I bought an EEE 901. More on that later.

For the past few weeks I've been trying to work out which "mobile broadband" provider to go with for my daily commute. It's a train journey from the north coast of Northern Ireland to Belfast and goes through some sparsely populated areas, so I wasn't expecting to get anything that would provide 3G all the way. However I do want a provider that can do their best to keep a session up for the journey, handing over between 2G + 3G as necessary. Coverage maps/checkers aren't too bad if you just want to check a static point, but really even then it's better to actually try the provider in the location yourself. So, armed with a bluetooth GPS (Bl eNEXT BN-909GR), an Option GT 3G Quad PCMCIA card and my laptop I set about measuring signal strength along my train journey for each of the 5 providers available. I also made sure to actually try a session with them for at least one journey, because signal strength is not everything.

I wrote some Perl using Net::GPSD and Device::Gsm to query my current location, signal strength, 2G/3G status and network every 10 seconds. I did this for 3 train journeys (except for O2) and then also produced an "optimistic" file of all the data points combined for that provider.

A second piece of Perl took this data and drew the maps you see below. The graph on the right for each provider is all data points. Red means 2G, blue means 3G, green means "Limited Service" (ie it could see a signal, but not one it was allowed to connect to). White means that we had a GPS location and no signal at all. Click on the maps for bigger versions. You can see the route on OpenStreetMap - my graphs are a little squished horizontally, but the journey is from Castlerock (top left on the coast near Coleraine) to Belfast (bottom right).







At first glance 3 look to be the best bet. Lots of blue, a reasonably priced data plan. Except they can't hold up a session to save themselves. Not only does a 2G/3G handover almost always seem to result in a drop, but I had periods of failing to get a 2G session up at all and had some random drops while in 3G coverage as well. So strike them off.

O2 and T-Mobile don't manage any 3G outside Belfast (that's the bottom right corner btw). I found that a few periods of 3G along the journey helped a lot; it meant I could do a quick mail sync rather than the long drawn out affair it was on a 2G connection. They can both handle handover between 2G/3G and keep a session up for most of the journey, but the lack of speed counts them out.

Vodafone managed the worst reception, which is disappointing. I found them quite good when I lived in England (my datacard is from a Vodafone Pay as You Use data contract). I did find sessions being dropped during the no signal regions, so they just don't seem to be a good bet.

Which leaves Orange. I've had issues with Orange and data in the past (pre 2004 IIRC) but in testing they were able to keep a session up between Belfast and Castlerock, handling 2G/3G handover fine. Coverage was reasonably good and they manage 3G at several points along the journey (the blue points roughly correspond to Coleraine, Ballymena, Antrim and Belfast). I understand Orange have some EDGE capability, but my card doesn't do EDGE so I've no idea if that'll be an extra gain or not. I had a few issues with getting dud DNS servers but this happened with the other providers too so I was beginning to suspect the datacard of playing up. Manually setting known good servers in resolv.conf worked fine.

So, before I go and sign up to an 18 month Orange contract, what have I forgotten?

Thanks to all that donated to the MS society in my name. Thanks to the generous donations and a match from Google I surpassed my goal and I may even get a cool bike jersey from the event. The actual ride was a lot of fun. The ride was very well supported. It felt more like 8 12 mile rides the first day instead of one 100 mile ride. The second day was even better. I managed to tag along with a group of cyclists from Deloitte who I could draft off of, for the second half of the ride, which made it very fast and a good learning experience. I have not had many opportunities to draft on rolling hills before.

The first day route had 7400ft of climbing over the 100 miles. The second day route had only 3500 over the 75 miles. However, by looking at the routes it is obvious that neither day was exactly the most direct route to the destination. Which is ok, I had all day to do the ride on each day and didn't have to turn around and ride home afterwards.

Speaking of afterwards, when I got back to AT&T park to pick up my stuff, I tried to ride back to my house. That was the slowest riding I have done for a very long time. The bright spot was I passed a couple of people starting on the wiggle, who did comment that everyone seems to be passing them :)

I am a big fan of zotero as it has helped me manage my research, especially collect, tag, time stamp, and keep web pages that are likely to vanish. I can’t recommend it enough. I have yet to use its bibliographic functionality and apparently it is this functionality which has made it the subject of what what looks like a pretty questionable law suit. It has been a while since a IP lawsuit has really caught my attention (only in so far as it was the same old thing, not because it was not important) but this one definitely has caught my attention (and caught me off guard as well as I never really associated End Notes with Zotero, in so far as they seem to work pretty distinctly). I am eager to see how an academic institution, George Mason in this case, will react. I just hope they stand firm and also get some great legal team to help out.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to find a window manager that allows me to improve my current “implementation” of my workflow. I currently use KWin. Since I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of window managers available, some of them being perhaps too flexible, and since what I want is very, very specific, I thought I’d go for a lazy-web post. My workflow is simple: I don’t do tiling, and my sole wish is that a simple key combo (Mod + one letter) can activate the window designated by that combo. Ideally I can statically assign combos to each application (or, in general, window properties) from the configuration file, but I can also use a special combo to change on-the-fly the current keybindings for a particular window. At the moment I’m “faking” this with several methods combined:

• keeping the number of windows in my main virtual desktop low, so that one or two Alt-Tab always bring me to the right window.
• using a terminal emulator with tab support, so that I can switch terminal context on a separate level than Alt-Tab.
• assiging a simple key combo to “next/previous virtual desktop”, and have in that one a number of small applications I only seldomly use.
• minimizing to the system tray applications that support it, so that they are one click away (eg. Akregator).
• using, when available, a global key shortcut to show/hide a window (eg. Minirok, or previously Amarok).

In my new world, I’d be able to just type Mod+M to activate Minirok, Mod+A to activate Akregator, Mod+B for the browser, and several others keybindings for each instance of my terminal emulator (one for my -release work, one for my ongoing Uni work, another for my ongoing programming work). I really, really want that’s it’s just one Mod plus a key, because I’m convinced that’d work out very well for me (though it should offer a way to cycle among all windows as well). As for the rest, ability to display Kicker (KDE’s panel) gracefully would be a plus. Please mail me with your suggestions, but I’d appreciate if you could include pointers to the relevant parts of the documentation, or even examples, of how to accomplish what I want. I’ve tried eg. awesome 3, and I only managed to get lost in Lua-land.

Hey - I usually have a personal policy of not talking about my current employer on my blog. It's why I didn't join Planet Ubuntu until after I'd left Canonical, for instance. This blog isn't theirs. I can promise you that no PR department I've ever worked for has approved the gratuitous overuse of the word "fuck".

But FUCK, this is cool: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html

My readers might remember that Angie and I spent a bunch of time writing letters to my Member of Parliament back in Canada in support of gay marriage, donated to egale, attended a church that got intervener status in support of gay marriage, and ultimately attended the senate debates where equal marriage became the law of the land.

And then, a year ago, we moved to this place. A place where this is still considered an issue. A place where people are willing to do what would never be considered back at home: They're willing to take away the rights that people have and are exercising to marry their partner of choice. And I don't have a voice. As a non-citizen, I can't sign a petition, I can't donate money to political campaigns, and I have no representative to contact and inform how important this is to me.

I was pleased to learn this afternoon that Google has decided to publicly make a stand for the rights of people in California. It's just one more thing that makes this the coolest job I've ever had.

(when your wife/SO is not around)

• Finally get around to play with the PowerPC you have had standing besides your desk for about a month.
• Discover that it still doesn't boot, since it can't find its hard drive. Also discover that it doesn't want to talk to your USB keyboard.
• After a while, think of removing and replugging the SAS connectors, which fixes the boot problem. The machine now runs YDL.
• Decide you want to install Debian instead of YDL, but also wonder how to do that safely since you still can't talk to Open Firmware.
• Search for the RJ45-to-serial adapter you got with the box. Discover you probably wired it wrongly the first time around. Break it when you try to rewire it.
• Find that spare DB9 connector you had lying about, find soldering iron and fix up the connector.
• Become very, very confused, since you get perfect output, but input still doesn't work. Discover you managed to solder all the connections mirrored. It worked with effectively just one wire, not even shared ground. Resolder.
• Download Debian ISO, burn it on a DVD. Get annoyed at the machine for failing to boot from the DVD.
• Set up netboot, boot from network.
• Discover d-i doesn't install a kernel, nor a bootloader, do that by hand.
• Oops, bootloader didn't work. Iterate a couple of times of running mkofboot until it suddenly feels like booting from the hard drive.

Hurrah! And it only took like six or seven hours. Notes for later: This is an YDL Powerstation, the magic mkofboot invocation is mkofboot -b /dev/sda1 --filesystem raw; the raw bit is needed for IBM hardware. The firmware also cares about whether the partition is marked as bootable or not, so make sure to mark it as such.

When the Debian installer starts, it will normally ask you what language you want to install in and gives you a really long list of languages to choose from. Unfortunately, that's not how it works when you install on a headless NAS device. The reason for this is that installations on NAS devices are done via SSH and the installer normally brings the network up after asking the user for their language. So we'd simply skip the language question and go with English. When Timo Jyrinki recently mentioned that he couldn't install in Finnish, Frans Pop pointed out that localechooser has changed a lot since etch and that it should now be possible to have the language question after setting up the network. This turned out to be correct and I managed to choose a different language but the installer still showed everything in English. Frans reminded me that the installer drops all translations that are not necessary but unfortunately this happens too early in our case. He pointed me to a variable that determines whether translations will be dropped. So in lenny translations will not be dropped on NAS devices that have enough RAM and users will be asked when they connect to the installer via SSH what language they'd like to install in.

Lennart Pottering’s post about the sound APIs available for Linux appears to have caused some consternation from people working with the modern out of tree OSS drivers who feel that the current, out of tree, OSS drivers are being unfairly maligned. This rather misses the point of his post. The fact that there are improved versions of the OSS code doesn’t really help developers who are trying to target current Linux distributions which only ship the old OSS drivers. From this point of view the new OSS drivers are probably best looked at as a completely different product. Joss is right, though - most applications should be working with a higher level user space API than either ALSA or OSS. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the embedded space where there are often vast numbers of controls that need to be exported in order to support the complex audio routing that devices like phones can have. Most of these should only be touched very occasionally when changing use case and should therefore be hidden from normal applications where they’re at best irrelevant and at worst confuse end users. They do, however, need to be exposed by the kernel in order to allow user space the flexibility to manage the audio configuration of the system at run time.

So, I would like to see the Green party win this election. There are some other good parties running canidates this time around. The Rhino's are back! There is also the 'Work Less Party' and the Bloc Qu b cois.

First root canal today. There were some interesting parts. I'll spare you. If I seemed a bit annoyed with awesome 3 configuration in the last post, this has put it well in perspective. One nice thing about awesome 3 is that it has good system tray support built in. So I've at least temporarily mainstreamed my laptop, so it's using the gnome power manager, and network manager, instead of hibernate and sleepd and my own scripts.

I ve been silent in this blog last few days, but that has an explanation: I ve been trying to make JRuby 1.1.4 work with one of my scripts. The problem is that after having done all the tweaks I can imagine, I still can t get enough performance with Ruby 1.8.7 (latest etch-backports). Our client will not allow Ruby 1.9 in the server (what is really a pity, for the performance boost I had with Ruby 1.9 is awesome!), but it already have Java6 So the only option I have left is trying JRuby beast. Since our script deals with system stuff, it uses syslog a lot, and that is where the main problem seems to be. Syslog support is new in JRuby, has had some implementation problems, and sure are not something to rely on right now so I dropped it from the script, and it run! Twice as fast (not as good as Ruby 1.9, though)! There are some other problems with this script and JRuby, more important ones being (1) at_exit doesn t work; and (2) errors are not easy to backtrace (when JRuby fails it seems to mess up with the backtrace stack), but not preventing it to work So with the increased performance of JRuby, and after fixing those minor glitches, I was still left with the syslog problem Until I investigate some final solution (I think I ll have to use some Java native syslog library given such a thing exist), I ve split the script in performance-boost needing and syslog-needing parts; the first is using JRuby, and the second, Ruby 1.8.7 They communicate using sockets (I know ugly I would like to use DRuby, but I would not introduce another point of failure in an already messy situation) and the overall performance was brought to a satisfactory level. So far, it s been interesting to study the issue Mainly because I haven t used JRuby since it s early versions, and it has improved a lot. But also because I read a lot about the future of Ruby (bytecode compilation, YARV and so on), and it made me even happier with my primary-do-it-all programming language. Now I ll try to compile java bytecode generated by JRuby into a native binary with GCJ :-D. Let s see if that is do-able Updated 2008-09-24 18:03:00: As you can see in the comments, syslog actually works. I figured this out this morning, but JRuby Subversion already had a patch. Anyway, I submitted another bug I found.

I was invited to participate at Festival Internacional de Software Libre (FISOL), in Tapchula, Chiapas. The other invited speakers were Sandino Flores (tigrux), Alexandro Colorado (jza), Eric Herrera (crac), John Hall (maddog) and Fernando Romo (pop), all well-known due to very different contributions to the Free Software movement in Mexico and abroad. Several other people also presented tutorials, but I was not involved in that part, and mentioning one while not the rest would be unfair.
The conference was quite massive - Tapachula is a medium-sized city (~200,000 people) in Mexico's Southernmost point - Sadly, due to its geographical location, it is mainly famous for being the region where illegal immigrants from Central America enter Mexico towards the USA, and it is a known spot for all kind of abuses, both from the authorities and from gangs of thieves.
This is the third time I come to this conference. The first two years (2005, 2006) it was organized by the local CUCS university and it was reasonably large, but this year it counted also with many other universities in the region. Attendance was... HUGE. We were told around 1600 students were registered to participate, and I expect at least 1000 to have actually been there. Very amazing and encouraging!
It is, by far, a base-level conference - Most attendees had had no previous contact with Free Software at all, or had at most toyed around with a distro for some hours. Some people, of course, _are_ already working and involved, on various different degrees. All in all, quite encouraging.
But not only I had fun (and got extremely tired!) at the conference, or at the beer sessions afterwards. I also got to push some more publicity (and work, of course!) towards my new favorite pet project: OpenStreetMap.
As many other Debianers, I joined the fever last August, during Debconf. So far, I have been quite busy tracing and mapping; I am quite fortunate to get the OSM addiction while living on the edge of the well-mapped area of Mexico City. So far, I have mostly worked on the Ciudad Universitaria and Coyoac n areas, where some sensible improvement can be felt. Lots yet to do, for sure, but I'm making progress.
Still, mapping Coyoac n sometimes feels a bit futile. Why? Because all of my cycling/tracing/mapping sessions look almost like a little blip on the overall state of my city, which is way better than what I expected - Most of the central city is done (although lots of work is still pending on the very large outskirts - but getting there can be a trip just by itself!)...
But this time, I had the opportunity to do something new, something better and sensible. And, yes, it feels very good. How does the map of Tapachula look for just a weekend of mapping activity? And, yes, I only went out once (morning running) expressely to get some new traces, the rest of it was while being transported by car to the conference-related activities. And I didn't even have to say once "lets go by a different route"! ;-)
Just for comparison: Last week, Tapachula's state was quite similar to what they have today on Google Maps - Just the major highways in the area. Besides, if you look at the satellite map for Tapachula, I estimate I managed to map around between a fifth and a tenth of the city's surface.
So, have you got a GPS? Do you enjoy going out on the street, be it walking, running, cycling on driving? Or even if you don't enjoy it, are you sometimes forced into it? Start contributing to OpenStreetMap now!

Just spent a good two^Wthree hours trying to configure awesome 3.0 to match my awesome 2.x setup. Docs are effectively nonexistant. So far, I'm stuck on several fronts:

• I want to be able to left click on a titlebar and drag to resize. Without pressing the modkey. But the definition for that is set deep within awful.lua, which is not a configuration file, and so I cannot see a good way to configure it.
• Why can't I resize an xterm to 80 characters wide? It jumps between 79 and 81.
• Why is it that despite using the same font as with 2.0, enough additional vertical space is used by the title bar and status bar, that I get one less line in all my xterms? It's using only a few pixels more than before, but that's too much..
• How do I configure a textbox so that, if I click on it, a command is run? Update: Figured this one out, for example: mympd:mouse_add(mouse( , 1, function () os.execute("awesome-mpd show &") end)) (Note that if the command isn't run in the background, and opens a window, it will deadlock awesome.)
• Can't figure out how to use awesome-client to add a value to a graph widget. (I'm sure this is simple, but I haven't stumbled over an example. I'd use wicked, but it's not packaged.) Update: Figured it out via the source: mpgraph:plot_data_add("foo", "10")
• Can't figure out how to make a textbox widget have a fixed width and truncate the text in it. Since it's displaying the currently plaging song, using the default dynamic width would make everything on my status bar jump around. Update: mytextbox.width=100
• There's no emptybox widget aymmore, so how do I add horizontal padding between widgets? Best I've managed so far is an empty textbox with a defined width.

Anyone else hate lua, or at least build-your-own-WM-in-lua config files for window managers that used to have simple config files?

I finally managed to process all my mails and it's not time to push Gammu towards stable release. If everything goes without problems, the just born 1.20.93 will be followed by 1.21.0. Version 1.20.93 fixes several crashes with parsing strange data from phones and changes a bit initialization of FBUS protocols. If you are using this connection type, please test this new code whether it behaves better or worse than older version. Full list of changes:

• Fix crash when decoding EMS pictures (bug #549).
• Motorola phones sometimes reply in UCS2 instead of HEX (bug #712).
• Use native functions sleep/usleep if available.
• Improve FBUS initialization sequence.
• Fixed reading for ringtones from Nokia 5510 (bug #529).
• Do not crash if ringtone name is too long (bug #529).
• Fix possible crash while reading of messages using AT.
• Increase timeout when writing SMS message (bug #596).
• Cleaned up issues with reading from Bluez (bug #670).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

I don’t have the expertise to intelligently explain the entire global financial meltdown myself, but here are a few resources that merit wide dissemination, especially if you are a podcast-listener:

• The Planet Money Podcast. NPR’s Adam Davidson hosted one of the most memorable episodes of This American Life on the Giant Pool of Money (complete PDF transcript). He has springboarded that show into a frequent short podcast in these times of peril. He finds a near-perfect balance between accessibility and complexity for a non-specialist but educated audience. It’s also entertaining. Of all major media outfits, NPR is miles ahead on the podcast front.
• Paul Krugman’s blog. Admittedly on the partisan side (”Conscience of a Liberal”), Krugman’s analysis is deep both on politics and economics. Steve drew my attention to this excellent illustration of the flaws with the current approach to bailout:

Just stumbled over this meme at Adrian (the meme seems to be started by madduck involuntarily), and since I’m fascinated by how people choose hostnames since my early years at university, I can’t resist to add my two cents to this meme. To be exact, I have two schemes, one for servers out there somewhere (Hetzner, xencon, etc.) and they’re all wordplays on their domain name noone.org, e.g. symlink.to.noone.org (short name “sym” :-), gateway.to.noone.org (usually an alias for one of the machines below), virtually.noone.org (always a virtual machine, initially UML, soon a Xen DomU), etc. So nothing for a quiz here. My other scheme is for all my machines at home and my mobile machines. I’ll start this list with the not so obvious hostnames, so the earlier you guess the scheme, the better you are (or the better you know me ;-). One more hint in advance: “(*)” means this attribute or fact made me choose the name for the machine and therefore can be used as hint for the scheme. :-)

azam

My first PC at all, a 386 with 25 MHz and MS-DOS. (Got named retroactively(*). Hadn’t hostnames at that time.)

ak (pronounced as letters)

Got it from my brother after he didn’t need it anymore. It initially was identical to azam, but once was upgraded to a 486. Still have the 386 board, though.

azka

My first self-bought computer, a pure SCSI system with a AMD K5-PR133 and 32 MB RAM. Initially had SuSE 4.4 and Windows 95 on. Still my last machine which had a Windows installed! :-)

m35

Same case and same speed as azka. Used it for experimenting(*) with Sid years ago.

azu

Initially also an AMD K5-PR133, later replaced by a Pentium 90 and used as DSL router.

azl

An HP Vectra 386/25N book size mini desktop I saved from the scrapyard at Y_Plentyn before his (first) move to Munich. The cutest(*) 386 I ever saw.

ayce

A 386 with 387 co-processor(*) and solded 8 MB of RAM.

ayca

A 1992 Toshiba T6400C 486 laptop bought at VCFe 5.0.

bijou

My 1996 ThinkPad 760ED, which is still working and running Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny (I started with Debian 3.0 Woody on it and always dist-upgraded it! :-)

gsa (pronounced as letters)

My long-time desktop after azka. A Pentium II with 400 MHz and 578 MB of RAM at the end. Bought used at LinuxTag 2003, it worked until end of last year when it started to suddenly switch off more and more often and now refuses to boot at all. Hasn’t been replaced yet though. I mostly use my laptops at home since then.

gsx (pronounced as letters)

An AMD K6 with 500 MHz I got from maol and which was used as Symlink test server more than once. (It was the machine initially named symlink.to.noone.org because of that.)

hy

My 32 bit Sparc, a Hamilton Hamstation.

hz (pronounced as letters)

My 64 bit Sparc, an UltraSparc 5.

tub

An HP Apollo 9000 Series 400, model 400t from 1990.

tpv (pronounced as letters, too ;-)

My Zaurus SL-5500G.

tryane

A Unisys Acquanta CP mini desktop with a passively cooled(*) 200 MHz Pemtium MMX. Used as DSL router for while, but the power supply fan was too noisy.

lna (pronounced as letters)

A 233 MHz Alpha

loadrunner

An IBM ThinkPad A31 running Sid. I use it as beside terminal.

pony

A Compaq LTE5100 laptop with a Pentium 90 running Sid.

dagonet

A Sony Vaio laptop which ran Debian GNU/kFreeBSD until it broke.

Those who know me quite good should already have guessed the scheme, even if they can’t assign all the names. For all others, here’s one name which doesn’t exactly fit into the scheme, but still is related in someway, but you need to knowledge of the theme’s subject to know the relation:

colani

A big tower from the early 90s designed by Colani.

Ok, and now the more obvious hostnames:

rosalie

A very compact Toshiba T1000LE 8086 laptop running ELKS and FreeDOS.

amisuper

Also an old Symlink test server from maol. He named it “dual”. 2x(*) Pentium I with 166 MHz. Unfortunately doesn’t boot anymore.

visa

An IBM NetVista workstation running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. My current IRC host.

nemo

My ASUS EeePC running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

pluriel

My current WLAN router running FreeWRT.

c1

My MicroClient JrSX, an embedded 486SX compatible machine with 300 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c2

My MicroClient Jr, an embedded Pentium MMX compatible machine with 200 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c-crosser

My Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

c-cactus and c-metisse

The KVM based virtual(*) machines on c-crosser running Sid and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

jumper

My NAS(*) at home, currently a TheCus N4100. Soon to be replaced by some Mini-ITX box.

Any one who hasn’t guessed the scheme yet? For those understanding German it’s explained at the end of my old hardware page. For all others I suggest either to look at the domain name in my e-mail address (no, it’s usually not noone.org). Still not clear? Well, feel free to ask me for all the gory details or mark the following white box to see the scheme as well as the explanations for nearly all hostnames hidden in there:

All the machines are named after Citroëns. Old machines after old Citroëns, current hardware after current Citroën models or prototypes. Those names starting with “A” are 2CV derivatives since the 2CV was Citroëns “A” model. “AZ” was the 2CV, AZU and AK were 2CV vans and everything starting with AY (e.g. AYA, AYA2, AYB – but those don’t sound that nice ;-) is Dyane based, but I currently only use Méhara names (AYCA is the normal Méhari, AYCE the 4x4 version). Interestingly not everything starting with AYC is a Méhari: AYCD was the Acadiane, the Dyane van. HY and HZ are variants of Citroëns “H van” (HX, HW and H1600 as well, but they don’t sound that nice), TUB was the pre-WWII “H van” prototype and later the nickname of the “H van” in France. TPV was the name of the pre-WWII 2CV prototype and an abbreviation for Toute Petite Voiture (French for “Very Small Car”), hence the Zaurus, my smallest Linux box, got that name. Rosalie was the nickname of a rear-wheel drive pre-WWII Citroën. M35 was a Wankel engine prototype of the Ami 8 and the Ami Super was the 4 cylinder version of the Ami 8. Bijou was a 2CV based coupé build by Citroën UK in the late 50s and early 60s. Visa and LNA were 2CV predecessors which were available with 2CV engines, but were stopped before the 2CV. GSA and GSX are GS late derivatives. C1, C2, (C3) Pluriel, C-Crosser, Jumper and Nemo are current Citroën models and C-Cactus and C-Métisse are recent Citroën prototypes and show cars. The 2CV Dagonet was an aerodynamically optimised 2CVs by Jean Dagonet in the 50s. The Tryane is an aerodynamic and fuel efficient, three wheeled car by Friend Wood based on the 2CV and with a body of wood. And Colani once dressed a 2CV so that it broke several efficiency world records. The Namco Pony was a 2CV based light utility truck (similar to the Méhari, but with steel body) built in Greece under license in many variants. And Loadrunner is the name of some CX six-wheeler conversions.

Some links about the naming items:

• Tryane II
• An original Loadrunner and a just recently built Loadrunner. I even saw the base of exactly that one in RL shortly before it was converted into a Loadrunner.
• Luigi Colani
• Dagonet
• Namco Pony
• C1, C2, C-Crosser, C-Cactus, C-Métisse, Pluriel, Nemo, Visa, LNA, GSA, Ami Super, Rosalie
• AZAM, AZL, AZKA, AZU, AK, AYCD, Bijou, TPV
• HY, HZ, TUB.

Hope you had fun. I had. ;-)

Now playing: Willi Astor — Gwand Anham Ära

Lately following the US elections (and lately the finance collapse) is an interesting thing, I have been watching the following (in the order of importance):

1. NBC Nightly News
2. NBC Meet the Press
3. NBC Countdown
4. The Daily Show/The Colbert Report

Additionally, if you watch it in this order, the fear and maybe even panic that sets in watching the news is slightly relived by the common sense and a bit of humor. And to the people that say that that the above is very anti-Republican leaning - I admit, it is a bit, but when Democrats fail, they cover it as well. It just does not happen as much lately. I mean, Republicans manage to contradict themselves inside one sentence, entertainment TV loves that and Democrats actually have hard time competing for air time. A Democrat gets an oral relief from his secretary? A bunch Republicans are selling government oil-rich lands for sex! Beat that! Poor Democrats

(including English!) The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59 yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this. That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian translators to polish their work. We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami. Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are reasonable!)

First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of
the last commit with an l10n update):
Languages meeting the release criteria: 59
------------------------------------------
Already activated and complete for level 1: 51
 Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish,
 German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French,
 Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
 Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian,
 Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch,
 Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
 Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish,
 Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6
Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof
Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2
 (the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me)
Irish, Serbian
Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15
--------------------------------------------------
Activated languages: 4
Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami
Not yet activated languages: 11
Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada,
Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa
Discussion
----------
(careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet
the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct)
Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet
the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1
release of Debian Installer.
Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not
activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated.
Two languages should be activated as they have met the release
criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian.
This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see
any reason to not follow our own rules there.
The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release
criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale:
Amharic: 
  I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly
  symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few
  African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the
  translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing
  stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading
  drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for
  the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during
  finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning
  that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by
  tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for
  the translator
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic.
Welsh:
  Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the
  small experience of PO files by the person who completed the
  translation during last week. One will make the regular user login
  name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password
  screen to be in English as well, that's all.
  Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of
  Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily
  cope with these screens.
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh.
Estonian:
  The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated
  back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the
  translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the
  translation.
  Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that
  appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the
  skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think
  this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and
  Estonian.
  As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian.
Northern Sami:
  The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language,
  that would be a reason to drop the translation.
  However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it:
   - Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back
     to Norwegian Bokm l which is understood by all potentials users
     as it is teached in all Norwegian schools. 
   - Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation
   - The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the
     translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu
     developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy
     to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian
     schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and
     its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the
     development of D-I
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami.
I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound
slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair
with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I.
Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release
managers...but advices are very much welcomed.