A little utility that has been collecting dust on my harddrive over the past two years is an enhanced version of a PyGTK exception handling module that was originally posted to the PyGTK mailing list by Gustavo Carneiro. I've now uploaded it to the sysfs download area; it is essentially unlicensed, considered public domain by Gustavo according to his email message.

Besides fixing a API incompatibility with recent PyGTK releases, there are two main differences with the original functionality.
First, I've modified the traceback formatting to include two lines of context to each line in the traceback, one before and one after the called line. Also included is a printout of the identifiers referenced in the traceback lines — variables, usually. On my personal wishlist was also syntax coloring in the debug window, but this was both non-trivial to implement, and it would likely add considerably to the complexity of the error handler, thus increasing the chances that the error handler itself would fail.
The other main functionality change is possibility to email feedback to a predefined address — mainly meant for deployment and debugging of company-internal applications. To enable this feature, two identifiers feedback and smtphost must be set on the module. This can be either by modifying the code, or, better, by adding them after module import:

import gtkexcepthook
gtkexcepthook.feedback = 'valid@email.address.here'
gtkexcepthook.smtphost = 'relay.smtp.hostname'

Bugfixes, enhancements and feedback welcome at mechanix on rack66.net.

Nine Secrets Health Insurers Don t Want You to Know.
Update: Link is now working…

Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon predicts thet spread and rise of the alpha girl. Does this mean we will see more female software hackers and developers soon?

This week I have been primarily looking over ticketing systems. So far I've looked at the following:

roundup

Initially this was the package that I liked best. It is small, self-contained, and easy both to install and manage. The significant downside was that it expected all users to create an account first, prior to submitting a ticket. If they didn't and they mailed submit@example.org they'd receive a reply back which read "Unknown user: sender@example.net". Shame because it was reasonably featureful.

otrs2

This was a little fiddly to get going with, but actually suprisingly good. Had I not experimented with roundup I'd have said it were the best I looked at.

request-tracker

Big. Heavy. Intense. It looks ugly, but provides a bamillion (metric) configuration options and can be used to do almost anything you'd like. If it didn't such up so many resources I'd have had no qualms about using it. Even the mail-gateway was nice and simple to get working.

I'm going to take a look around some more and see if there are any non-packaged systems to look at. Pointers welcome. All I want is for incoming emails to appear in some sort of queue where they may be assigned to an owner. If the original submitter can view the ticket online great, but no big deal if not. I'd expect that replies sent to the ticket would be routed back to the submitter, and that replies to those would similarly update the ticket. I guess thats standard though?

New Jersey is one of the states holding presidential primaries on this Super Tuesday and since you asked, I voted for John McCain. The chief reason for my vote is of course the war against Islamic terrorism. Now that we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq, we can't afford to elect someone who will fail to see victory through. Mind you this isn't necessarily a reason not to vote Democrat. The anti-war wing of that party has been thoroughly marginalized. Hillary atleast has a commendable reputation for viciousness. Even Obama has made some encouraging remarks (ok that was probably a red herring but I have the audacity to hope you see.) But while the Democrats do not take the anti-war crowd seriously, they do depend on them for a great deal of their funding. A Democratic president might feel the need to throw them some bones inadvertantly screwing up things in the process. On the Republican side, Huckabee might leave tactical planning to Jesus. Romney would toe the line but there is no sign that he has any original thoughts on the matter. While I continue to support the President, it must be admitted that this whole war is stretching out as long as it is because mistakes were made. We need options beyond "staying the course" and "cutting and running" and McCain a military hero and early supporter of the surge could be the one to find them. The other big issue is supreme court appointments. One, possibly two justices may need to be replaced in the next four years. We need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration. Here there is a big split in the Conservative establishment. Ideologues consider McCain to be insufficiently pure and worry he will end up appointing another Souter or O'Connor (both appointed by Republicans it should be noted.) Pragmatists point out that McCain is viewed more favorably than Romney or Huckabee amongst the independent and moderate voters who will be crucial to victory and that even the slight chance of a bad choice is better than the certainty of a bad choice if Clinton or Obama get to make it. Social issues are important to many Republican voters and in this area too there is some grumbling about McCain being too liberal. Some have even suggested that if McCain beats Huckabee or Romney, a Democratic victory and four years out of power would be preferable in order to bring the GOP back to the straight and narrow. Although this contingent is loud I frankly don't think they have the influence people think (As evidenced by the actual performance of Huckabee or previous champion Fred Thompson.) When push comes to shove, they will rally behind the party candidate especially if McCain makes a bona fide social conservative (Huckabee himself?) his vice-president. On economic issues, the president's job is to not interfere and let business run itself. I don't see any of the Republican candidates being much different in this regard. Or the Democrats for that matter. [Careful readers will have noticed I have avoided mentioning Ron Paul. Paulestinians, consider this carte blanche to send me your long, rambling, incoherent screeds about how Dr. Paul has the answers to everything. Because God knows I haven't read enough of them lately.] Update: Kevin asks what I think about the candidates in terms of "geek" issues such as net neutrality, DMCA etc. IMO there is not a whole lot of difference between the major candidates on these issues. Republicans one would think would be more beholden to corporations in general. Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws. Overall, I don't think it ought to be much of a factor in choosing the president even for Free Software types. Rather we should focus on the legislative branch (in Congress as well as the states) which holds the real power here and in the court of public opinion.

I finally got around to finishing MyTab on Sunday, the group finance web app I’d been promising my housemates for a while. I’m not exactly sure how to describe it, but it’s kinda the equivalent to that sheet of paper on your fridge that you use to share bills around the house. I wrote it mainly for my current house to use, but if other people find it useful, then that’s great. It’s got RSS feeds and some shiny AJAX, which proves that I’m totally down with the kids. (However, the Javascript is optional and it also supports email notifications, so I’m also down with the adults.) It’s my first experience writing a Django app, which was mostly an enjoyable experience. In somewhat of an experiment, it’s released under that crazy Affero GPL license. Patches welcome, as usual.

Last night, after dropping a package from a control file, I was wondering why my package.install file for the remaining package seemed to be ignored (upstream installs a bunch of stuff that I don't want installed in the Debian package; the symptom was all that junk was making its way into the package). Turns out it comes down to the following logic in CDBS: i.e. if there is only one package, then by default install in debian/package. Therefore whatever make install does is what you end up with in your package. Although I can see the reasoning behind this, it wasn't what I wanted since I need the package installed into a temporary location (i.e. debian/tmp) which then uses a .install file to pull out only those files I want. The solution is simple, override DEB_DESTDIR to $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/ in rules. I hope this saves someone the half hour or so I spent investigating why my install file was "corrupt"!

This year at Linux.Conf.Au there was a student party sponsored by Google. The party was held in a bar and lots of free drinks were provided. This was fine for the university students, but for school kids it was obviously lacking. Some people point out that it’s “quite legal” to run a party that excludes children, the point however is whether it’s desirable to exclude them. Also the concept of a state where laws dictate all aspects of your life to a degree such that obeying the law is the only possibility is fortunately restricted to science fiction. Another common fallacy is when people point out that we should be grateful for Google’s sponsorship. As far as I am aware Google doesn’t insist on any particular conditions for sponsoring a party. If the conference organisers were to request a party at a more child-friendly venue (for example a restaurant - which if licensed could serve alcohol to adults who desire it) then I doubt that Google would refuse. Being grateful for Google’s sponsorship is entirely unrelated to the issue of whether their sponsorship money was spent in the best possible manner. My interest in this topic started at LCA 2007 when I heard complaints from young delegates who were excluded from the Google party. This year the Google party (a different event from the “Google student party”) allowed everyone to attend and issued coloured wrist-bands to indicate whether the person had shown suitable ID to be served alcohol. The Google party was inviting for all and I believe that it was a significant improvement over last year (more attention was paid to serving food than alcohol). I have suggested that at future events some tables be reserved for people who aren’t drinking. As a general rule people enjoy being around people who have consumed a similar type and quantity of mind-altering substances (something I learned from my friends in Amsterdam). There is of course demand for serious drinking, and it seems impossible to satisfy people who want to do serious drinking at the same party as people who won’t or can’t drink at all. If there is not going to be an official party that is suitable for U18s then I’ll arrange it and pay for it myself. The consensus of opinion seems to be that less than six U18s are not worth catering for (one of the common objections to my suggestions is that there may be only four or five U18s). I can pay for a party for that many people which (in terms of food and non-alcoholic drinks) compares well with whatever Google might offer for the drinkers. The rough idea is that U18s will have free food and non-alcoholic drinks. The venue will be some suitable restaurant (is there a Pizza hut or similar near the next LCA?). The party will be open to parents and delegates who are >18 and don’t plan to drink (but I’m sorry I can’t afford to shout you). Opportunities to learn about cool Linux stuff will abound (I expect that a number of knowledgable Linux people who can teach some interesting things will be interested in attending). If I’m paying then children who aren’t delegates will also be welcome to attend, but their parents would have to pay for their food/drink. But this is merely a matter of budget, if it was to be an official event or there were other sponsors then this might not be the case. What I would like right now is expressions of interest from young people who plan to attend the conference and from parents (who plan to attend the conference or whose children will attend). If it looks like there will be a suitably large number of people interested in this then the conference organisers may decide to make it an official event. Also comments from adults who would prefer an alcohol free event (whether it be due to medical reasons, religion, or choice) would be of interest. It’s all about the number of people who will attend.

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First of all: no, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. In fact, when I don't feel too good, I tend to avoid them, since they can depress me at times. But once in a while, a romantic comedy doesn't hurt, and I do kindof like them at times. Early last week, I picked up a DVD of the first movie at a low-price DVD shop nearby, and watched it. The prince and me isn't my favourite movie in the genre; the plot surely is interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that things work out too easily in the end. Compare with Notting Hill, for example, where the two protagonists need to go through (I believe) three cycles of relationship/no relationship before the end of the movie; this, in my opinion, makes for far more interesting cinema. But, all in all, it certainly was an interesting watch. I might think the plot could've used some improvement; but that doesn't mean it's bad. The entire visual aura of the movie is great; they went through quite some effort to make it look well. For instance, in a number of scenes it's obvious that they made the clothing of the characters blend in with the background; and yet they still managed to create diversity in those colors during scenes, by making the clothing differ just that tiny bit, and different parts of the background as well; the entire scene would be built up of one painting-like shot after another, yet all of them slightly different. Impressive. And then I haven't even mentioned the casting, which was magnificent. Anyway. Since I kindof liked the movie, and since the sequel DVD wasn't expensive, either, I got that DVD as well. Boy. I've never quite seen a movie's sequel be so completely and utterly out of touch with its original. What horror. Except for the male protagonist, not a single actor of the original cast returned for the sequel. They had good reason, so it seems. The plot is utterly stupid. It revolves around an ancient law that made it somehow illegal for the couple to get married. Hello? Do you really think a king wouldn't have the influence to convince parliament to get rid of that law? Of course not, but then you wouldn't have a plot anymore. Now if the rest of the movie would make up for this silliness, then it wouldn't be so bad. Except it doesn't. This movie is bad in... let me count the ways.

1. The plot error, as explained above. Also, the plot was quite incoherent, for the most part.
2. The casting is terrible. The original King Haraald, father of the male protagonist, managed to create a believable king, with that somewhat eccentric and strange flair that most European royals seem to have these days. The queen had a bit of an iciness over her, warming up to an interesting character once she started to like Paige. Even the minor roles were so well played. In the sequel, none of this returned. The queen was just tight; an empty shell. The new Paige had a problem with overacting in some of the scenes. In fact, that was a common issue; I don't think I've ever quite seen this much overacting in one movie. Also, King Haraald didn't even remotely look like the original; not physically, and not in his acting.
3. Speaking of the King, and given the plot of the original movie, he shouldn't even have returned for the sequel; he abdicated because he was terribly ill; he should've been dead, for crying out loud!
4. The CGI was horrible. In the original movie, there were a few scenes where I'll bet CGI was used; not because it showed, but because I don't think it were possible to create that scene otherwise. In the sequel, you could tell when CGI was used due to the utter lack of natural feeling. Ever heard of a randomizer? It's what you use to avoid having a full room of butterflies all shake their wings at the exact same speed. Shudder.
5. The "painting" feeling and attention to detail of the original movie was nowhere to be found. In fact, at some point they show a castle which supposedly is in Denmark somewhere, but it shows the Czech flag, instead. Ugh.
6. Some of the gags were funny, but not as intended; because they were so silly. I've seen 3-year-olds make better jokes.

... I guess I could go on forever, but then there isn't much point in boring my audience. The short version: the original "The prince and me" is an interesting watch, but please forget about the horrible sequel... ... I guess there's a reason why they put it directly on DVD and skipped the theatres.

Yes Junichi, this new release explicitely deprecates dashed form of git commands, as they will probably go away from the $PATH for many good reasons:

• the shell completions are way better hence the need for git-* being in /usr/bin has gone for quite some time now;
• the amount of git-<tab> completions scares the hell out of new users, let's do like bzr (that has more commands than git, and many undocumented ones unlike git whatever they say, they just hide them) and don't publicize our guts for nothing (though everything will always remain documented);
• there are some issues with dashed commands being in the $PATH that generate misfeatures, for example if you have a ssh command in $HOME/bin it won't be picked because git puts the path where dashed command live front (to avoid versions mismatch) hence you pick /usr/bin/ssh again (hi dato !);
• we may not have a 1:1 relation between git commands and dashed version for the rest of git's life;
• aliases (that you can configure in $HOME/.gitconfig already don't work with the dashed form for obvious reasons, so it's better not using the dash for consistency's sake.

So we gave our users a pretty good timeframe to adapt their scripts, hence the deprecation notice. Also note that best practices about scripting are now documented in the gitcli(5) man page I wrote.

Finally I was able to open the registration for DebConf8 and send the Call for Papers. For the full details please read the whole mail. We had a lot of work in the last few weeks to make this possible, as we set us the goal “We will keep all data entered last year, people won’t have to enter that again”. And we made it! It wasn’t all that easy to do, as we switched from the old 0.2.10 version of Pentabarf to the more recent, completly rewritten 0.3.9 release of it. Which had a completly new database schema, making the database upgrade a fun task, having had a lot of changes for our own data… After Mark and Stephen finished the database it was my task to get all the changes to the interface back which we had done. Which took about a week longer than I expected it, unfortunately delaying the CfP about 4 days. But hey, the new code is way better now. The actual difference between us and plain upstream is about 30% of that with 0.2.10. Which is nice. Of course we still miss a few things, but those aren’t important for the CfP and will be readded soon. Some of those features also will be sent (and most possibly merged) upstream. A big thanks go to Mark (mhy) Hymers and Stephen (sgran) Gran who did the database upgrade (keeping all our own data in it!) and to upstream who did help me out multiple times to get this running. (Yes, this stuff is also the reason why NEW got that huge again. No worries, I will fix that this weekend, shouldn’t take more than one or two “NEW-sessions”).

To: Chris Lamb <chris@chris-lamb.co.uk>
Cc: web-discuss@openjdk.java.net
From: Tim Bell <tim.Bell@Sun.COM>
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:42:14 -0800
Subject: Re: "Mailman day”
Hi Chris:
> It is somewhat of a tradition in the free software world to wish each
> other a “Happy Mailman Day” at the beginning of each month.
>
> However, the OpenJDK mailing lists seem to send the reminders about the
> middle of the month. Could this be changed?  
That was when I got around to turning on the reminders.  I’m glad to hear
someone noticed.  All of the internal feedback on this so far has been
negative.
I will change the cron job to the first of the month.
>  (In addition, the mailman@openjdk.java.net email address listed at the
>  top of http ://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo bounces.)
Good to know.  I will check that out.
Cheers - Tim Bell

Yay!

The Phone Coop (agent link) will hold its workshop and annual meeting on Saturday. If anyone is going and wants to car-share from the N.Somerset/Bristol area, let me know (new comments form follows this post). I can't quite afford a 5h train trip instead of a 2h car trip, but I'd quite like to reduce the damage. Also, we've just finished and sent the official reports for TTLLP yesterday. We've also various projects which I want to get finished, including the IPC::Open3 for Koha. If I'm a bit hard to reach this week, this might be why. We are still returning calls in batches in our breaks, though, so please please please leave a voicemail. Social Source South West is next Tuesday in Bristol. I'll be there. Will you?

I live in a cooperative living group, and during the fall semester a person who we’d invited to live with us who is a dwarf and relies on a scooter for most of his transportation decided he’d like to move in. Unfortunately, while he can get out of his scooter and come inside by himself, we had no stepless entrances such that he could bring his scooter inside to protect it from the angry Cambridge winter. Mmm, frozen batteries. So, we’re a coop and we maintain the house ourselves—so we decided to build one, of course. A ramp up to the back porch! Nevermind the fact that we need to sink four-foot foundation holes in the ground in January. We got started right away at the beginning of IAP, while people were still trickling back into town from all over the country. First we surveyed out where the posts should be sunk: Then it was time for excavating the holes where concrete would eventually be poured. This involved a power auger of DOOM: It’s advertised as a 2-man tool. Two 200-pound construction workers, that is. We had to put four people on it plus one person with a shovel clearing dirt to make it manageable, and even then it was a pain. There’s a delicate rhythm you have to get into to avoid getting the bit stuck—DOWN. UP. CLEAR. And inevitably there are rocks and roots that have to be dealt with. We lucked out with a fairly warm weekend to do the digging on, but on the first day we still had to deal with a couple inches of frozen ground: There was also some fun stuff involving having to clear away our (frozen) mulch containers and use a concrete cutter on a weird old concrete pathway that used to run through the same area: Next we mixed and poured concrete: And placed hardware in the concrete to hold the posts: Framing: Eventually it became functional, woo: And done! (except for metal handrail): This all took place over the course of about three weeks. And now our scooter-bound housemate can bring his wheels inside! The house still isn’t totally accessible to wheelchairs/scooters, but at least the first floor is. It really brings me pride to see things like this go from start to finish here. We can do it! This guy who is moving in has really influenced my life—he’s really good at making people feel comfortable talking to him, and for me it’s gone from “wow this is awkward, I have no idea what to say” to “talking to a person with different physical abilities and characteristics seems normal”. And that’s made me a better person.

To the people looking for a way of converting from metres per seconds to metres per days: multiply your value by 86400 (60 for seconds in a minute, times 60 for minutes in an hour, times 24 for hours in a day).

One of the disadvantages of using dynamic web pages, is that you might end up serving pages (depending on how the application works) that basically say: "I can't find what you're looking for". Over the last hour I've kept half an eye onto the webserver logs for this weblog, and noticed that the Google crawler tried to index pages which simply aren't there, like for example an archive view for the year 2083. But the underlying PHP script happily returns a HTTP 200 status, with the message that filters don't match anything. Hardly useful.
I also ran trough a large part of the site, checking if any page could refer to such 2083 archive, but haven't found any links to it. Which leaves me wonder why Google came to it.

On faulty pages; for the last couple of days I've also been updating the script code to some extent, and through the log following of the server logs I noticed that some links were broken (and did not return 200 but 404 instead, or, in case of the comment code, made it impossible to post anything at all). Largely due to modification of a global in some code path, which variable was used later to build up these broken links.
I think I've covered all faulty links; but if I oversaw any please let me know, I can be reached by email at mechanix on rack66.net.

In Brazilian Portuguese, "bombeiro" is the word for both a fireman and a plumber. If someone asks you to call a "bombeiro," their statement is usually unambiguous due to context. Usually. Both SVG source and t-shirts are available at cost.

Due to the lack of entries so far I am amending the rules. It is no longer required that an entry be on the blog of the person who submitted it. Being on any blog that is aggregated by the conference Planet will do. This is known as a “guest post“. All it requires is that you email the post content to a blogger who you trust and they post it crediting you as the author. Guest posts are fairly common among serious bloggers, a google search will surely give more information.

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• The Virtual Cable concept
• Security vs. Privacy
• Resolutions 2008, a found list
• A Softer World: 273
• Twist Ending

Or, a modern guide to CPU frequency scaling with Linux. Having setup my laptop long ago, I had a strange hybrid of daemons running all trying to scale the frequency of my laptop periodically based on a myriad of different situations. Having decided to fix this, it appears the simplest approach is, as usual, the best. The way of the future appears to be to let the kernel do all the work with the ondemand govener. The cpufrequtils Debian package will arrange this for you on boot and by default should just work, although you can of course tweak parameters like minimum speed to decrease to and so forth. You can use the cpufreq-set utility to fiddle with settings, or just go into /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/cpufreq/ to tweak them by hand. The many available daemons (cpufreqd, powernowd, etc.) appear to be largely redundant and are probably best removed. This dropped the temperature of my laptop about 10 degrees C and, apart from a much cooler lap, is so far imperceptible.

See Encodings in man-db for context. Yesterday, I uploaded man-db 2.5.1-1 to unstable. With this version, not only is it possible to install manual pages in UTF-8 (as with 2.5.0, although with fewer bugs), but it's also possible to ask man to produce a version of an arbitrary page in the encoding of your choice, and have it guess the source encoding for you fairly reliably. This finally provides enough support to have debhelper automatically recode manual pages to UTF-8. It'll probably take a little while to shake out the corner-case bugs, but I'm generally pretty happy with this. Once the new man-db and debhelper land in testing, I'll send a note to debian-devel-announce and push harder on my policy amendment. Considering the historical state of man-db when it comes to localisation, and all of the dependencies and general yak-shaving that had to be tackled to get here, this represents the end of probably several hundred hours of work, so I'm pretty happy that this is out the door. The only remaining step is to add UTF-8 input support to groff, which fortunately Brian M. Carlson is working on. After that, we can reasonably claim to have dragged manual pages kicking and screaming into the 21st century.