I’m now already 9 days in Edinburgh (started writing this at day 5 already :) ), and all of them have been days of “get up at 8h, breakfast, goto Teviot, work until 23h, go back to Hostel”, with some short breaks in Teviots Bar and for Lunch/Dinner. Sounds stressful but actually was (mostly) a lot of fun, preparing the network, setting up all the core servers together with two other admins while at the same time getting a lot of request to change various parts of our Conference Management System Pentabarf to fit some peoples need at various places. The airline managed to get me to EDI, together with a few other Debian people on Friday, 8th June, around noon, where Mark (mhy) Hymers did wait already, so I didn’t need to take a bus to get into the town. On the way to Teviot I also remembered some of the places from back when we did the Venue visit for the DC7 decision. But not many, of course one forgets a lot over the time. At least I was able to remember some food places, which is always a good sign. :) At Teviot we met with Stephen (sgran) Gran to (unsorted list) have some food, unload the car, think about the way to get our uplink to our server room, check into the hostel - and whatever else we did at that day. Next day, officially called Setup day, we started to get two cables from our server room to the place our uplink is - you can see them if you go to the left site of Teviot. (The other two got there a bit later). After that we started with the setup of the network, which is pretty nice this year. We have a lot of sponsored machines that are doing various tasks, a nice network layout involving a lot of vlans to seperate stuff and a lot of (good) crack. What, you dont want to listen to boring details? Ok, here they come: - The main machine is, again, called Homer. Connected with a 2Gbit link to our master switch. It does those little things noone needs, like firewall, local mirror, dns, nagios, routing between various nets we have here, the schedule bot, etc. - There is also a Marge, who is the central point for the whole wireless network, running chillispot to have authentication for it. - Barney is used as a storage server for the video team, having some 1.5TB (raid5) space for the video data. It has 2 additional disks, 500G each, to copy data on and get them home to a video team after the conference. - Our streaming master machine at DC7 is called Lisa, and does not more than streaming for all the local clients and sending the stream out to our streaming master somewhere in the internet which then relays it to our streaming servers kindly offered by a lot of admins all over the world. - We also have Bart and Maggie, which serve as public build boxes for the attendees, where Maggie even runs a distcc open to the whole local network. - You can add the same amount of servers to this list which all do various tasks for the video team. This stuff is all glued together by a set of managed switches building our core backbone, running a number of vlans to seperate the different network segments. Which actually works quite nicely, as even at the time some expert managed to plug a cable into the same switch twice (yay, loop) - the only affected network part was that where he was in. The rest of the conference didn’t even notice it - until all of the admins jumped out of the admin room at once, looking for that fuckup. :) Sounds like crack? Probably is, but is a nice setup all together, and it was fun to set it all up together with Mark and Stephen, the two main admins for this conference who designed most of the whole structure and are the ones that really know it. I already “volunteered” them for the next DebConf to help as admins and really hope they decide to do it. Later on during DebCamp we also had Peter (weasel) Palfrader joining the local admin team. His main work here is related to the video team by hosting the geodns setup for the streaming and by running a local nagios to check the things we need to check. This enabled us to simply tell everyone Use streams.video.debconf.org:8000 wherever you are and you will get to the right server for you. Explaining this in a short way basically goes as “a monitoring tool keeps track of which servers are up and only enables them to resolve. Our geodns server then replies with the right server IPs, depending on in which region of the world you are.”. Which means streams.video.debconf.org will resolve to the local streaming server lisa while you are here, at the same time resolve to a number (those that are up) servers in Europe if you are in Europe or to those in the US if you are there. Nice. (And while I’m already blogging - I do hate my laptops suspend, err - I mean non-suspend mode. Somehow it got worse in the last days, sometimes needing multiple minutes (like 10) to decide to suspend to disk, and the suspend-to-ram still wont work. I should really get someone here that knows this stuff having a look at it. :) ).

The Caps lock key is quite useless, most people agree with me here. So I configured my system to make the Caps-Key a general control key: Caps-E starts a terminal, Caps-t lists my tomboy notes, Caps-Down selects the next workspace, Caps-2 selects the second workspace. For the workspace switching commands, there are also variants with Shift that move the current window, so that Shift-Caps-Down moves the window to the next workspace, Shift-Caps-3 moves the window to the third workspace and Shift-Caps-2 does nothing.At first I thought it was a misconfiguration, but upon closer inspection I found out: As soon as Shift and Caps are pressed, all keys in the line F1-2-W-S-X, as well as the key are not registered, not even by the kernel, it seems. Is this some old legacy problem with PC keyboards, when the bits of a key code were hardwired in the keyboard? And is there a way around it?

Several of my workmates and I are regular listeners of technology-related podcasts like Diggnation, TWiT or FLOSS Weekly (which BTW is as “weekly” as the Halley comet). Some days ago we realized that there weren’t similar podcasts in Spanish (or at least we didn’t know about them), so we thought that creating one would be cool. During this week we recorded our pilot, we had some problems with sound and I spoke a bit too fast, but I think it’s nice overall, at least I would enjoy listening to it Trying to emulate people like Kevin Rose or Leo Laporte (in the media business since 1991), who create podcasts professionally, is quite hard for amateurs like us, but we’ll do our best. Be sure to check it at Foocast (sorry, Spanish only, that’s the whole point )

Lately I have been thinking about switching source code management systems. In years gone by, I have used CVS, Subversion, arch, and most recently bazaar-ng for managing all the source code that I have to change. Lately I have been unhappy with the speed that bazaar takes to get some things done, and after watching a Google talk by Linus about Git, I thought I would give it a look.

I was surprised to find out that it actually models the way that I work normally slightly better than the bazaar model does. The main thing is that a repository holds a bunch of branches, but the working directory only has one of those branches checked out at any point in time. I use bazaar with about 4-5 branches per project, and only work on one of them at once (normally, sometimes I want to transport a bug across a couple branches) - so the "working space replaced by branch you want to work on" actually works out OK for me. I also need to collaborate with a bunch of projects at school and work that use other systems including CVS and Subversion, which Git seems to make it easy to do.

I did run into some questions that I don't really have a good answer to, however, therefore the new segment on the blog: Ask the interwebs. Normally I would just ask on some IRC channel, but the Minneapolis public library doesn't seem to allow anything but HTTP out. On to the question!

When using Git, how do you manage having multiple computers (at multiple locations) that you work on? I have approximately 5 different computers that I use regularly. Luckily I have enough space to have git installed on all of them, and I also have a web server that I can use WebDAV on if necessary. What I would like to have is a repository that I can pull from before I start work (if I am connected) and then push to when I finish so that the next computer I sit down at I can just pull again and get everyting. I would like this to include any branches I may have made on the first computer. Is this possible, hard, or easy for Git users? How much do I need to worry about slowdown? My WebDAV server is in the cloud, and I would prefer to be able to get up and go on say, a minute's notice.

I'm also interested on what your workflow is like even if it doesn't match the model I just described. I'm open to changing - the bazaar-ng to git change is big enough that I can probably incorporate a new workflow as well.

Comments: (8) Trackbacks: (1)

Comments

1. adrian: hi, i'm a just a newbie so can't help much.
   You can host your push repository in http://repo.or.cz.
   If you prefer to do it your own you have git-daemon (Have a look to tutorials). Good luck!
   #1 2007-06-16 13:59 (Reply)
2. Michael Janssen: I looked at the public repo.or.cz, but decided against it, because while I want my branches to be available at some point, I'd rather not all of them at the same time. People randomly finding them is okay, but I'm sure I'll check in unworkable/uncompilable code in this state, because I would basically be using git as an easy sync between computers at times.
   
   I'm just really interested in how other people deal with this issue of needing semi-location-independent access to the branches.
   #1.1 2007-06-16 23:29 (Reply)
3. mike: Sounds already good for you to use git.
   
   Enjoy!
   #2 2007-06-16 15:57 (Reply)
4. R mi Vanicat: I haven't answer to the synchronization problem on my blog post because it is one I don't have. Still, you can make a git repository that can be pull and push from, and git can use https/dav or ssh or its on git protocol for this.
   
   Just read man git-remote, man git-push, man git-pull and man git
   #3 2007-06-17 00:06 (Reply)
5. JM Ibanez: Just upload a bare git repository (e.g. copy /.git in particular) to a server you have ssh access to. Then, in your working copy in git 1.5:
   
   
   <br />
     $ git remote add upstream git+ssh:///path/to/bare/git<br />
    
   
   
   You can then
   
   
   <br />
     $ git pull upstream .<br />
    
   
   
   or
   
   <br />
     $ git pull upstream/some-upstream-branch my-local-branch<br />
    
   
   
   or
   
   <br />
     $ git push upstream/some-upstream-branch<br />
    
   #4 2007-06-17 01:15 (Reply)
6. Josh Triplett: A followup to that: you can do the same thing without ssh access, by using WebDAV. See Documentation/howto/setup-git-server-over-http.txt in the Git source (also available various other places in other formats).
   #4.1 2007-06-17 02:13 (Reply)
7. Steven Walter: Whenever I want to create a non-local git repository for push, whether for sharing the code or just backing it up on another system, I follow this procedure:
   
   ssh remoteserver
   mkdir myproject.git
   cd myproject.git
   git --bare init --shared=all # world readable, group writeable
   chgrp -R git .
   vi description
   exit
   # back on local system
   git remote add origin git+ssh://remoteserver/path/to/git
   git push origin master:master
   git push origin branch2:branch2 # repeat for other branches
   
   You may then want to re-create your local branches so that they "track" the remote branches. "man git-branch" for more details on this.
   
   Hope that helps!
   #5 2007-06-18 04:25 (Reply)
8. brian m. carlson: For your workflow, you can try this:
   [geshi lang=sh]
   # first time on each machine only (you can use DAV, too)
   git remote add server git+ssh://server-hostname/path/project.git
   
   # every time
   git push server
   ssh anothermachine
   git fetch server
   git pull server branch-on-server-to-merge-from
   # merge happens; continue working
   # start over again from the push
   [/lang]
   #6 2007-06-18 09:56 (Reply)

Trackbacks

1. How I use git
   Michael Janssen ask about workflow and git, so I will explain mine. I have three types of git repositories: git-svn repositories where I don’t have write access on the upstream subversion repositories. git-svn repositories where I do have write ...
   Weblog: Debian, and other stuff (Tracked: Jun 16, 23:49)

Many manuals of installing and using World of Warcraft (or simply WoW) in Linux using Wine (Windows emulation) are outdated and provide lots of complex instructions for old Wine version. The truth is very simple:

1. Take a recent Wine version. Any version from this year (2007) will do. Debian and Ubuntu users can either use the wine from the latest releases of the distros or use the winehq.org repositories.
2. Install WoW via the usual installer
3. Edit $WOW/WTF/Config.wtf and add following lines:
   
SET gxApi "OpenGL"
SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "100"

4. Run ‘wine regedit’ and set HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Wine->OpenGL->DisabledExtensions to “GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object” (you will need to create this string value)

That is it! You can now simple run ‘wine WoW.exe’ and play the game. Updates also work perfectly. The speed is a bit faster then in the other operating systems and (just like in MacOs X) you can have all your software opened on one virtual desktop, WoW on another and switch between them instantly.

yay, today is the Debian Day and for those not here with us in Edinburgh you can enjoy some of the cool stuff online:

Debconf 7 website:
http://debconf7.debconf.org

IRC:
irc.debian.org - #debconf, #debconf-uppertalks, #debconf-lowertalks, #debconf-upperbofs, #debconf-lowerbofs

Live Streams:
http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000/

Download and Install Debian (I recommend CD or DVD multi-arch, yes it will be installable on your regular PC, ibook and even on that shiny new amd64 server your company bought):
http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

Use Debian Live:
http://live.debian.net/etch-builds/current/i386/

Join Debian - Yes, we're also recruiting! :-P
http://www.debian.org/devel/join/

Congrats to the organization team! :-) debian/rules

I’ve thought S3 was pretty awesome sounding ever since it launched early last year. Sadly I haven’t managed to get it set up yet – it’s refusing to accept my credit card (which I’ve used to buy stuff from Amazon before), so I just get a NotSignedUp error and told “Your account is not signed up for the S3 service.” The webservices help has responded, but not managed to work out wtf’s going on yet. One of the things I’d like to do with it is (the pretty obvious and staid) remote backup thing – though what I’m actually hoping for is more to get something more or less the same as the backup described in Greg Egan’s Distress, which is more or less: your laptop automatically backs itself up to the web somewhere, then when your laptop dies or gets stolen, you get a random new one, authorise it with your passcode or thumbprint or whatever, and it automatically recovers itself from the backups you’ve got on the web. Oddly though none of the command line tools seem to quite do backup “right” (by my definition) – there’re some that encrypt, some that do an rsync equivalent, and none that I’ve seen compress, all of which seem like a requirement to me; and given the support for metadata pretty easy to actually handle. It’d be even nicer if there were some other services with similar APIs (and cost structures!) so it wasn’t quite tying yourself to amazon so much, but until Google decide to release G-Drive or some other distributed thing happens, there’s not much to be done. Of course while amazon won’t even let me in, not much to be done…

Some people have been missing me today. Sorry about that. Flying sucks. Plane from Copenhagen to Heathrow delayed one hour - so the hour I had to get from the first plane to the next plane was kind of … gone. Getting from Heathrow terminal 4 to terminal 1 required to take a bus, then be half hour in the queue to be allowed to join the queue to a extra security check. I got rebooked to a plane to EDI 3 hours later than my original flight, so I had a couple of hours to kill in the domestic part of Heathrow. The place where the gate is the most exciting place to be. British Airways was nice and offered me a cup of coffee and a piece of cake while waiting. Finally I was allowed on the plane with 16:15 planned departure. Somehow I was upgraded to first class which was nice - so I sat on first row next to the aisle. And then the pilot said we was delayed. Maybe we wouldn’t take off to until 20:20 or something … F*ck - was the general word amongst the people - even on business class. Somehow Heathrow got stuff sorted out and we departed 18:05 - only almost 2 hours late. Finally Edinburgh airport needed to find my luggage. It only took as long time in Edinburgh to get the luggage as the time it took from when we took off in heathrow … Finally - at 21:00 I walked into Teviot and got registered. \o/ A quick trip to the hostel to check in there was needed before 22:00 - so I was back at teviot 10 to 10. Open laptop. Get on internet. Try to get beer. The bar was just closed. *sigh* what a day. Hope it gets better tomorrow ;-) At least I have met a couple of nice Debian people - and it seems I have a bed.

Transcript of the call for participation on the Gathering of the Indigenous People of the Americas. If you don’t mind, feel free to skip it. Considering that 515 years after the first invasion of our ancestral territories, the war of conquest, the plunder, and capitalist exploitation have not altered their course, but rather have become a new war of extermination, a war designed for the destruction and utter plunder of all the original peoples of the Americas; Considering that the long history of wars of independence and numerous revolutions that have taken place on our continent have not yet changed the condition of colonized people, nor have they allowed for a full recognition of our rights in the nation states that formed in the last two centuries; Considering that despite a long history of domination, our resistance has sustained itself and that our people continue to live and struggle, and that this struggle has been encouraged by the uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) in the first days of 1994; Considering that the strategies of the national governments of the Americas have always sought the division of our people through the establishment of borders, reservations, and legislation designed to fragment us and to neutralize our efforts of autonomy; Considering that the strengthening and the unity of the struggles of liberation of the indigenous people of the Americas will be possible as our peoples meet and come to know each other; Considering that for our people it has proven necessary that their struggles be made known world wide in order to be supported by all honest movements that struggle for a society effectively just, free, and democratic; All indigenous communities, tribes, and nations of the Americas are called to

THE GATHERING OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF THE AMERICAS Which will take place the 11st, 12nd, 13rd, and 14th days of October, 2007 in the community of V cam, Yaqui Territory, Municipality of Guaymas, State of Sonora, Mexico, to address the following

TOPICS 1 The war of capitalist conquest in the indigenous communities in the Americas.
2 The resistance of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and our defense of
mother earth, our territories, and our cultures.
3 Why do we, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, struggle?

ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES 1st Principal. Delegates, observers, and communications media workers attending the Gathering will abide by the regulations of the Yaqui Tribe devised by their Traditional Authorities in order to govern their presence while in attendance.
2nd Principal. All participating indigenous communities, tribes, and nations are invited to demonstrate their clothing, songs, dances, and other traditional forms of expression.
3rd Principal. Authorities and Representatives of indigenous communities, tribes, and nations of the Americas are invited to participate as delegates with voice and vote.
4th Principal. Individuals and members of social movements and civil organizations in solidarity with the struggles of indigenous peoples of the Americas invited by the organizing commission will be able to participate as observers.
5th Principal. National and international communications media workers that are accredited by the organizing commission will be able to cover the event.
6th Principal. All agreements adopted at the Gathering will be made by consensus of the participants and not through the method of voting.
7th Principal. Organization of the Gathering, the national and international distribution of its publicity, as well as accreditation of participating delegates, invitees, and any unforeseen issues will be resolved only by the organizing commission in conformity with the Traditional Authorities of the Community of V cam, Yaqui Tribe, The National Indigenous Congress (CNI), and the Sixth Commission of the Zapatista National Liberation Front. Information: 1. Office of the Sixth Commission of the EZLN, located on Zapotecos St. No 7 Col.Obrera, C.P. 06800 Mexico, D.F. Telephone: (01 or 011) 55 67 61 42 36 Monday thru Friday, 10 AM 8 PM., Saturday, 10 AM 6 PM.
webpage: www.encuentroindignea.org e-mail: informes@encuentroindigena.org
2. Official Precinct Office of the Traditional Guard of the Yaqui Tribe, Vicam Station ,Colonia Yaqui, Municipio de Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. Telephone: (045 or 001) 64 49 98 94 08.
3. Office of the Organization of Indigenous and Campesino Communities, de Tuxpan, Jalisco, in Nicolas Bravo, No. 65 , Tuxpan, Jalisco,. Telephone: (01 or 011) 371 41 764 15 from Monday Saturday, 10 AM 8 PM. e-mail: comunidad_tuxpan@hotmail.com Written - April 22nd, 2007 in Tohono O Odham Territory of the Tohono O Odham Nation, Sonora, Mexico. Attentively,

Wa-a itom yo Lutu-ria yoribetchibo, intoka a Wiutinepo Amani
(Por el respeto a nuestros usos y costumbres, nuestra identidad y cultura y nuestra verdad que permanezcan en el tiempo y no se olviden)

Never Again, a Mexico Without Us ~ Liberty, Justice, and Democracy

 

Nde Cultural Historical Organization
(Organizaci n Cultural e Hist rica de la Naci n Nde/Apache)

 

Tierra y Libertad / Chicana Indigenous Organization, Tucson, Arizona
(Tierra y Libertad / Organizaci n Xicana Ind gena, Tucson, Arizona

 

Native and Immigrant Indigenous Development Organization
(Desarrollo de Los Pueblos Indios Inmigrantes y Nativos, A.C.)

 

Michelle Cook (Dene Nation)
(Nacion Dene/Navajo)

 

Tohono O Odham Nation Mexico United States
(Nacion Tohono O Odham M xico - Los Estados Unidos de America)

 

Traditonal Authorities of Vicam Community, Yaqui Tribe
(Autoridades Tradicionales del Pueblo V cam, Tribu Yaqui)

 

National indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Ind gena)

 

Clandestine Revolutionary Committee, General Command of
the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)
(Comit Clandestino Revolucionario Ind gena-Comandancia General del
Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional)

It is time for a DebCamp update, since I’ve been here three days now. I have mainly been working on picking up the slack regarding Debian/Ruby Extras. This meant: getting rid of a CDBS rule that substitutes the entire team in the Uploaders field, cleaning up some package, uploading some packages with new upstream, solving and filing bugs. During all this, the “picture” of the environment outside is actually only missing yellow/brown trees shedding their leaves. Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0 In between the Debian/Ruby Extras work I have been able to finish the documentation of our Ruby D-Bus protocol implementation. It is due for release this weekend and I think we’ll make it.

Well, made it to Edinburgh, via a forty hour stopover in Singapore. Picked up a tie and kilt in the Debian tartan. Sadly Edinburgh in midsummer isn’t as warm as Singapore in summer, or even as Brisbane in winter, so there’s good odds my knees are going to be shaking as well as visible all to soon. Oh well, there’s reports that there might be scattered sunshine by Monday – fingers crossed. The dak BOF’s been delayed until tomorrow (Saturday 3pm, Edinburgh localtime) so Andi and Steve can sit in. Bit weird having something that technical on Debian day, I guess, but hey, whatever. It’s scheduled for a 2hr session, but I’m hoping it’ll be pretty informal and hacky rather than slides and lecturing or whatever. I’m hoping people will arrive with some ideas on what cool things that dak ought to be handling, and we can spend the time actually making dak support as many of those things as possible. Some of the ideas I like are in the BOF proposal. It might also be worth having a look at the video (or audio) of Robert Collins’ talk (“…Release always?”) at the Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au earlier this year, particular related to some of the ideas about setting up separate GNOME or KDE or libstdc++ staging areas for getting major updates ready for unstable rather than mixing them all up in experimental. Anyway, feel free to plan on arriving or leaving anytime during the BOF, unstructured is just another word for freedom! Yesterday I had a quick chat with Frans about getting debootstrap officially incorporated into the d-i subversion repo, so that it’s officially team maintained, and there’s a convenient central place for hacking on it. Given the recent discussion (while I was flying to debconf, in fact – how inconsiderate!) hopefully that’ll mean we’ll get a couple of cleanups there too. Oh, also got informed that Eben Moglen will be giving a free lecture in Edinburgh on Tuesday after debconf (the 26th) courtesy of the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Sounds interesting if you’re into the whole theory of law and the effects of modern technology thereon:

In this lecture, Professor Moglen considers how private legislation is replacing public law as the organising intellectual structure for software and the technology industries, with far-reaching social consequences and theoretical implications.

Not sure if he’ll arrive in time to drop by during DebConf proper or not.

MJ Ray blogs about online banking, and how they're all stupid. I wish I could feel his pain (sortof...), but I don't. And that isn't because I don't have an online banking account, since I do. My bank actually thought about this stuff before implementing it. Rather than using a silly password, they have an implementation that makes use of the Digipass, a small hardware token you get as part of your contract. If it breaks or I lose it (and yes, this has happened), I go to the bank and immediately get another one, without being charged additionally for it (at least not if I don't need one digipass every other day). Their webserver implementation involves a standard HTTPS server, and a set of webpages of which I'm not entirely sure whether they're standards-compliant, but at least they've tested it on more browsers than just IE; and since they don't require any other client-side software besides a browser, it easily works on free operating systems. If I wanted to, I could also use a smartcard reader and my regular debit card -- but I don't have to. That's the good part about it. The only downside about Fortis is that they're not the cheapest. But that's okay—I don't mind paying for quality.

I'm registered with three online banking systems. (Actually, I'm probably on more, but I only use three.) Two of them use similar authentication systems. The third one uses some similar details but adds a random alphanumeric user ID and a load of restrictions on passwords and so, I just locked myself out again which has annoyed me somewhat, as well as blocking my access to some of my money. First of all, adding restrictions to passwords is stupid. It makes them easier to guess by eliminating whole regions of the solution space. If I can send the damn thing to the webserver, that should be all that matters. It also makes me more likely to either store the crippled password or details of the crippling somewhere. And it makes me more likely to lose access, like I just did yet again. How many more of the Security Myths and Passwords do they need to follow? Just put the login in a GUI transmitted unencrypted and they'd have a full house, I think. Secondly, why the devil aren't our banks using things like certificates or multi-site identity services yet? Our national government moves with the efficiency of treacle in snow when it comes to web services, yet it has been using both in its government gateway for years. It's not perfect, but they're working. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for everyone to get on the list of banks that work with GNU/Linux and I've yet to find a PGP- or S/MIME-ready bank. Online banking authentication - stupid bad technology.

It’s 24h until DebianDay, the day promoting Debian to the general public in Edinburgh, which is the preceeding event of DebConf7. The video setup is almost completly done now. It will allow us to publish the recordings shortly (within hours) afterwards, with very little manual work. Today we’ll be polishing it some more and test everything with three simultaneous streams. Yesterday we successfully tested mixing video from three cameras, which was recorded and streamed to the net. While recording has still the highest priority, the streaming setup this year will (hopefully) also really rock: thanks to the help of some friendly OFTC people we’ll use geoDNS, so that there will be one DNS name for all and the users will automatically be directed to the closest server. The problem is, there is only one server in Australia, and no servers in Asia, Africa and Antarctica. If you have a server in one of these regions, and if can open port 8000 in- and outgoing, please contact us, as described in this mail. Clients will use about 300 kbit/s each. As soon as the geoDNS is in place, I’ll blog again and publish the URL, so that you can watch us testing… :-)

• Ignore what the check-in agent tells you -- your aerosol deodorant is still on the "banned liquids" list. Thanks, you numpty. I would have checked it if I'd known.
• They should possibly filter what goes onto the TV screens in the departures lounge. I can imagine that a song whose only lyrics are "destination unknown" might not fill some travellers with joyous anticipation.
• Your seat assignment is usually decided long before you check in. If you want a good seat, it's best to ask for it explicitly when you book. Failing that, you can ask at the check-in counter and again at the gate. It worked for me, but only because whoever got assigned that seat originally didn't make his earlier connection and hence wasn't going to be on that flight without teleportation.
• There's free wifi in some strange places -- even international departure lounges. I suspect that The Authorities weren't really aware of the one I was using -- the SSID and public IP address don't feel particularly "official".
• There's a Qantas 767, "City of Rockhampton", which has CASA registration VH-OGG. I find that particularly humourous, although I suspect that my entertainment is largely a function of boredom.
• The Internet kiosk machines in the International departure lounge at Sydney airport run Ubuntu -- not sure of the version (GNOME post-login splash screen was quite rounded, but I don't memorise what different Ubuntu versions' splash screens look like). They then run Opera on top of that. Anyone know anything about this?
• A lounge music version of the LJ Hooker theme song is a true abomination to mankind.

Parsing HTML to get the information you need can be a very hard task if you take complex pages like the ones generated by the Debian Bug Track System, which I need to do on my GSoC project while the debbugs people doesn't finish the SOAP interface. I was doing it through regular expressions, heavily based on the reportbug-ng code, when my mentor (thanks, Lo c) mentioned BeautifulSoup, a python module (with a strange name :P) to parse html.

If you ever need to parse html code in python, I strongly suggest you take a look on it. As usual with python stuff, it's very well documented, and it has a very good set of features which allows one to easily find anything inside a html document. It also has a xml module, which I haven't tried (yet).

BTW, did I already say I think GSoC is a great learning experience? Even I'm surprised by how fast I'm being able to apply GSoC-acquired knowledge in other activities, as I'm already using BeautifulSoup in another project.

Just a quick note to say a huge thanks to everyone who's offered support (financial, hardware-wise, or just verbal) to the r5xx project -- we really appreciate it. A couple of FAQs:

Thanks! Where can I send money?

Sadly, money isn't the issue: we have jobs/university theses/lives to tend to. We just lack for time right now.

Thanks! Where can I send hardware?

If you have a card that you won't be needing back (we may lose or fry it), please email myself (daniel@fooishbar.org) and J r me (j.glisse@gmail.com), detailing what you have, and we'll get back to you if it'll be useful to us.

Will this work with the X2xxx cards (r6xx)?

Yeah, pretty much. It just needs someone to hack up the small amount of code to deal with it.

What's happening with X1650 and above (r530/r580)?

Most of the code is written, however, initialisation doesn't happen correctly for some reason.

What's happening with 3D support?

It should be relatively simple to implement from the existing driver, as the engine is believed to be extremely similar, but we want to get the basics working before we start attacking things like this.

Which tools do you guys use?

For tracing the video BIOS, we use a hacked version of xresprobe: vbetool will instrument the BIOS quite well. For tracing fglrx, we use a hacked version of valgrind: run it against the X server, making sure that it is not suid root. For getting impatient and playing with registers, we use avivotool.

Where does the development happen?

On IRC, #dri-devel seems to serve somewhat as the ATI development centre. This gets fairly well coalesced into The Irregular Radeon Development Companion, however, so you may prefer to just follow that.

Shouldn't all this be on a wiki page somewhere?

Yes, but I have to get up in less than four hours.

Once again, thanks for the support, from all of us. It's been great.

Yesterday and today, I've spent most of the time sitting next to Dami n Viano (des), feeling 1337 because we are doing exactly the heavily recommended pair-programming thingy with a Rails application that everybody in Debconf is familiar with: We are adding some stuff for our beloved video-team in Pentabarf! Now, Pentabarf is -as we were trying to explain earlier on, amidst angst and frustration- a strange beast: It looks like your regular Rails app. It smells like Rails. But it tastes like Java.
For some reason, the Pentabarf author (who I sincerely expect to meet soon - yes, he is coming to Debconf as well!) decided not to use Rails' killer app part, the one which has got most interested people into the whole framework, ActiveRecord. For all of the object-relation mapping needs, uses something called Momomoto.
To its defence, Momomoto is a lightweight library. This has the great advantage that, although it completely lacks documentation, its source code is very easy to follow, and it takes just a couple of hours (and forehead-wall bangs) - Much unlike ActiveRecord. But on the down side, as lightweight as the library is, the model it uses is completely suboptimal for many of our (so far really simple) uses. We have a simple view, for example, that runs in at least On^3 (measured in independent DB queries, of course). Going through a different model, it could at least be cut to a much nicer On^2.
Anyway... I'm relieved. The extension the video guys wanted is not that large, and it's mostly done. It is surely showable by tonight's meeting (modulo a couple missing bits, of course, but it's just bits), and will be ready no matter what by tomorrow. I'm just sorry I had to throw des aside, as pair-programming for two days in a row for the best portion of the day is not good for sanity.
Well, neither coming to Debconf is, so whattheheck... ;-) At least I could get a bit of my mail and RL work backlog processed.

My latest venture, Expectnation, is conference management software aimed primarily at the traditional form of running conferences. The schedule, speakers and topics are all lined up in advance.
Campers at O'Reilly's Foo Camp unconference However, many conferences now are taking the form of "unconferences" in whole or part, exemplified by the BarCamp movement. At these events, the schedule is assembled just in time, and almost everybody is a presenter. The same problems exist for BarCamp organizers as for conventional event organizers. They still need to use a bunch of diverse tools for their web sites, registration, communication and reportage. Expectnation solves this problem by being a "one-stop shop" tool for conventional conference structures, and we want to do it for BarCamps and unconferences too. Tell me what you need  I'm asking for feedback from attendees and organizers of BarCamp-like events as to what kinds of features they're seeking in their support software. We already have the platform to build on, and we want to find out the best ways in which to do it.The sort of subject areas I'm keen to hear about include

• registration,
• attendee social networking,
• documenting the event,
• tools already in use, and their effectiveness.

If you have views on this, please join the discussion thread over on the forums. It's worth restating too that I'm very keen to talk about this with attendees as well as organizers.

Sarah's approaching the 23 week mark. So far the pregnancy has been going swimmingly. The obstetricians are still freaking out (although a bit less), but nothing's happened to warrant it. We went to see the cardiologist today, and Sarah's aortic root is no bigger than it was prior to conception. He did indicate that he didn't think having any further children was a good idea (despite there being no problems to date). He was saying that we should probably expect to not have a choice, and have to have a Caesarean section delivery. If we did have a "natural" birth, it wouldn't be all that natural - he'd be wanting for an assisted delivery (probably involving suction) after the first stage of labour. None of this is really the way I'd envisaged or wanted my child to come into the world, but you can't really argue with the doctors, and I'm not the one having the baby, so my personal preferences are really just that. Young PJ, (Pollock Junior) as we've been calling him, is proving to be very active. He's doing lots of kicking, and I can feel some of them as well now. Sarah's employment contract was up for renewal, and they wanted to renew it for another 6 months rather than try to convert her to full-time. Given that she'd have to take some time off mid-way through the new contract to have the baby, we thought that it made more sense for her to just cease working now and take it easy for the remainder of the pregnancy. So she's now a lady of leisure (and loving it) again as of Monday.