The Tour of Britain organisers emailed me to announce their launch. The race this year will be 7th - 14th September (starting stage 2 in my old stomping grounds of MK and finishing stage 3 in Burnham on Sea, the next town south from my home) and they announce daily coverage on itv4
on their front page. Well done ToB and itv! That should be a vast improvement on the 2 hours on the last day that BBC were giving it, although I expect it’s highlights rather than live.

Bernie S again tipped me off that ETBsat is showing the GP Indurain on Saturday. I see they’re listing at 15:50 CET TXIRRINDULARITZA:INDURAIN SARIA “SANTUARIO DE PUY. LIZARRA” which I think might be it. Nice spot again Bernie!

A while ago, Koha started using CGI::Carp in order to give more useful error messages and save us having to tell mailing list posters to read the fine Apache HTTPD error log quite so often. Even this still has limitations. Sometimes an unexpected response from a networked resource causes one of the underlying layers to return an error. That error itself doesn't help us much. We need to know what Koha or our C4 modules did to provoke it. So, I enabled backtraces. I copied a line from BitTorrent::TrackerCGI and added $main::SIG __DIE__ = &CGI::Carp::confess; to Koha in the relevant place. Isn't there a nicer way to do that? Or is this a bad idea for some reason? A patch for this has been sent to koha.org and it's inspired Galen Charlton to fix a related bug in the CGI::Carp usage.

Bernie S wrote in: “Bit concerned RTBF not showing Flanders on Sunday (4 hrs last year). Only Eurosport (19 east) and RAI Tre (13 east) I can find so far. I just checked ARD/ZDF no deal there. Also France 3 said on Sunday at CI that Flanders is not live there. So, coverage is a bit sparse, although NOS will probably show but are encrypted.” Thanks Bernie. Eurosport is schedules show it as 13:00-17:00 CET and RAI Tre has it 15:10-18:00 CET (which probably means Eurosport will overrun and not show the presentations, as sadly usual). Unusually, it’s also on SFinfo (13 east) at 13:00 CET. Highlights 15:15 CET Monday and 13:30 CET Wednesday on Eurosport.

First of all, you can't do All Fool's Day pranks on global web sites because of time zones: if you do, you'll be pranking either early or late somewhere and so you're the fool. Now, I've been a bit quiet recently because I've been moving dozens of Wordpress blogs over to one Wordpress MU install. Clearly the right way to do it. They're all on different domains and we want their names to have www, which needed the following small change...

 
--- wpmu-settings.php
+++ wpmu-settings.php
@@ -6,8 +6,8 @@ if( $current_site && $current_blog )
 $wpmuBaseTablePrefix = $table_prefix;
 $domain = addslashes( $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] );
-if( substr( $domain, 0, 4 ) == 'www.' )
-       $domain = substr( $domain, 4 );
+if( substr( $domain, 0, 4 ) != 'www.' )
+       $domain = 'www.'.$domain;
 if( strpos( $domain, ':' ) )  
        if( substr( $domain, -3 ) == ':80' )  
                $domain = substr( $domain, 0, -3 );

I could have sworn I changed something else in that file, but I don't see what. Oops. I guess I'll run a check against the release tarball before merging the next upgrade from upstream. If anyone wants to hire someone to move blogs to Wordpress MU, you how where to find me. It's pretty enjoyable once you get into the routine, even if this project overran. I'm looking at changing my own blogs too. I'm looking at Chronicle but maybe with more email-like input files.

I've just uploaded a small "preview" of dammit. It doesn't do too much yet, and falls over more often than not, but it shows the general direction the tool is going to take. Available from the dump or attached to this blog entry.

Filip, I like my music loud, that's one of the main reasons I go to clubs in the first place. I also find it acceptable that people in the clubs I go to smoke, even if I don't. Coolness of earplugs is achieved by buying them in military shops, by the way.

As last year, I'll be trying to help with the Debian Project Leader IRC Debate tonight (2008-03-26 20:30Z until 23:30Z). This annual election is probably the biggest influence most developers have on the direction of the project, so please choose wisely. :-) Unlike last year (IMO), it's a more interesting field of candidates who are all strong in different ways. I feel even the weakest candidate is stronger than in previous elections. Anyway, I shan't write more until after the debate. If you can't make the debate, recordings will be posted promptly, among the rest of the debate that's on debian-vote. This old dog is probably going to use a new IRC client for the debate, to make it easier to watch everything and copy-paste audience questions, so I hope I control it properly!

I've been putting off upgrading my faithful old retai^Wlaptop for a while now. I finally added another 512Mb at the weekend (damnit, 640k should be enough for everything - remember the 80s?). I usually slice my hands when I open desktop machines, but upgrading this laptop was surprisingly painless: undo one screw, slide off one panel, insert new stick, press down to click, replace panel and screw, boot. The machine now flies along, even with Firefox^WIceweasel still leaking all over the shop when stressed.

Programs themselves cannot be patented. They're explanations of mathematical relationships, not inventions. Paul Russell mentioned this ruling to me and Alex Hudson mentioned it to fsfe-uk. There's been some BBC coverage and very silly coverage in Computing which summarises it as as

"Symbian's win could benefit UK software makers"

You what? Shouldn't we be enabling other UK companies to compete in a free market with Symbian, which is a consortium of foreign companies after all, instead of granting Symbian a monopoly here? *fume*

I’ve a soft spot for this race - it was the first one I saw after putting up my first satellite antenna. WDR (19e, widescreen and in stereo) are showing the race from 10:20 to 16:05 CET.

• I guess i'm boring but... at Rob Bradford's Weblog - I'd find an alterslash-style Skip link more useful than the recently-added "Hide Author" links on planet.debian. Also, why does google put that in a bookmarklet instead of using a simple link?
• Debian, and other stuff Trying to launch emacs only when needed - can emacsclient run elisp? It would be really useful to be able to remote-control Emacs like that.
• Bubulle's weblog: F1 and anthems - at least France has an anthem... England doesn't. The slightly-religious/King-supported/used-at-cricket/Labour-linked Jerusalem and pretty-aggressive/Conservative-linked Land of Hope and Glory are often used, but aren't official.
• Write a new license, every day - Ganneff's Little Blog - this is why I was scared SPI might create a new licence for the debian logo by accident, instead of using the MIT/Expat one requested.

Everyone’s favourite Saturday one-day classic so far this year(!) will be live on RAI Tre (13e) from 14:50 CET. Highlights are on Eurosport (19e) at 17:00 CET. (It’s live on Eurosport 2, but that’s not free-to-air.) Anyone found other free TV coverage? This seems surprisingly sparse, but I guess it competes with skating and swimming championships.

I post it here, because other might find it useful, even if probably somebody else will already have done it. So here is the problem I tried to solve: when using Emacs as an editor, there are several way

• one can use EDITOR=emacs, then each time you need an editor, you will have to wait for the Emacs launching time, and Emacs is not known to be quick fo this. Also, if the application that launch $EDITOR is waiting got it to end, you will have to quit Emacs and relaunch later.
• one ca use EDITOR=emacsclient, then if you forgot to launch emacs before using an application that need an editor, this will failed.

So I needed something to launch Emacs if needed, then to launch emacsclient, so here is my script (its named myemacs):

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$*" ]; then
    emacsclient -e "(raise-frame)"   (emacs &)
else
    emacsclient "$@"   (
	(emacs &)
	sleep 3
	emacsclient "$@")
fi

There is still problems with it: if emacsclient failed for any other reason than the nonexistence of the Emacs session, Emacs will be launch again. Also, one might want to launch it in “waiting” mode even if there is no argument. If you don’t want it to wait for the end of the edition of the file, you can use the -n option. Edit(Thanks to tom s zerolo): of course you need the proper incantation in the .emacs to start the emacs-server.
Reedit(thanks to MJR): and you need a recent (emacs22) as older emacsclient cannot evaluate lisp code.

I just switched to the Windows 2008 Server SDK (from 2003). So far, no problems. I can almost say I like it.

About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow. Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore)… BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print! For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power. Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)