I am really upset by the way the ARM build daemons are managed. The packages are not uploaded regularly, with sometimes three days between two uploads. Well it should not be a problem, if packages that have failed to build due to some packages not uploaded fast enough (see for example python-gnome, or rkward) were requeued, but that’s actually not the case. Also last week, the build daemon named “cats” stopped to upload packages, despite it continued to build them. 11 days later, nothing has changed even after a mail to arm@buildd.debian.org. And I do not speak about build daemons building nothing. All of that resulted in ARM being the slowest architecture to build packages. It looks like the ARM build daemon maintainer does not know the excellent page made by Jeroen. As arm@buildd.debian.org is everything but responsive (well if you can assign a level of responsiveness to /dev/null), I have decided to act. I have installed QEMU on an 8-way Opteron machine, and created 8 emulated ARM machines, which 256MB of RAM and 10GB of disk for each, all running buildd + sbuild. Altogether those 8 emulated ARM machines should be faster than all the Debian ARM build daemons. I have setup a wanna-build database on my server. During the day it has built around 100 packages. Yes I agree that real machines would be better, but I don’t have a stack of fast ARM machines at home. Anyway when you see random segfaults on the build daemons, or strange failures (that happen for weeks) on the build daemon named “netwinder“, you may think to that again. Unfortunately the machine I use for that is only available for a few months, and I will have to stop the emulated machine then. I just hope that the situation with respect to the build daemons will improve, so that I can stop them even before.

The last few days I attended a Debian QA meeting in Badajoz in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I worked on a number of QA tasks, like cleaning out bug reports for removed packages and tidying up some WNPP bugs. I also started another compilation run of the archive using GCC 4.2. In general, I worked on a number of TODO items I had, such as updating my Debian on Cobalt pages for etch, and responded to some email. My inbox is actually empty right now and there are few specific things I need to do, even though there's a lot in general, just like always. Tomorrow I'll head back to Madrid to meet up with some friends. Apparently we'll go bowling. On Monday I'll briefly visit the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos where I stayed for three months earlier this year before catching a flight to Austria where I'll spend New Year.

I'm pretty happy to note that I've been invited to speak at South by Southwest Interactive in March on the subject of wikis and commercialization. I'm pretty psyched about the subject, as I think a rich and varied ecosphere of wikis -- from personal to informal clusters to formalized non-profits to formalized commercial ventures -- is a necessary step to the development of a read-write Web. OK, so, it wasn't like they invited me out of the blue -- I submitted an idea for a wiki panel a few months ago, and it got morphed into a one-person presentation instead. Which will be fun, since I'll be able to pontificate at length on this interesting subject. Maj booked us our hotel rooms in November -- I wanted to stay at the Austin Motel, but they have some kind of one-time callin system for the week of SxSW, and their rooms sell-out in an hour or so. We missed the callin time, which was no big deal. tags: austin wiki sxsw austin motel sxsw2007

Recidivista Bad Vista is a clumsy and confusing name. Who's running the Wordplay Department over at the FSF nowadays? I hope it's some wily Germans, and that "Bad Vista" is some sort of elaborate spa joke. But for some reason I doubt it. Offer to the FSF: I just registered recidivista.org today. It's an awesome name. It is yours for free if you promise to use it well and be funny instead of shrill. Deal? tags: fsf bad vista vista recidivista

Maptastic I'm pretty happy to note that I got around to developing a new MediaWiki plug-in that uses the Mapstraction library to switch between well-known-but-proprietary mapping services like Google Maps and unknown-but-open-and-cool services like OpenStreetMap. Each page on Wikitravel that's had some geo-data RDF magic added to it gets a link to the Mapstraction page, which will focus on that destination. Eventually it will have icons for each museum, restaurant, bar, hotel, or other feature of the city, and you could move them around or even edit their information through the map interface. But, for now, I'm starting small. More map-centrism will come with time. You can check out Montreal for an example of a mapped-up page right now. tags: mapstraction geohacking wikitravel RDF wiki maps

C-List So, I like this Are you an A-list Bloglebrity? tool on kineda.com. A simple re-packaging of some publicly-available data from Technorati, ranking blogs into lists by authority. Excellent hit-mongering. I'm sad to say that I'm still in the C-list on the blogging front, but that's really just dependent on longevity. I've only been doing this since last May -- errr, Flor al -- which is just 7 months (that's 49 months in blog years). If the A-list gets the Lear jets and the red-carpets, I don't know what kind of perks come along with the C-list. Free refills on your orange soda? tags: blogs c-list technorati

Parenthood One of the things that parents often notice is that they have a hard time relating to their non-parent friends. And, of course, single non-parents have a hard time relating to their friends who've bred. Why is it so hard for these two kinds of people to connect with each other? I think there are some superficial reasons, like having different schedules, different imperatives, different needs. But I also think there's something more fundamental about the split. Organisms who've survived long enough to successfully reproduce have realised one goal in life -- if you listen to Charles Darwin, the only goal in life. If you have children, you have found a purpose for yourself -- an answer to all those questions about who you are and what you're supposed to do with your time on earth. If you survive to breed, you have won the game. Now, it's not the only way of winning, and it's not really the most interesting game in town. But I know at least for myself, and for other parents I've talked to, there is an existential satisfaction in finding yourself almost accidentally filling this purpose. Having never felt before that I had a definite purpose, it's been a strange sensation. Non-parents don't get the same sensation -- or, at least, they don't get it in the same way. So they're still looking, thinking, questing, trying to find some answers. And that gives them a vibrant edge that fulfillment dulls. I doubt there are many non-parents who would be satisfied with the Darwinian answer to their questions -- spawning like crayfish isn't a very lofty goal in life. Or at least it doesn't seem so from the outside. I'm not sure how to tell my friends how my life's changed since we had a daughter -- how when I'm reflecting and summing up my life, I don't feel the same panic as I did before. It's a good feeling, though. tags: parents parenthood survival reproduction crayfish

Iraqi taxi This blog post with a graphic illustration of the process for a build-your-own Iraqi taxi cracked me up. It was also nice for giving me a link to Wrecked Exotics. No, it's not about drunk strippers, nor orchids that went unfed; it's crashed cars. tags: iraq blog wikitravel wreckedexotics

As anyone who follows my blog knows, I’m fond of linking to other sites with brief little quotes that either get me thinking or reinforce points I’m trying to make elsewhere. (Credit where credit is due: Dave Winer and Doc Searls both do this very effectively, and I’m just shamelessly copying them, down to the quoting style they typically use.) One of the quotes I’ve had queued up for a long time is this one from Jon Udell:

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I m working on will deploy to Linux, I ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. Why? Because on Windows, an open source component is likely to come with an installer that just works.

He’s right. Unless an application is included with your Linux distribution of choice, installing that application on Linux is a nightmare compared to Windows. Here’s an example. To install Sun’s Java Studio Creator on Windows, I just click on the .exe on Sun’s web site, which downloads the file and places it on my desktop. I double click the .exe (after, of course, checking it for viruses) and am up and running in a few minutes. In contrast, on Linux, I click on the .bin, which downloads the file and.. up pops a text editor showing me a /bin/sh script. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that is, so I save the script to a file on my desktop. I double click the file, and.. up pops a dialog box telling me the file isn’t executable. Nice. Fortunately, I know what that means, so I drop into a shell and run chmod +x ./creator-2_1-linux-ml.bin. I double click the file again, and there’s a nice graphical installer now. Finally, it looks like everything is going my way. Halfway through, though, the installation fails, telling me I need to install the RPMs for compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev. Nice. Assuming I even know what an “RPM” is, I then realize: I’m running Debian, and Debian doesn’t use RPM. Maybe I know about alien, but even if I do, where do I go about getting the compat-libstdc++ and compat-libstdc++-dev RPMs? At this point, I’ll probably hit Google—that is, if I haven’t already thrown up my hands in disgust and gone back to Windows. After a bit of Googling, I find this page, which tells me on Debian what I really need is libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 and libstdc++2.10-dev. Of course! I should have known that. (Note: I’m being sarcastic.) After installing those two packages, I restart the installer (which, thankfully, knows how to deal with the fact that it’s already half installed, but that won’t always be true). The installation finishes this time, and the installer kindly offers to start the program for me. However, after poking around a bit and exiting back to the desktop, I don’t see a menu entry or a desktop icon, so I’m not sure how I’m going to find it again (and I hope I don’t have to explain why cd’ing to ~/sun/Creator2_1/bin is not an answer). Anyone who has ever installed software on Linux is familiar with this song and dance. If it’s in your distro of choice, you’re only an apt-get or a yum install away from running it. But if not, you’d better know what you’re doing, have a lot of patience, and understand how to construct effective Google search terms. (And, no, moving everything into the distribution is not a very good option. Remember that one of the key tenets of open source is decentralization, so if the only solution is to centralize everything, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture.) Oh, well. At least I didn’t have to check for viruses! Fortunately, some of the problems I experienced are bugs. The above was done on a pre-release Debian etch system over the summer, so it’s likely the problems have been fixed. I repeated the experiment on an Ubuntu edgy system, and it didn’t open the text editor, nor did it complain about an incompatible C++ environment. However, there were still no menu entries or desktop icons, and there was an additional problem too in that when I double clicked the file, it opened it in CrossOver Office, which I also have installed. Regardless, even if it works better on some distros than others, there’s still no usable solution until ISVs and end users alike can depend on things consistently working regardless of the distro being used. Again, fortunately, we have solutions to parts of the problem already. The LSB abstracts away the differences between the runtime environments of the various distros, so the Java Studio Creator installer could have simply said “you must install the LSB environment” rather than trying to deal with the hundreds of little variations in both the environments and the package namespaces that provide them (e.g., compat-libstdc++ vs. libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2). Better yet, on distros that provide the LSB environment in their default configuration, the installer doesn’t have to do anything. And Project Portland promises to give us a consistent interface for creating menu entries, desktop icons and such things. However, far too few applications take advantage of the LSB today (though that’s changing), and Project Portland isn’t in any of the distros yet (though we’re looking at bundling its primary deliverable, xdg-utils, with the LSB 3.2 SDK to work around that). Finally, even though the LSB provides ISVs with a consistent way to create an LSB compliant executable, there’s no consistent way to deliver an LSB compliant application that’s easy to install and that integrates well with the distribution’s package system. Yes, the LSB includes RPM today, but for a variety of reasons, ISVs don’t want to use RPM, and as already mentioned, not all distributions support RPM natively. Fortunately, once again, this isn’t just a rant. The LSB tackled these very issues at the LSB face to face and Packaging Summit last week in Berlin, Germany, and we think we have a way forward that’s acceptable to all involved: Linux distribution vendors who already have well established package systems and systems management tools built around them; ISVs who need to support multiple platforms and so don’t want to support the Linux specific RPM format or who otherwise want more control over the installation experience; and end users who want to use the software management facilities their distributions provide, whether that’s RPM or something higher level like APT and yum. More in part 2…

An important PHP security developer retires, with some rather harsh words on the project and PHP security. While I agree that PHP by itself isn't really insecure (actual security bugs excluded), the one thing I really blame PHP for is that it does not assist the developer at all in writing secure applications. On contrary, give a novice PHP developer some non-trivial task involving a database and some extra files and you'll have at least two security issues. I stopped using PHP some years ago for a few reasons, including above "security issues by default" (which IMHO are due to a badly designed language) and because PHP is heavily encouraging the user to mix design and application (which is a pain from a maintainance point of view). Of course you could do model-view-controller in PHP, but it doesn't make it easy to do so (another thing why I consider the language to be badly designed). And don't get me started on "register_globals"... OTOH, some years ago I maintained a PHP extension, ming, which has recently found it's way back into Debian. Back then, I had the impression that PHP itself is also a pain to package. Building an extension worked okay, but it seemed as if getting PHP to build and work reliably on all architectures with all extensions is a pain. (That maybe is why the php packages have many open bugs; and why it took e.g. four years to add packages for the pspell extension)

By the time i had a poor ThinkPad 660E my way to interact with the computer was IceWM. It was small, light, configurable and it had everything i needed. Or almost. Now that the frenziness of changing names to ice* has started, i keep wondering why not renaming icewm to iceicewm. And no, abcde will not be renamed, although iceicebaby will be a good name for hotbabe. ;) abcde needs one more upload and a pray to debian-release to accept it for etch (2.3.99.6 has some problems, and 2.3.99.7 aka 2.4 should solve most of them). On (un)related news, trac 0.10.3~rc1 was accepted into etch. Is a bugfix release, and should have no regressions, over 0.10.2, which was a bit messy. 0.10.3 proper will be uploaded tonight, and it is just a re-brand over 0.10.3~rc1 with no changes in the code.

Three prostitutes have been murdered near Ipswich and two more are missing. BBC News ( The World At One in particular) seem to be dwelling on the fact that Suffolk has no permanent investigation team. It's probably totally alien to London-based commentators and analysts that an area the size of Suffolk (roughly the middle third of the round bit north of London that sticks out into the North Sea - an area about two-and-a-half times the size of Greater London) has only about a dozen killings a year. What would the investigation team do for the rest of the year? It seems better to have police that know their service area, but sometimes call in help from neighbouring police to investigate murders. I wish the BBC would stop looking at East Anglia through the London Eye and treat it like the other regions. I lived there until recently and East Anglia may be next to London, but it's very different. Why does BBC even bother to point out that it was Norwich South MP Charles Clarke who proposed merging Suffolk Constabulary with two of its neighbours? London-born Clarke was infamous for doing as he was told by Islington Blair. Anyway, this is well outside my normal writing, but the BBC non-news really irritated. Now, fingers crossed that Suffolk Constabulary get to the bottom of the murders soon and the BBC stops criticising the police at this early stage.

(Translated from my same post in Spanish) A few days ago, McDonald published a cartoon on the end of the dictator Pinochet. Yesterday, fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet died in the Military Hospital in Santiago, after heart and lung diseases, being 91 years old. Now, current president Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, in case Pinochet is given State memorials, could be attending the ceremony (in a predominantly conservative country as Chile), even after she was tortured and persecuted under the dictatorship and his father was murdered under the regimen, after serving Salvador Allende‘ government. Shitty life, huh? Viva Chile!, just as the ironman stated.

There were more shocking news for me when I got back home yesterday. Via Toni Hermoso, I learned that Toni Cucarella, a Valencian writer I recently discovered, just announced that he has abandoned his writing activities, just a little bit after announcing he wouldn't further update his blog. I learned about Toni Cucarella's literature aproximately one year ago, when I heard about a new novel, Quina lenta agonia, la dels ametlers perduts, on the radio, which sounded interesting. The book fascinated me as soon as I started reading. Describing the life of a group of children in the outskirts of X tiva, a small city south of Val ncia, in the late 1960s, Cucarella managed to transmit some feelings about my childhood during the summers of the early 80s around my town in the inner province of Castell . It wasn't anything in particular what did this, but the way the book was written, which managed to describe how these kids lived happily and in freedom around their houses, regardless their economic status and the difficulties their families went through. All of this reminded me of my sister, cousins and friends running around the streets and fields, away from our parents or any adults, in a time when nobody thought this was dangerous or irresponsible. The only two sins were to play on the road or to get back home a lot after the sunset. Toni Cucarella has been very vocal against the Language Authorities in Val ncia regarding the unity of the Catalan language, and specifically against the Acad mia Valenciana de la Llengua, a recently created institution which now has competence over the "Valencian language", something that was previously in the hands of a scientific institution like the Universitat de Val ncia. He has finally burned out, not only due to the bad situation Catalan literature is in the Valencian Country, but also because leaving aside two very prominent exceptions, Valencian authors are basically ignored in Catalunya, making their subsistence quite difficult. I hope Toni can build some new motivations after some time and the public can enjoy new novels written by him in the future, as well as more of those very interesting blog entries we had got used to reading every few days. In the meanwhile, thanks for your writings, Toni, and good luck with your new activities!

Last night, when we got home after the long weekend up around theawesome Terres de l'Ebre, first thing I learned from the news is that Augusto Pinochet had finally died while we were driving back. It is too bad that once again he managed to avoid a trial that would have made him officially guilty of all the horrible happenings of Chile during his military coup and his bloody dictatorship. But he's gone now, and this will be a great relief for the thousands of Chileans who survived his regime, and for those who lost family members or friends just because they defended some ideals. The world will associate his surname to torture, murder and corruption; he surely won't be remembered for the image of the old, calm man surrounded by family members that an ever-shrinking minority tried to transmit. Last night, I raised my cup to celebrate Pinochet's death. Viva Chile!

The Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 came into effect on Friday 8 December. It is now legal to use CE-marked "micro" FM transmitters, which are intended for linking portable ogg players to nearby FM radios. Transmitters can have at most 50mW power (if I understand page 35 of Ofcom's Interface Requirements 2030), compared for the local 100W commercial station on top of the hill, 25W for a full Restricted Service Licensee, 1W for low-power FM (LPFM) and 300mW for stadium commentary stations. Update: Kimmo Jukarainen / OH3GNU commented:

"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."

Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old ps2ascii indeed confirms

v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.

Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:

"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."

Rob Hart commented:

"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."

Andy Parkins commented:

"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."

The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:

"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."

Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.

The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use.Before you read on, don't forget that the XTech 2007 call for participation ends this week. The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed.Both of these services support XML output, but only with the semantics crammed awkwardly into RSS or Atom. Neither have plain XML for public consumption (some is available behind a registration protected API), but do support serialization via other formats. We don't really have "XML on the Web". We have RSS on the web, plus a bunch of mostly JSON and YAML for those who didn't care for pointy brackets.Did we as supporters of XML get it wrong somehow? I think we did. The success of the XML project and the W3C as a unifying forum was seductive, and we felt more bound to the edicts of the W3C than we thought. Our justified love of open standards inadvertently promoted a straitjacketed approach to using XML. XML was felt to need a schema language.What we missed was that settling on schemas for data serialization represented much more of an up-front commitment than most developers could really make. The rise of agile programming techniques further emphasizes the hazards of prematurely freezing a design.Schemas never really came with great evolution or migration strategies.
And of course it didn't help that both DTDs and W3C XML Schema are pretty darn obscure. Somehow we never got the word out, despite the "standalone" XML declaration, that it's OK to spread schema-less XML around.We had of course the Simple XML movement, but it came to little. Other voices pointed the way forward. Walter Perry notably promoted an agenda that required little a priori agreement between communicators, but it gained little ground in common thought. Ironically it took James Clark to push the agenda of developer convenience, with the RELAX NG compact syntax giving us all permission not to think in angle brackets.Meanwhile, busy developers with work to do on the web have created non-XML syntaxes such as JSON and YAML. Though I deliberately closeted myself in XML for a long time, I have come to appreciate the utility of these syntaxes.One of the more intriguing developments is that the Semantic Web crowd, while still very much W3C oriented, have really proved themselves more flexible in their attitude than the XML world at large. RDF/XML is hardly the only acceptable way to approach the throne of Tim, and the man himself threw out XML syntax pretty early on with the development of the N3 scribble format. More recently, the work on GRDDL to scrape semantics from HTML has shown the semweb folks' amenability to outside initiatives such as microformats.Maybe it's not such a bad world, as making an XML mapping of YAML, JSON and friends isn't really very hard. I'd just like to get the message out to web application developers that Plain Old XML is fine by me. I live in hope yet that the rise of REST will hit this home.So while markup has most definitely won on the web, it's a shame XML hasn't yet achieved as much as it could. It's not too late for an injection of pragmatism and a little less constraint.

As described in a NO2ID newsletter you need to send an opt-out letter to your GP, else all your medical records will be transferred to central government and could be made available to thousands of people who have nothing to do with your medical care.

In a watery contrast to the real Venice, The Venice Project surfaced from stealth mode recently (and I just fixed my blog, so I figured I’d get caught up). Our blog has some more official news and buzz, too.
People who know me at this point will be wondering why I’m involved in a TV project when I hardly ever watch TV, but we’re actually aiming to solve much of my irritation. Colm writes about what TVP solves for him, and I agree that the social aspect is one the fundamental points to our work. We’re seeing - via MMORPGs, blogging communities, etc - the attraction that connectedness has and the importance people are beginning to attach to sharing and aggregating data effectively.
Leo has written about some of the underlying technologies that parts of the project are using, although unfortunately he somewhat takes the reasoning behind the choices for granted.
My other major problem with TV is timing. This one is pretty obvious, but being able to build channels with content that I want to watch, and watch them when I want to is pretty compelling.
And I’m looking forward to combining these two…
So what am I doing? I’m broadly doing operations, with - unsurprisingly - a Linux bent… But more about that later.

I’ve enjoyed reading Richard Gott’ article named Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler elite, where he goes deeply on how the recent political movements in the region has been marked more on lineage and classism than in anything else. Read the article in English here, or in Spanish, here (thanks to Rebeli n).

UK media regulator Ofcom released Ofcom sets Digital Switchover related licence conditions about the terrestial broadcast network, including a consultation on self-help relays. Essentially, the public service station multiplexes (BBC Royal Charter, Digital 3 & 4 and Freeview, labelled 1, 2 and B on this list ) will be available from all current public analogue transmitters, but the commercial multiplexes (SDN/itv and National Grid Wireless, which are A, C and D on the list) only need to continue the current coverage. So, free-to-air satellite reception will still be better for radio, music and films in most current poor-DTT areas.

One problem with keeping your journal in the French Revolutionary Calendar is that you have to keep looking up what the date is. It is nice to know that there are functions for converting Julian dates to French Revolutionary dates in PHP. Also a nice link on that page to the strange and mellow http://bottoms-dream.de/ , which isn't anywhere near as pornographic as it sounds. tags: french revolutionary calendar php bottoms

Blinky Redux I had Blinky Hockey again tonight -- the first time in a month that I've gone. (Blinky is the pickup hockey team my friends Meg and Patti started. It's for people who don't play hockey so good but want to learn. Like me.) Last time we had it, I flew out to California at 6AM the next day for 2 weeks, so I missed two practices in between. And then last time I had everyone over for Thanksgiving dinner, and I fell asleep putting the baby down. Doh. So it was good to go out this time around. I've been going to our local hockey rink, Ar na Mont-Royal, for free skating from 4-5PM a couple of times per week since we got home, and I think I'm getting a little steadier on the ice. I still haven't got the whole stop-on-a-dime thing or skate-forwards-backwards-forwards thing, but I'm able to get around without going face down. Which is good. Tonight we did some more sophisticated drills and had a good scrimmage at the end of practice. I didn't score but I had an awesome shot. It would have been cool if it were a score. Anyways, I think I'm going to have to keep practicing on my own. Going to the Ar na is great, but maybe I should fill our parking lot out back with water, like this R ves de Glace site suggests. That'd be cool. tags: hockey blinky skating montreal

Calendar wishlist So, I'm always trying to learn to use my calendar application, whatever's easiest and most available. I have a Treo 650 and Evolution, and they work OK, but they don't work great. I have a lot of things that I wish calendar programs had.

• Project management integration. This is probably the biggest one for me. I can't believe that we have two different kinds of programs for planning the exact same information: what you're going to do with your time. On top of that it's remarkable that so few of project planner programs talk to calendars (or vice versa).
• Hierarchical TODO lists. I'd like to break up tasks into sub-tasks that depend on each other.
• Effort estimates. I'd like to be able to make notes about how long I think a task is going to take, and when I'll get it done.
• Repeating TODOs. Probably the most egregiously un-ergonomic thing about modern calendaring programs. Almost everything I have to do in my life I have to do on a repeating schedule. I have to take out the recycling once a week before Wednesday morning. I have to pay rent before the 1st. I understand it's a tricky problem, but that doesn't mean I don't want a program to do it.
• Open invitations. I'd like to be able to send open event invitations to mailing lists and have people RSVP automatically (if they want). All the systems I've used require that I know the email address of each invitee ahead of time. And they rarely work across calendaring systems.
• Skipped TODOs. Sometimes I give myself a task todo and I just don't get around to doing it. I'd like to be able to mark a task as not done, but no longer important. I don't want to forget it forever, just remember that it never got done.
• Logging. It'd be nice if there were more and nicer interfaces to say what I did with my day after it's done. When did I finish that module? When was the last time Niko came over for dinner? It would be nice if my calendar helped me remember the past as well as plan the future.
• Sharing by default. I want to set up calendar sharing once, have my local and remote calendar synched transparently, and never worry about it again. CalDAV seems neat, but I have got no idea how to get it working.
• More shared calendars. I like using shared calendars; I wish more organizations published them. I'd like it if Bell Canada published a calendar that told me when to pay my phone bill, and I'd like it if MSLUG published a calendar of their meetings. I'd like it if I could mark my phone bill as paid, and RSVP for an MSLUG meeting, through my calendar interface.
• ACLs. Different people need to see different parts of my calendar. It'd be nice to have finer-grained control than "public" and "private".

tags: calendar wishlist