I had a chance of visiting the annual South California Linux Expo (SCALE) over the weekend. It was fun, as usual. People at Gentoo booth were emerging something continuously, NetBSD people had their traditional toaster running NetBSD, FreeBSD had some pretty funky crowd, and Debian booth was too small to accomodate all the people . Newbie-friendly FreeSpire had some very enthusiastic folks, showing off their new Click and Run service. They got pretty excited when I mentioned debtags to them. Krugle is a relatively new source code search engine with some nice features. Unfortunately, they were not indexing the Debian’s code repositories, but promised to fix it ASAP (and add support for crawling git repositories as an added bonus). Zenoss presented their impressive open-source monitoring system, and I had a chance to fiddle with the new TrollTech’s Linux-powered GreenPhone. Coming with its own software development kit, this gadget has some serious geek-appeal, however at a price tag of $700 I’m afraid I’ll have to pass for now. And it was exciting to learn that there are still people who feel like writing their own OS pretty much from scratch.
There was one inquiry regarding the Debian’s accessibility features for the visually impaired. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Speakup-enabled kernel flavour we used to have in Sarge is no longer available in Etch. I think that reintroducing it (at least, for i386) should be a release goal for Lenny, I’ll definitely try to see what I can do about it.

Our despicable prime minister said "I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory".

That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq already. Claiming that removing US troops at this stage will do any further harm is unproven (and except for the Kurdish area extremely unlikely). Trying to link a presidential candidate with a terrorist organisation is the worst type of dirty politics.

Texas Republican senator John Cornyn requested that the Australian government stay out of US politics. It sounds like a reasonable request. But I wonder whether John Cornyn got involved when the US ambassador spoke out against the leader of the Labor party at the last Australian Federal election...

Senator Obama suggested that if John Howard wants to criticise his policies in Iraq then he should first send another 20,000 Australian troops (there are currently 140,000 US troops compared to 1,400 Australians). According to the CIA World Fact Book Australia has a population of 20.3M while the US has a population of 298.4M. If the ratio of serving soldiers was to match the populations then Australia would have 9,500 troops in Iraq. If Australia was to be a full military partner of the US (but scaled down due to the smaller population) and therefore had troops in South Korea, Japan, and Germany then the number of Australian troops committed might be closer to the 20,000 number cited.

But this is no criticism of Senator Obama. For a number that was made up to demonstrate his point that Australia is not pulling it's weight in Iraq it's a quite reasonable estimate.

The US Democrat Senator Ron Wyden correctly described Howard's comment as "bizarre". This may become a catch-phrase for the Howard regime (as the Bush regime is described as a "miserable failure").

Johnny seems to think that it's in his best interests to send Australians to fight a war that has no benefit for Australia (or the US for that matter), but he doesn't have the guts to do it properly. Fortunately for him the Bush regime understands his position and allows him to send a token force to demonstrate support without the risk of any significant number of casualties or having to conscript soldiers.

This mutual meddling in elections is a demonstration of the way Bush and Howard conspire against the interests of the Australian and US citizens. Both countries need governments that look after the interests of their citizens at home and let the UN take a larger role in world issues.

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

One of the benefits of Xen is that it allows a machine to be easily rebooted. Remote console and remote power management technologies are either expensive or implemented on the motherboards of expensive machines. With Xen the virtual machines can be managed without such expense and also with less effort.

This raises immediate possibilities for training sys-admins. One problem with training system administrators is that they need to have servers to administer and the mentor needs to be able to easily access them and fix them when they become unbootable. Xen makes these problems easy to solve on cheap hardware.

Monash University has for many years had a machine named Yoyo which is used for training sys-admins. It's not expected to be up as much as machines that are run by experienced sys-admins (hence the name) but I expect it would still have better uptime than a lot of corporate servers.

Unfortunately until recently there were no options available to people who weren't Monash students for learning about system administration. To solve this I want to run some sys-admin training with a server.

My plan is to set up a machine running Xen at a server room and provide a basic Debian install in a domU. I will then give the root password to a small group of trustworthy people (who I have known for some time or who are local and can be verified) and start the training. My plan is to set up a mailing list for emergency communication on one of my servers and have the trainees set one up for regular use on the domU. I will provide DNS secondary service and have an NS record for yoyo.coker.com.au point at the machine in question so the first task for them would be to run a DNS server.

I won't have unlimited bandwidth so I will track the bandwidth use from the dom0, and I will use the dom0 to make backups of the system via LVM snapshots.

The terms of service etc will be mostly copied from the Monash machine.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for how to run this.

Hopefully this will work out and other people will want to do the same. If you run such a machine then please add a comment to this post with the URL for information on it.

... suck. The XML Schema "datetime" format can't be handled by Java's SimpleFormat (ok, that probably is more Javas fault, of not being able to handle hours:minutes in the timezone specification, anyway, this is mildy annoying). The XSLT2 parsers are very intolerant about the format of the time specification, too. They could have made more stuff optional such as the specification of seconds; an error here will make the whole XSLT fail with an exception. Some compact form of error handling would be nice... as would be a smart parser which can handle various formats. The XML Schema "duration" is even worse. First of all, it was completely forgotton when doing XSLT 2; there are no functions to format or disassemble it (except by regular expressions, which could also use a zero-width lookahead). Secondly, it's lacking common specifications such as "next week". While "next week" is computationally equivalent to "in 7 days", it can have different semantics in some contexts (especially when not being aligned): If I'm looking for the week February 9th 2007 is in, the result is February 5th two February 11th. If I'm looking at a 7 day interval containing this day, there are infinite possibilities (aligned on milliseconds and below...). So it does make sense to make a difference between 7 days and a week.

Canonical and Linspire announced a technology parternship today. I think it doesn't mean much for Linspire and Freespire success since it's basically a switch from Debian to Debian. Ok, maybe less work to merge bleeding edge stuff into Linspire products but not really mind blowing.

What's really impressive on the deal is the CNR usage in Ubuntu. I believe they're gonna use the CNR regular client for the next release for commercial software, but i bet that in the second semester will push to a integration with the www.cnr.com or a cnr.ubuntu.com. It means a lot to Canonical and Linspire companies and Ubuntu, Linspire and Freespire users. Read more about my view on what could be coming from this CNR on the web thing.

After cnr.com launch, the missing piece will be Red Hat and/or (Open)SuSE come up with a similar service providing a way to upstream developers (maybe through sf.net and similar services) distribute development snapshots or releases not verified (signed if you want) by distributions. It will pave the way to turn the Linux software distribution and installation easier than ever. The shame is that Debian isn't playing a major role on this silent move.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

As already mentioned (Camsync is shaping up), I've been working on a script to automate part of the workflow of digital photography (the part where pictures go from the camera to the computer and get registered into the photo management program). This script was PTP-only so far, since my other, older, USB mass storage digital camera was broken. I eventually found the time and willpower to tackle it with the usual method:

• unscrew every screw in sight until you can reach the part you believe is at fault (rather easy when the camera tells you "Zoom error" on boot);
• poke around, trying to see what sticks;
• push the thingy;
• push the thingy harder;
• hit the thingy;
• push the thingy (gently) in the appropriate direction;
• reassemble;
• find a spring on your desk;
• disassemble again, put the spring back where it belongs, reassemble;
• yay, it works!

So I converted my Contax U4R back from an expensive SD-card reader into a working camera (even if the autofocus seems to be less accurate than it used to be). Anyway. My point is: I've updated my camsync script (and the related Synchronisation scripts for digital cameras page) so it can now handle USB mass storage cameras, as long as they can be accessed through an automounter. I haven't tried it on a memory card reader, but it may just work. As usual, feel free to use, hack, send patches, and report your experiences.

Last Monday (5 Feb), I observed a meeting of Kewstoke Parish Council I mentioned the forthcoming North Somerset Cycle Forum but most of the public contributions were about the Cygnet Hospital. The hospital was accused of breaking promises given last year to the village and the police, namely:

• letting patients roam the village without supervision;
• chopping down screening trees they said would be left to grow and leaving dead wood on obstructive trees they said they'd cut; and
• now seeking to take drug rehab patients.

They also have some faulty light timers, floodlighting neighbouring houses from 1am to 6am every day. That's both antisocial and wasteful. A terrible way for Cygnet to keep their neighbours awake. Is it any wonder that there's an outcry? Regardless of what I think about the above promises, Cygnet should do what they said and not behave antisocially, or be punished. Fine them a century per night per house for the lights and they'd soon fix them, I'm sure! There was also some comeback on the Kewstoke toll road farce. The district council's panel has asked the officers to reexamine the options, after they noticed the creative accounting of including road maintenance (which must be done whether or not the road has a toll) in the toll cost. There was a reporter from the Mercury present, so maybe this will appear in their edition later this week.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 20 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No blog entry yesterday, sorry for those of you who like the "bubulle fights the dragon" adventures. I was travelling from Paris to Badajoz/Spain for the Free Software World Conference. Frans Pop, Wookey, Martin Michlmayr, Knut Yrvin and I will give a common talk about the results of the "Extremadura work sessions" funded by the regional government of Extremadura last year. My net connection will be jerky as we have a very good connection at the conference site, but nothing at the hotel (except a ridiculously expensive Telefonia wireless, which can't even be circumvented with IP-over-DNS). viewvc is to be uploaded by ender very soon. No news for dpkg-cross. A NMU is pretty likely now. I just uploaded a few more NMU's today as I got network again:

• ipsec-tools
• libpam-ldap
• php4-rrdtool
• freetds
• icedove will be taken care of by Alexander Sack and we will even rewrite the templates while we're at it

In a previous article about Stuff To Do, my ajaxified priority queue program, I talked about how best to keep track of the user's state of activity, should they so desire. I opted for the popup, as that was the best compromise between simplicity, and ease of use for the end user. From an end-user point of view, it's similar to how gtalk can detach from gmail if you want to run it in its own window. The trick was to implement the popup/popout in Rails, which actually ended up being pretty easy, and, all things considered, is a pretty cool technique. It's neat to pop stuff in and out of a web page. The easy part is popping out the window:

<%= link_to_remote("Pop out " + image_tag('popout', :border => 0),
                    :url =>   :controller => 'tasks', :action => 'popout'    ,
                   :title => 'Pop the status window into a popup window') -%>

Which subsequently calls popup.rjs:

page.replace_html('status', "<i><small>status in popup window</small></i></br>" +
                  link_to_remote("<small>Restore</small>",
                                  :url =>   :controller => 'tasks', :action => 'popin'  ,
                                 :title => 'Restore the status window'))
page << 'statuspopup();'

Which is pretty simple - the first call replaces the html in the status div, and the second calls the javascript function statuspopup. This lets us replace what was in the status window with some placeholder text and a 'restore' link in case things get screwy and the user wants to simply restore the old content of the div in question. It's worth noting that we also store the popped out status in session[:popped_out] in order to let the application know that the window is "popped out". This doesn't actually pop the window itself up. The statuspopup function in javascript (located in application.js) takes care of that:

function statuspopup()  
  window.newwindow = window.open('/tasks/openstatus','status',
                                 'height=10,width=210,status=no');
  return false;
 

And then the openstatus action opens the same rails partial that the regular page does:

<%= render(:partial => '/tasks/status', ...

Meaning that you don't have to rewrite the same code in two places. So, that's all it takes to pop up a new window, and replace the contents of the old div in the html page giving the user the sense of having popped a piece of the page out into a popup. So far so good. Now what happens when the user closes the popup? Luckily, we get a reference to the window that opened the popup called window.opener that we can use to comunicate with the main window. For instance, in our case we set up an event listener to fire when the window closes:

window.addEventListener("unload", statusClosed, false);

And this, in turn, takes care of popping the window back into the main page:

function statusClosed()  
new Ajax.Request('/tasks/popin',   method: 'get', asynchronous: false  )
$('popoutlink').style.display = 'inline';
w = window.opener;
target = w.window.document.getElementById('status');
code = $('onidle').childNodes[1].innerHTML;
target.innerHTML = $('status').innerHTML;
target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';
target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';
w.eval(code);
 

Once again, pretty simple. What's happening:

• Ajax.Request just takes care of letting the rails app know that we've popped in, which resents session[:popped_out].
• Then grab the window opener, and find the status element within that window.
• Instead of re-rendering everything with a rails partial, we simply transfer the HTML that was residing in our popup to the main window: target.innerHTML = $('status').innerHTML; target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb'; target.style['backgroundColor'] = '#bbddbb';

We also fix up the color just a bit, to mark the user as active. All in all, it's pretty useful for time tracking. In Linux, it's ver easy to set the new popup to follow you around the screen, making it so that it's not a bother at all to wave the mouse at it to let the application know you're online. All you do is set the 'on top' and 'always on visible workspace' options - at least in Gnome.

It seems some of my fellow students have found my blog. Wow, took you only four month to do so. I'm impressed ;) Beside the fact, that I mostly blog in English (most of my posts appear on planet.debian.org) the thing which interested them most was a recent rant blog. Most found it quite funny and some warned me, that it might be a bad idea to continue posting blogs like that... just in case someone tells the lecturer¹. Many thanks for the warning! Indeed, many thanks! But why should I be afraid of someone, who needs three attempts to count without error in binary from 0 to 111? 1: I would really like to point out, that he is not a regular professor at our university. It's just that some people thought it would be a good idea to let him teach that course because of his experience as administrator.

One of the leading newspapers in Mexico, often associated with its left-wing ideology (and, I don't think it's a coincidence, my personal favorite newspaper) published today this cartoon:

So, dear Rocha... Are you implying that many past and present Debian releases are identifiable with the corrupt Mexican government? Our de facto president is like our first official release, Buzz (1.1)? Does Rex (1.2) properly represent the worst of the PRInosauric regime? Is Hamm (2.0) a good symbol for our whole political class? Woody (3.0), the first release I had the opportunity to work on while still being in NM, is like our sadly unforgettable ex-president Fox? Does our current stable release Sarge (3.1) equal to the repression that Chiapas, Atenco, Oaxaca, Michoac n and others have suffered? This cartoon made me sad, really sad.
</jokingly>

It's the Fourth Safer Internet Day which is fine in itself, but it also seems to be an excuse for politicians and journalists to say stupid things about the internet. Example 1: Interior Minister John Reid suggests making sex offenders register all email addresses and internet nicknames - seems fine at first reading, but then you realise that anyone can have an infinite number of email addresses and nicknames and wonder how the hell the police will cope with a denial-of-service attack that enumerates each address and nickname in turn. a@mydomain, b@mydomain, ... z@mydomain, aa@mydomain, ab@... you get the idea? Example 2: BBC Five Live asks 'Should websites that promote anorexia be shut down?' which was also subject of an ITV news programme called 'thinternet' yesterday evening - There are practical problems shutting down any web site (censorship is often seen as damage and the internet can route around it) and if it's not on the web, it will be passed from person to person. It's shameful that Eating Disorders Awareness Week is getting hijacked by this futility. Can someone get these people to realise that banning and controlling things on the internet is about as easy as controlling radio waves? The radio laws are mostly unenforced against small offenders because they are mostly unenforceable without a huge police force. The solutions will come from addressing the problems (sex offences, eating disorders) not the symptoms (email addresses, web sites).

I’ve done this exercise a long time ago, but I think last time was before the first post with Wordpress. So here it is: my improbable (or not) best of search engines keywords for january (provided by webalizer). “ ” - !
“debian fundamentalism” - where ?
“asa dotzler troll” - did Blake Ross post here ?
“could have agree with you anymore” - all your opinion are belong to you
“do i need firefox if i have iceweasel” - firewhat ?
“your name in firefox 2″ - I know
“lifelike androids” - paranoid ones are better
“dumb ass” - still ?
“blitzer blog” - wrong address
“a lot of horse facts” - i don’t know what to say
“damage harddisk instantly” - drop your laptop from the 10th floor
“iceape vs iceweasel” - none of the above
“do you like the american accent” - no
“facts about the horse” - what is it with the horse ?
“feliz a o nuevo happy new year ” - Bonne ann e !
“free mozilla firefox” - as in beer ?
“icebrowser community edition” - nice one
“normal life” - what is it ?
“shake laptop crash hard drive” - shake it the other way
“trademark versus copyright”, “trademark vs copyright”, “trademark vs copyright vs gpl”, “trademark vs reserved”, “trademarked and copyrighted logo”, “registered trade mark vs copyright” - ask mozilla, they are knowledgeable
“what should stop working” - you
“what is a patent” - something I hate (I’ll tell you stories about that soonish)
“why does debian call firefox iceweasel”, “why does debian name firefox iceweasel”, “why iceweasel debian instead firefox” - because we can’t call/name it firefox
“will flashplayer work with iceweasel” - why not ?

Update (05/1): The cabal now emphasize Debian related websites (even the most obscure ones) but also return results to any other topic. I'm sure it's better than Google vanilla for Debian contributors, developers and dedicated users. Give it a try. ;-)

Update (02/1): OpenSearch support has been added. In other words if you're using Firefox or IE7+ (ouch!) add The Cabal in your browser now.Go to The Cabal page and click on your search engines box on top right, you will see "Add The Cabal" on the list.

I've just added a Debian related custom search engine to my people.d.o page. Actually it works using Google Custom Search Engine, but i plan to add Yahoo Search Engine Builder to the mix. The search engine is called "The Cabal".

What it is:

• Something cool and useful to me, i hope others enjoy too
  
• Relevant results even if you use weak queries or something really out of the context
• Refinements/Tags/Labels based search already included
  

What it isn't:

• A [insert your preferred regular search engine] replacement
• A lists.d.o search replacement yet
  

What is coming?

• I'll be adding special results through the subscribed links feature - e.g: You will be able to search by developer's name and read his/her bio (just already public information); search by package tags (probably will need google base integration too)
• OpenSearch support (done)
  

Search examples:

• democracy
• debian
• quality assurance
• aptitude
  

Suggestions and feedback about how you are using the search are welcome.

After last post about a FHS amendment to address the structure of user’s home folders, I received a lot of comments and there is one very significant thing that can be changed in the proposal - instead of having $HOME/ .data .cache .config /appname structure, to change that to a mandatory $HOME/.library/appname/ cache config … . This version still has all the benefits of the first solution (configuration for an application can be easily identified and erase, and all cache can easily be excluded from backups using “$HOME/.library/*/cache” regexp) and also has additional benefits, main of which is the ability to later introduce the concept of user installed packages. The idea is that it would be possible to support having /bin, /lib and /share subdirectories in these application directories thus making an ability for the whole application to e packed in a single directory and allowing the application to be installed simply by unpacking this directory. I admit that much of this is glanced over from MacOS X world, but I do not think that it diminishes the idea itself.
Some problems appear there - support of these distributed bin folders, support of separate lib folders, handling of application plugins, handling of dependencies, handling of the application menu, upgrading notifications for the user software vs. system software. But nothing there that can not be solved. I feel that this can bring together FHS and LSB by providing something of an API for software being installed by users. Having no registry of the software in this solution allows for some interesting things, for example having multiple versions of one program just by renaming the application folder.
A lot of specification work is required here, therefore I proposed a workshop on this topic in Debconf7. I hope to have something that everyone can agree on and maybe even some code by then, so that after Debconf7 there can be a formal policy amendment proposal. So there are two questions:

1. Is there something better in $HOME/.cache/appname vs. $HOME/.library/appname/cache ? Any other trade-offs that I have forgot?
2. What do you think about the further idea of users having the ability to install software in their home folders or remove such software in a very simple fashion?

Eventually, it just had to happen. Being used to subconsciously disregarding emails asking me to "update my application details", I overlooked both of the reminders to please fill in the timeframe in which I'd be at DebConf. Which probably means, I'm not going to get food/accomodation sponsorship. If I calculate with the (ballpark) figures I have, that would be a massive amount of money, even if I can get space in one of the hostels (which I currently do not know). So, I went out today and investigated some other options. One that particularly stuck out was a luxurious house about 15 kilometers from Edinburgh, that, provided there are a few others who'd share, would cost about the same to each of us. The downside is obvious: It'd be quite some distance to the venue, the train takes about half an hour to Edinburgh central and we'd have to get to the train first (the web site advertising the house says "car advised"). On the other hand, the house has an indoor pool, a sauna, Internet access, a washing machine and a clothes dryer and a garden with barbecue place. If there is a significant number of people (there is space for nine) interested, this might be an option.

My project the last few weeks has been to start exercising at a gym regularly. While I could stand to lose a few pounds, I'm more interested in feeling less lousy than I have lately -- among other things, I've been feeling tired and having trouble concentrating, and my back has been hurting again. I don't know for sure if getting into shape will fix these problems, but I figure being more healthy couldn't possibly make them worse.

In other news, I've finally done what all the cool kids were doing in 2002 and started a Flickr album. Right now it mainly contains cat pictures like this one:

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok.. Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.