, and second because the bag itself was lent to me by a friend (forgive me, HP). By the time I left the station it was about noon, and there was water everywhere, but I made it to the hotel almost dry. The Thai duly respect if you have a bag, smoke a cigarette, hold a cellphone, or simply wave your hand. It goes without saying that the two massive splashed I received nevertheless were from tourists, who must have reached some sort of overpowering state of joy and didn't care about what they sprayed. When I saw some tourists splash buckets onto a couple of old people (which is a no-do), I was really ashamed. The New Year festival in Chiang Mai is said to be the biggest and most lively all over Thailand. I met Aline back at the hotel and we headed out into the centre city for yet another day of soaked clothing, and we can probably agree that the "festivities" here are second to none. This time, following the bad experience of the inferior position of a water gun on a motorcycle, we bought two puckets and got up on one of the pickups with some Thais and Burmese people speaking excellent English, and had excellent fun for an hour or two -- gettting no further than 200 metres along one of the rivers or so -- there was no driving on the roads which were filled with people and vehicles, just not touching each other, and there was water everywhere with people getting fresh canisters from the rivers all the time. We then remembered that we were wearing our last set of clothing, the other stuff being laundered and ready for pickup tomorrow, so we disembarked the truck and headed out of the city to the market in hope to find some trousers to wear, but short of a Sarong for Aline, there was nothing striking our fancy (which, mind you, isn't high. I just don't want to be wearing thick jeans in this weather). Anyway, the trousers we were wearing had dried in the mean time, and now the challenge was to make it back to the guesthouse without being splashed again -- and quite a difficult endeavour it was, but we almost succeeded, only soaking up another litre each, which, believe me, was peanuts by then. Sorry for this somewhat unexciting entry. Starting tomorrow, we'll break with the festival as we've had enough of water for the time being. On our list are a day of cooking school, the zoo, a 1-2 day treck in the hills, a seminar with monks, and, of course, a bunch of the temples of the city. Thanks again for reading along.

12 April 2006

John Goerzen: Tuttle: Neither Gone Nor Forgotten

So just when I thought the whole Tuttle story had wound down, more starts appearing.

The Register has a new article: Only "freaks" waste their time with Linux in Oklahoma. In it, they posted a video clip from an Oklahoma TV station that called Tuttle "an international laughing stock." Quite a funny little piece. The Register also mentioned that the Tuttle city manager left work when he heard a TV crew would be there to interview him. Favorite quote:

Instead of a website, Taylor discovered an Apache server configuration page that mentioned CentOS. He's an Oklahoma man, and the Apache feather must have proved frightening.


Today's next little piece of fun is this page at the Tuttle Times. Look on the right, under Links. See the link that reads "Example of CentOS test page"? Notice where it points to. Yes, that's right, www.tuttlechamber.org. Click on it, and sure enough, up comes the infamous test page. So the Tuttle Chamber of Commerce apparently is getting ready for round two...

And while we're speaking of the Tuttle Times: they have published a letter to the editor from Johnny Hughes, the CentOS lead developer that was on the other end of those exchanges with Tuttle. I think Johnny wrote an excellent little piece there.

And finally, another funny headline from the Tuttle Times homepage: "Prosecution attorney presents complete case." I am glad to hear that at long last this terrible scourge of incomplete cases has been brought to an end. But beware, this shocking story is not over yet! The next article is "defense raises compelling questions." Another first for Tuttle?

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