Past weekend Warp had its first WARPtivity (which, as you may suspect, stands for WARP activity, you know, team building and that stuff). We (including all partners and almost all workers) spent a night and a day in the breathtaking Ordesa valley. I’m quite biased as I love the valley since I was a child and have enjoyed lots of weeks there, but it’s indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately our regional government (PSOE and PAR, kick them out on the 27th May election) are spoiling most of the Pyrenees, I hope there is something left for the next generations. We arrived at Torla (a little village near Ordesa) on Friday evening, had a great dinner and some drinks and played table football. Next morning we woke up quite early and hiked through a nice forest path to the Horse Tail waterfall. After having lunch by the waterfall some of us decided to return by the Faja de Pelay, a higher path above the forest, with awesome sights. As it was still early May, there was some snow remaining in the path, making it a bit dangerous, as there is a 300 hundred meter cliff. Luckily enough we managed to survive and blog it

I find it increasingly difficult to keep memes and idioms apart. Especially a certain animal formerly in possession of a bucket really confuses the hell out of the part of my brain responsible for irregular verb forms.

Paul Dwerryhouse blogs about mobile phone etiquette.

1. Taking excessive calls at a restaurant is annoying, but keep them short and it’s no big deal.


2. Strange ring tones are OK as long as people answer their phone. It’s when they decide that they don’t want to answer a call that the entire Avril Lavigne song annoys people. In regard to this issue wearing headphones in public with the volume turned up high enough that everyone else can hear is a much worse problem - which will incidentally deafen the person using the headphones in the long-term as well as annoying everyone else in the short-term.


3. I used to work with Paul and we had a colleague who repeatedly chose not to answer his mobile phone because he didn’t want to talk to a particular recruiting agent but refused to say so. Eventually the agent tried calling the office and got to me, I told him “if someone never answers their mobile phone when you call it means that they don’t like you, take a hint and stop calling”. There were fewer unanswered calls after that.


4. I have to agree with that, having a phone call in the cinema (or even worse the theatre) is just wrong. If you are on the list for organ transplant (the only time you really MUST have your phone on all the time) then turn the phone to vibrate mode.


5. When on the train the range of things that I can do is limited. Rather than waste time I make calls that I don’t have time to make on other occasions. The only exception is when I was in Japan, in respect of their cultural standards I turned my phone off most times when on the train.


6. Walking and talking? Unless you are crossing a busy street then why not? People who inappropriately use mobile phones while performing dangerous activities will tend to be weeded out by Darwin. They usually don’t give Darwin Awards for mundane things such as not seeing an oncoming truck while talking on a mobile phone.


7. In regard to the issue of whether you have to answer a phone, some people believe that it’s an issue of courtesy to the person who is calling to answer the phone if reasonably possible.


8. Whether “call me back” is adequate depends on who is calling. I generally find that when someone leaves such a message they have been correct in their assessment of the value of their call to me. The people who leave such messages are generally the people who’s call I will return on the basis of such a message. Leaving a long voicemail message adds to the profits of the telco used to making the call as well as the telco that maintains the voice-mail box. My 3 voicemail service charges me to receive the messages and I prefer them to be kept short.


9. Anyone who thinks that having a fancy phone, car, computer, etc will make them a better person or impress anyone has bigger problems than the choice of a phone. Also if the $600 a year that you might spend on regularly updating your mobile phone makes a significant difference to your savings then you will probably never be able to afford a house either.


10. Bluetooth headsets do make you look like an idiot, but they do have some benefits. When doing tech-support it is a real benefit to be able to use both hands for typing. The only reason I don’t have one is that I don’t do tech support enough to justify the expense of buying one or the inconvenience of carrying it everywhere. Note that when you define “tech support” in the most broad sense (which includes helping all your relatives with their computer problems) most computer people do quite a lot of it even if it’s not their job.

E-Week has an article about the popular computer hardware review site Tom’s Hardware (tomshardware.com) being hit by a trojan in a banner advert. From the article it’s not clear whether a criminal paid for a banner advert under a legitimate business name or compromised the advertising server run by an innocent third-party who paid for advertising on Tom’s Hardware. But really it doesn’t matter very much for users. The facts that are clear are that Tom’s Hardware is a very reputable site (that I personally visit regularly and recommend highly) that apparently did nothing wrong. Yet Windows users who visited the site who hadn’t applied the latest patches had their systems compromised (and presumably used for other criminal activity). Apparently a month ago there was a patch released for the bug in question. One thing that has to be noted is that large corporations often don’t apply patches immediately. Spending a month testing a patch before deploying it widely is not uncommon in an enterprise environment. The general thinking in an enterprise is that the employees are almost always prohibited from visiting porn sites, and often prohibited from using forums, and webmail services. With these things prohibited the risk of attack is dramatically reduced. Now there is evidence that even the most reputable sites run by the competent sys-admins can be vulnerable to such attack. One possible method of alleviating such attacks would be to have sites that are supported by advertising also allow ad-free subscriptions. So if an enterprise wanted to use a site such as Tom’s Hardware without the risk of advert based attack then they could pay for an advert free subscription. I’m sure that it would be easy for an enterprise to pay Tom’s hardware more money than they would ever be likely to get from providing advertising to the employees of that company while still not having any impact on the IT training budget. But the best solution is that a Windows machine that is used for main desktop work should not be used for web browsing (to any sites). A Linux or Mac OS/X desktop machine could be used for such web browsing with less risk due to having less security holes in the OS. Another option is to use VMWare, Xen, or another virtualisation technology to use a virtual machine for web browsing to make it a lot harder for an attacker to break out and compromise the main environment.

Turbogears i18n quirks Collecting strings from .kid files tg-admin i18n collect won't collect strings from your .kid files: you need the toolbox web interface for that. Indentation problems in .kid files The toolbox web interface chokes on intentation errors on your .kid files. To see the name of the .kid file that causes the error, look at the tg-admin toolbox output in the terminal for lines like Working on app/Foo/templates/bar.kid. What happens is that the .kid files are converted to python files, and if there are indentation glitches they end up in the python files, and python will complain. Once you see from the tg-admin toolbox standard error what is the .kid file with the problem, edit it and try to make sure that all closing tags are at the exact indentation level as their coresponding opening tags. Even a single space would matter. Bad i18n bug in TurboKid versions earlier than 1.0.1 faide on #turbogears also says:

It is of outmost importance that you use TurboKid 1.0.1 because it is the first version that corrects a BIG bug regarding i18n filters ... The version below had a bug where the filters kept being added at each page load in such a way that after a few hundreds of pages you could have page loading times as long as 5 minutes!

If one has a previous version of TurboKid, one (and only one) of these is needed:

• Patch Kid with the patch at http://www.kid-templating.org/trac/ticket/203
• Patch TurboKid with the patch at http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301
• Upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2, which also works like a charm with python 2.5, which is a performance boost.

So, in short, all i18n users should upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2 or patch TurboKid using http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301.

Did you know that it's the last day of Compost Awareness Week today (Saturday 12 May)? No, nor did I. I was pretty aware of the compost bin when it flew across the lawn before I bricked it down. Maybe that's not what they meant. Getting a compost bin has reduced our rubbish to less than a bag a week, but we've yet to get any compost yet, after six months of winter. So last week, I tried a coco peat brick that you reconstitute in water. Easy to transport, but it seems to need mixing with regular compost to give a decent growing soil. Are you aware of your compost? Go on, give it a hug. Update: Alex Hudson wrote:

"Actually, I was aware of compost awareness week! We have a nice local website which many local groups use, including EcoLocal - they were doing build-your-own compost bin today, and handing out soil conditioner. I actually built our composter out of fence panels which blew down in winds a while ago, and I like the idea of using wooden/constructed bins than plastic (though I suspect plastic is much more efficient)."

I moved recently. I seem to have some random tiles and bricks, but I left all the wood behind in King's Lynn. The fence panel that was lying around when we saw the house was cleared away before we moved in. I'm not sure that I'm good enough at woodwork to build-my-own anyway. I don't know if plastic is better - I guess it insulates better, but they still tell you to wrap it up in winter, which is nuts: any wrapping would blow away in a storm.

Sam commented:

"Quality motion. This is exactly the point that I raise at just about every committee meeting I attend, but to have it formally supported by the wider membership is a good step. If things don't improve soon, we should try that line of attack in the Central and Eastern region."

One suggestion in the debate was to have a co-operatives fortnight, similar to the fairtrade fortnight, to promote the Co-operative Group (tCG) membership, other tCG businesses and other local cooperatives. Let's see whether SW can lead the way again! ;-) The question-and-answer session was pretty interesting. All of the questions were submitted in writing. Some of them were submitted in advance and others during the lunch break. No spoken questions were taken and most Insurance (CIS) and Bank questions were held back because no-one from financial services was there. The answers were grouped under a few headings.

Ethics, answersed by Catherine Staveley

1. CIS's voting record is public, but some details are buried under sustainabiliy on the group's corporate web site.
2. The panel were asked to define a few terms. By ethical, tCG means generally being "a good neighbour". Materiality is how much a business relates to tCG's aims and they think shelf penetration is how much space and promotion a product gets in the stores. The financial services profits aim to be all-ethical.
3. Members were asked to please take part in the consultations about the new food retail ethical policy.
4. tCG has a "triple bottom line" - in addition to looking at profits, we also consider our effects on our communities and sustainability.
5. tCG is leading the way on packaging minimisation: onion nets are already biodegradable, work continues on developing biodegradable fruit nets and a new light-weight (but still strong) whiskey bottle has just been launched. We'll see whether it's possible to give more dividend points for buying less packaged goods.

Food retail, answered by David Parker (regional food), Gary Metcalfe (operations), Clive Netherway (top 100 stores) and Nick Lowe (sales and support)

1. Local stores: Minehead Post Office contracts have been exchanged and planning permission granted in Budleigh Salterton - both sites should be ready in a couple of months.
2. There are new small stores at Amesbury, Ilfracombe, Perranport and Lyneham (where it's hurting Tesco Express more than anyone). tCG have also acquired 7 stores from Higgins, one from Savages and a petrol station with minimarket in Bath. Dawlish has just opened, giving a total of 14 new stores. In addition, 50 stores are being refitted in the south-west region.
3. The Falmouth store is a bit of a puzzle: whether to split the existing store or develop a nearby site.
4. tCG stores have outperformed the The Institute of Grocery Distribution index for 15 months in a row and is now seeing growth-on-growth.
5. Problems with product stocking should be taken up with store managers first.
6. Home delivery has been trialled and failed several times, but is being trialled again in the new OCO stores. (What does OCO mean? There's one at Portishead.)
7. Supply problems with RSPCA Freedom Foods meats will be investigated.
8. The Westbury-on-Trim Stoke Lane store will only be expanded if its turnover increases.
9. Suppliers are still letting some stores down on delivery times. This will be re-checked.
10. The best response to the crocodile community projects of other companies is to strengthen tCG's community project funding in areas before other supermarkets open new stores.
11. Local produce is rarely stocked because of problems with availability and meeting tCG technical standards (I could almost hear the hackles raise at this answer!). Organic is only usually stocked in areas where surveys suggest the target audience lives (which I guess is why my tatty 60s store has more sweets and sugar drinks than fresh food). Similar biases exist for other ranges.
12. Missing product complaints will get written answers: Clipper tea and sugar-free Mintoes.
13. There was a complaint about the lack of notices about the unique status of co-op milk. (In short, we own our farms so our milk had better not be getting abused.)

Corporate questions, answered by Frank Jones

1. Compensations of the merged tCG/United Co-op societies are shown on page 12 of Stronger Together.
2. There was a question about a 10% profit target which I didn't understand. The answer was on page 13 of the annual report.
3. Party politicians were in the hall.
4. The results of the merger meetings were unknown at the time.
5. The Co-operative Funerals are derecognising the GMB union, which has worried many members. The comment from the floor was "there's usually one motive for derecognising a union"!
6. There's a 16% pay increase for executives who don't join tCG's pension fund, which is what would have been paid into the fund for them. Whether it applies to all employees will be checked and a written reply given.

Strategic questions, answered by David Doyle

1. Travel offers will be promoted in the food stores. tCG wants to avoid "silo" businesses which don't cross-promote with other businesses where appropriate.
2. Leaflets of other tCG and other co-ops should be stocked, particularly at festive times.
3. Offsetting CO2 is not a complete answer to climate change, but it was the only one of five suggested actions which was approved. Is the Co-operative Travel chain underperforming because it doesn't offer enough ethical choices? Some shouting from the floor about them still not offering European rail tickets.
4. The regional view of the United merger... This was nicely controversial, as it bloody well ought to be... There's no requirement for a tCG membership vote, so there will be no tCG membership vote. There was a hierarchical vote: very few of the Cornwall area turned up at the regional meeting in Bristol, but Devon and Somerset turned out in numbers and the south-west's delegates to the national meeting voted against 5 of the 6 merger resolutions, which were passed anyway. The chair stepped in and cut short the debate, stating that everyone knows the south-west is unhappy about certain aspects, like not having a choice on the first merged chief executive, but what's done is done.

Finally, a list of questions being sent for written answers were given by Andrew North and the chair (was it Colin House? It's annoying to find one name and lose another).

I went to the Co-operative Group's South-west region Annual General Meeting in Taunton last Saturday (5 May) and I'll be writing this up over the next few days. It's taken me that long to find time to reread my notes. I'll try to blog the two bits that I think are interesting to other regions today, because more AGMs are happening tomorrow.

"The AGM is one of only two [formal decision-making] meetings open to members each year, when they can recieve information on the performance of their Society, and hold their elected representatives to account. Afternoon sessions will again be less formal, and include topics such as food retail, ethics, our banking and insurance businesses, and healthy eating."

(from A Cambridge Co-operator). There are other meetings for members during the year, of course, but they tend to be consultations and workshops and so on. The meeting was opened by the Woodcraft Folk, who I didn't know much about, but they seem to be like an outdoorsy co-operative youth club. Then there were introductions by the chair, a presentation by Catherine Staveley from group head office about ethics, environment and community, the annual reports and then a motion:

"This meeting is disappointed that we fail to declare our distinctive, mutual, consumer ownership and ethical values in our trading outlets. In our large outlets, wall space is left vacant and little attempt is made to promote what we stand for. We undersell ourselves as an alternative form of business enterprise which has principles. Therefore, we request the Regional Board to pursue the prominent display of messages to proclaim our ownership structure and promote the causes fundamental to our unique consumer appeal."

After many speakers in support and one against, the regional board came out in support and the motion was passed overwhelmingly. Finally, there were the questions and the report of the Party. More on that soon.

More developments on cycling and the Highway Code: There was a written answer in parliament about the Highway Code which completely avoided the question - cyclists are voting 'no' to its 'Does this answer the above question?' poll. I have. bikeuser wrote about the Highway Code with excerpts and links to me and also linked Eleanor Blair - More Highway Code which mentions the Early Day Motion in parliament with a suggestion that you write to your MP and ask them to sign it. In a comment, Anonymous asked:

"I agree with you that cyclists should have the right to decide that a cycling road seems too hazardous. However, other than that, any reason why cyclists should get to use roads when cycle paths exist?"

Yes. The most important reason is that most cycle paths are built to a very low standard (design speed of 18mph on an unladen hybrid bike) which is unsuitable for commercial carriers and even ordinary road bicycles (what I used to call racers). Even national government suggests to use the road if you want to exceed the design parameters of cycle paths.

"As a general rule, if you want to cycle quickly, say in excess of 18 mph/30 kph, then you should be riding on the road."

Also, cycle paths usually get the lowest priority of all highways at every junction (contrary to national guidance) and are hopelessly badly signposted. Would you choose a bumpy-road that gives way at every piddling side road when you have the choice of a flat, smooth A road? I doubt it - that's the basic form of traffic calming in bypassed villages like Blisworth. There are some cycle tracks I use, but even those are so badly signed, it's taken me weeks to figure them out - and I've been visiting family in this area for years! For example, I don't enjoy riding on the exposed Somerset Avenue dual carriageway and the adjacent purpose-built shared-use path is segregated, with few junctions or pedestrians, but consider the junction complex at West Wick (the aerial picture shows the cycle path, but the roads on the bottom right have changed). It's faster to use the underpasses, cross Churchlands Way into Yew Tree Drive and then use the Summer Lane underpass to reach North Worle, but which way do the cycle route signs send you? Yep, round to the left, across four sets of traffic lights where the cyclists get the lowest priority (and a 'Cyclists Dismount' sign for good measure) and then along a path that level-crosses an estate road completely blind (under construction in the aerial pic, above the roundabout). Oh, and the cycle route map's wrong for that area, just to make it even more confusing. Because of the bad signposts and maps, it's also very difficult to report any problems with cycle paths and tracks to the highways maintenance team. Cycle paths often don't have names and I've sometimes had reports come back with "there is no fault" when it turns out they've looked at the nearby road, not the cycleway. Forcing cyclists to use cycle paths will probably always be the wrong choice, but there's a lot of improvements needed before you can expect many cyclists to use them by choice. Doing so now would be like directing all cars onto unsigned B-roads instead of motorways that exist for the same journey, just because vans and lorries have a bigger need for the motorways. I like having B-roads available for journeys which would be much longer otherwise, but I wouldn't want to be forced off the motorways just because they exist. Even if you're a car driver, write to your MP and object to directing classes of traffic off of roads that are safer than alternatives. Else, if you tolerate this... The bigger question is "why is so much money spent on the cycling equivalent of B-roads?" and I don't know the answer to that. We would do much better to widen roads to add cycle lanes (or allow safe in-lane overtaking by cars), instead of widening the adjacent paths and painting them as shared use.

After I described yesterday that GCC rejects semicolons after functions, Ben Hutchings pointed out that semicolons are actually allowed according to the standard. I regularly complain to the GCC people for introducing new errors, but when this was was introduced I assumed there was a good reason and didn't want to complain yet another time. Turns out that I should have. Fortunately, somone else must have noticed the problem because GCC has been changed in SVN and this code is no longer rejected.

My parents got back from a whirlwind trip to Canada this afternoon, and we thought that since their visit here was scheduled before we knew Sarah was pregnant, we thought one small way they could participate was to come along to an ultrasound screening that determined the baby's gender. So we lashed out on one of those gimmicky 3D/4D ultrasounds, and didn't tell Mum and Dad what was going on until we got there, so as to make it a bit of a surprise for them. I think Dad thought we were going to see a baseball game, because when Mum asked what to wear, I told her it didn't matter, and that it was a spectator activity. I called it as a boy before the sonographer made a call. She initially thought it was a girl, but revised it to be a boy as the scan progressed. I'll update this post with some of the images later.

Another beautiful day here in Paradise. Montreal is fantastic in the late Spring/early Summer -- it's a great time to be here in the city. Yesterday, Amita June and I went to Parc Jean Drapeau, the beautiful park on an island in the St. Lawrence, the former site of Expo 67. We played at the (really cool) new playground, ran around in the grass, and looked at the river rushing by. Today I rolled out a new table-of-contents layout on Wikitravel; you can see an example on our page about France. It's the culmination of about 11 months of debate and compromise amongst Wikitravellers, me, Maj, Internet Brands, and pretty much everyone else under the sun. It took a looong time, but we eventually got something that most people could live with and (shock!) some people actually liked. It wasn't easy, and my earlier unilateral decisions about it were so upsetting to people that it produced our current Wikitravel:Technical infrastructure policy. It's been great to finally reach some closure on this particular issue, since it was such a source of learning for me. tags: wikitravel wiki montreal amitajune toc

RoCoCo -- one week and counting We've got about one week before RoCoCoCamp starts. It's going to be pretty exciting; we've had a lot of responses and the list of participants is growing strong. But there are still a lot of infrastructure things to be done -- I'm going to be really impressed if we get them all done before next Friday. I'm getting more and more amazed that the folks in Portland (Oregon) manage to put on RecentChangesCamp there. It's pretty hard to do a three-day unconference. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp

Kanren So, I've just finished re-reading The Reasoned Schemer, the sequel to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. Reasoned is a really nice introduction into what seems to be a classic compulsion for Scheme freaks: re-implementing the logic language Prolog more-or-less in Scheme. The little language that unfolds in Reasoned is elegant, simple, and best of all, extremely Scheme-y. There's a really long digression into binary mathematics and deriving bitwise operations for arithmetical functions, which all seems to be the long way around the block since it's unlikely that users of their system would use anything but the math system built into the host language, Scheme. The implementation in TRS is laid out at the back of the book. It's a learning version of a bigger project, called Kanren. I've been fiddling with the system, which has re-inspired my dream of creating a declarative language framework for Web applications. I'd like to see what Web programming in Kanren would be like... I'll see how it goes. tags: kanren scheme the reasoned schemer logic prolog

Domains Another way I spent my time today was that we've finally gotten around to transferring the wikitravel.org/.net/.com domains to IB. IB's owned the site for a while, but we've never really had a reason to switch the domains over, so it's gone undone for a long time. And I'm kind of glad. It sucks transferring domains between registrars. wikitravel.org was on Joker. which used to be my registrar of choice, but which has been superseded by Godaddy. Transferring a single domain took 6 Web forms (on two different sites), 3 security codes, and 4 email confirmations. Thankfully, this also gave me a chance to transfer over my speculative domains phonojournalist.com (for telephone photos) and phrygiancap.org, for general freedom issues. I like the phrygian cap, what can I say? All right, so I have a lot of domains that I'm unlikely to ever exploit. If that's so wrong, I don't want to be right. tags: domains ib joker godaddy phonojournalist phrygian cap

The Debian Desktop team is pleased to announce DebianArt (http://www.debianart.org). DebianArt is a place for high quality artwork and themes for the Debian Desktop. The idea is use the website for contests, creating an archive of user contributed artwork that can be freely used and included in upcoming Debian releases.

Thanks to Valessio Soares de Brito and Andre Luiz Rodrigues Ferreira (si0ux) - (debian-moreblue author, the default desktop theme for Etch) the DebianArt admins.

Please register, post your free wallpapers, splash screens, sounds, screenshots, and stay tuned for artwork contests!

Steve Kinsella wrote:

"Your right to ride on the road is in jeopardy. The revised Highway Code says cyclists should "use cycle facilities where possible". [...] The implications of this are bad. First, we will suffer more abuse and intimidating driving. Secondly cyclists will be disobeying the Highway Code when they assess that a cycle lane or path is dangerous and act accordingly. Thirdly, if a cyclist is involved in an accident and tries to claim damages, the insurance companies are likely to argue that the rider contributed to the accident by not using the cycle facility. The Highway Code has been laid before parliament. It will automatically be approved possibly by 20 May unless it is referred to a House of Commons Committee which cannot amend it and can only recommend the whole document be rejected. [...] There is a petition on the government website. One can be sceptical about the value of these petitions but the publicity is valuable as can be seen from this Sunday Times article of 7 May. It is interesting to note that 35 MP's objected to the original revised wording. Unfortunately, the replacement wording is worse. 11,000 objections were received to the previous wording. There are 70, 000 in the CTC alone who should now be objecting. If this Highway Code is approved by government cyclists will effectively lose the right to ride on the road where there are alternative routes or adjacent facilities. Please register your name on the petition and persuade others to do the same."

(via nscycle )

Registrations for the Munich Lindy Exchange (20. - 23. September 2007) are open.That will be a Lindy exchange to remember: this is the first Oktoberfest weekend, and of course the Lindy people will rock the Oktoberfest, too (apart from doing all kinds of other fun stuff, of course).(And yes, that means you should plan ahead - flights could become rather expensive during Oktoberfest. :-( )So if you are a Lindy Hop dancer, and want to meet some fun people, come to visit us. You won't be just a tourist, but you'll have "Munich natives" around you to show you all the cool places.Organized by Swing and the city (Christine von Scheidt).

The great thing about the internet, is that no matter how bonkers it gets, there is always someone to take it to the next level. Read all the way down to the bottom... Thanks to Edwin for showing me that.

It's just not our week, I guess. For the past couple of days, gabe.freedesktop.org (www.fd.o, ns1.fd.o, lists.fd.o) has been playing up: it will just mysteriously die with no explanation. It appears to still be alive, but we can't access it at all. Bringing it back up yields nothing suspicious before it dies, so we're suspecting some bad hardware. This wouldn't be too major a problem, bar the loss of the above-named services and dri.fd.o, openclipart.org, and a few other services, if it weren't for other things conspiring against us.

All revision control services (git/CVS/SVN committing and checkout, web access to same), Bugzilla, xorg.fd.o, people.fd.o and planet.fd.o, are on separate machines which are unaffected by this failure. But, unfortunately, we got less than 24 hours notice that our secondary DNS server at MIT was being moved, and would be offline for a while. Two DNS servers gone. Our third DNS server, hosted in the UK, is still servicing requests just fine, but apparently our registrar never noticed the update. So the third DNS server according to the glue records is home.keithp.com, which is also off the air right now for some reason.

So, ns0.bluelinux.co.uk is still serving names, and you can still access some services if you use that, but we're not sure how long until normal DNS is back up, let alone how long it will take us to get gabe fully fixed.

Sorry for the outage, please bear with us. If you think it's frustrating not being able to check www.fd.o, try checking the remote console and watching /proc/meminfo hopelessly spew into the serial console as you are unable to log in ...

I'm impressed. Via Google Apps, I was able to register a domain (squeezedbooks.com - nothing there yet, though) for $10. But it's not just a domain, it comes with email, google calendar, and a bunch of the other google apps thrown in for free. That's a lot of stuff for ten bucks - especially for the large portions of the world where the currencies are appreciating against the dollar. The service does have some drawbacks though.

• It doesn't do .it domains, something that I would find handy. For that matter, it only seems to offer .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz, which is sort of limited. I guess I don't blame them for not wanting to take on the Italian domain registry and its stupid, bureaurocratic rules, but having some other TLD's there would be nice.
• It relies on another site for DNS fiddling. Google partnered with enom.com for their registration service, and one notices the difference between the nice, clean google interfaces, and the enom app when you get shunted off there to make DNS changes. The app isn't even that bad, it would just be nicer if it weren't necessary to log on to something external.
• The amount of power that google is ammassing is scary in some ways. I have happily used gandi.net for a number of years, and would have continued, but 14 Euro vs 10 Dollars + the apps is simply not a contest.

I did it.
We did it.
The whole lot of us did it.
And we liked it.
In fact, we loved it.
Today, Spencer Tunick held his long awaited session in Mexico City. I signed up a long time ago, yet could not believe this was really going to happen - And man, did it happen!
For those still wondering who is Tunick (lazy you, as with the first link, it becomes just obvious), he is an artist who enjoys gathering large crowds, getting them all naked, and photographing them. Some people (including me, until this morning) erroneously categorize him as a photographer - No way! Out of Tunick's own words, out of many comments I heard and read today (i.e. at El Universal's forum), I can assure you only a participant can feel Tunick's art - A sensation of togetherness, of freedom, of clean enjoyment, throwing out the denial and repression we have regarding ourselves and our society. I was quite skeptical. The Mexican society is well known for being conservative on many issues. Nudism in Mexico is basically something not even talked about. There are a couple of nudist beaches, but they are closely associated with relaxed morals and drug abuse, and are just not safe for, say, women on their own. Nudists are seen as sex-maniacs... And, yes, this is as far as it gets from truth.
As I said, not only did it happen here, but how! We were between 18,000 and 20,000 naked people in the Z calo, Mexico City's main square, the third largest square in the world. The previous attendance record for Tunick's works was at Barcelona, Spain, with 7,000 people. And the surprise is not just the number - I insist, it fills me with joy to recognize a positive change in my country, to recognize we are not that retrograde anymore.
Nadezhda and I were there, as many couples, groups of friends, even families (although, yes, people under 18 were requested not to come - they would be expelled if found). I think the main age group was people in their late 20s, but there were many people from every age group. We met people who travelled from Jalapa, Veracruz (5 hr away), to be here today. I read reports of people coming from Guanajuato (5 hr), Oaxaca (6-7 hr), even Durango (14 hr)! We met near the Z calo at 4:30 AM, as Tunick likes making his work with the early morning light. As you can imagine, and after quite a busy and tiring day, I feel like minced meat... So I'll leave this for now. I expect to come back to the topic in the next couple of days - But anyway: This was amazing. Incredible.