I currently use Google Reader to read most of the blogs I track. It seems to work in a way I like. However I'd like to be able to aggregate in Livejournal using my OpenID so I can read friends-locked posts. I don't think it's appropriate to use a public service like Google or Bloglines for this, which means running something myself. I've had a look around but not found anything that's close to Google Reader. I like just having all the posts in chronological order, not listed under each source feed. Most things I could find give you a sidebar of a tree for each feed and then you have to look at each feed in turn. I just want my content splurged at me goddamit! Planet does this, but I also want content I've read to go away by default, which Planet doesn't handle (being a generator of a static web page). So, any suggestions? I'm using Firefox under Linux, but I'm not tied to an in browser solution (I've a feeling it would be easier to get my OpenID stuff working that way though). So far I've tried Sage and Wizz. I've also looked at Straw but not installed it as it looks a little unmaintained. Liferea looks like it could be an option, so I think I'll go play with that for the moment.

Last week, Binary 2.0 Conference (Japanese) was held. "Binary 2.0" is a new buzzword inspired from "Web 2.0", so the definition is not clear. But many peapole enjoyed the conference. In that time, there are two new presentation methods. The first one is SPS - SDL Presentation System (Japanese). It seems realy cool. The presentation had some beautiful effects, like wave of water on the mouse cursor. The second one is GDB presentation method (Japanese) . He made a MIPS compatible CPU on a FPGA board, and control it via GDB remote debug protocol. It is also cool. On the other hand, I tried to make my presentation by Macromedia flash. It is my challanging since 2003, however I can't beat the above methods. However my method has an advantage, portability. The SPS make an executable file, it is dangerous to execute, and not portable. My presentation file can play under many flash player, like rich mobile phone's browser.

Are you gonna setup a wiki anytime soon? Checkout the WikiMatrix site which allows you to compare various wiki software projects according to a huge amount of criteria. My favorite has always been MediaWiki (probably because I occasionally write for the Wikipedia). I use that for both, the Unmaintained Free Software wiki, as well as the Crazy Hacks wiki (both need some more love and contributors, hint hint). I'll checkout some of the other wiki software projects soon, though... (via ZDNet Blogs Between the Lines)

Accessors
Matt, Python has advanced tremendously and supports uniform access even more nicely than Ruby. You don’t need to play __getattr__ games at all. class Foo(object):
    def get_foo(self): return unmangle(self.__foo)
    def set_foo(self, value): self.__foo = mangle(value)
    def del_foo(self): ...
    foo = property(get_foo, set_foo, del_foo, "docstring goes here") There’s actually a nicer syntax with the new decorators, but this will work with the Python in Debian. Unlike Ruby, this means you can un-wrap the attribute later if it turns out you don’t need mangling functions and do need speed. (Dick Davies pointed out I said this without anything to back me up. Timing these different methods, it turns out raw attribute access in Python is 30% faster than Ruby’s attr_*, which in turn is 50% faster than manual attribute setters in either language; non-property-ized Python get/sets are slightly faster than Ruby, but property-ized ones are slightly slower. There is a definite advantage to being able to expose the raw attributes.) Really, public get/set methods are a nasty hack, mostly restricted to C++/Java and Ruby/Python/etc. written by people who spent too much time around C++. Welcome
Michael Urman, co-developer of Quod Libet (and author of its sexiest parts), finally got a weblog. Currently there’s not much there, but he’s (hopefully) going to write about the metaprogramming he used to write an awesome Python ID3 reader/writer, and also some details on the Python interpreter bugs we keep turning up.

Today is the first day of the Lincoln Christmas Market. With over 300 stalls and many other attractions around the uphill quarter of Lincoln, it's probably the biggest in England and one of the biggest in Europe. If you're within a few hours of it, try a visit. Finishes Sunday (4 December).

This musical Russian roulette thing that's been going on lately in Planet Debian is not a new thing. It made rounds in the Finnish blog circles in the beginning of December. Here's my list (I made a twenty-song list, not just ten-song like most):

1. Jethro Tull - Acres Wild
2. Cliff Eidelman - Surrender for Peace (Star Trek VI soundtrack)
3. Miljoonasade - Paskanmarjat
4. Roxette - Fireworks
5. Verdi - Alfredo! Voi! (La Traviata)
6. Ultra Bra - Hei kuule Suomi
7. Cincinnati Pop Orchestra - Back to the Future theme
8. Johann Sebastian Bach - Blute nur, du liebes Herz (St. Matthew passion)
9. Verdi - Annina? (La Traviata)
10. Miljoonasade - Radiorakkautta
11. Pave Maijanen - Palava syd n
12. Nirvana - In Bloom
13. Albert Prefjean - Sous les toits de Paris
14. (unknown horrible synthesizer thing) - Thunderball (James Bond)
15. Sibelius - String Quartet D minor op. 56 "Voces intimae" I Andante - Allegro molto moderato
16. Emmi - No Nothing
17. The Kings of Convenience - The Girl from Back Then
18. Maija Vilkkumaa - Kristiina
19. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Oh, Boy!
20. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Valley of Tears

Two Sundays ago, Jim and I walked down to Ubuntu Love Day. The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is being held at the Holiday Inn in Chinatown. That's the one with the fake Chinese tiles on the roof, which is sort of tacky. We found our way downstairs to the conference room and sat down. The previous night's revelries still had quite the effect, so I'm afraid I drifted in and out while listening to people speak. I thought I had rid myself of this habit, but apparently university has trained me to consider digital projectors as sleeping aids. I'll have to do something about this one day. I got to see some fairly interesting people: Mattias Klaus, whom I met earlier at Jeff Bailey's place; Fabio Di Nitto, who is incredibly jolly; Chris Peterman, who was with his classmates from Clarkson; Colin Watson, whom I thanked for working so hard on Debian; Jeff Waugh, who dressed up as an inmate; and plenty of others. Oh, I managed to meet Andrew Mitchell in person, but we failed to have a proper CHUG meeting while we were all in town. We broke for lunch, which was held in the hotel restaurant. A buffet, with some Chinese-style dishes, was being served. There, we had to negotiate with the unilingual (Cantonese) staff to find out what Jeff could eat. We had a special order of plain white rice brought for him and we were informed that it was safe for him to eat the stir-fried vegetables. I suggested to Jeff that he ought to keep a phrasebook on him whenever he travels. On each page, one per language, there should be a written description of what he can and cannot eat. Then, he just has to show this to waiters who don't speak English or French. For reference, the characters that mean "vegetarian" in Chinese are and . Most of the time, they mean "vegan", but there are some places where eggs and oysters are considered vegetarian. After lunch, Mark Shuttleworth gave Jeff a very nice birthday speech. He also gave Jeff a nice bottle of wine, which was very nice. And Matthias came up to give Jeff a bottle of fish-oil pills, which was very odd. Then, there were two Birds Of a Feather sessions, involving how to make an Ubuntu package and how to be an Ubuntu advocate. Being upstream to both these issues, I sat in the middle of the room and listened to both presentations at once. This was quite interesting, and slightly taxing. After this was done, we broke up once more. The plan for the evening was to meet for dinner in the hotel lobby. This transformed to meeting outside the front door. Jim, wlach, and I showed up and were greeted by this mass of people. Since there were stragglers and I knew where dinner was to be held, Jeff took a group of nineteen people in the metro. I followed about ten minutes later with a group of eighteen. We met up on St-Denis, and by this time we had lost some of the more impatient, and more hungry, people. Eventually, a group of twenty-three were milling about outside Le Nil Bleu. Angie had made arrangements for us to be served a set meal, and they had agreed to seat twenty-five of us. I went inside to let the staff know that we had arrived. When 20:30 came around, we were let into the restaurant and seated. I think the kitchen was still preparing food, because we had to wait about an hour before being served. Unlike my previous experience there with Jeff, the food was quite good this time and the service was very attentive. We enjoyed ourselves very much, and Jeff seemed to be having a very excellent birthday dinner. Some of the guests were not so happy, because the food was a little spicy for their European palates. Since gratuities are not standardised around the world, we discovered that some people had not tipped. To cover the embarassment, Angie and I made sure that the wait-staff were adequately compensated for their efforts. I'll be sure to go back to this restaurant again, but with a more significant crowd to ensure good service. After eating, a group of us including Matthias and Tollef went up to B l K , which was just a little north on Mont-Royal. That's a really interesting bar with beautiful tiled floors and ostrich heads on the walls. We enjoyed the lovely music, had a very good conversation there, and laughed until we were all exhausted. Since the Canonical people had to be awake for the 09:00 keynote speech the next day, they left early. Jim and I bid goodnight to them before we staggered home.

The DCC Alliance (not to be confused with the DCC Alliance, which is entirely unaffiliated with the former. But it's a recursive acronym, so there's NO TRADEMARK ISSUE) aim to produce a distribution which is entirely binary compatible with Sarge. A laudable aim. Sadly, there's a bit of a problem.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released this week. In common with previous versions, it's a horrid mixture of C++, Java and assembler. It's the Java that's the problem, of course. To compile it, you either need Sun's ridiculously non-free Java, or you can use gcj. That's gcj 4.0, of course. Which can be installed in parallel with gcc 3.3, so that's not a problem. Except. gcj 4.0 wants the libgcc from gcc 4.0 (unsurprisingly), which has the same SONAME as the libgcc from 3.3 (correct behaviour - code built against libgcc from 3.3 will run fine with libgcc from 4.0). However, libgcc from 4.0 adds some extra symbols - as a result, code built against libgcc from 4.0 will not necessarily run on systems with libgcc from 3.3.

Or, in other words, shipping libgcc from gcc 4.0 will result in a system that will build binaries that can't be installed on machines running plain Sarge.

So, there's a bit of a dilemma. Either

• Fail to support OpenOffice.org 2.0


• Only support OpenOffice.org 2.0 if non-free Java is used


• Break binary compatibility with Sarge


• Do something really quite nasty

The DCC Alliance want to build a distribution base that's binary compatible with Sarge. It's an entirely laudable aim, and (regardless of any impression I may have given in the past) I hope it's successful. But. That level of binary compatibility inherently compromises your ability to use new software. To begin with, you can work around that - backport code to older versions of libraries, include local copies, do static linking, that sort of thing. Over time, it gets harder.

Optimistically, Etch will be released in December 2006. If we assume that DCC releases occur at roughly the same rate as Debian ones, we're looking at 18 months until we get a DCC based on etch.

In 18 months time, is it really going to be possible to build a useful modern desktop system that's binary compatible with Sarge without it being an utterly unmaintainable pile of ugly hacks? Even after 5, we're seeing pain.

There's a reason that derivative distributions tend to diverge from the original project. It's because it's really quite remarkably difficult to maintain sanity, technical correctness and not change any of the underlying structure. I'd like to see DCCA succeed in doing so, and I do admire them for not just giving up in exasperation already.