So I seem to watch a lot of movies now. First is the Abigail Breslin trio. First, No Reservations & the Ultimate Gift. I watch these on airplanes between Brazil and Canada. In both Abigail plays some disadvantaged girl who hooks up her mother figure with a random guy who shows up in the mother figures life. The Ultimate Gift is more about teaching us good values in life than the mother figure getting laid. So given this caveat, let's compare the box office revenues. No Reservations: $92,572,766; Ultimate Gift: $3,438,735. Oh, I also saw Little Miss Sunshine. It was cute, but I don't think I appreciated as much as the people who recommended it to me.

Next up is The Golden Compass and The Big Hit. The Golden Compass had a horribly done evil mother character and watched like someone playing an RPG where they don't screw up and you don't have to think. So, don't both. As for The Big Hit, it is cheesy, but it is supposed to be. Grab some guys, grab some beers and sit back and enjoy.

Slow day today. I slept at home, and got in at around 9:40am. Sarah didn't sleep well again overnight, her O₂ saturation levels kept dropping below 90% because she wasn't breathing deeply enough in her sleep, and that causes an alarm to go off. So she was pretty flat when I first got in, but she picked up as the day went along, and was fairly chirpy by around 11am. The doctor came by and explained the photos that we've been given, so I'll have to try and regurgitate all of it and update the captions. Her lungs are still looking a bit suboptimal. The third lobe on the right lung isn't inflating well apparently. They said something about there being some fluid as well, although the nurse said she can't hear anything. All that said, she spent a lot of time in a chair today, and her O₂ saturation levels have been the best they've been since she was in the ICU. So good, that they're trialing having her off oxygen while she attempts to take a nap as I write. Her blood sugar levels are settling down. I think they're still slightly elevated, but not to the point that insulin is required. She only needed insulin with lunch yesterday, so it definitely looks like it's improving. She's already been on her three walks today, by 4pm. An occupational therapist came by, and went through the sternal precautions again, and showed us how to get in and out of bed without putting undue pressure on the sternum, and Sarah's been getting out of bed unassisted from horizontal since. Her pain has been quite manageable. So while today started out looking like it was going to be a small backward step, I think it's still a good move forward. Sarah's continuing her breathing exercises, so I'm sure her lungs will sort themselves out in the next day or two. I guess they'll take another chest x-ray this afternoon, although it's getting a bit late in the day. Sarah's starting to get a bit of cabin fever, but I think today's been pretty slow, in part because we deferred having visitors on account of her being not up to it in the morning.

2007 was a busy year, here is where I managed to live/stay/visit:

• Auckland - January and February
• Dublin - February, photos
• Hamilton - March
• Miri - April, photos
• Sarikei - April, photos
• Kuching - April, photos
• Kota Kinabalu - April, photos
• Singapore - April, photos
• Dubai - April
• London - April, photos
• Dublin - May onwards, photos
• Galway - June
• Cork - June, photos
• New York - July, photos
• Cambridge - July, photos
• Belfast - August, photos
• Luxembourg - September, photos
• Paris - November, photos
• Whistler - November, photos
• San Francisco - November/December, photos
• Bratislava - December, photos
• Bad Gastein - December, photos
• Salzburg - December, photos
• Vienna - December, photos

18 cities, 5 towns/villages and a total of approximately 101,216km travelled in the air!

In rough chronological order, with capsule reviews. I don’t think I’ve missed any, but it is possible that I have. If you look through the list (behind the cut), you’ll see I read mostly Baen books nowadays. There’s a simple explanation: Baen is (almost) the only publisher that does real e-books, and I tend to avoid the inconvenience of paper books where I can. Still, there’s about a hundred titles on the list. (more…)

I got myself a new camera for Christmas. after much research I decided on the Panasonic FZ18. It's a nice ultra zoom 8MP camera without going SLR. Now I have a camera built in this century ;)

I just called the ICU for an update before I head in for the day. She's apparently doing well, and can probably transfer out of the ICU later today, although apparently beds are tight in the ward. Update 1 I've managed to find somewhere with EVDO access, so I can update this in between ICU visits. She's looking really good this morning. She asked for some 7up, because her throat's really dry and sore from being intubated. She had something to eat at 6am. She hasn't had much sleep though, because the ICU has been too busy. She's getting turned every two hours, which isn't terribly enjoyable, but her pain is manageable. She's such a trooper. Update 2 Sarah's continuing to do well. The nurse sat her up on the side of her bed for lunch, and had half a roast beef sandwich and some fruit. Her throat's still pretty sore, and she's really preferring the liquids. Apparently her blood sugar is a bit high (something that can happen post-operatively) so they gave her some insulin before lunch. Getting her back down again looked a bit painful, as did shuffling her up the bed. Apparently there's a bed with her name on it in the intermediate ICU, so as soon as the doctor's order comes through to move her, she'll be moved. They'll also take out the central line and one of the peripheral lines at that time. Update 3 Last update today. Sarah was moved out of the ICU and into intermediate intensive care (where she'll remain until she's discharged) at 2:25pm. She got a private room again, which is very fortunate. It's nice and quiet, so she should get a good night's sleep. I can stay the night as well. One of the doctors from the team looking after her came by at about 5:50pm. She said the chest drain can come out in the next day or two. They took another x-ray this afternoon to check on some pleural effusion that they were worried about. When we asked the doctor about it this evening, she described it more as trapped air than trapped fluid, and that it should work itself out in the next few days. The x-ray showed that it was "stable", in that it hadn't really changed from the x-ray in the morning. They'll take another x-ray tomorrow morning to see how it's going. Other than that, she's continuing to do really well. The pain seems manageable. She got up into a chair for dinner (with help). They didn't give her any more insulin beforehand, so I presume her blood sugar is settling down again.

Inspired mostly by Joey’s nonchalant way of dealing with the death of his laptop…

This seems less of a disaster than other times a laptop’s disk has died on me. When did it start to become routine? […] My mr and etckeeper setup made it easy to check everything back out from revision control. […]

…I’ve been looking at getting all my stuff version controlled too. I’ve just gotten round to checking all my dotfiles into git, and it crossed my mind that it’d be nice if I could just set an environment variable to tell apps to create their random new dot-files directly in my “.etc-garbage” repo. I figured using “$USER_ETC/foo” instead of “$HOME/.foo” would be pretty easy, and might be a fun release goal that other Debian folks might be interested in, so I did a quick google to see if something similar had already been suggested. The first thing I stumbled upon was a mail from the PLD Linux folks who apparently were using $HOME_ETC at one time which sounded pretty good, though it doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere. That thread included a pointer to the system that has gotten somewhere which is the XDG spec. It’s actually pretty good, if you don’t mind it being ugly as all hell. They define three classes of directory – configuration stuff, non-essential/cached data, and other data. That more or less matches the /etc, /var/cache and /var/lib directories for the system-wide equivalents, though if the “other data” is stuff that can be distributed by the OS vendor it might go in /usr/lib or /usr/share (or the /usr/local/ equivalents) too. Which is all well and good. Where it gets ugly is the naming. For the “/etc” configuration stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which defaults to ~/.config, and has a backup path defined by $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, which defaults to /etc/xdg. For the “/var/lib” other data stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME, which defaults to ~/.local/share, and has a backup path defined by $XDG_DATA_DIRS, which defaults to /usr/local/share:/usr/share. (Though if you’re using gdm, it’ll get set for you to also include /usr/share/gdm) And for the “/var/cache” stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_CACHE_HOME, which defaults to ~/.cache. That seems to me like exactly the right idea, with way too much crap on it. If you simplify it obsessively – using existing names, dropping the desktop-centrism, you end up with: Put configuration files in $HOME_ETC/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared/fallback configuration, search $PATH_ETC if it’s set, or just /etc if it’s not. Put data files in $HOME_LIB/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared data, search $PATH_LIB if it’s set, or look through /var/lib, /usr/local/ lib,share and /usr/ lib,share if it’s not. Put caches in $HOME_CACHE/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared caches, search $PATH_CACHE if it’s set, or just look in /var/cache if it’s not. That seems much simpler to me to the point of being self-explanatory, and much more in keeping with traditional Unix style. It’s also backwards compatabile if you use both old and new versions of a program with the same home directory (or you happen to like dotfiles). And having the XDG variables set based on the above seems pretty easy too. I wonder what other people think – does HOME,PATH _ ETC,LIB,CACHE seem sensible, or is XDG_ CONFIG,DATA,CACHE _ HOME,DIRS already entrenched enough that it’s best just to accept what’s fated?

Military.com reports that the UK government will no longer use the term War On Terror [1]. Sir Ken Macdonald (the UK’s chief prosecutor) said that “terrorists” are criminals and need to be responded to in that way. This of course is the only logical and sensible thing to do. Soldiers who are taken prisoner are released when the war ends, if members of al Quaeda are considered to be soldiers then they would have to be treated in the same manner. The next logical step is to persue criminals who are members of al Quaeda in the same way that other criminals are persued. As far as I am aware there is no country where the majority of murderers are members of al Quaeda. Other suspected murderers have the right to a fair trial and people accused of al Quaeda membership deserve the same. Another interesting statement is that “The term “Islamic terrorist” will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities“. Finally they realise that there is a huge number of Muslims who want nothing to do with terrorism and that such people are the best potential source of leads when it comes to tracking down criminals associated with al Quaeda. Thanks to Bruce Schneier for blogging about this [2]. Bruce’s blog post has some interesting comments, one is “you can’t make “War” on “Terrorism”. “Terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy. To declare war on Terrorism is about as confused as declaring war on Blitzkrieg” by Carlo Graziani. Carlo also writes “It’s stupid to declare a “war” if you have no idea of when and how the war will end, and no clue about how to bring it to an end. If there is no real prospect for declaring “victory”, the “war” will go on for ever. This is tantamount to saying that insofar as we take the rhetoric of war seriously, we are agreeing to live under what is essentially martial law, in perpetuity. We are stipulating that the sort of emergency measures that a nation might consider taking in time of war — suspension of civil rights for certain suspect groups, suspension of laws limiting government surveillance powers, etc. — may be only a decree or a vote away, forever. There can be no more corrosive climate to liberty than war. If we really allow this idiotic rhetoric to be taken seriously, our polity is doomed.“. A particularly insightful comment from umacf24 is “How did the early 20th century Anarchists stop? Well, one of the attacks precipitated an unprecedentedly bloody and catastrophic war in which both sides used WMD. Military setbacks caused revolutions in the Russian and German empires which led in turn to most of misery of the rest of that century. Not a happy parallel“.

• [1] http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159067,00.html


• [2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/war_on_terror_o.html

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I'm exhausted, but very relieved. The important news: the operation was a success, the surgeon, Dr D. Craig Miller, bless his cowboy boots, managed to spare the aortic valve (he'd given us a 99% probability of being able to do so beforehand), so we don't have to be concerned about pig/cow valves for now, and mechanical valves later. He was reluctant to say that her own valve will last her the rest of her life, but it should last a "long time, long enough to have a family". When I left the hospital, Sarah was in intensive care, extubated, conscious, and talking to me, but very very tired. She's got a daunting array of things coming out of her at the moment (a lot of which I couldn't see because she had blankets over her). It's been a long day, so I decided to head home, rather than potentially keeping her awake for the next two ICU visiting times tonight. Here's the time line that I recorded: 05:15 - Arrive at the hospital to go through the admissions process 06:35 - I leave Sarah shortly before they're going to wheel her off to the operating room (I'll get into my fun at the end). 09:30 - I ask for an update, and they tell me she's going on bypass 10:30 - It looks like they can save the aortic valve 12:25 - Still doing the valve stuff, making a new sinus of Valsalva 14:15 - I ask for another update, everything is going okay, someone will come out to talk to me 14:55 - Still going, at least another hour until they start to close up 15:15 - Closing up, surgeon will be out to talk to me 16:10 - Surgeon comes out to talk to me about how the operation went 16:50 - I got to see Sarah briefly in the ICU, she was still intubated, but conscious and seemed to respond to my voice ~18:15 - Extubated. Spoke with her briefly. She was very tired, and I decided to let her rest for the remaining visiting times and go home and get some rest myself So what the surgeon had to say for himself was very interesting indeed. He didn't end up doing exactly what he'd said previously, based on how things looked once he actually got in there. He said that the sinuses of Valsalva were paper thin. So thin, you could see the blood flowing through them. They were about 0.5mm thick, rather than the normal 1.5mm thick. Sounds a bit like a disaster waiting to happen. Apparently it's not possible to detect this with imaging, you have to get in there and see it for yourself. He didn't end up removing as much of the aorta as previously planned (specifically the part around the transcending arch) as whilst the diameter was a bit bigger, the tissue apparently looked healthy. He said the part of the aorta he did remove (preceding where the braciocephalic, left common carotid and left subclavian arteries branch off) was "cheesy" in consistency, so it's not like she just happened to have an enlarged aorta, no aneurysm, and way too thin sinuses of Valsalva. There was definitely some unhealthiness to the aortic tissue, just not as bad as thought from the imaging. So it's all good. I think she'll spend a day or two more in the ICU before getting moved to a normal ward, but it's too soon to say what's going on with all of that. There's some elevated risk of stroke due to blood clots for the next 24-48 hours, but she's on blood thinners, so it shouldn't be a problem. The day was pretty crazy for me. I'm not sure if it was stress, or the stomach bug that's been doing the rounds of Central Park Apartments, but I went to bed last night at 11pm, was up again at 1am, with shall we say, a gastrointestinal upset, and up again at 3am, throwing up. We got up at 4:15am to get to the hospital. I felt really nauseous all morning, and was an absolute wreck while I was in with Sarah when they were putting a peripheral line in her before they wheeled her off to the OR, so I bailed about 5 minutes early and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again. I haven't eaten all day, just tried to keep the fluids up. I'm debating having some plain boiled rice for dinner, or waiting until tomorrow to have something easy on the stomach. I definitely felt a lot better as the day progressed, but my stomach is still pretty tender. Sarah and I ate pretty much the same stuff yesterday, so I don't think it can be food poisoning. She tends to have a very sensitive stomach at the best of times, so I'd expect her to be showing problems before me if it was food poisoning. But enough about me, I'll live. I hope it's not a stomach bug, as I don't want Sarah to come down with it as well, now that she's on the road to recovery from this surgery. Many thanks to Shona, Briana, Laura, and Christina for spending time with me throughout the day to keep me occupied. ICU visiting hours are every even hour between 10am and 10pm, for thirty minutes at a time, so I plan on spending all day at the hospital tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good spot to get some EVDO coverage, so I can update things as the day goes along, rather than at the end of the day when I get home, like I had to today. Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight than I did last night.

Assume for a moment that you have 148 hosts logging, via syslog-ng, to a central host. That host is recording all log entries into an MySQL database. Assume that each of these machines is producing a total of 4698816 lines per day. (Crazy random numbers pulled from thin air; globviously). Now the question: How do you process, read, or pay attention to those logs? Here is what we've done so far:

syslog-ng

All the syslog-ng client machines are logging to a central machine, which inserts the records into a database. This database may be queried using the php-syslog-ng script. Unfortunately this search is relatively slow, and also the user-interface is appallingly bad. Allowing only searches, not a view of most recent logs, auto-refreshing via AJAX etc.

rss feeds

To remedy the slowness, and poor usability of the PHP front-end to the database I wrote a quick hack which produces RSS feeds via queries, against that same database, accessed via URIs such as:

• http://example.com/feeds/DriveReady
• http://example.com/feeds/host/host1

The first query returns and RSS feed of log entries containing the given term. The second shows all recent entries from the machine host1. That works nicely for a fixed set of patterns, but the problem with this approach, and that of php-syslog-ng in general, is that it will only show you things that you look for - it won't volunteer trends, patterns, or news.

The fundamental problem is a lack of notion in either system of "recent messages worth reading" (on a global or per-machine basis). To put that into perspective given a logfile from one host containing, say, 3740 lines there are only approximately 814 unique lines if you ignore the date + timestamp. Reducing logentries by that amount (78% decrease) is a significant saving, but even so you wouldn't want to read 22% of our original 4698816 lines of logs as that is still over a million log-entries. I guess we could trim the results down further via a pipe through logcheck or similar, but I can't help thinking that still isn't going to give us enough interesting things to view. To reiterate I would like to see:

• per-machine anomolies.
• global anomolies.

To that end I've been working on something, but I'm not too sure yet if it will go anywhere... In brief you take the logfiles and tokenize, then you record the token frequencies as groups within a given host's prior records. Unique pairings == logs you want to see. (i.e. token frequency analysis on things like "<auth.info> yuling.example.com sshd[28427]: Did not receive identification string from 1.3.3.4" What do other people do? There must be a huge market for this? Even amongst people who don't have more than 20 machines!

happy newS year So this was Christmas, new year, et al. Too bad Murphy struck again on the first day of my (theoretical) vacation, delivering me a nice flu (not yet completely absorbed). Nevertheless I managed to do something funny in the last few days:

• I remembered that I do have, as all other DDs, a personal lintian page and I have thus spent some time fixing warning ignored since ever (almost all uploads are still in delayed queues however); while I was at it I also decided to "destroy" my lintian page moving my name to Uploaders for packages that still weren't co-maintained. (/me eager to see this implemented, go Russ, go!)
• I have fixed the vcs field stats page to consider as equal Vcs-Svn fields pointing to URLs like svn://svn.debian.org/foo and svn://svn.debian.org/svn/foo which are indeed the same final path on alioth. That's why in the graph you now see an inversion in the relative positions of field with wrong value and correct field, in case you were wondering. Thanks to Sandro Tosi for the hint.
• I have finally managed to leave the 18th century my mail set-up was living in: goodbye pop + fetchmail + mutt, welcome imap4 + offlineimap + mutt. In the former setup I was unable to read my old mails while away from my laptop, now I have decent replicas of my full mailboxes in various places. I'm still a bit unhappy about how can I force a send/receive email cycle: with fetchmail I used to have a demonized fetchmail running in the background and just executing fetchmail I was able to force that. Now, with offineimap, I've an autorefresh-ed offlineimap running inside screen and I need to bring up the screen and then hit 1 to trigger a sync cycle.

... now back to that paper introduction due for December 26th

On New year's eve, I went to some local movie theatre, and watched the above movie. Must say I'm impressed. Been a while since any movie managed to get me hooked like this. I just love the way in which the backstory is communicated to the audience through little clues and flashbacks that are given throughout the movie. This certainly makes for an interesting way of discovering what the hell is exactly going on here. Add to that a premise that is sure to raise some interest (New York abandoned? Quite some special effect), and you get a very entertaining night out. But credit where credit is due: Will Smith's performance was outstanding. He's done a marvellous job in portraying a real human being: not a superhuman, but a person who's had the luck not to be affected by this horrible disease, and who's now slowly turning insane because of his lack of contact with other human beings. Really nice movie.

Well, this is actually our fourth day home, I just haven't had the time or inclination to write anything until now. We had an uneventful trip home on the 29th. I think I'm getting more used to these long-haul flights, the time went pretty quickly. There is much to be said for Qantas' in-flight entertainment system. And Melatonin tablets. We had a good, jam-packed three weeks in Australia. We landed on a Sunday morning, at around 8am. Sarah's Aunty Glenda picked us up from the airport, and we stayed with her for the week. We caught up with two sets of friends on the Sunday, and managed to last until the evening without crashing. I spent the week working from the Sydney office. Jetlag is a wonderful thing for making me into a temporary morning person. I was at my desk by 8am every day. I'd forgotten how early the sun got up in Australia in the summer time. Monday in Sydney is Sunday in California, so Mondays are blissfully quiet and great for getting things done. The beauty of getting in by 8am meant I still caught Mountain View from about about 1pm onwards for the rest of the week, so that was good. I got a lot done while I was in the Sydney office. On Tuesday morning we went to the US Consulate to sort out Sarah's visa renewal. It was a no-brainer, and our passports were back at my parent's place within 48 hours. Thursday night was the Sydney office Christmas party. The Friday night we flew out of San Francisco was the Mountain View office one, so it was good to be able to catch a party somewhere. Got to love working for an international company. Photos here. Sarah spent the week in Sydney pottering around and catching up with relatives. Every night was booked out with dinner with friends. Photos from the week in Sydney are here. Next stop was Canberra for four days. We stayed with different friends each night. We'd really come to appreciate how bug-free California is. Apparently Canberra was having a particularly bad fly season this summer. They were just about carrying us away. We stayed a night with Rusty and Alli on their farm out at Majors Creek, which is always a nice getaway. It was great to see how the place is coming along. We won't recognise it next time we're there. At Canberra airport on the way to Brisbane, totally by chance, we bumped into our old upstairs neighbour Melissa, from when we lived in Turner. Her and her husband and kids moved to Brisbane around the time we moved from Turner to Ainslie, and we hadn't done a very good job of keeping in contact. To cap it off, she ended up sitting in the seat across the aisle from us on the plane, so we had a good old chinwag for an hour and half. Photos from Canberra are here. Then we got to Brisbane and did the family thing. It was good to see my family again, and show them all of the photos of Joshua and just spend time with them. Brisbane traffic has degenerated significantly in the last 12 months. The Gateway Arterial Motorway near the airport is a complete mess. There's a lot of construction going on for the new cross-city tunnel they're putting in. Probably the highlight of the trip was the mass outing to Australia Zoo. It's been a couple of years since we've been there, and boy, does that place just keep getting better. My hot tip is to save yourself a fortune, and a precious couple of hours, and avoid purchasing food from the catering area. It's sheer bedlam, and very expensive. The zoo is getting so big, that you really need all of 9am to 4:30pm to see it all properly, so you can save a lot of time by bringing your own lunch, or getting a pass-out and getting lunch from somewhere nearby. Photos from the zoo trip here The weather in all parts of Australia that we saw was pretty grey and wet for the most part. I'm not complaining, we need all the water we can get. It was sounding like most of the rain was falling outside the catchment areas though. It was nice to see Canberra not looking all brown and dry though. Photos from the time in Brisbane here. In a brief fit of spontaneity we decided to sign up for Qantas Club memberships. I'm really kicking myself for not getting lifetime membership back in 1999 when I sold my share of our business. I've done so much travelling since then, and it'd have really come in handy. As it happened, we got good use out of it this trip. The flight from Brisbane to Sydney was at 8:15am, so we left my parents' place at about 6:15am, sans breakfast or showers, and breakfasted at the Brisbane airport, and showered in the Sydney airport, as we had about 5 hours to kill until our flight to San Francisco departed.

Somewhere at the beginning of the holiday madness, which seems like a long couple of weeks ago, my laptop crashed and came up with a bad superblock. That's Not Good, but fsck fixed it, and I was too busy preparing for company and parties and trips and stuff to do anything about it. And forgot about it. Of course it died. Right before new years, and with only 5 minutes advance warning from SMART before it started spewing IO errors and corrupting files. I have a new drive on order, and am running diskless from NFS over wireless, which is an amusing way to use a laptop, but acceptable if you don't plan to go anywhere for a few days. Maybe they'll be snowbound days. This seems less of a disaster than other times a laptop's disk has died on me. When did it start to become routine? Maybe this will be the second to last time -- I certianly hope that my next laptop has a flash disk. The Debian Live CDs were quite helpful before I set up the NFS, and I even managed to use the default gnome desktop for an evening with them, without utterly hating it. My mr and etckeeper setup made it easy to check everything back out from revision control. So the tools for dealing with a dead laptop disk are improved, though d-i still doesn't support installs over NFS, which would have saved me some time setting that up. The first snow is starting to fall..

Sound Juicer "Esoteric Quotes, Most Frightening" 2.21.1 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Special thanks to the wonderful people who worked on a few bugs I tagged as gnome-love, and Carl-Anton for working on the SJ GHOP task!

• Save custom genres (#382667, thanks Jonh Wendell)
• Make the progress bar smaller (#460650, thanks Stefan Oderbolz)
• Detect VFAT and NTFS filesystems and strip characters they can't handle (#321436, thanks Carl-Anton Ingmarsson and GHOP)
• Inhibit power management suspension when ripping (#344947, thanks Carl-Anton and GHOP)
• Don't crash when finished extracting (#498500)
• Remove the Rip Completed dialog (#504639)
• Set pipeline state to NULL when disposing (#495410)
• Escape the album and artist in the cluebar (#504862, thanks Luca Cavalli)

* It has been really good (and bad) year for us. I managed to achieve 60% of my wishlist in 2007 and yes, Kavin is our great achievement of the year I was almost 1/2 year away from home and looks like that 2008 will be almost same for first quarter * We had great new year party at office. K and Kavin also enjoyed some moments! The best part was movie The school of Rock. Event management was very well done (TM of our HR :)). * Not going to outside for any party. Listening: Us and Them (Pink Floyd) and trying to fix dupload issue(s) with my damn slow connection.

The last day of each year sees one of the strangest traditions I've ever noticed. A 40-year-old English-language film of an 80-year-old music hall comedy is played repeatedly on various stations in Germany - and in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Australia too. There's not only the film, but edited versions, localised versions, spoofs and other shows based around it too. The film still isn't shown on any English stations, as far as I can tell. I'd never heard of it before getting satellite TV. So, to see what the fuss is about, grab your Dinner for One times (may contain annoying ads if you switch Javascript on) and sit down with the satellite TV (best), or enjoy this description and script from analoguesat, a German-language description or this BBC report which includes this snippet:-

"To the end of his life, Freddie Frinton heartily disliked Germany and the Germans, thanks to his own wartime experience. He refused to allow a German-language version to be made. That is what has led to the extraordinary fact that today the Germans as a nation have embraced a trifling one-act play in English as their all-time favourite entertainment."

Anyway, the last joke is on we English. It's much better than the aging boy bands on our TV at New Year, isn't it? (Updated 2008-01-03 with 1 comment)

I just came back from Taiwan(went there basically for TWDebCamp2007) tonight. I met lots of great people down there and had lots of fun. I'll write about it later. Theoretically speaking, I was supposed to have decent Internet connections everywhere, but in most cases it didn't work or I was away from it anyway(and we had busy schedule!). So now I'm kinda catching up things quickly, especially what happend on the Net lately. Anywise, it would be a good time to look back 2007 and foresee 2008. Personally, these things were significant for me in 2007:

Finished GPLv3

GPLv3 is finally out, and I'm proud I took part in the revision process. Also I could manage to finish my Japanese translation of GPLv3/LGPLv3. Now my translations are being reviewed by lawyers and other legal professionals, so it will be more sophisticated soon.

Establishing MIAU

As I wrote before, we founded a little organization called MIAU, in hope of becoming a Japanese version of EFF. At the copyright war front in Japan, we are partly losing the battle since the Japanese government essentially ignored our 1800+ unique public comments and seems dare to go the wrong direction somehow. However, we are not going to give up easily -- next year, we will sophisticate our tactics and try to get more people involved. Chris Salzberg wrote up a series of great articles on these or related issues in English, and also submitted his story to Slashdot.

Joined Wikimania 2007

This was also a great fun in Taiwan. I gave a talk at there and also met many great people.

Released GNU a2ps 4.14

Well, this is far less significant, but the new release is now out. I hacked up this release in my hotel room just before I left, so may contain stupid bugs. anyway, as usual, enjoy.

So, now we seem to be in 2008 now. Happy New Year or whatever. I'm gonna do the following this year, at least:

Finish my PhD thesis

This will be the highest priority, of course. I'm planning to make it be a comprehensive study on FLOSS from management/organizational theorists' view. Will contain some math. Maybe not.

Finish my book

I'm still writing a book on Open Source licensing. This was supposed to be done within 2007, so it's long overdue now.

Finish translations

I'm still translating Peter Seibel's great book Practical Common Lisp into Japanese. Also, I guess I should update my Japanese translations of www.gnu.org.

Reduce weight

I'm obviously overweight. I'm gonna go to swim, cycling, or even jogging, and do my best not to eat too much. I'm serious!

Anyway, again I'd say Happy New Year to all, and enjoy your life.

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