Scott commented on my attempt to upgrade the Ogg player from GNU/Linux:

"I bought my YP-U2 in the US where the installed firmware doesn't do OGG at all. I actually had to flash it to international firmware before I could even mount it in Linux. I found the firmware on the Samsung web site after much searching, and actually installed firmware for a slightly different version of the player to get it to play OGG. Sadly I don't have the URL handy, but I may have the firmware files I used. Additionally, I was required to use Windows to upgrade the flash."

I extracted some sb files that I think may be the firmware, but I don't know what to put where or how to persuade the YP-U2 to load them. Also, I don't own a computer with Windows installed - I may have a valid licence key somewhere, but I really don't know where. Still no sign of the email Samsung promised yesterday.

Elizabeth Montalbano and Andy Updegrove write about IBM’s donation of iAccessible2 to the Free Standards Group, which is being formally announced today (see the IBM and FSG press releases). In addition to IBM, the project is backed by Sun, Oracle, SAP and other major vendors. This is a big deal in and of itself, of course, because it will make applications based on ODF, AJAX, and other emerging open standards more accessible to visually impaired users. But it’s also an important milestone for the FSG, so I thought I should say a few words about that here from my own little pulpit. The first clue is that iAccessible2 is an accessibility API for Windows. Windows? Yes, the FSG is primarily a Linux organization (our main project is, of course, the Linux Standard Base), so why on earth are we now involved in building APIs for Windows? First of all, we’ll be moving this project forward as an extension to our existing accessibility projects—which, given the way the FSG is structured, flow into the LSB as they are adopted by the Linux distributions (who, as I’ve already mentioned here, are active participants in the LSB project, so we’re not just hoping the distros adopt our work, we’re proactively trying to drive consensus on these key issues). So, this definitely impacts our Linux work by bringing accessibility features to Linux that not only equal those of Windows but exceed them (iAccessible2 itself came about because Microsoft Active Accessibility has notable shortcomings). But it’s more than that. Another way to look at this is that the LSB APIs will be taking on a distinctly more cross platform flavor, particularly in the “around the edges” cases such as this. Again, that begs the question: Why is cross platform support important for a Linux organization? That one’s simple. APIs are for application developers. Application developers target multiple platforms. The less Linux specific work an application developer has to do to support Linux, the more cost effective a Linux version will be, the more likely it is to get done. It’s all about more Linux apps. There’s another dimension to it as well. There are a certain class of features that the vast majority of developers don’t think much about because that vast majority doesn’t need them. There’s no itch to scratch, as it were. Accessibility is a great example of such a feature: I have no idea what it’s like to be blind, nor do most people. If we can provide a set of open, cross platform APIs that allow application developers to easily add such features to their products, more standards based products will support them. As Massachusetts and ODF brings into sharp focus, these “around the edges” cases developers don’t think much about can turn out to be very important indeed.

The Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 came into effect on Friday 8 December. It is now legal to use CE-marked "micro" FM transmitters, which are intended for linking portable ogg players to nearby FM radios. Transmitters can have at most 50mW power (if I understand page 35 of Ofcom's Interface Requirements 2030), compared for the local 100W commercial station on top of the hill, 25W for a full Restricted Service Licensee, 1W for low-power FM (LPFM) and 300mW for stadium commentary stations. Update: Kimmo Jukarainen / OH3GNU commented:

"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."

Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old ps2ascii indeed confirms

v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.

Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:

"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."

Rob Hart commented:

"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."

Andy Parkins commented:

"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."

The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:

"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."

Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:

• install the qemu package
• optionally install the kqemu module:
• install the kqemu-source package (from 'non-free')
  
• run 'module-assistant prepare'
• run 'module-assistant auto-build kqemu' (Daniel, in case you read this: This may be easier than running make-kpkg as suggested in the README.)
  
• install built package with 'dpkg -i kqemu-modules-[kernel version]'
• possibly change permisisons/ownership of '/dev/kqemu' to allow non-root users
  
• run 'depmod -a' and 'modprobe kqemu' to load module
  
• create a disk image (Using qcow means we are not using a sparse file, so compressing and decompressing does not inflate the file.): qemu-img create -f qcow hda_40GB_sarge.qcow 40G
• get a sarge install CD, e.g. 31r4 netinst
• install the initial sarge system:
• start qemu e.g. like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow -cdrom ./sarge-31r4-i386-netinst.iso -boot d
• start the installer and go through the normal motions
• restart qemu like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow
• finish the installation:
• select a mirror (Note that DNS is not setup - fix this or use IP addresses for repositories. Also, something like apt-proxy comes in quite handy.)
• choose 'manual package selection' in the installer
• update the packages as suggested by aptitude
• quit aptitude and finish the installation
• now would be a good time to take a copy of the fresh sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_pristine.qcow
• compress the copy (The uncompressed image is ~ 1GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 100MB.)
  
• install X:
• start aptitude, select 'x-window-system-core' and install
• leave all X config settings standard, except:
• mouse device: /dev/psaux
• mouse type: PS/2
• screen size: 1024x768 (or similar)
• install Gnome (That's just what I use, KDE or others are equally fine.):
• start aptitude and select the following packages and install:
  
• 'gnome-desktop-environment'
• 'xscreensaver'
• 'gdm'
• 'gdm-thmes'
• 'synaptic'
• 'menu'
• 'menu-xdg'
• quit aptitude
• restart gdm: invoke-rc.d gdm restart
• now might be a good time to take another copy of the sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_gnome.qcow
• compress the new copy (The uncompressed image is now ~ 2GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 540MB.)
  
• install other software as desired that you want test the upgrade with, e.g.:
• 'mondo'
• 'mondo-doc'
• perform the upgrade (following the preliminary Release Notes):
• get to the command line in the qemu system, e.g. by running 'invoke-rc.d gdm stop' in a gnome-terminal
• change apt source from sarge to etch
• run 'apt-get update'
• upgrade the kernel by running 'aptitude install linux-image-2.6-486' (This is not what the Release Notes say but it works for me.) (Say 'Yes' to removing the running kernel.)
• upgrade aptitude by running 'aptitude update aptitude'
• upgrade the system by running 'aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade'
• if applicable, rerun and keep rejecting offerings to resolve conflicts until the one upgrading mondo is offered (I'll have to look into this.)
• run 'aptitude -f --with-recommends install gnome-desktop-environment' to reinstall Gnome

All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

Vim's Feature of the Day #1: i_CTRL-R I'm really astonished of how much there's to learn about Vim and how much you can forget about it, especially because I consider myself a rather power user of my beloved editor. Digging into my ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim I found some mappings that were laying there from quite a while (I think I wrote them something like 4 years ago):

vmap ,b "zdi\textbf <C-R>z <ESC>
vmap ,e "zdi\emph <C-R>z <ESC>
vmap ,t "zdi\texttt <C-R>z <ESC>

Looking at them I went through :help i_CTRL-R ... and it's wonderful! Hitting CTRL-R in insert mode Vim enters in a "waiting for a register name" mode and when received it inserts its content without leaving insert mode. That's amazingly quick, and I'm already addicted to two combos:

• CTRL-R " which inserts the content of the unnamed register (i.e. the last stuff you yanked/deleted/...). That's interesting since I often end up doing: go somewhere, yank, go somewhere else, enter insert mode, type stuff, exit insert mode, put, re-enter insert mode
• CTRL-R + which inserts the content of the X clipboard, finally an handy way (or better, a way I'm apparently able to remember) to copy stuff from a Gnome application and paste it back in Vim without having to use the "edit" menu

Debian Jr. development revived Recently there has been some lively discussion on the Debian Jr. list about how to arrange an account for a child of 1 to 3 years of age. Suggestions included using set-top box software like Freevo, tailoring DEs with panels and large buttons, using simpler WMs like fvwm, or using an “activity centre” app like Gcompris. Now, I respect those parents who hold that a child this young should interact more with the “real world”. While I wouldn’t go so far as to outright prohibit my young ones from computer use, I can see the wisdom in keeping it to a minimum. But, for better or worse, our family is one of several who have some experience helping our youngest members use our Debian systems. We would like to share what we’ve learned through the Debian Jr. project. Getting started with live.debian.net To that end, last week I was inspired to follow the Debian Live ISO Howto to produce my first rough draft of a Debian Jr. live CD built from scratch on Etch. For the final product, we’ll want to use a local partial Debian archive mirror, as it not only optimizes fetching packages for several build iterations, but also can be kept stable, which is important as we near release. But for this draft, I ran into trouble building the complete package list to populate the partial mirror, as cdebootstrap, which make-live uses, has no handy --print-debs switch like debootstrap does. So for now, I rely on approx to cache packages for optimization only. A straightforward process to create a working live CD The rest of the process was straightforward: using live-package, I created a package list¹ containing Gnome and the Debian Jr. metapackages, I configured /etc/make-live.conf to point at my proxy, and then I ran the make-live script on the package list. The end result was ./debian-live/binary.iso, which successfully booted under qemu. At this stage, there is not much to show. To be truly useful, the live CD needs to be set up so that children and their guides can immediately find and use the material intended for them. We will need not only one live CD user, but four, varying in age range and role. (More about this in a future article.) However, it is an encouraging start, and shows that we may be able to produce something usable by the time Etch releases.

¹ For this exercise, I simply combined /usr/share/make-live/lists/gnome with the junior-* metapackages in Etch, and added mozilla-firefox-gnome-support to satisfy Gnome’s web browser dependency and cut down on redundancy, resulting in the following list.

junior-art
junior-doc
junior-games-card
junior-games-gl
junior-games-net
junior-games-sim
junior-games-text
junior-gnome
junior-internet
junior-kde
junior-math
junior-programming
junior-puzzle
junior-sound
junior-system
junior-toys
junior-typing
junior-writing
mozilla-firefox-gnome-support
eject sudo
console-common locales
gdm gdm-themes gnome-desktop-environment gnome-cups-manager gnome-screensaver
gnome-themes-extras
rhythmbox synaptic
x-window-system-core

Over five years ago, I wrote a very simple web-based system. This system, however, did some basic client-side (Javascript, of course) validations before sending the data off to the server. And it worked nicely. On Linux, of course.
The system went live.
It worked correctly less than 1/10th of the time. Yes, somewhat strangely, quite close to the ratio of Netscape/MSIE users.
Yes, a Javascript coding bug.
The embarassment made me swear not to get close to Javascript ever, ever again.
Of course, we live in a world where idle loops get optimized and where infinite loops have an ETA, this had to change at some point. Earlier this week, I decided to unfuck a web layout that worked (again) correctly in Mozilla and KHTML, but horribly in MSIE. I didn't care before, because this layout was used on a production system at work, but its users were only two colleagues and myself - Only I'm about to put a public module up. I re-did the site layout and CSS (I cannot believe Dreamweaver code is that ugly!)... The only problem was, I now know, quite common: I needed equal height CSS-made columns. And although I had come to several pseudo-solutions, they all appeared pseudo-b0rked in one or more pseudo-browsers. The only way I found to get it working was to free myself from prejudices and go back to Javascript. BTW, the Javascript X library looks quite handy - but at over 50k, it's not something I'm terribly happy about including in a website.
What's next? Am I going to fall for coding over-AJAXy sites? I hope to maintain at least partial sanity.

Long day today (yesterday, actually, but I'm post-dating this in the interest of chronological flow). The baby's having a hard time coming off of West Coast time; she got up late and took a loooong nap till half-past three. Which was fine, because I needed the time to work on my NSLU2, which needed some attention. The NSLU2, or "Slug", is a tiny Linux computer from Linksys, about the size of a two packs of Marlboros laid side-by-side. My brother Nate gave me one last year for Christmas (thanks, nate), and I've been using it for network backups, but on our trip to SF Nate showed me that he's running all kinds of wild services off of his. So I decided to start shifting over some responsibilities to the little bugger. Which was just about time. Sometime during our trip to San Francisco, my main home server started having fan problems; it kept overheating and shutting itself down. It's going to take some time to diagnose the problem, but I figured that this was as good a time as any to move the critical services over to the Slug. The main one that needed budging was DNS. Maj's main domain, as well as my two .san-francisco.ca.us domains, run from home, because it's too hard to get the registrar to change them. The Unslung system I use for the Slug has a BIND package, which is a good thing to run, anyways. I was running MaraDNS on the big server, because I always root for the underdog, but there wasn't a MaraDNS package for the Slug. So I rewrote my zone files and things are up and running now. I don't know what else I'm going to put on there. Jabberd? Asterisk? A home wiki? Just not sure. tags: nslu2 slug unslung baby

Blah blah blah When the baby got up, we went to our local Loblaws, out towards the end of rue Rachel across from Canadian Tire. It's a pretty fantastic place to buy groceries -- it's the old CPR Angus Shops, a repair and maintenance facility for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The building is huge, with giant cranes and beams still attached to the roof. Amita and I grabbed a crapload of groceries and brought them home to Maj, who'd just had a massage at the centre around the corner and was feeling really good. She'd rented Tristram Shandy, the 2005 movie based on the 18th-century level-twisting novel. Me and Amita June made some baked potatoes, and we all watched the movie, and a good time was had. tags: tristram shandy loblaws angus shops movie maj amitajune

H****e en vrac One thing I always want to buy when I'm at the store in Quebec is the quite commonly available communion wafers. Yeah, really! big ol' 5-inches-diameter communion wafers, in the snack section next to the Doritos and the Humpty Dumpty potato chips. Quebec society has a had a precipitous secularization -- from around 90% church attendance in the 1950s to less than 10% today. But Catholicism still infuses all parts of life. For example, in Quebec, you cuss by using words from the church, including, of course, hostie ("the host"). So I can't figure out why hostie are a tasty snack treat. Is it a deliberate snub to the sacrament of communion by a secular society? Or did the practice antedate the Quiet Revolution, and did the formerly religious Quebecois eat communion wafers for fun? Or is it just a snork-snork funny thing to do, when the name of the food is actually a naughty word? I dunno. I'm fascinated, but not enough to buy a big bag of communion wafers to eat. (They're never cheese- or BBQ-flavored, by the way; they have a pristine seriousness to them.) More info solicited. tags: hostie quebec snack food

Opinity One of the services mentioned in the Web 2.0 Summit infrastructure workshop was Opinity. Opinity seems to be a distributed reputation system, kind of like claimID but with a little more soft information. I think it looks pretty cool, and I'm glad to see another addition to the growing OpenID identity provider market. tags: openid opinity identity reputation

More Functional Programming in Python 2.5, where's the Syntax? I'm glad to read that more functional stuff is coming with Python 2.5, especially for the introduction of partial application, the heart of functional programming. Still, FP is not only about semantics, is also about fostering code reuse and implementing stuff in more elegant and concise way. For such stuff to be effective though, a nice and handy syntax is (IMO) mandatory. Anyone knowing i J. Random Functional Language (whatever Lisp dialect, ML, Haskell, ...) should be able to guess how to apply function partially in Python. Considering that Python has a long history of syntactic extensions via PEPs (think about list comp or generator expressions) I fail to understand why to apply a function partially I have to write something as ugly as:

all_evens = functools.partial(all_divided_by, x=2)

It's only me or the most natural syntax, that everyone would be able to guess out of the box, would have been:

all_evens = all_divided_by(x=2)

?

Today I received a copy of the PIN for my MBNA credit card in the post, despite not having asked for it. In response, I've cancelled my account, and reported their incompetence to You and Yours. I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised, since MBNA have a habit of randomly sending out unsolicited cheques (which also has worrying security implications), but I actually found it quite shocking to see the PIN that I'd chosen printed in clear text. Obviously, in the first instance they generate a random PIN, and print it out, but I was rather hoping that their systems would be set up so that that random PIN, and certainly any PIN subsequently selected by the customer, would not be available in clear text at any time. If I forget my PIN, they should generate a new one, not remind me of the old one. They should not be able to remind me of the old one. The two people I talked to seemed surprised that I would cancel an account that I've had for about 13 years over a single PIN in the post, but given that that's their policy, I don't think it's a massive leap to think that a corrupt postman might be tempted to collect these PIN letters (which are pretty easy to spot and most of which are not being expected, so won't be missed). Then, assuming that a reasonable percentage of people will match MBNA's laxness by setting all their PINs alike, the criminals will be armed with all the information they need to do a targeted mugging for the card(s), with an average return in tens of thousands of pounds, especially if they hospitalise/kill the victim to ensure they don't get to cancel the cards.

Getting to the gym consistently is one of the biggest hurdles that I have stuck to jumping over while I'm trying to lose a bit more than a few. I seem to have no consistent schedule, except that I do end up doing it every day that I can. One downside of this is that I tend to work out late at night, almost always an hour or less before I go to bed. I've heard that this is not the best for the sleep, but I suspect it is actually better than nothing, so I continue to get to the gym at 11pm or 12pm. Unfortunately, I found myself with some extra roadblocks this week: the exercise room was half broken. The breakers on one half of the room tend to trip when the air conditioner and two machines that are on that circuit are all in use. This means that no one can use those machines until someone from the coop management goes and resets the switch. The treadmill machine, my weapon of choice for shedding a few pounds, is inconveniently on this circuit, and can't be plugged in anywhere else. This happened 3 times this week, Wed-Fri. I'm calling the office for the second time tomorrow.

It is significantly harder to exercise when I don't have the treadmill handy — the stepping machine works on semi-powered days, but it tires me out much too quickly and I cannot get enough exercise in. I'm not the kind of person to reliably run in place or do jumping jacks. My solution was to move the exercise bike to the powered side of the room. The biggest problem with semi-powered days is motivation. Usually I have the motivation to get to the exercise room and start the machine, and once I've started I can stop. Opening the door to a bunch of non-working machines is a huge motivation hit though. It's so much easier to take a roadblock like this and skip a day — in fact I did this week once. Luckily I discovered that the bike is on wheels on one side so it is easy to move to the other side of the room. However, I'd like to solicit suggestions for alternate exercises for semi-power days. The things that work in the room are a weight machine with a bunch of attachments, the stepping machine, and the exercise bike. I can't really go outside and exercise, because of the late hour and neighborhood that I live in, so it needs to be an inside task. The last requirement is that it focuses on losing weight, not gaining muscle. I'm fairly sure that I'll be gaining some muscle along this process, but the goal is to drop the weight.

I have taken Saturdays to be my day off, so that I can get a little rest and not be so stressed about things, but I'm not taking it this week as I need to "make up" for the skipped day.

This week (Nov 3 - Nov 9):
Minimum: 338.0 (-0.5) (Nov 7)
Maximum: 340.0 (-1.0) (Nov 4)
Average: 339.25 (-0.35) (139.25 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2314 on 5 days
Average Calories per session: 462.8

I'm sitting in the keynote for the Web 2.0 Conference and realizing that it's been far too long since I made an entry on my blog. It's been a huge week for me since I last posted.

• We went trick-or-treating with my brother Andy, his wife Pam, and their daughters Elena and Tessa, all over their neighborhood in wt:Mountain View. Amita June dressed up like a pumpkin, and although she was initially shy, once she figured out there was candy involved, she really got into the t-or-t process.
• I wrote a Web 2.0 Conference preview article for LinuxWorld, talking about the intimate relationship between Open Source and Web 2.0 projects. I think it's pretty darn good, although Don thinks it should have more sexy references to cool Web 2.0 personalities. Well, I hope I'll get that for my daily coverage this week.
• We stayed with my brother Nate and his very nice girlfriend Kristen in their place right across from Laurel Village in wt:San Francisco. We had some great Chinese take-out from Eliza's in Pacific Heights. We stayed at their place through the weekend while they headed to Chicago for a Notre Dame football game.
• We visited our friends Natahne and Russell in wt:Petaluma on Friday night. Natahne is a friend of Maj's from waaaaaay back; she's since become a doula, and she helped Maj through some of her pre-natal time. They have a cute daughter, Iayanna, who's about 10 megatons of energy packed into a 5-year-old's body. We went to wt:Novato's Maya Palenque restaurant -- really tasty Yucatan-style Mexican food (plaintains, seafood) and family friendly service. Amita June got a balloon, which she loves like a mother loves her youngest child.
• We had brunch at All You Knead on the Haight on Saturday, then I drove for 3 hours down to wt:Big Sur to visit friends from Pigdog who were doing a campout over the weekend. It was totally great -- I met some very nice folks who I'd only seen on pictures on the Web, and then sat around with old friends around a campfire and told the same old bullshit stories we'd told each other for more than 10 years. Beautiful full moon over the ocean on my drive back up Highway 1... got home at 2AM, loved every minute.
• Brunch for my Mom's birthday at the Cabana in wt:Palo Alto. Lots of grandkids underfoot, family and champagne all around nice.
• We had dinner with Jack Herrick of wikiHow, his wife Tricia and their kids Brodie and Tess on Sunday night. Good kids, nice Thai takeout (hint for people with family friends: get used to takeout), nice to talk to people who know a lot about travelling and a lot about wiki.
• Spent the day with Jack at his office in SF yesterday afternoon, then over to wt:El Cerrito to have dinner with Zach and Wendy and Wyatt at Fat Apple's. Zach and Wendy are like the dream parent friends we wish we had at home -- it's nice to spend time with them.

Whew. OK, so, I think I'm caught up. There's probably a lot of stuff that I missed, but I don't feel like I have to fill in any more. The next 3 days at Web 2.0 are going to be busy, so I really want to be able to blog without guilt. tags: san francisco petaluma zach wendy jack herrick cabana brunch mom big sur pigdog

After much pain and misery (why did I ever decide that starting to care about real-mode code approximately 25 years after the PC was first released was a good idea?), the first release of libx86 exists. It's a library that exposes an interface that looks very like LRMI, but ought to work on architectures other than x86 - amd64 is the obvious one where it's useful, but it ought to be handy for any other architectures where you have cause to deal with running real-mode code.

I'll be doing a new vbetool release based on it in the near future, and usplash ought to move over to it as well. That should fix the problems both currently have on amd64 systems. It probably needs a bit of work on non-Linux platforms, and it's likely that vbetool will need some love before it's useful on anything that isn't fairly PC-like - I think it ought to manage Alpha right now, but PPC and Sparc are probably dead losses at the moment. I'll dig out some hardware and check at some stage.

Jonathan gets many thanks for being stupid enough to agree to helping debug code by staring at register dumps and pointing out my wide range of stupid assumptions. Also obvious thanks to the original LRMI and x86emu authors.

My life without CAPSLOCK Yesterday I spotted the option "Make CapsLock an additional Ctrl" in the Gnome keyboard preferences (Desktop > Preferences > Keyboard > Layout Options > Ctrl key position). I enabled it, obtaining the end of errors due to erroneous enabling of Caps Lock (as suggested to me by several people at DebConf6, but so far I've been too lazy to learn how to do it with xmodmap). In addition to feeling more relaxed when using Vim (we all know how dangerous can be Caps Lock in Vim!), using Caps Lock as CTRL is actually really handy, since key combinations involving CTRL can be formed moving the left pinky way less: probably a dream of all Emacs users out there Now it is just a matter of training my left pinky to stop going in the bottom left corner of the keyboard ...

So, the following package exists in Debian:

Package: update-manager
Version: 0.42.2ubuntu22-5

Now, what is this abomination? What does the "ubuntu" tell us? That this package was stolen from Ubuntu? That it has Ubuntu specific patches? Branding? Or that it simply is the same package that is in Ubuntu, and the maintainers saw no good reason to use a different version string in Debian? I prefer the last explanation, and believe this to be part of a greater trend. There have been a number of REJECTs because Debian simply does not have any releases codenamed "dapper" or "edgy", and people simply uploaded the package to the wrong upload queue. I believe the Ubuntu side also had a few uploads to "unstable" that their archive maintenance software could not process. Quite a number of packages are maintained by the same people in both distributions, and in most cases, it does not make sense to have packages differ at all. Even more disturbing, Ubuntu has been built for more architectures than they released edgy for, while some people in Debian are trying to reduce the number of architectures in the hope of getting towards a shorter release cycle, which Ubuntu has just admitted to be suboptimal for server installations by preparing an "LTS" release. So Debian and Ubuntu are becoming more and more alike. Now, is this a good thing, or would we all prefer that both keep a strong "profile"? And: if they are to grow together, where should we meet? I think most of us can agree on an installer with a big "expert" switch, and a lot of eye candy as long as you can deinstall it, but we'd also have to merge the respective communities, which is what I'd consider the more difficult part. Debian's NM process is quite different from the MOTU programme, and on both sides there will be "hardliners" (I consider myself one) who will push for their respective community's standards. Still to be filled remains the spot of the end user friendly distribution. I just got a call asking me to fix a printer setup, and, frankly, this stuff is *way* too complicated. Maybe a joint project, by members of the Debian and Ubuntu communities can tackle this?

We had a great day on Sunday at the house of my brother Andy and sister-in-law Pam. They threw a pumpkin-carving party at their house in wt:Mountain View. Between Amita June, their two daughters, Elena and Tessa, and with their friends and Andy and Pam's friends, we must have had 25 kids under five running around in their backyard. It was really good to see my old friend Chris Steskal and his wife Lisa Park and their daughter Francis and son Duncan. They drove down from wt:Oakland for the afternoon to hang out with us at the party. Francis has grown quite a bit since we last saw her, but Duncan was the big surprise: he was only a few weeks old the only time I've met him. He's 11 months now, a good crawler, and quite a character. tags: family friends andy pam chris steskal lisa park amitajune elena tessa francis duncan

I'm setting up my new laptop, and for obvious reasons I have to copy over some data from the old to the new laptop. The wireless network here at my apartment-sharing is crappy; and it lacks a local DNS server offered by newer DSL routers. So I would have to find out the current IPs of my laptops to copy data around (note that the router also doesn't give you IP persistence apparently, the laptops have new IPs each reconnect...) mDNS to a rescue. Multicast DNS (Bonjour / Zeroconf / Avahi) comes in handy here. It allows me to locate my laptops by just using "hostname.local" (using the libnss-mdns package) or using the avahi zeroconf browser (package: avahi-discover).

The word on the streets (in my comments really) is that Epiphany may be the future of reliable web browsing so I will have to check it out. I also got an excited email today about a firefox plug-in that is for the (academic) gods: zotero… It looks pretty nifty and handy but since I don’t even use a bibliographic program like End Notes, at least I am not missing out on huge functionality, which reminds me, does anyone have opinions on good GUI free software bibliography programs ?