Martin Michlmayr reported Debian's 444444th bug yesterday, for those who like nice-looking numbers. This bug was reported against a Debian Installer package and closed a few hours later by an upload by Joey Hess. As one sees, even if the D-I team is still a little bit jerky after Frans Pop resignation as Debian developer and D-I release manager, the maintenance of the code is still happening. J r my Bobbio and Otavio Salvador, our new release managers, are still learning and building their knowledge to be able to release a beta version in the next months. New interesting mark in Debian's BTS is bug number 500000. It took 10 months (309 days) to go from 400000 to 444444. That means 695 days at the same rate to reach bug #500000 which means one can expect bug #500000 to be reached on Oct 18th 2008. But we all know that the bug report rate is not linear in Debian....:-) Update: thanks Frans for correcting my jerky English: "resignation" is better than "resignment".

My desktop seems to have melted something precious in this morning’s lightning storm, despite the recent and rather hefty UPS sitting behind it. I am, to say the least, annoyed. It was a nice self-built Shuttle system from 2005, but now all it is is a machine check generator:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 0 4 northbridge TSC 6eb92ec370b
  Northbridge Watchdog error
       bit57 = processor context corrupt
       bit61 = error uncorrected
  bus error 'generic participation, request timed out
      generic error mem transaction
      generic access, level generic'
STATUS b200000000070f0f MCGSTATUS 4

It’s not even bad RAM or a bad RAM socket, the way most memory errors seem to be; I had two DIMMs in two sockets so I was able to try for both possibilities. Unless it fried both somehow, of course. It seems to boot a little further when left cold for a while, and not as far just after crashing. I am inclined to suspect the motherboard. I think I’m going to have to write it off as a loss. Which means I need a replacement. I can get by with just my laptop for a little while, but not indefinitely. Are there any good options for pre-built Linux systems yet? I was somewhat underwhelmed by Dell’s. I usually build from parts, so looking at pre-built systems always has a certain amount of sticker shock. My main concerns are CPU / memory performance (a lot of compiling here), room for at least three hard drives, and reasonably quiet. Otherwise it’s off to newegg again…

My desktop seems to have melted something precious in this morning’s lightning storm, despite the recent and rather hefty UPS sitting behind it. I am, to say the least, annoyed. It was a nice self-built Shuttle system from 2005, but now all it is is a machine check generator:

HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 0 4 northbridge TSC 6eb92ec370b
  Northbridge Watchdog error
       bit57 = processor context corrupt
       bit61 = error uncorrected
  bus error 'generic participation, request timed out
      generic error mem transaction
      generic access, level generic'
STATUS b200000000070f0f MCGSTATUS 4

It’s not even bad RAM or a bad RAM socket, the way most memory errors seem to be; I had two DIMMs in two sockets so I was able to try for both possibilities. Unless it fried both somehow, of course. It seems to boot a little further when left cold for a while, and not as far just after crashing. I am inclined to suspect the motherboard. I think I’m going to have to write it off as a loss. Which means I need a replacement. I can get by with just my laptop for a little while, but not indefinitely. Are there any good options for pre-built Linux systems yet? I was somewhat underwhelmed by Dell’s. I usually build from parts, so looking at pre-built systems always has a certain amount of sticker shock. My main concerns are CPU / memory performance (a lot of compiling here), room for at least three hard drives, and reasonably quiet. Otherwise it’s off to newegg again… Or I could always buy an equivalent computer to my current one, for a fraction of the original price, at a local consumer electronics megastore! How’s that for a different idea.

I just realized that tonight is the last minute to place your bet about the day the 500000th Debian bug will be reported. And I didn't even bet myself yet!

There are good chances that the Debian BTS will turn the #500000 mark at some moment during the etch->lenny release cycle. In order to make this more fun, a small contest has been set up. The principle is very simple: please place a bet (one per person) about the day this bug will be reported. The winner(s) will be the person(s) placing her his their bet as close as possible of the real moment bug #500000 is reported. Nothing to win, just fun and maybe a French kiss by the DPL at the next Debconf. To place you bet, just go to the contest wiki page and follow instructions there. Bets can be placed modified removed until July 15th 2007, 00:00 UTC.

For those who care about kids... I recently blogged about TMBG s marketing genius in releasing kids albums that adults who grew up to TMBG will love and buy. Another good example of kids music that you, too, can enjoy is Ralph s World. It's not quite as ironic or odd as TMBG, but still a good listen. Check out, for example, the RealAudio clips for Clean-Up (much better than the Barney version!), Baa-Baa Black Sheep, and The Coffee Song. Speaking of Barney, apparently his music has been used to torture Iraqi detainees. Technorati Tags: Children's Music, Music

I was up late last night upgrading Wikitravel from MediaWiki 1.8.3 to the new 1.9.3. It took a long while, since the 404-handler caching extension that I built for MediaWiki a couple of years ago (which keeps Wikitravel running on a single, albeit quite big, server) is pretty invasive, and a lot of things had changed with the way users and stuff worked, so I had a lot of hacking to do. But it's stable now, even if some watchlist stuff is a little funky. Doing major upgrades is a real bear for me, but I'm happy when it's over. tags: mediawiki wikitravel caching extension 404 handler

Home people Maj had her final oral exam in her French class tonight, which left me and Amita June home alone to fend for ourselves. We had a lot of fun. First, I had to do the day's dishes (lunch and breakfast) that were sitting in the sink. I brought the footstool around to the sink from our laundry room, and she stood on it and helped me with the dishes. After I'd finished washing a dish, she'd carefully fill it up with water, dump it out, then put the dish in the dishrack next to her. Pretty good for 18 months old. That went so well that I moved the stool over to the kitchen table where I cut tofu and vegetables for dinner. I gave her pieces of pepper, cabbage, and carrot while I was working, and she nibbled on them a bit and then practiced chopping them... with the handle of her mother's toothbrush, which she'd stolen out of the bathroom earlier in the day. After dinner, we had a bath, then we read some books, and then she went to sleep on my shoulder while I walked around her room and sang, like she's been doing for the last 2 months. It was another good night. tags: home amita june dishes home with papa

Soft launch We launched two new Wikitravel versions overnight, too: Catalan Wikitravel and Finnish Wikitravel. Catalan recently, uh, catalyzed from a blog post by Carme Pla . Readers and the Catalan-speaking community rallied to our Catalan Wikitravel Expedition and got the project rolling. I got the site set up last night and they've started translating key help, style manual and policy guidelines already. Mean, Finnish had been simmering on the back burner for a while, so we got it launched at the same time. My friend and colleague Jani Patokallio is a Finn and a longtime and well-respected Wikitraveller; I'm glad he's taking leadership of the project. Finns have such disproportionate contributions to Free Software and Free Culture; I'm glad to have that Freedom Powerhouse Country all working together on Wikitravel now. And, y'know, I'm going to totally rack up a ton of HugAFinn points off of this. Actually, now that I think of it, I have no idea if "Carme Pla" is a real name or even a plausible personal name in Catalan. It sounds like it to me, though. tags: fi ca expedition finnish catalan wikitravel

coComment A couple of months ago Don Marti recommended that I check out coComment, and I made a mental note and then forgot to follow up. But I started using the system a few days ago, and now I wonder how I ever lived without it. coComment is a Firefox plugin that keeps track of when you post a comment on a blog or some other comment-handling system. It then keeps track of the conversation that happens after you comment. I have a lot of standing keyword searches on Technorati and Google Blog Search, and if people are talking about a subject I'm interested in, I'll usually jump in and talk about it. But sometimes I'll go back months later and see that people asked me questions and continued the conversation without me. So coComment is exactly the kind of cross-the-Internet aggregation service I need. tags: cocomment comment blogs firefox

Sage Speaking of keeping up with blogs, I've realized in the last week that I've outgrown Live Bookmarks for following RSS feeds. Rather than going with a Web-based RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, I opted instead for the in-browser reader, Sage. It's simple, it does what I need it to do, and it supports OPML so I can move my subscriptions somewhere else if something better comes along. Good piece of software. My best candidate for something better coming along? Probably if I get my Netvibes home page customized well enough to handle my 50-60 feeds. And maybe when Netvibes gets smart and becomes and OpenID identity provider (or at least figures out a way that you can log into your ID when you start a browser session). tags: sage rss feed firefox netvibes

I've been ill; I had the flu (first time I've ever actually had to take a day off work). And then I spent a week working from Portstewart. Which was a bit odd, as Katherine's living in furnished rented accomodation which means the decor is completely not us (we've always lived in unfurnished places before). Anyway. I went down to London Saturday week ago, and of course there was no direct train from Norwich because Network Rail like to screw over people travelling on weekends. And then I came back from Stansted yesterday and there were no trains from Stansted. So I end up on a replacement bus service to Cambridge (where I'm supposed to pick up a train to Norwich). And the moron driver goes to Audley End (fair enough, we knew it would stop there), reaches J9 of the M11 and decides to go southbound rather than over the junction towards Cambridge. So we end up practically back at Stansted - at J8 he comes off the M11 and rejoins northbound, then drives up to J11 before coming off. I'm not a Cambridge resident, but I'm sure this isn't a sensible route, even factoring in that I don't think you can go northbound at J9. 3 hours of travelling time. I'd have been better on the bus, but I just missed it and the next one wasn't for another 2 hours. And then there's pricing. I'm going to a wedding in Glasgow next month. It was £50 cheaper to fly than take the train (and even given check in times I suspect will be significantly faster). I'm considering a meeting in Manchester at the start of April and flying is cheaper than the train (again by over £50) and in fact given the timings would mean I could actually do it in a day rather than having to sort out accomodation. Flying is even cheaper than driving it seems, and probably faster or at least equal given check in times. I know I'm supposed to be flying less, but it's hard. Give me a viable rail network that's actually competitive on pricing (I'm not even talking about walk on pricing, I'm trying to book in advance with known travel dates/times) and has a decent schedule and I'll use it!

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

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weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

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spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

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TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

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literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

I was in a multiple-car accident yesterday. I've been having to tell this story a fair amount in person and on IRC, so I thought I'd blog about it. Short version: it was a fender-bender. I'm doing fine, nobody was hurt, Michelle wasn't in the car, and 75% of the cars involved were driven away from the scene — including mine, by me. Want the long version? Well, I'm gonna tell it anyway. I had just pulled to a stop at a traffic light, heading northbound on Keystone Avenue where it intersects 106th Street, in Hamilton County. The line of cars at the light was pretty long, and people love to try hauling ass on the stretch between 96th Street and 106th. Apparently the person behind me was one of them. The line of cars stopped in the left lane (where I was) at the light was pretty long, and much shorter in the right — the cars over there were still moving at a good clip. I looked in my rearview mirror, thinking "if someone's trying to match pace with the cars in the right-hand lane, they're gonna need to brake pretty hard to stop." It was about 1815, so it was starting to get dark. A pair of headlights approach. Fast. Oh boy. I don't stop right up on people's tails, so if I'm hit, hopefully I won't go into the car ahead. I look forward again. Yeah, there's some room here. Screech. I didn't tense up; I felt a strange sense of calm and curiosity, as I'd never been in a car accident before. I bought my car, a Volkswagen Golf, in part because of its fairly good safety ratings. It has lots of air bags, and I always use a seat belt. Plus, in this instance I figured I wouldn't get hit a high speed. "Strange Deja Vu" by Dream Theater, from the Scenes from a Memory CD, was playing. Normally I listen to All Things Considered while commuting home, but I was annoyed because when I got in the car, I heard Nina Totenberg signing off a report, which means I'd just missed some Supreme Court coverage. Damn. Anyway. BONK. I got hit. Ouch. My teeth had chomped together too hard. Maybe they should install rubber mouthpieces in the doors of cars so you can grab them right before a crash. You know, car crashes never sound like the stock sound effects that have been around for about 50 years. I guess that's because they build cars to crumple these days instead of act like steel shrapnel bombs. Damn that Ralph Nader. My wreck doesn't sound cool and stuff. And I get to walk away, well, get back in the car and drive away, instead of my wife collecting on my life insurance policy. But I digress again. A middle-aged woman in a Honda Civic skidded into me, and knocked me into the Buick Park Avenue ahead of me, which in turn tapped the minivan ahead of him. I blinked a bit and tried to reorient myself, and then turned off the CD player. We all got out of our cars. The woman in back was very distressed, and immediately and repeatedly said the thing your insurance card tells you never to say after an accident. Oh well. Being a middle-aged woman, she'd probably have to wreck a school bus full of children — twice — before her premium would go up. Mine, on the other hand — we'll see. Called 911. Reported the incident. Tried to call my wife, but she decided not to answer. I later found out she was gabbing it up with my mom. Isn't it nice when your wife gets along with your mother? I COULD BE BLEEDING OUT ON THE COLD ASPHALT, BUT YOU TWO JUST KEEP ON TALKING. Michelle and I have the same model of cell phone, and we have call waiting with caller ID, so I know she knew it was me. Anyway, I try a couple of times, then give up and leave voice mail. Turns out the guy in front, in the minivan, was a Deputy Prosecutor for Hamilton County. He said something about being experienced in car wrecks, but I don't clearly remember it. Anyway, perhaps in part because he decided he was only "tapped" and didn't need to file an insurance claim, and perhaps in part out of professional courtesy, when the cops showed up, they let him go very quickly, so I didn't get any of his information. Everybody was fine, polite, and decent about the whole thing. The couple ahead of me, whom I got knocked into, didn't have their insurance info on them (or maybe this is a euphemism for "don't have insurance"). But, except for the deputy prosecutor guy, who was outta there, we all traded names, addresses, and phone numbers. I hope the Debian Project doesn't mind that I used my Debian Project Leader business cards for this purpose. These people (and the Carmel Police Department) now have my GPG key fingerprint. Uh oh. Anyway, that's about it. Appointment tomorrow with the insurance agent, to get help filling out INDIANA OPERATOR'S VEHICLE CRASH REPORT, State Form 38656 (R6/7-91) Stock 301 Effective 1-92, which has to be filed with the Indiana State Police within ten business days, or my driver's license will be suspended. Aww, yeah. Gotta move fast, because on Friday I leave for Mérida, Spain, to attend the 2nd Annual Open Source World Conference in Extremadura. Also have an appointment with the claims adjustor tomorrow. Then I'm hoping to just leave my car at the dealership so they can work on it over the week when I'm gone. My wife and my mom, those talkative two from a couple of paragraphs ago, will be coming along with me. My mom's got a jones to visit Spain, and I've had a jones to take my wife to Europe. We'll have a couple of extra days to see what Spain is like — I'll be there from 22 October to 28 October. I hope one day to visit Barcelona and hang out with some proper anarcho-syndicalists.

On Friday afternoon I'll be arriving in Oldenburg, Germany, for the eleventh annual Linux developers' conference. Historically, this conference has had a strong focus on non-x86 ports of the Linux kernel, boot loader development, the GNU toolchain, and so forth. At long last, it looks like this may be my opportunity to get my Macintosh Quadra 840AV out of mothballs and back into commission, thanks to Wouter Verhelst. I should be able to fit it into my luggage if I don't bring many clothes... :-) This year, however, in addition to that, a couple of mini-conferences are being piggybacked onto the Oldenburg meeting. These include the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam and the Debian Security Summit. The Java programming language is a divisive issue in the Free Software community, and has a degree of controversy that sets it apart from the usual language wars. The dominant factor in this controversy stems from what Richard Stallman refers to as the Java trap; with the specifications controlled, and the reference implementation kept unavailable on DFSG-free terms by, an industry consortium dominated by large corporations, a Free Software hacker might fear that using Java will consign them to either having to compromise their principles by using non-free class libraries (for example), or being doomed to chase the taillights of standards that could conceivably be tailored to disadvantage competitors. (Java is not alone in this respect; many people fear that Microsoft's .NET, despite being openly standardized through ISO/IEC, will in actuality be completely controlled by Microsoft.) Despite this peril, Java is attractive to GNU/Linux-using organizations. The Free Standards Group, developers of the Linux Standard Base, has received inquiries about a Free Java standard and implementation from organizations already committed to GNU/Linux. In my job, I've encountered an interest in Java from several customers and prospects. Intriguingly, these institutions are, by and large, very much aware of the Java Trap. They like the language, and are not strong advocates of Free Software, but they too are worried about vendor lock-in. They've seen the success of community-driven development as GNU/Linux moves from strength to strength, claiming territory formerly held by Microsoft and proprietary versions of Unix. Even if I can't persuade a customer to adopt a Free Java stack, I can exhort them to only code against Java standards that have seen a free implementation. That way, their development bets are hedged against any "madman theory" of the controlling vendor. Furthermore, this way they only code to standards that are seeing independent implementations, and they leave their engineers free to switch between varieties of development kit. Engineers like flexibility because it enables them to work more efficiently; sales people, marketing personnel, and strategists like efficient engineers because they make a firm more nimble. That's where the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam comes in. Free Software Java enthusiasts want to see their implementations fully mature, and are working hard to make it so. The Free Software community has the opportunity to make its Java implementation not just an available alternative, but a compelling alternative to the proprietary ones on technical as well as licensing grounds. The recent release of GNU Classpath 0.18 shows just how vigorously this opportunity is being seized. Having mature software is only half the battle, however; that software has to be coherently put together and easy for the user and developer to manipulate. For many of these folks, it's not enough just to have good, Free Java virtual machines (like Kaffe and SableVM), class libraries (GNU Classpath), compilers and interpreters (gcj and gij, respectively, from the GNU Compiler Collection), and application servers (Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, and JOnAS, among others). They also want these technologies to be mutually integrated and easy to install and use. Good software and good packaging complement each other to drive adoption of the technology, and that's what the DevJam is all about. I'm glad to see that representatives of Debian's Java packaging team will be joining not just upstream authors, but their counterparts at Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo in furtherance of this goal. I've approved a budget of EUR 2000, which Petter Reinholdtsen will administrate, to support the expenses of Debian's participation in the DevJam. We've received 1500 USD in sponsorship of this event from a corporate sponsor that chooses to remain anonymous. The other mini-conference I'll be attending is the Debian Security Summit. We're bringing together the heads of our Stable Security and Testing Security teams — the two Joeys, Joey Schulze and Joey Hess, as well as a bevy of other security-minded people, with the goal of revitalizing and streamlining our security processes. Several members of the Stable Security Team have gone dormant over the past several months (or longer), leaving an increasingly small number people to handle, as of Sarge's release, not one but two stable releases. This is because we do not terminate security support for our previous stable release (in this case, Woody), until some time has passed. We've had other challenges on the security front. We had what amounted to a security support hiatus for about three weeks in June, which caused much consternation. More recently, klecker.debian.org, which provides the security.debian.org has suffered some occasional availability problems, and it hasn't always been clear what's caused them. It's my understanding that we have new hardware in place that can serve in a backup, supplemental, or failover capacity. The general feeling at DebConf 5 was that our security apparatus was in need of attention to make sure it keep pace with the demands being placed on it. I've been in fruitful contact with Joey Schulze, Steve Kemp, and others over the past several weeks, and I look forward to a productive few days.

Steve McIntyre talks about this puzzle, but I think he wants this one instead. NP: Madeleine Peyroux, You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

As most of you know already, there was a horrible accident in the L nia 1 of the Metrovalencia underway system of Val ncia, where I live. The death toll is, as of this writing, 41, and several more people are in critical condition in the hospitals. Thanks to the many people who mailed, texted and msgd me on IRC to find out about my status. I am ok, as are my closest relatives and friends. The causes for the accident are not clear yet, but officials say the southbound train, one of the oldest in the system and in service for 20 years, derailed due to an excess of speed in one of the bends of the tunnel, next to the Jes s station, after one of the iron wheels broke. The crash must have been very violent, as the number of dead has always been quite higher than the injured. With these numbers, in a not so big city as Val ncia, you're sure to learn about the luck of people you know. In my case, one of my best friends Sabrina escaped the accident thanks to her stubborness. She had to go to the Hospital Peset a few minutes before the time of the crash, and although her two workmates were taking the Metro, she decided to cycle alone, avoiding taking the deadly train. Her two workmates are, luckily, only injured; one of them was being shown on the very early TV foootage, as she was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance. The only information I have is that one arrived in the hospital unconscious, the other needed leg surgery due to the wounds. I think they weren't among the very grave. TV stations have been missinforming about the status of the Metro system in Val ncia. The reality is that the Line 1 has been in service for 20 years, and I've been a user for at least 17, as it's the only one which connects Godella, where my father lives, and Val ncia. I've seen the infrastructure go from brand new to it's current despicable state. There are trains which are as old as the line itself, and others which are even older, as they were in use in an older, now taken over by Metrovalencia, train service which connected several towns with the North and South of the city. For more than a decade, the effort to modernise Line 1 have been inexistant, other than prettifying the old trains to make them look more like the new models in lines 3 and 5. The railroad Unions of Metrovalencia have been denouncing the state of the infrastructure for several years, and the local government had finally announced a massive replacement of trains for later this year. Just a bit too late. I'm getting ready for the official reports making the train driver the only responsible, though. Valencians are getting used to this kind of deluding. The needed investments for other equally important matters in this city, like the America's Cup or the imminent visit of Pope Ratzinger next weekend have not been delayed for years, though.

Argh. A long time ago I got LinuxBIOS up and running on a Via EPIA-M mobo - someone else had done the initial work, but it had bitrotted. As part of that I got auto power on working, such that if you removed power from the box it would come on when you reapplied it, even if it had been turned off before. However I never checked this into LinuxBIOS as it's a bit intrusive - not everyone wants boxen auto powering on. What I now find is that not only have I lost the code to do this, but the copy of the vt8235 (southbridge in use on the EPIA-M) datasheet doesn't have the details of which register I need to twiddle. I'm sure it used to, but that might have been an older copy which of course I no longer have. So, does anyone out there have a copy of the vt8235 datasheet and can tell me what magic value I need to poke to what register(s)? Please? I've tried creatively Googling, I've tried running Via's factory BIOS and seeing if the PCI config registers changes when I flip the option in that, but all to no avail. Someone save me. I don't want to have to disassemble the BIOS trying to find this one tweak. :(

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…) So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource. Implementing Technorati style tag URLs The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-) A pure Blosxom solution A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom. Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes). And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia. from the slashdot dept. Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin. The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now. Update 02:52h Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…) So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource. Implementing Technorati style tag URLs The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-) A pure Blosxom solution A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom. Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes). And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia. from the slashdot dept. Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin. The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now. Update 02:52h Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

So, as of sometime this morning, most of our worldly possessions were (in cartons) loaded into a shipping container bound for the US. Unfortunately, I don't finish work until Wednesday, so my lovely wife was charged with supervising the packers yesterday and today. My one word of advice with respect to packers is to be extremely careful, and assume that they will assume nothing. If you don't want something packed, don't leave it unsupervised or anywhere where it may be packed. My electric toothbrush was left unattended for slightly too long, and is in a carton somewhere. As was half of the bike rack until we raided a few cartons last night and rescued it. Obviously literacy doesn't rate very highly as a requirement to be a packer either. We had "stools" spelt as "stulls" and "wine rack" spelt as "win race" on some of the items packed. I'd also never seen a couch bubble-wrapped until yesterday. Pretty much no item was left exposed. Everything is either in a carton or bubble-wrapped with funked brown-paper-backed, branded bubble wrap.

So, as of sometime this morning, most of our worldly possessions were (in cartons) loaded into a shipping container bound for the US. Unfortunately, I don't finish work until Wednesday, so my lovely wife was charged with supervising the packers yesterday and today. My one word of advice with respect to packers is to be extremely careful, and assume that they will assume nothing. If you don't want something packed, don't leave it unsupervised or anywhere where it may be packed. My electric toothbrush was left unattended for slightly too long, and is in a carton somewhere. As was half of the bike rack until we raided a few cartons last night and rescued it. Obviously literacy doesn't rate very highly as a requirement to be a packer either. We had "stools" spelt as "stulls" and "wine rack" spelt as "win race" on some of the items packed. I'd also never seen a couch bubble-wrapped until yesterday. Pretty much no item was left exposed. Everything is either in a carton or bubble-wrapped with funked brown-paper-backed, branded bubble wrap.