I have been trying to make a script that should put my laptop into hibernate, run automatically from cron, so it forces me to get to sleep.

I had managed to make it work from a console (tty1), but it seemed as if it refused to work from cron.

During the tests my local mailbox was getting the output of the command, and I stood and watched at this error message for more than an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I couldn't understand what was wrong:


This option is not available. Please see --help for all possible usages.

This was from zenity and I was starting to suspect that it was failing to expad properly the text variable since it worked with a fixed text.

This was failing:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "'$NOTIFICATION$XMSG'"

And this was working:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD!"


I couldn't figure it out. Until I tried this:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD! "


And it failed.


God damn! Setting LANG in the script fixed the issue right away!


So, if you ever want zenity to show up from cron dont forget to:

• set DISPLAY
• set LANG

zenity is a pice of shit when it doesn't work. It could have printed the "option which wasn't available".

I've seen a few posts (1,2,3) from people recently who are announcing new software uploaded to unstable. It's my understanding that, even in freeze time, unstable is designed to be for packages which are supposed to be going into the next release. Therefore packages which are intended for the release after that (lenny+1) should not be uploaded to unstable until Lenny is out. Perhaps experimental is more appropriate (that's where I've put a few of my such packages). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's been announced at quite a few places, so you probably already heard about it: Miro 2.0, the new major release of the cross-platform Internet RSS audio/video aggregator and player has been released. Miro is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, the new release on Linux now features a "native" GTK+ widgets UI (instead of the Mozilla-based HTML widgets of earlier versions) and supports both a xine, as well as gstreamer renderer (for audio and video). I won't even attempt to list all the improvements and new features, please check the release notes and the feature list for details. Overall more than 670 issues have been fixed since the last 1.2.x series release. You can also watch this video (Ogg Theora, 10 MB) for a short introduction in Miro 2.0. Together with the software release, the getmiro.com website, as well as the online Miro Guide have been competely rewritten and are a lot more usable and better-looking than before. Finally, I have uploaded a new Miro 2.0 Debian package to unstable yesterday, by now it should be available from most mirrors. For Debian we're defaulting to xine at the moment, but please consult README.Debian if you want to switch to the gstreamer backend. Please test the new release extensively so the few remaining issues (if any) can be ironed out soon...

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Of course, I was in Brussels this week-end, for FOSDEM. I gave a talk about Ultimate Debian Database (slides here) in the Debian devroom. The conclusion was UDD is ready, go play with it! so you know what you should do now! FOSDEM in general was great and huge (see the video from Quim Gil if you still doubt that) as usual. On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop s release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there s always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans talk boiled down to: The release team doesn t know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I m so qualified. Giving such talks at FOSDEM, in front of an audience with many people not involved in Debian development, is really insulting. To make things worse, he finished the talk late, not leaving any time for questions/discussion, so the audience might be left with the impression that his opinions are representative of the opinions of DDs.

Biella asks if I can read novels from a screen. Yes, I've read what has to be getting close to a thousand novels that way, over the past 8+ years. I was thinking about this just the other day as I read The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age. That article does a good job arguing against many of the common complaints about ebooks, such as "I can't read an ebook in the bathtub".

my pile of paper

Right now, I have a pile of paper books I want to read or am in the middle of reading. But if I want something new to read, I don't reach for that pile, but for my (much larger) directory of ebooks. The pile of paper is reserved for special occasions: plane trips, camping, etc. I started reading ebooks in circumstances where it was too hard to get access to paper ones. Traveling in the third world, hauling along a lot of paper books wasn't practical. Living rural, where every book had to be backpacked in. I've stuck with it because it works for me and because I've enjoyed stretching my muscles of concentration on the screen. To me, the focus required to read an ebook from the screen is similar to the focus required to work on a program. And completly different than skimming through a web page. The best example of this that I have right now is Real World Haskell, which I've almost finished (hurrah!) reading in a combination of paper and web editions. I was only able to stick with reading this book when I got the paper version. I use the web version for reference, or for looking for help on a challenging part of the book. For reading, it's just too much a web page; too easy to skim, or be distracted by the comments that can be attached to every paragraph, or jump off to Wikipedia.

screenshot of my ebook reader

Just as most programmers tune their development environment so that it uniquely suites them, I've put a lot of thought, trial, and error into tuning my ebook reading environment. The most important thing seemed to be getting rid of anything that interfered with focusing on the text. Since I wasn't (easily) able to use that environment for reading Real World Haskell, I wasn't able to read it from the screen.

As you may know I maintain a Creative Commons licensed photoblog at my website. I'm also cross-posting some of the better photos to my flickr page. Even with my humble, and not really widely-known little photoblog, you can already see the Creative Commons license's effects on media sharing and remixing/reusing kick in. Quite a number of my photos have already been used by other people for various different purposes (blogs posts, articles, even album covers), including some of the "bigger" sites such as the Wall Street Journal Blog or Cult of Mac... Here's the list of places I know of where my photos are used. Please leave a comment if you spot more of them in the wild. I intend to keep this list updated as more of my photos appear elsewhere. (Oh, and I have no idea why people seem to be so obsessed with my "Sugar" photo...) Sugar

• Wallstreet Journal Blog: A Clue for Tumor Survival Lies in How Sweet It Is (blog post)
• Discover Magazine: Blood Sugar Surges May Be Responsible for Senior Moments (article)
• Dear Mark: Sugar Cravings (blog post)
• VentnorBlog: Today is World Diabetes Day (blog post)
• EcoSalon: What Does That Bargain Really Cost? What It Takes to Make 10 Everyday Items (blog post)
• Paradox 365: The sugar cubes (riddle)
• Married to Fitness: Sweeteners Are Everywhere: Look Out for Hidden Sugars! (blog post)
• Charting the Course To Better Health Care (blog post) dead link
• creativecommons.org: CC Q&A and the joy of being reused (blog post)

Clock

• Angel Ortega: Dispersoul 1 (album cover)

Autumn Leaf

• The music of J.D. Warrick: GOING, A. THE LEAVING (album cover)

Scissors

• 20somethingfinance: Is your 401k Match Being Cut? This May be your Hint to Find a New Job (article)

Soccer World Championship 2006

• Nicht nur in China versteht man kein Englisch... (blog post)
• ununun.de: Zu viel des Guten (blog post)

Organized

• Context is King: Organized (blog post)

Dandelion

• Herbal Healthcare: Dandelion (blog post)

Intel Celeron CPU

• Cult of Mac: Intel Unveils Lower-cost Mobile Core 2 Quad (article)

Smoke

• Carbon Trading: Australian Targets Loom (blog post)

Sun and trees

• Let's Read and Find Out!: The sky, the sun, the stars (blog post)

POSIX.1g

• Nyfiken Vital: Nya funktioner och tj nster i Nyfiken vital (blog post)

I ve been working on a redundant wireless network for a client. The network has two sites that have pairs of links (primary and backup) which have dedicated wireless hardware (not 802.11 and some proprietary controller in the device - it s not an interface for a Linux box). When I first started work the devices were configured in a fully bridged mode, so I decided to use Linux Bridging (with brctl) to bridge an Ethernet port connected to the LAN with only one of the two wireless devices. The remote end had a Linux box that would bridge both the wireless devices at it s end (there were four separate end-points as the primary and backup links were entirely independent). This meant of course that packets would go over the active link and then return via the inactive link, but needless data transfer on the unused link didn t cause any problems. The wireless devices claimed to implement bridging but didn t implement STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and they munged every packet to have the MAC address of the wireless device (unlike a Linux bridge which preserves the MAC address). The lack of STP meant that the devices couldn t be connected at both ends. They also only forwarded IP packets so I couldn t use STP implementations in Linux hosts or switches to prevent loops. Below (in the part of this post which shouldn t be in the RSS feed) I have included the script I wrote to manage a failover bridge. It pings the router at the other end when the primary link is in use, if it can t reach it then it removes the Ethernet device that corresponds to the primary link and adds the device related to the secondary link. I had an hourly cron job that would flip it back to the primary link if it was on the secondary. I ended up not using this in production because there were other some routers on the network which couldn t cope with a MAC address changing and needed a reboot after such changes (even waiting 15 minutes didn t result in the new MAC being reliably detected). So I m posting it here for the benefit of anyone who is interested.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
use Sys::Syslog;
use POSIX; my $cfg_file = "/etc/bridged.cfg";
my $daemon = 1; openlog("bridged", "pid cons", "local1") or die "openlog"; if($ARGV[0] and $ARGV[0] eq "-d")

$daemon = 0;
open(CFG, "<" . $cfg_file) or die "Can't read \"$cfg_file\".";
my %cfg = ( SLEEP => '30',
PING_INTERVAL => '3',
PING_COUNT => '3',

);
while(<CFG>)

chomp;
if($_ =~ /^#/ or length($_) == 0) next;
my ($name, $val) = split(/ *= */);
$name =~ s/ \t*$//;
$val =~ s/^ \t*//;
$cfg $name = $val;

close(CFG); system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down"); my $route1 = 1; if($daemon == 1)

my $rc = fork();
if($rc > 0)

# parent
exit(0);
if($rc != 0)

error("Can't fork.");
POSIX::setsid();
my $pidfile = "/var/run/bridged.pid";
open(PID, ">" . $pidfile) or error("Can't open $pidfile.");
print PID getpid() . "\n" or error("Can't write to $pidfile.");
close(PID); open(STDIN, "</dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDOUT, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDERR, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");

syslog("info", "starting up, 60 second delay");
sleep(60);
syslog("info", "now running"); sub ping_host

my $ip = shift;
open(CMD, "ping -i $cfg PING_INTERVAL -c $cfg PING_COUNT $ip sed -n \"/transmitted/s/^.*\\([0-9].*\\).received.*\$/\\1/p\" ");
my $count = <CMD>;
close(CMD);
if($count == 0)

syslog("err", "Host $ip can't be pinged");

return $count;
while(sleep($cfg SLEEP ))

if($route1)

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
if(ping_host($cfg PING1 ) == 0)

system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 50");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is broken, using interface $cfg IF2 ");
$route1 = 0;


else

if(stat("$cfg SIGNAL "))

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is considered to be fixed");
sleep(60);
$route1 = 1;

Yesterday I phoned into The Phone Co-op AGM 2009 and heard the reports, most of which you can read in the PDF annual report from the AGM website. There were also various questions from members, which I scribbled down as follows:-

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don t want to manage the fund directly because it s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and report miles

Is the description of non-white in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine. I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

Since late 2008 WebKit/GTK+ has been advancing in a better pace than earlier that year. Patches are being reviewed and committed actively, mostly by Holger Freyther (zecke). This last month, among other goodies such as better keyword searching for the WooHoo bar in Epiphany and enabling WebKit s Soup backend to upload files, I have been working on getting download support into WebKit/GTK+ so that we can use that API in Epiphany. Most of the heavy work was done by Marco Barisione and Pierre-Luc Beaudoin early last year. I brought the patch up-to-date and modified it with input from various people into something simpler and handling some more use cases. Tonight I finally reached a milestone, being able to download a Debian ISO with Epiphany/WebKit:

This is work in progress. There are many rough edges to sharpen, still, but this work should be ready for merging very soon. If you want to help take a look at the WebKit bug report we are using to track this work, and the corresponding Epiphany bug report. Anyway, I ve been using both Epiphany and WebKit/GTK+ from trunk for about a month now, and the number of things I am missing is going down quickly. Come help us test and get a regressionless Epiphany with WebKit/GTK+ for GNOME 2.28!

On Saturday (7 February), I should be attending both The Phone Co-op AGM and The Phone Co-op Members Workshop before it. I ll be asking a question at the AGM, if we can get the wording nailed down in time. Sadly, travel from Bristol to Chipping Norton by train is totally screwed by engineering works near Didcot and the usual poor connections from the cross-country line, so I ll be making a 2 hour car journey instead of a 5 hour train+bus combination. If you re travelling from the Bristol area and can car-share, please get in touch. Next Tuesday/Wednesday is Voice09 in Birmingham and I should be there if things come together in time. This is the Social Enterprise Coalition s annual conference. Conservative Party leader David Cameron MP will open as keynote speaker, with Liam Byrne MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, opening on Wednesday. Would live-blogging or similar be interesting to people reading this? If you d like to meet up at either event, get in touch somehow - comments here, instant message, email, or phone. If you ve something you d like to send to either, also get in touch.

I would like to thank James for saving me two tubes and two floor pumps.

Tim Skirvin sent me some enhancements to this script, so I took a moment to write documentation and put it up on my miscellaneous scripts page. This is my version of the integration script between git-buildpackage and pdebuild with cowbuilder. There isn't very much to it, but it does handle automatically adding the etch workaround option where needed and supports selecting the chroot in which to build via an environment variable. As usual for these sorts of little scripts, it hard-codes some of my preferences and will probably require modification to work smoothly in your environment. Unlike the larger packages I maintain, these random scripts are little things I use to speed daily tasks or obscure scripts for specific needs I have. I make them public on the outside chance that they'll solve some problem someone else is having or will serve as a useful example. Further updates generally won't be announced in my blog.

I'm supporting a class of high school students who are new to programming, and will be learning some python. Most of these students are comfortable with computers, but not hacker types, and few if any of them have written code before. I'm looking for an editor or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that won't be too scary for them, and will help them get used to the novel idea of writing code without simultaneously having to get used to the novel idea of an unfamiliar user interface. So i can't expect them to pick up my beloved emacs, for example. But on the other end of the spectrum, i'd hate for them to try to write python in an word processor (i've seen people do it!). Here's what i think i'm looking for:

• comfortable graphical interface -- these students have not used the command line before, and while they'll be introduced to the python shell, they should be able to write code and browse for files, etc. in the "normal" (sigh) way. This means, for instance, that tk-based interfaces are less good because they don't integrate with the common GTK-based UI.
• syntax highlighting -- the students will need to figure out what's a variable, what's a function name, what's an operator, what's a reserved word, etc. Visual indications like font-lock-mode from emacs would be really useful.
• whitespace management -- since python has syntactic whitespace, it would be great if there were convenient/intuitive ways for students to adjust the whitespace in their programs. Of course, it's hard to say what's going to be intuitive for other people. I like tab-cycling whitespace myself; are there other approaches i should be proposing?

Do you have suggestions for tools that work well for the above needs? Favorites? Are there features other than the "top three" i listed above that you think i should pay attention to? FWIW, they'll be working in a labful of machines running Ubuntu Hardy for the most part, but i'm willing to port and deploy programs (particularly ones that feel like a perfect fit) if they're not available in hardy.Tags: ide, python, recommendations, student