After six months of sending approximately one email a week to this company, I finally received my replacement item today. The vast majority of my queries went unanswered, and the responses I did receive were either blatant copy pasta, or requested details I had purposefully laid out in my exposition. Such gross incompetence clearly wasn’t the 5 I saved, so at least I learnt something. Avoid.

My mobile phone has a 206 area code (Seattle). People sometimes ask me why I don't have a 617 number (Boston/Cambridge). In fact, I had a Massachusetts number in college but switched to a 206 several years ago on a trip back home in order to get a "permanent" Seattle number. With a move to mobiles phones, the idiosyncratic fact that US mobiles remain tied to geographic area codes, and the effective elimination of domestic roaming and long-distance, an area code in the United States is increasingly not about where you are but about where you are from. Or, perhaps more accurately, about where you want people to think you are from.

Lev t t pour tre frais et dispo pour la premi re s ance, je me suis pr par rapidement. La nuit a t assez courte, couch vers minuit pour finaliser le support de cours. Enfin, il est pr t. J'ai juste quelques ajustements y apporter et il partira pour l'impression. Mieux vaut tard que jamais ;) J' tais donc pr t 7h30 pour un petit d jeuner ma foi agr able au bord de la piscine et accompagn de Tisserin et de la superbe Grue Couronn e quelques dizaines de centim tres de moi ;) Un petit tour au coin wifi internet pour envoyer 2 ou 3 mails et me voil attendre. Tout compte fait, j'ai d attendre jusqu' 10h30 pour que l'on vienne me chercher. La salle n' tait pas disponible, les petits tracas administratifs de derni re minute. Une fois sur place l'ENA (Ecole Nationale de l'Administration) je me suis lanc pr senter le syst me 25 personnes. Mais impossible de faire fonctionner loe r troprojecteur mis ma disposition. Pb de configuration Xorg voir ce soir. Donc j'ai projet mes transparent fait avec MagicPoint g n r s en HTML sur une machine sous Windows. Apr s une br ve introduction nous voil partis dans le vif du sujet. Les stagiaires taient tout ou e et donc je n'ai pas m nag les informations dispens es. Repas 14h frugal pour ma part, je n'avais pas trop faim. Poulet en sauve, crudit s, riz, pommes de terre. Me voil reparti 15h pour la deuxi me partie de la journ e. J'ai demand aux stagiaires de se pr senter... Bon, il va falloir que je fasse les bases des syst mes Unix pour tout le monde sans exception. Seance fini vers 18h o je suis rentr l'h tel, seul. Donc au programme de la soir e, remplir mon billet quotidien, r cuper la conf Xorg me permettant d'utiliser le r troprojecteur, manger et ensuite rododo ;)

Dear Bastian let's fix your blog post.

Philipp thinks, the fact that rng is not using the information in /usr/share/bug renders rng unfit for release and upgraded the corresponding bugreport from wishlist to serious. Moreover: since I dared to downgrade the report back to wishlist he decided to remove rng from testing and block it until the bug is fixed.

s/Philipp/the Release Team/g. And yes, we believe that reportbug-ng goes against the Maintainers wishes, and doesn't help users that don't know how to report a bug (and which are rng audience unless I'm mistaken).

I don t want to heat the debate about this bug again, but Philipp s decision seems arbitrary for me and I wonder if the same standard is applied to every other Debian package.

It's not, it was discussed in the Release Team and was not Philipp on his own alone. And yes, the same standards of quality is wanted for every package in Debian.

I mean, rng has no release critical defects.

That's you claiming that, there have been really constructive remarks in both bug that we upgraded, and that I think explain wisely why the current reportbug-ng behaviour doesn't makes it a suitable reportbug tool right now. I think for example that Sam's and Michael Biebl contributions in both bugs are good explanations of what is wrong and why.

It just does not use the aforementioned scripts as additional information in bugreports does this really render the software unfit for release ?

Yes it does. Again, people that use rng are I think, less experienced users, who need guidance through the bug reporting process. The kind of users that often send annoying bug reports. Instead of lowering the annoyance factor, you aggravate it. In the end, rng makes the frustration higher, and totally fails to meet its primary goals: making bug reporting nicer, simpler, and more efficient for the Reporter and the Maintainer. While it's probably nicer for the reporter, you totally fail on the other part of the contract. And if you don't care about the Maintainer, then well, reportbug-ng is just a spam machine to them, and your careless attitude toward them is unfit for release for sure.

Philipp thinks, the fact that rng is not using the information in /usr/share/bug renders rng “unfit for release” and upgraded the corresponding bugreport from wishlist to serious. Moreover: since I dared to downgrade the report back to wishlist he decided to remove rng from testing and block it until the bug is fixed. I don’t want to heat the debate about this bug again, but Philipp’s decision seems arbitrary for me and I wonder if the same standard is applied to every other Debian package. I mean, rng has no release critical defects. It just does not use the aforementioned scripts as additional information in bugreports — does this really render the software “unfit for release”? For example: In Etch we shipped a famous email client with a known bug which lead reproducibly to loss of emails on IMAP accounts, just because removing the program, or one of it’s components was not possible in the remaining time.

For some reason (maybe related to upgrading openssl recently), my Jabber client became unstable. Instead of fixing it the right way, I simply upgraded to Emacs 22.2 (which also got me the emacsclient --eval option mentioned on this blog previously). It still wouldn't make SSL connections at first, but a quick application of [jabber.el] Anybody using emacs-jabber with Emacs 22.2? fixed it. That's the wrong way to fix that bug, but it's not quite as wrong as misusing computers to try to fix copyright infringement. MediaDefender denial-of-service attacked a TV production company, as described in Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 on May 29th, 2008 at 07:49 am by Jim Louderback in Polemics MediaDefender or MediaDestroyer? That's the wrong way to fix that bug, but it's not quite as wrong as making treaties mostly in secret, under NDAs to try to evade local copyright law-makers. The US government, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Australia and a handful of other countries are meeting in a secret negotiation on a new treaty

"that undermines civil rights and privacy, and which many say will change the substantive rights the public has to use copyrighted works or inventions."

Read more at Act On ACTA and then contact your law-making representatives.

Using org mode to write ikiwiki posts I have been much taken by org-mode in Emacs recently. Firstly, this has allowed me to actually effectively implement the tenets of Getting things done , which is amazing by itself. I always used to start with great enthusiasm, which rarely lasted longer than a week. Until org-mode. Then this is so amazingly flexible. It has better handling of tables and even a spreadsheet mode than anything I have used and it has a pretty decent HTML export function. I practically live in org-mode on work days now. I strongly recommend org-mode, from things like agendas, TODO lists, calendars, appointments, articles, and now Ikiwiki posts. I rarely ever use markdown, apart from blogging using Ikiwiki and thus, since I blog so infrequently, I rarely ever remember all the syntax. On the other hand, org-mode syntax is now at my finger tips so I decided it was time to write a Ikiwiki plugin so I can now write my blog posts using syntax I can actually remember. It is still rough around the edges firstly, this requires emacs23 (or, on Debian, there is the unofficial emacs-snapshot package), secondly, it uses hueristic hacks to prune away the bits of the stand alone HTML page that org-mode creates; all I can say is that it currently works for me, as you can see from this post. How git this is for mainlne inclusion is another matter. The code is here: org.pm. It can be dropped in to the Ikiwiki plug-in directory, and that s all you need. With this, Ikiwiki pre-process things in the input file, and then passes it to emacs to htmlize it.

Dear Recruiters,

While I appreciate being contacted with interesting opportunities (at the moment I'm not looking. It's a lovely cross between being happy in my current job and hoping for a particularly uneventful 12 months on the home front), emailing me from noreply@saic.com is just going to make me mock you. It's at moments like these that I with I could channel Matthew Garrett. When I try, I just sound like Overfiend from the good old days ;)

The family went up to the City today with some friends of ours and I had the most amazing thing: I walked into an Apple store, and the greater at the front solved my iPhone problem. The phone decided a week or so ago that there was always a headset plugged in. The greeter pulled up a clever tool that looks like an 1/8th inch to 1/4inch adapter with tiny holes milled in it for blowing air in. Seems they have this problem often. Being with 3 kids and two families, I couldn't reliably book a time to see someone at the Genius Bar, but he just blasted it out and it worked wonderfully.

Of course, I came home to plug it in and have discovered that the cord to connect to the charger appears to have corroded and won't charge the phone now. So, AppleEmployees++, AppleHardware--. I now will make the distinction.

Next technology FixIt: Convince my Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth stereo to go into pairing mode again. Both seem to have decided they won't do this anymore.

MarketWatch reports that oil prices had the biggest daily gain on record, going up $11 in one day. They claim that this is due to an impending Israeli attack on Iran and a weak US economy. $150 per barrel is the price that they predict for the 4th of July. That’s an interesting choice of date, I wonder whether they will be talking about “independence from Arabian oil”… The New York Times has an interesting article on fuel prices [1]. Apparently sales of SUVs are dropping significantly. The US senate is now debating a cap on carbon-dioxide production. The NY Times article suggests that if the new “carbon taxes” could be combined with tax cuts in other areas. If implemented correctly it would allow people who want to save money to reduce their overall tax payments by reducing fuel use. Also as increasing prices will decrease demand (thus decreasing the price at import time) it would to some degree mean transferring some revenue from the governments of the middle east to the US government. The article also states that the Ford F series of “pickup trucks” was the most popular line of vehicles in the US for more than 20 years! But last month they were beaten by the Toyota Corolla and Camry and the Honda Civic and Accord. Now Ford needs to put more effort into their medium to large cars. With the hybrid Camry apparently already on sale in the US (their web site refuses to provide any information to me because I don’t have Flash installed so I can’t check) and rumored to be released soon in other countries Ford needs to put some significant amounts of effort into developing fuel efficient vehicles. According to a story in the Herald Sun (published on the 23rd of April), survey results show that 1/3 of Victorians would cease using their car to get to work if the petrol price reached $1.75/L [2]. Now the Herald Sun has run a prediction (by the assistant treasurer and the NRMA) that $1.75/L will be reached next week (an increase of just over 10 cents a liter) [3]. The good news is that there will be less pollution in Australia in the near future (even if $1.75 is not reached I am certain that the price will increase enough to encourage some people to use public transport). The bad news is that our public transport is inadequate at the moment and there will be significant levels of overcrowding.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/business/04leonhardt.html


• [2] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23585733-661,00.html


• [3] http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23827860-661,00.html

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I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution), a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence the name) window manager ratpoison (other keyboard driven window managers like wmii or awesome probably will do as well as ratpoison) and a good keyboard driven web browser which can bind or by default has bound a key to follow <link rel="next" ... /> tags. Like Opera. Opera has bound the space bar to scroll one page down and if you reach the bottom of the page to go to the next page as labeled in the link tag. Additionally the full screen mode is helpful, too. Or the dream browser of all Emacs addicts, Conkeror, which has bound the function browser-follow-next to ]]. (Conkeror packages will hit Debian Experimental quite soon.) Or the GNOME feed reader Liferea which has bound Ctrl-Space by default to scroll down the content by one page and if you reach the bottom of the content go to the next unread item. With that equipment I can read my favourite web comics like Questionable Content (whose content seldomly is questionable :-) or Ozy and Millie (Think of a mixture of Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts and Kevin & Kell) in the bath tub without drying my hands before reading the next comic or fearing water or health damage by the combination of water and computer. I just press one or two keys on the keyboard floating over my lap and have a good time. BTW: I’ve got a blue, non-branded one (packaging reveals it as “AirTouch Keyboard”, probably manufactured by SanChuan Electronics, China) with swiss-german layout from ARP Datacom (whose website offers no permanent links and insists on session cookies *puke*), but those from Keysonic or from ROCK seem to be very similar — nowadays they are also available in illuminated, miscellaneous colors and wireless, but only IP65, probably because of the necessarily accessible battery compartment. But this kind of having fun still has optimisation potential: non-flexibel water-proof keyboard (IP67 recommended, so those IP66 keyboards and mice recently posted at UF LOTD are probably not tight enough), flat screen mounted above the bath tub, etc. ;-) Or maybe a completely water proof laptop if such thing exists — Does it? One more note: In Debian Sid and Lenny recently a new tool called keynav has been added, which allows you to control the mouse quickly using the keyboard only. So with Sid or Lenny, I don’t even need an waterproof mouse or trackball if an application insists on mouse usage. ;-)

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed.

*O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software
Livre.org convidam:
*_*
Palestra com a antrop loga Gabriella Coleman*_
professora da New York University (NYU) *Quando:* Sexta-feira, dia 13 de junho, s 9h
*Onde:* Audit rio do ILEA, Campus do Vale - UFRGS
*Entrada:* Gratuita
*Transmiss o web: *tv.softwarelivre.org *
_Revolu es Silenciosas:_*
*O Ir nico Surgimento do Software Livre e de C digo Aberto
**e a Constru o de uma Consci ncia Legal Hacker* A palestra oferece uma an lise antropol gica e hist rica do
surgimento da comunidade de software livre e de c digo aberto,
procurando mostrar como, ao longo de duas d cadas, hackers e
entusiastas do software livre garantiram para si um dom nio de
autonomia legal para a produ o de software. Em uma poca
marcada por profundas transforma es no regime de Propriedade
Intelectual, a comunidade de software e de c digo aberto se
organiza cultivando uma acentuada consci ncia das transforma es
no mbito legal. O objetivo da palestra o de demonstrar como e
quando se cruzaram as trajet rias parcialmente independentes das
transforma es nas leis de propriedade intelectual com a
consolida o do “movimento” de software livre, para se tornarem
hist rias insepar veis voltadas disputa pelo futuro das
tecnologias - especialmente o computador pessoal e a Internet.
Com este foco, ser discutida uma nova pr tica social de
produ o de tecnologia que fornece uma nova vis o de mundo
insurgente e que desafia as justificativas neoliberais que
animam a expans o das leis de propriedade intelectual. Nesta
discuss o, ao inv s de oferecer hist rico abrangente, ser o
apresentados exemplos selecionados da hist ria do movimento de
software livre e da globaliza o das leis de propriedade
intelectual, com vistas caracteriza o da pr tica de produ o,
distribui o e utiliza o de Software Livre e de C digo aberto
nos Estados Unidos.

Four years ago, the last time I was in Brazil, I came as an anthropologist-in-training to attend and give a talk at Debconf4 held in Porto Alegre. I have returned to this city in the south, again in the winter, but this time I have come back as an anthropologist who is giving a talk at the department of anthropology at the UFRGS, based on my research conducted many years ago. This time, thanks to my (really friendly and energetic) hosts, I am seeing far more of the actual city, its beautiful and legendary sunsets, its outlying neighborhoods, and even its subcultures. This has been my first foreign trip where I am interacting primarily with anthropologists and this has been really interesting for me. On the one hand, because of the language difference, there is a lot that is strange and hard for me to follow and I am acutely aware of the general and particular economic gulf between north and south and its impact on students (books are expensive, traveling for conferences is very difficult, and even applying to graduate schools in the north can be impossible because it costs so much to apply to each school!) On the other hand, the methods and subjects of study, the style of analysis, and the teaching are all very familiar, making me feel like I am part of a discipline that (thankfully) transcends national borders. Many of the projects I learned about–the tensions between free software advocacy and development, the role of memory among fan s of a corny country/Gaucho singer from this area and the surgical management of intersex (hermaphrodite) newborns were some of the most interesting projects I have come across and gobbled as much information about them as I could. I was also struck, yet again, by the deep myopias of anthropology, north and south. My own project, which focuses mostly on white, American and European hackers, often does not strike as culturally authentic enough because, well, the people I study are white, American and European (and I am slowly coming to see that if you study the so-called white and male or the North American/European elements of technology and the Internet and the law, you are probably white and male yourself and anything having to do with ethnicity/gender is usually the province of female academics, which I find really problematic). If I had carried out my first project in Brazil, where there is a foreign language, where there is a long tradition of studying various groups, then my project would have been stamped by that mysterious aura of authenticity/approval. On the other hand, two of the students here (those that worked on free software and the country singer) complained that their papers have yet to be accepted by the Brazilian Anthropological Association for being too strange, non-traditional, and it seems in their case, the problem is that they are studying urban Brazilian, popular culture (which for me would have just been just the thing to study). We are located far apart but find ourselves in similar positions by virtue of studying something geographically close to where we live, which is confused and misperceived as being culturally close to our world. But if there is something I wish to hammer into my students and other anthropologists is that there is tremendous plurality and multiplicity within our own societies. We can travel far, in the cultural sense, just by staying home and opening our eyes a little wider. Another nice experience is that I am learning a tremendous amount about free software politics and development from the graduate student, Luis Felipe, who is really responsible for getting me down here. He found me on IRC many moons ago and finally we have been able to compare notes and have long conversations about free software, the differences in how we can gather data due to gender, and a topic close to me, which is the tension between the political and apolitical in free software. Our relationship is at once based on friendship and also one of mentoring. And it reminds me of others who have also mentored me and how crucial this mentoring was to the development of my own work. One of my most important mentors, Chris Kelty, just published his book on Free Software (and I will soon write an entry about the book but the WHOLE THING IS ONLINE) and so it felt quite nice that we were discussing what I think his one of his most amazing chapters on the creation of the copyleft in our class on Friday. Not only was the topic about the genesis of the first free software license appropriate for a class on IP, but in many ways, because of his mentoring, I have gotten to where I am and so it felt also appropriate to honor and recognize that genealogy in my own work.

 158 Ns+ Jun 04 Debian Bug Trac ( 13K) Bug#250202 closed by Russ Allbery 

That only took, eh, four years. The report started out as a "I'm sick of all these confusing and different ways to package a package, we need a solution", suggesting a few extra targets to debian/rules, but then quickly changed into a proposal to add a README.source file to the debian/ directory. At some point, early on, I started to prefer the README.source solution way more than the extra debian/rules targets thing, but the proposal reached a stalemate as some people did prefer the extra targets thing. A solution was only reached when Russ Allbery wrote a compromise proposal that managed to satisfy everyone, which he first sent out about half a year ago. Now, finally, the update is in. Which makes me really, really happy.

Probably due to some mistake or just an excess of randomness in the world, our webmaster cooperative has been invited to Bridgwater College's Computing Advisory Panel meeting next week and it looks like I'm going. The interesting agenda items are:- 5. Current Curriculum offer 6. Computing and ICT Sector Developments - Education and Training - ICT Diplomas - Distance Learning - Specialist training / apprenticeships 7. Meeting Employer Needs I've asked some nearby cooperatives and social enterprises for comments and I'll probably highlight things like Linux opens London's Oyster and Specsavers sees clear benefits in open source when arguing for more free software use and emphasising "worker needs" rather than "employer needs", but please send me any other suggestions in a comment on this blog post or an email.

At times, when I'm working with an HTML file - an article about programming, for instance - I need to include a snippet of code inside a <pre> tag or a <code> tag. It's very annoying to have to indent that code by hand, and since the language may be anything from Hecl, to Erlang, to Java to C, I don't want to use something like two-mode-mode for Emacs, so I threw the following elisp together:

(defun indent-region-as (other-mode)
  "Indent selected region as some other mode.  Used in order to indent source code contained within HTML."
  (interactive "aMode to use: ")
  (save-excursion
(let ((old-mode major-mode))
  (narrow-to-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
  (funcall other-mode)
  (indent-region (region-beginning) (region-end) nil)
  (funcall old-mode)))
  (widen))

To use it:

1. Put it in your .emacs file.
2. Select the region to indent according to the other mode.
3. M-x indent-region-as - which will prompt you for the other mode to use. You need to give the function for that mode, such as tcl-mode, java-mode, ruby-mode or whatever.

My elisp is a bit rusty, so I'm sure it's possible to improve the code above, but it does the job for me.

Italian weather agencies Most Italian regions have agencies providing good regional weather forecast. However, I could not find a useful national index of all their weather forecast pages. So I made one, tweaking an image map found on wikipedia. I only filled in those regions that I was checking to organise a specific trip. With time, if I'll keep using this map I'll add more regions. Of course, if you now of a weather forecast page of a regional, public funded agency that is missing here, send me an e-mail.

(Playing Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call.) Warning: This is a long-wound complaint post. The only reason this is going to the Planet is because I have no method yet of disabling individual posts for syndication. Please skip, with my apologees for the noise, if you don’t want to listen to complaining. May contain nuts. May drive you nuts. Drove me nuts. Mmm, pistachio. When I was around 11, I got my first cellphone. I was very proud. This was back when being 11 and having a cellphone was a real novelty; pagers were still being sold, and the NMT network was still running. Like many things I appreciate, I found it in a dumpster. It was ancient, even then: a Motorola MicroTAC brick, missing its antenna. I borrowed one of my grandmother’s hairpins, and voila, working phone - as long as you didn’t leave Oslo. It had a certain cyberpunk look to it, even then: I loved it. I remember that I first bought a NetCom pay-as-you-go card; I don’t quite remember the number, but it had “283″ in it at the end, if you want to wardial. For some reason, Dad needed a SIM card so I gave him mine. So I bought myself a new one, a Telenor card, pay-as-you-go, number 91 85 95 08. I must have been around 12 at the time. And that number served me very well. Fast-forward 6 years, to late March, 2006. I had just turned 18, and one of the first things I wanted to do was get a massively cheaper, proper subscription. I’d been procrastinating it for a bit - as I am wont to - but when a nice gentleman at the subway station told me about a nice new company called SEA Norway and their wonderful prices, I accepted. Big mistake. Here begins the saga of woe… For a good while, I was very happy with their service - even though GPRS data never worked, I never used it anyway. Their name changed to Vitel somewhere along the way. I received a phone call from an enthusiastic salesman who told me how much cheaper Vitel’s power subscription is. It seemed very reasonable, so I went for it. One of the arguments he gave me was that I could collect all those utilities into one bill. I told him that I couldn’t have this: Since I’m a live-alone student, my power bill is covered entirely by the city council, so I need a proper bill to hand over every month. “Sure, that’s no problem”. I check and double-check that, and I stress it. Sure, no problem. OK, deal. Big, big mistake. They draw 2700 Kroner from my account, using the automated pay system (AvtaleGiro) that I had set up for the phone bill. 2700 Kroner (530 US Dollars) is a lot of money, especially when your monthly income, 5000 Kroner (1000 US Dollars) barely covers the necessities. So I cancel the autopay system. (I still have not received that money!) 23rd of January, my subscription is cut, since I hadn’t paid the bill. They hadn’t mailed it to me, and I’d told them I’d cut the AvtaleGiro, but I simply did not receive the bill. So I call them up in February some time and try to figure out a solution. “You didn’t pay the bill, so the subscription is closed.” -”So if I pay the bill, will you reopen it?” -”No, sorry. It is closed now.” -”So then I’ll have to transfer the number to another provider?” -”No, you can’t do that; it’s closed now.” -”You can’t refuse to transfer the number, that’s simply not legal.” -”Sure it is, the subscription’s been closed.” Urgh. So some time in the middle of March, before The Gathering, I call NetCom up: I want to transfer my number to them, please. Sure, no problem. No, this number is registered as active in our system. All is well. We’ll make the switchover on March 28th, and you will get your SIM card in the mail: It should be in your box by then. Fantastic! The 28th of March came and went with no great ceremony, not even a SIM card. No switchover occurred. I give them the benefit of the doubt for more than a fortnight. Some time in April, then, I get sufficiently annoyed to call them up and ask what had happened. “Oh, no, it seems Vitel is using the old transferral system”. -”OK?” -”Yes, you will have to send us a form with your signature by fax to carry this transfer out.” -”Sigh, alright. Where can I get this form?” -”I’ll email it to you.” Great. So I get the form. May was very busy, so I didn’t get an opportunity to fill the form out, and by now I was getting fairly tired of the whole thing anyway! The thing that finally got me, however, was a bill from Vitel - on the “closed” subscription - for not only the monthly fee, but also several kroner of SMS “content services” (Read: ring tones) and GPRS data (Which never even worked even when the subscription did!) So last Tuesday, June 3rd, I send them the damned fax. Wednesday, June 4th, I call NetCom up and ask what the status is of my subscription. “Oh, yes, this is now active with us.” -”Really?!” (I was happy in the way that only someone who’s gone 5 months without a working phone could be.) -”Sure, we’ve sent the SIM card to Bekkeveien (something).” -”…Bekkeveien? But I’ve never lived at any Bekkeveien. My last name is Bekkedal, but..” -”Alright, then that’s probably a mistake. What you can do, though, is go to a NetCom dealer and pick up a new SIM card.” -”Perfect! I’ll do that, then.” (I stress “pick up” for a reason which will later become apparent.) Goodie. I’ll get a working phone! I was very happy as I took the tram down to Aker Brygge and looked everywhere for the damned NetCom dealer. Having finally found it, I happily stride inside and ask for a SIM card for my subscription. “Sure. That’ll be 200 Kroner.” Argh! I hadn’t brought enough money! She did say pick up. Oh well. Aker Brygge is a center of business, I’m sure there are other shops. So I ask to use one of their phones to call NetCom. Sorry, no phones you can use. Sigh. Fine. Do you know of any phone booths around? They didn’t, but I found one anyway, finally. I deposit the necessary $1 for a local call (See, this is the problem with having a cellphone company run the phone booths!) and dial NetCom customer service. They take my number and - Sorry, that number isn’t yet active, it’s still registered to Vitel. ARGH! Fine. So what’s standing in the way? Well, Vitel can’t refuse it - (thanks, I know that already) - but the form that I was sent wasn’t the right form. The form I need to send is from Vitel to Vitel, authorizing the transfer.While I’m trying to hold a conversation with the customer support guy, some drunk guy is accusing me of stealing phones, and begins reading out loud the sponsor company names on the back of my DebConf T-shirt. But Vitel has already told me that I cannot transfer this number, under any circumstance! They consider it closed! “Yes, but you have to talk to Vitel.” -”I have!” -”Well, we can’t really do anything…” Alright. So I hang up and I try to call Vitel. But that doesn’t work: They closed at 3 PM!. So finally tired of Netcom failing to port my number for a while, I call Telenor. I talk to a very cheerful and helpful lady who admits to not knowing about the particulars of that situation. Fantastic! At least she isn’t going to fib it! She says that she has a vacation Thursday, but she can call me back on Friday after discussing the matter with the number transfers department. Wow! She’s actually going to confer with the relevant expertise! This is too good to be true! So she said she’d call me back Friday at 1PM with a status update. As I am writing, it is Friday at 11:01, I am anxiously awaiting the telephone call. But now I get a funny SMS message:

From: NetCom Message from NetCom: Your number has been ordered by another operator. We would like to remind you that violation of the commitment period will be billed to the order of 1500 kroner. For questions, call 05050.

My subscription with Vitel was made in 2006, more than the 12 months I and knowledgeable friends believe to be the maximum legal commitment period (I doubt I would have agreed to more anyway!). Besides, the text message keeps saying that it’s from NetCom. So my deduction is: It’s from NetCom, who I have registered an active subscription and are now complaining that I’ve moved the subscription I’ve opened with them (but which they have not successfully moved from Vitel), over to Telenor. I don’t think this is an unfair conclusion. So I call NetCom customer service - which to NetComs infinite credit is a number you always can call, almost like 112 (technically it’s accomplished completely differently, but you get my point. The number is never blocked in a blocked subscription.) And they say it’s not from NetCom, even though it says it’s from NetCom. So I’ll keep both of my readers posted on the developing situation. At least the text message indicates that something is happening with my subscription. I just want the dialtone!

Regular readers of this blog (ed: oxymoron alert) may recall tales of woe with our beloved (ha!) cable internet provider such as this; then there are of course minor tales like this or this or this or the other stories on on this page but I am probably forgetting others. Anyway, yesterday's highlight was initiated with a mail, seemingly sent to all customers, informing me that

ACTION REQUIRED: Comcast has determined that your computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email ("spam"), which is generally an indicator of a virus. For your own protection and that of other Comcast customers, we have taken steps to prevent further transmission of spam from your computer(s).

and the email went on to recommend some Windows anti-spam measures, including a reference to a page I could only open with IE at work and one URL to a page that doesn't exist. Nice. Not. Needless to say, there are now Windows computers sending mail (via Comcast) here (as the lone windows box, my wife's work laptop goes straight to her university webmail). And obviously, they blocked port 25, so no more mail sending from home. So I grumpily logged a compaint having been on hold and in telephony menu hell for fifteen or twenty minutes. I was promised to hear back in 72 hours. Hasn't happened yet, naturally, but we're only half way through... Anyway, to make a long story short and this post constructive: Here is what you do on a Debian or Ubuntu system running exim as your mail transport:

• sudo editor /etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost and add a line port = submission in the remote_smtp_smarthost block (assumming you have the split configuration chosen for the exim4-config package). Setting port to 'submission' switches from plain old STMP to the authenticated version running on port 587; submission is mapped to 587 in /etc/services.
• sudo editor /etc/exim4/passwd.client and add your user and password id as e.g. for comcast web-login
• sudo update-exim4.conf to update the configuration
• sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart to restart exim

And it may pay to check /var/log/exim4/mainlog for any irregularities. Barring those, you should now be sending mail to you smarthost using authenticated transfer over port 587. In the meantime, it looks like they unblocked port 25 at some point today...

(update with right spellings for Catalan names, thanks Guillem) So, we (Elizabeth and /me) spent four days in May-end in Barcelona...without my laptop. That was already 2 weeks ago but it took me time to cook this blog entry..:-) Indeed, we enjoyed that a lot. That city is deeply appealing and friendly, and welcoming, and etc. Elizabeth found a good, though expensive, hotel in the city center, close to La Rambla (career Junta de Comer for those who care)....but far enough from La Rambla's noise..:-) The city is of course full of tourists...just like us...but, in some way, it absorbs the "load" very well and it doesn't look like the Touristorama that Paris turns into from May to September, for instance. It probably comes from the city having several interesting places to go without hard "hot spots" where all international buses of hurried folks run around like a sheep cattle...:-) Of course, we went to the "famous" places and, well, we enjoyed them a lot. For instance, the city hot spot, namely La Sagrada Familia... I wouldn't really have guessed that I would enjoy it that much. I was expecting something crazy and full of religious crap, just like Paris' "Sacre Coeur". I actually found a marvel of modern architecture. The portal of Passion is....astonishing and its modern sculpture framework is full of emotion. The inside, though still under huge work left me thrilled. That forest of pilars, the size of the ceiling and the elegance of all this is....wonderful. Really, I hope I'll live enough to see the end of this. We spent more than 4 hours there... La Rambla is as well somethign one has to enjoy. Of course full of crappy tourist-oriented stuff....but also a really living place and a place where one just want to "ramble on". We visited Park G ell on Friday with the best weather we had. Just sitting there on the terrace and enjoy the sun and some music by a quite good trumpetist was a great first introduction to the week-end. We wandered a long time around Montjuich hill, enjoying the view on the city. Definitely a place I would love running in if I was a Catalan. We also wandered through Gr cia which was a separate village in the past, though close to city's center. Nice walk in small places. Go there on evenings. The Musuem of the City's history is also a place to go. Great visit of remainings of the Roman and post-Roman city, under places just near to the cathedral. We were also lucky to see the Corpus Christi procession with Giants and related things (interrupted by rain, unfortunately) as well as attend a local "sardane" contest on a small place close to the cathedral on Saturday. Just friendly and nice being sitting there. We also went on some event I have no idea about, which featured some kinds of "fratenities" of people in a procession, with many giant flags (I mean *really giant*: about 5-8 meters high and held by one single person). We followed them for 1-2 kms in the avenues around the University after seeing them from the bus...:-) Barcelona's transport system is great. We had the great idea to buy "Barcelona cards" which just give you free access to bus, trains, metro, tram and several reduced fees to museums and such other places. This way, we could go around the city without walking too much and be too tired... If you do so some day, just use busses. They go everywhere, are very fast and they come often, even on Sundays. The metro is faster but you don't see the city. My favourite bus line is 24. Another option is the bicycle rental system. It seems fairly easy to use and, just like Paris V'lib, you find bicycles everywhere. Just remember that you'll ride in Spain (the same stands for Paris...) so buy eyes for all around your head. I still have so many things to say about Barcelona, but I want to complete that blog entry. In short, go there and enjoy. It deserves it. Ah, and if you live in Barcelona (and are not veg'), just try the "Biblioteca" restaurant in Junta de Comer o (I hope I remember the name well...anyway there are not that many restaurants in that street). We went there two nights in a row just because we wanted to try more stuff from their great menu..:-).