In the past I have spent about 18 months living in hotels with a couple of months of breaks in between. I have previously written about it in terms of living in London hotels [1], but I have been asked for more generic advice. Firstly the amount of possessions that you may have when living in hotels is seriously limited. For ease of travel you want to restrict yourself to one suitcase for checked luggage and one for carry-on luggage. Hotels often have short-term storage space for possessions of guests, so having a second suitcase of items that are not worth stealing (clothes and books) may be an option. But consumer electronics devices other than a single laptop computer are not an option. I read an interesting blog post on ZenHabits.net titled Minimalist Fun: The 100 Things Challenge [2] which advocates counting and limiting the number of possessions you own. When living in hotels if I considered my books as one collection and my clothes as another (having never been interested in trendy clothes they count as utilitarian items for work or leisure not objects that I seek to own) and as my mobile phone was a tool for work and my computer gear was strictly limited to items that were needed for work (and thus “tools”) my only possessions were a digital camera and some bottles of liquor! The lack of ability to accumulate possessions may be considered as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on what your aims are. If you are moving to another country for work there are three ways of doing it. The easiest is to be a permanent employee of a company that assigns you to work there - in which case they will probably pay to transport your stuff when you buy or rent a house. If you are a looking for new employment (either contract or permanent) in another country then you can either find the work before moving or after arriving there. Finding work before arriving in the country is difficult and generally only works for short-term contracts. So it’s most likely that you will either be looking for work immediately after arriving or after a short contract. In either case having better mobility increases your employment options - why restrict yourself to one city or region when you can choose from all jobs in an entire country or (in the case of the EU) half of a continent! The career benefits of being able to accept any job anywhere in the world at short notice are significant! There are situations where an employer will pay hotel bills. One example was when I was working for a London based company and they assigned us to work at the other side of London. My colleagues complained and the company paid for hotel bills for everyone Sunday night to Thursday night inclusive as well as an extra hour of pay per day as compensation for the inconvenience. For me of course one hotel was as good as another so it just meant that my employer was covering 5/7 of my living expenses. Then I had a meeting with the hotel manager and pointed out that having me check out every Friday would be bad for them as the hotel was mostly empty on the weekend and suggested that they make me a deal for the other two days - I ended up paying something like one night of hotel fees per week! If I had rented an apartment I would have still been paying the full rent (which while less than 30 days hotel fees per month would have been considerably more than 4 or 5 days of hotel fees per month). If you live in a hotel then there is always some sort of deal that can be arranged. Apart from certain busy days (such as around the Christmas and new-year time) they always want long-term guests and will be willing to reduce the price, give free dinner or drinks from the bar, etc. The cost of living in a hotel at times such as Christmas may be as much as five times the regular rate. That is a further incentive to visit friends or relatives at Christmas. If you can’t visit your family (which may be difficult if they live on the other side of the world) then finding a friend who has a spare room might be an option.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/05/living-in-hotels/


• [2] http://zenhabits.net/2007/09/minimalist-fun-the-100-things-challenge/

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Processing a NEW package (etckeeper) of our debconf system and what do I find there?

lintian output:
 W: etckeeper: debconf-is-not-a-registry ./etc/etckeeper/pre-apt.d/50uncommitted-changes

HA! :) (Besides that its using the wrong VCS, but thats a different topic :) )

Yesterday I bought a laptop for a friend, who also asked me to install Linux on it. Since she's not computer-savvy at all, I opted for an Ubuntu. I provide here a short description of the hardware and what to expect regarding compatibility for anyone about to buy one of these. Hardware description

Model	HP 530
Part No.	GU322AA
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz (stepping 12) - 2 MiB cache
CPU flags	fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor est tm2 xtpr
Screen	330 mm x 250 mm viewable area, "glossy" wide-screen. 1280x800 pixels.
Video	Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller
Audio	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) HDA
USB	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller
Ethernet	Intel 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ - PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller Mobile
WiFi	Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
Optical media	Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560A
Hard disk	Fujitsu MHY2120BH, 112GiB, max UDMA/100

Problems The only problems I had with the hardware were related to the sound card and the lid. The sound card had exactly the same problem as my Dell Inspiron 6400: it won't turn off the internal speakers when you plug something in the audio output jack. This is easily solved adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options: options snd-hda-intel enable=yes model=laptop The problem with the lid is that the screen didn't turn off when the lid closed. Just one time it did work, and stopped doing so after a reboot. Looking with acpi_listen, it seems that the acpi event isn't even generated. I don't know if this is a hardware or software problem. Also, some not very nice things should be noted about it: it has no independent media buttons for volume, suspend, etc.; only the WiFi transmitter kill and the power button, the rest needed a key chord. It has only two USB ports, which nowadays is incredibly few. No LEDs for hard dist, scroll lock or num lock. The audio jacks are on the front, which makes them very unsuitable for any straight plug. Although seldom used, it is nice to have the ability to turn the screen 180 , but this one can't do it. Finally, the battery is tiny: only four cells amounting 2 Ah of capacity. The power consumption seems a little better than my Dell: running on batteries, with low brightness, an idle GNOME desktop gave a reading of 820mA. Watching a movie from optical media in full screen ranged from 1 A to 1.3 A depending on the spinning of the media and the codec. Burning a DVD at 2x took 1.15 A The good After installing a Ubuntu 7.10, almost everything Just Worked . Of course it warned me about the non-free ipw3945 driver, but in seconds network-manager had connected to my home WLAN. Network manager could be a little more smart and turn off the WiFi transmitter when it's disabled by the user, but I guess that's not only an Ubuntu problem :). Most media keys worked out of the box, the WiFi kill switch worked OK, as did suspend to ram and to disk. Video acceleration and obligatory eye candy worked automatically. No problems either with burning a DVD, listening to music, watching a movie or connecting to my home network. The external aspect is not bad, the screen looks good, and the touch pad is very nice: just a matrix of dots over a surface that doesn't show any other sign of being an input method. In conclusion, it shows that it is a very cheap machine, but the drawbacks seem very few comparing to the good price. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Tecnolog a

Dear Lazyweb, After several years without regular physical activity, I resumed it last summer by running 3 or 4 times a week. I still have to write down how good this can be, and how good it has been for my health (from 82kg down to 75kg is already a good result, imho).. Anyway, I'm currently trying to find some software to log my running activity, to keep track of at least the distance I run (which can range from 4km during the week up to 16km, my current record, during week-ends), the time I spent running and the path I followed (I'm lucky enough to live close to forests, country and have numerous choices for my running loops....anough to nearly never reproduce the very same path). In fact, this activity is now enough a challenge for me (how long can I run? After all, I'm now not that far from the semi-marathon.....but the last kilometers may be hard) and I feel some need to track it down. So, is there something around for doing this? "apt-cache search" was silent about this but I may have used the wrong keywords.

Ian Lance Tailor started a discussion that has in the meantime reached Planet Debian via Miry and Giacomo. The single-threaded memory model is the only sane choice for languages that are as close to the "metal" as C and C++ are. For a multi-threaded model to work, the compiler needs to have intrinsic knowledge of "locking", and it needs to emit the appropriate code around all accesses to variables that cannot be accessed atomically (which also means that signal handling does not work — the signal might arrive in a critical section). Java uses such a model. In the language, there is the "synchronized" keyword, which can be used either as a modifier on a method definition (locking the object the method is called on), or before a block (locking an explicitly specified object). The lock is recursive, so calling another "synchronized" method on the same object works fine, leaving the last one finally unlocks the object. Memory consistency is achieved by flushing the object before unlocking (so accessing an object that another thread may use without locking it is still undefined behaviour — but class authors can avoid that by allowing access only through "synchronized" methods). I doubt we want the same in C/C++. For one, it adds a recursive lock to each instance of a class or struct, whether needed or not, since the compiler cannot rule out that some code might want to use this object as a lock. Also, the object inclusion and inheritance rules are quite different, as Java does not have inclusion, and only allows simple inheritance. Basically, if I were to emulate Java's rules, I'd need a "virtual" base class to provide the lock, which is a lot of extra overhead since every derived class now needs to keep the offset to the most derived class. The other two big show stoppers are the "intrinsic" knowledge of locking that the compiler must have (it needs to know how to embed a recursive lock into an object, which is an operating-system dependent structure as it stores some thread identifier for the current holder of the lock) and that it becomes a lot more difficult to write signal handlers, as you need to avoid any code that might implicitly lock some object (which is true already, but there is no implicit locking). Java can do that, as they have a virtual machine that provides locking primitives and object lookup (so they can keep the lock separate). There is a change to the memory model I'd like to see though: the concept of an I/O buffer that behaves like regular memory (so load/store coalescing/reordering is allowed), but will be flushed before volatile accesses and re-read afterwards (optionally, with finer grained control). This would work for both hardware accesses (where the volatile access triggers some hardware) and for "hosted" environments (where the compiler assumes that system calls perform volatile accesses), and still allow most optimisations like writing in the hardware's natural bus width. If you want to write reliable multi-threaded code with current compilers, there are two simple rules:

1. any data structure shared by multiple threads needs to be marked volatile
2. any access to a shared data structure needs to be guarded by a lock

The accesses to the shared data structure are ordered with regard to the locking functions and cannot be optimized out, which is exactly what you want. The appropriate mental model is that anything that is not declared volatile (or handled by a platform locking primitive) cannot be seen by the other threads.

On debian planet. I read the C and multithreading post of Miriam Ruiz, but I don't agree with some conclusions:

First of all, I don't agree with Linus. C standard doesn't allow such optimizations. One of the driving point of C standard (and thus C) is that compiler should do what a programmer write, without much optimization, i.e. C should remain a low level language. It was iterated also for the principles of new C1X standard.

Second point. Volatile is not the right solution. volatile means that a variable should be read every time it is accessed, so the variable should not be but in registers (remember the nearly obsolete register keyword).

The problem of multi threading is not only that variables could changes (but this is a fact also of
single thread programs, when you write a signal handler [which are specified in C standard and which are handled correctly]), but for semaphores there are "barriers", i.e. you should not move read or write across such barriers.

What do volatile have with barriers? Nothing. If you read the standard (you can check also only the one page C appendix), you see that C specify what are the "standard" barrier, and they are nearly in all obvious points (i.e. a ";" is also a barrier), so moving instructions is "illegal" for C.
Ok. volatile had few other barriers, but across ";" there is already a barrier, so volatile is not the solution of barrier problem (AB locking).

References: see C wiki and C standard.

On Sept 30th 1997, alternated traffic regulation was decided in Paris for the day, because of a pollution peak. As of now, this has been the one and only time this decision was applied and it won't probably happen again because of many (stupid) limitations:

• cars with a "green" sign are not concerned and about 90% of cars now used in France have it
• it is limited to Paris and not its suburbs
• the pollution level that triggers it is stupidely high

Anyway, when this happened, I was, like dozens of millions of moron^W people in the Paris area, driving from my home to my work place (the same home and workplace than now): 30km one way, between 30 and 120 minutes (most of the time 45-60). I then decided to try using public transportation for one full month and then see if I can survive it (as many people who seldom use public transportation, I had horror stories in mind, such as full trains, no respect of schedules and of course, the horrific FRENCH STRIKES). This was 10 years ago and I never stopped. Since then, my daily trip is:

• 7 minutes walk to the bus stop
• 16 minutes ride to the train station
• 10 minutes ride in a first train
• 20 minutes ride in a second train
• 15 minutes ride in a bus
• 6 minutes walk to Onera

So, about 75 minutes from my home to my work place. 30-60 minutes "lost" per day? Not really. In the train, I can read, sleep (funnily an internal system always wakes me up at the right moment) and of course, hack on my laptop (which is my most common activity there). This, quite comfortably with enough room for my arms, feet. The same goes for the bus rides (I don't suffer from car sickness). I still haven't found a way to hack while walking (but I found some free Wifi spots at some bus stops). So, in my opinion, I *won* 90 minutes a day. And, indeed, Debian benefits it a lot as this moment is my privileged moment to work on my packages, or write stupid things in my blog, or just hack around and look for things to improve in our favourite distribution. In 10 years, I of course have a few "horror stories" about crazy schedules, missed busses and of course the awful FRENCH STRIKES. About the latter, the reality is that I just have to look at the special schedules on strike days...and spot the few trains that are schedules (either 1 every 30 minutes or, at worst, 1 every hour....when the usual schedule is 1 every 15 minutes)...and then I reach my home/work pretty safely, while many moron^W other peopl suffer from awful traffic jams on highways. So, in short, here am I, ready for 10 more years of public transportation use and being seen as an ET in my neighbourhood because I leave home by WALKING even if I am not a high school teenager. Strange person, indeed? Not to forget: from my records, I saved about EUR41,700 by doing this, assuming a cost of 0.4EUR/km, 60km/day, 200days/year for the car trips....and EUR623/year for my transportation card. I should buy a brand new SUV..:-)

Groups that campaign for free technology, like the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tend to be supported primarily by technologists. Both groups have struggled to communicate their messages to non-geeks. I have written an article and helped create a new weblog, both called Revealing Errors, that attempt to address a root cause of this issue in what I hope is both an insightful and entertainingly manner. Geeks support groups like the FSF and EFF because, as people who understand technology, they understand just how powerful technology is. Geeks know that control of our communication technologies is control over what we can say, who we can say it to, and how and when we can say it. In an increasingly technologically mediated age, control over technology is not only the power to control our actions; it is the power to limit our possible actions. Our freedom to our technology is our freedom, full stop. This message fails to resonate with non-geeks but it does not fail because non-geeks are happy to hand over their freedom. It fails to resonate simply because the vast majority of people do not understand that technology, and control over it, is powerful enough to impact their freedom. Most people fail to see the power because, quite simply, most people fail to see technology. While we all see the effects of technologies, the technologies themselves are frequently hidden. We see emails but not mail transport agents. We see text messages but not the mobile phone network. Before one can argue that such systems must be free, one must reveal their existence. Technologists are keenly aware of the existence of these systems. To everyone else, they are completely invisible. Marc Weisner of Xerox PARC cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because, with spectacles, "you look at the world, not the eyeglasses." When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer indeed. Similarly, people see their MTAs when messages bounce. They see Windows on their ATM or phone when the system crashes. Technological errors are moments when usually invisible technology becomes visible. They are, in this sense, also an educational opportunity. I have recently published an article in Media/Culture Journal from the University of Melbourne within a special issue called Error. If you are interested in learning more about what I'm trying to do or looking at some examples, please read the article. With support and ontributions from Aaron Swartz, I have also created a new weblog, Revealing Errors, that reveals errors that reveal technology by posting descriptions of errors with commentary on what the error reveals. I've posted a few examples there already and I will be updating it regularly. The goal is to help explain the power and influence of technology in the service of broadening the base of people who can get excited about freedom to technology. Eventually, I hope to be able to communicate this message to a less technical audience. With that said, I hope that even seasoned technologists will learn things about their technological environment through the analysis and interaction. I hope readers of this blog will subscribe to it and, if possible, comment on and contribute to the project as it moves forward.

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.

MJ, each French NPO is free to establish its own regulation rules, which may include a differential voting system if they want to. That should of course respect the French law (for instance, no discrimination based on sex, religion or any other genetic factor) but, as far as I know, nothing prevents deciding that "personnes morales" (ie non physical people) have a higher or lower vote than others. However, this is certainly not common, but many NPO simply don't have non physical members anyway (some don't authorize non physical people to be members). For those who care, Debian France (which is a NPO, but not regulated by 1901 law, but by the special NPO law for Alsace and Lorraine, inherited from the 1810-1918 years) admits physical and "moral" members with an equal voting right. The only special case is a rule that allows Debian developers to have a veto right on any decision of the organisation. See that official regulation rules of Debian France for details (French only). PS: Debian France is currently inactive, due to a longstanding dispute with the French Tax collecting organisation (Direction des Imp ts) who initially refused to consider us as a non profit organisation...because "we sell an operating system" (doh!).

So, A completely non-existing French team lost against a....nearly completely non-existing English team. Too many bad decisions, too much bad kick play, too many lost balls....and even no luck (the English try...damn). The French team couldn't win with such poor play (even when they were leading by 9-8, we both were completely sure they would lose on a penalty kick). What's pretty sad is that England nearly showed nothing too and, therefore, both teams made this the worst match I've seen in that world cup. Hopefully, Argentina and South Africa will show some better play tomorrow. However, when I see this, I nearly regret that France eliminated New Zealand. The All Blacks could never have played as bad as France did and they would certainly have kicked out that boring English team. Definitely, I'll be South African or Argentinian next Sunday (I have a small preference for being Argentinian, indeed).

After one day off, we watched Argentina-Georgia yesterday evening. Interesting game because it directly affect France's chances to qualify after Argentina's win on Friday. Argentina had a big disadvantage by playing only 4 days after their historic battle against France. As a logical consequence, they appeared quite tired and very imprecise. On the other hand, Georgia fought very courageously with a strong pack of forwards, encouraged by most of the crowd in Lyon. Finally, Argentina won *and* scored the bonus point by scoring a try in the very last minute (which might become very important to qualify in this pool. Good game even if Argentina was not that impressive, but I still think this is mostly because of the 4-days delay. Today, 3 games were scheduled. We didn't watch USA-Tonga (15-25). USA was slightly favourite for that one but they also were quite tired by playing 4 days only after their battle against England on Saturday. This was the first match for Tonga and obviously the island players were less tired and played a good rugby to win that one. Japan-Fidji (31-35) seems to have been the most uncertain match as of now. I somewhat regret not watching it as these two are among the teams I like watching and 7 tries in the match probably made it very interesting. Tonight, we watched Italy-Romania (24-18). The italians compete with Scotland for the remaining qualifying spot in that pool, if one assumes that New Zealand will obviously win all its matches. So, Italy *had* to win that match. The quality of romanian rugby has decreased in the last 10 years, but they still have a good set of great players, most of them playing...in France (just like one third of the italian team, indeed). The match was quite indecise with italy keeping the ball all first half long, but only leading 8-0 on half time....and being surprised by two romanian tries at the beginning of second half (8-12). After a strong domination of Italy, Romania was logically sanctioned by one expulsion and a penalty try (for successive voluntary faults), but, until the end, Italy was still in danger. They finally made it, which was the most important for them, 4 days after they were sweeped out by the All Blacks. We're now eagerly waiting for *THE* game of this week, England-South Africa in the Stade de France on Friday. Elizabeth found out that a few tickets are still available, but for 253 euros each, we decided to watch it on TV. So, between 21:00 and 23:00UTC that day, don't even think about pinging me on IRC. I still haven't decided who I'll support the most as I'm not a huge fan of either team....but they're still among the best in the world, of course.

My latest fun project: http://www.langpop.com Of course, the results aren't very scientific, but they're interesting, nonetheless. I'll be adding some more charts like trends once I have data over a few months. I ran some similar stats a few years ago, but this time I've geared up to automate the whole process, so results should be updated regularly, once everything is up and running.

It's quite some time since I daily live with a partly broken KDE. I know that some transitions are on their way, so this might be related in some way. As of now:

• Cookie Manager not working in Konqueror (going to "Cookies" in the Konqueror configuration dialogs just says "Unable to start cookie manager" which is what I call informative)
• kwallet seems to have lost track of the few (low importance) passwords I registered in it. Launching kwalletmanager just shows an empty window and trying File/New wallet just....does nothing.
• klaptop no longer showing the status of my battery in the tray (of course, this is supposed to be set in the KDE configuration center). Manually launching 'klaptop_check' gives nothing (dunno if that one is the systray application)
• kmix status of the sound settings disappears from time to time from the tray
• ....and probably a few others I don't even notice anymore

This is quite frustrating as I see no obvious place to look at and I dealt with daily aptitude upgrades quite painlessly. It is not frustrating enough to make me look deeper into this but, anyway, I have no damn clue about where to look, indeed. I guess that a KDE wizard could probably have more clue about this but, really, putting myself in Joe User's skin, I really feel as clueless as the average Windows user when something is broken on his computer. THat's maybe the 'just like Windows' stance of KDE, after all...:-) (GNOME zealots, go away: I ran out of GNOME a while ago when I had about the very same feeling during some transitions and my only option was to either try understanding every funky file in ~/.gconf to fix my problems)

Keeping /etc in git and other version control systems has been talked about and attempted by lots of people. I tried it with CVS, but that was a joke, with svn, but it sucked, now with git I actually have something I think I'm happy enough about to use. There's already a tool to do this, but I was not really impressed with isisetup. After considerable pain to find the source code (download links that resolve to 192.168. addresses are niice), I found that it was pretty old and had lots of weird hardcoded things like server names, and it wants to be a git porcelin with its own set of commands for manipulating the /etc repository. I don't want that, I just want a simple setup procedure that lets me use regular git commands to manage the repo. So instead I followed the lead of these blogs combined with David H rdeman's metastore for solving the metadata storage problem. I also hacked in a solution to the empty directory storage problem, and a few other issues with trying to use git for this thing that it was not really designed for. I'm very happy with the way it works, you just run "etckeeper init" and then can commit etc as usual with the file permissions etc included in the commits. Clone the same repo to elsewhere and again "etckeeper init" is all you need to restore those permissions (be sure to not clone the repo to a world readable directory, as there is a window when files would be readable). Automatically committing changes at the end of apt runs is also a handy feature. :-) etckeeper is currently only available from git. ftp-master is down so I can't upload packages, but both it and metastore can be built from git easily enough:

git clone git://git.hardeman.nu/metastore.git; cd metastore; dpkg-buildpackage
git clone git://git.kitenet.net/etckeeper; cd etckeeper; dpkg-buildpackage

If you should discover, while sitting in a airport departure lounge, that your TomTom has lost its SD card, don't despair. Provided you have a spare SD card (I stole the one from my camera) and have the laptop you've used TomTom Home with to hand, all might not be lost. I was able to do something along the lines of:

cd /media/disk
cabextract ~noodles/TomTom/HOME/Downloads/navcore_7.131.8483.one.cab
mkdir "US - Western Region"
cd US\ -\ Western\ Region/
cabextract ~noodles/TomTom/HOME/Downloads/US_-_Western_Region.cab 
cd
umount /media/disk

which got me up and running again. Of course it doesn't have the UK maps that came with the device, but as I was on my way to the US that's not so important (and Katherine has found the SD card anyway, so I can just replace it when I return). I was quite pleased with myself. And then I ended up with a rental car that had GPS of its own anyway... (Oh, yes, I'm in Fremont, CA, flying back on the morning of Saturday 18th November. I am currently jetlagged and trying hard not to go to bed. If you are in the area, know me and would like to meet up for food/beer/whatever feel free to drop me an email.)

Over one year ago, still at DebConf 6, the Latin American Debian people (and by people I mean just interested people, regardless of whether they were/are official DDs or not) held a BoF session. One of the ideas we discussed there was that, in order to increase Debian presence in our region (which is by no means small - Let alone the geographical aspects, I'm guessing we are about 350 million people, roughly split in half between [officially] Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking countries). Yet, this is an area with very little involvement in Debian in particular, and with Free Software in general.One of our first issues seems to be language - Just by its scale and economic importance, we cannot even put in the same scale Brazil and the Spanish-speaking countries... So I'll focus on Spanish-speaking Latin America, as (I recall) we did in that session.So, we agree: We need more local involvement in each of our communities. And, so far, we have seen quite relevant results. The number of people directly involved in Debian in Argentina, Chile, Per , Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador and Mexico (excuse me if I forget you in another country!) has notably risen since I brought this topic up, together with Christian Perrier, back in DebConf5, Helsinki. An undeniable fact is that distances in our continent, however, are huge. In the 2006 BoF, we agreed we should promote regional meetings, that would serve both for working focused on Debian topics (i.e. hack sessions, as we do in DebConf) and for spreading our work to the local population, to help them see that it is not needed to be super-skilled or anything like that to contribute to a real, important and large Free Software project such as ours. Of course, taking into account the distances in the continent, we thought it would be sensible to split it in two - and to try and hold regional mini-debconfs - One for the Northern half (i.e. Per , Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Cuba and Mexico), and one for the Southern half (Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay). And, for logistical reasons mainly, I strongly advocated having our first Northern meeting in Panam . Why Panam ? Because it is a place cheap and easy to get to. They have a very important international airport, connecting to most if not all countries in the region, and -as they have risen as a business center- have good connectivity. Visa is required for many of the interested countries, but trivial to get (as opposed to what happened here in Mexico :-( ). Of course, other countries also looked interesting (there was some argument pushing Venezuela, but in the end, we all conceded it would be in Panam .I have to strongly thank Guillermo Garc a - He is not (yet? :) I hope he still wants to get involved with this bunch of people) in Debian in any way, but after I contacted him, he agreed to start looking for a way to get us the right facilities in Panam . He coordinated with a team which did most of the organization - A very nice web site is still available so you can look at their work - Quite a good job, I must add.They contacted Universidad Tecnol gica de Panam , started talking with several potential sponsors, got information regarding hotels for us... But in the end, it flopped. Why? Because, although many of us were originally interested, in the end very few people (only three, none of them officially a Debian Developer, according to their last press release) confirmed their intention to attend.Which brings me again to the question: Why?First and foremost, I think it was lack of involvement. For one reason or another, all of the people that in the beginning pushed for this miniDebConf ended up busy doing other stuff, and didn't get at all involved in organization. It would have been a great present from our Panaman friends, yes, but quite unfair. And, of course, with no Debian people involved in organizing it, we got an chicken-and-eggesque situation... Where it didn't grab the attention of other Debian people.Second, what they offered us was quite different to what we intended in the first place - At least, to what I imagined. On my first messages both to debian-devel-spanish and to Guillermo, I tried to get something close to what we had in mind: Something as informal and as intimate as it could be. My original request to Guillermo was just to get us a room where we could hack and talk, and probably sleep with sleeping bags.Of course, I can perfectly imagine that when he requested the space to the university, on one hand, they didn't feel at ease having International Guests (with capital I and G - Very important for most Latin American universities!) sleeping on the floor. And, on the other hand, they would love to be able to show us around! Having an international project focus on a university in a non-technologically-well-known little country is quite something to show off!Anyway... What happened? I was among the instigators, but Real Life called me away (I've been mostly inactive in Debian since September! :-( ). The miniconf was scheduled for November 14-17. I also insisted originally on having the miniconf on a long weekend (say, Friday through Sunday), as -being a miniconf and not the Real Deal- it'd be much easier for most of us to rob one day off work than a full week. In the end, this was the most important point for my decision not to join: I cannot afford more time off my work, not at this time of year. About the other involved people? I do not want to speak for any other people.In the end, sadly, Guillermo had to inform us they cancelled - No, not postponed, but definitively cancelled. Why? Because -and I have to agree- next year we will have DebConf in Argentina... And many people in the region will focus our time and money on getting there. Ok, making this whole story short: I'm very, very ashamed and sorry, with you personally, Guillermo, and with your whole team. And I hope we can resurrect this idea - be it in Venezuela (as it was suggested once) or elsewhere.

Well, now this is quite the experience.

I've been trying Viper for the past few days. Viper, for those that don't know, is usually described as a set of Vi bindings for Emacs.

After reading the nearly 100 pages of documentation and trying it a bit, I have realized that this is not really an accurate description. Viper is a port of vi to Elisp.

But that doesn't really do it justice. Viper seems to have pretty much everything going for it that Vim does, and then some. It is extensible with Elisp, and works with all the Emacs major modes (indentation and so forth). Yet it also is a very authentic Vi implementation, yet more customizable than Vim. And, in my opinion, more capable than Vim too.

On the one hand, this is a really neat combination: the power of the vi editing commands with the power of Emacs and Elisp for indentation, customization, etc.

On the other hand, it makes my head hurt. While Viper and Vim both are supersets of the vi command set, they don't always implement extensions (such as multiple windows) the same way or with the same keys. Of course, you could remap them in both, but it's a bit jarring to run Viper in expert mode, press C-w to start creating a new window, and have it run the Emacs cut command. (You can run Viper in a more limited mode where it does not recognize any regular Emacs keys if you don't want that)

It's just weird. It mostly looks like Emacs. It is modal like Vim, and responds to all Vi and most Vim commands. It has an additional mode: the Emacs mode. Also if configured to run in expert configuration, Emacs commands are accepted most places. Yes, you can move with h, j, k, l and C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b all at the same time.

The main drawback I can see is that Viper mode doesn't work well with Info mode, which has other bindings for keyboard shortcuts... so all of a sudden, hjkl don't work in info mode.

I don't know yet if I'll use viper much, but it is a slick program.

After massive processing of new queue during weekend (check graphs to get better impression, kudos to all who managed to handle hundredth of packages during weekend), new Gammu is in unstable. It is still not in shape for migration to testing, but it is much better than the one I accidentally uploaded before. Currently there are no known open regressions, so if you see something failing what used to work before, just report it!