• I've joined the Debian GNOME team and updated deskbar-applet to version 2.18.1. The new version has a del.icio.us handler, which is pretty cool.
• Pirates 3 is spectacular, but the scenario is way too complex. Who's siding with who, again? Dude, didn't you just die five minutes ago?
• There's a discussion about Emacs 22.1 Debian packages on emacs-devel.
• I'm not going to debconf.

tm suggested:

"delete the feeds you find yourself reading less and less frequently"

In general, maybe, but there are always exceptions, like feeds which rarely update but carry important information when they do. I guess I should scan my subscriptions to see if there are any extremely unupdated feeds. Update: tm clarified:

"I meant those feeds you've subscribed to, but find out you don't read so often, regardless of how often they're updated. for me, one of those is/was: http://feeds.howstuffworks.com/DailyStuff"

That's not so easy for me to tell. I read my subscriptions through a planet-like page, so they appear in the page flow whether or not I expand them or not. Matt Palmer replied:

"I've got to say that I've never had a problem commenting on Limes & Lycopene. I suspect that the problem you had with Alexis Sukrieh's blog was likely unrelated to SpamKarma2 (or if it was SK2, it was a dodgy deployment -- you don't sound too sure what the cause of his breakage was). On the other hand, if there is anything broken on a blog, the polite thing to do is to tell the owner about it -- it might not necessarily be a problem for everyone (although with SQL errors and things like that, it should be possible for the site owner to get error reports via e-mail, but how often do you reckon that gets done?). And yes, Captchas give me the faeces too. For L&L, at least, I know for a fact that any problems will get looked at and fixed up damn quick. Contact e-mail is on Kathryn's site."

I sent a pingback. No response yet. I'll try email if there's no response later.

"Oh, and a comment on your comment system -- the text entry box is tiny (6 lines by maybe 35 characters just isn't enough for a literate comment)."

My preference is for 40x20 but if I make it that big, I get feedback that it's too big. It's always a compromise. It's meant to be about 22x8 now, but what size should it be?

It's been a topsy-turvy week, but I'm finally getting my head above water again here at our new home. A lot has happened, which I'll try to capture here, but I'm not sure I can get it all. On Tuesday, Maj, Amita June and I spent the morning in Central Park in New York City. It was a beautiful day -- the rains had cleared overnight, and it was warm and crisp everywhere. We went to the big playground near Columbus Circle, which had about 1000 kids from 2 to 14 running in every direction, and a huge water spray fountain which meant that most of those kids were soaking wet. We went and grabbed lunch at the Whole Foods Market on the circle itself, and ate it out on the grass. AJ and Maj went back to the hotel for a nap, and I got a haircut for the awards ceremony that night. Then I had coffee with Tim Wu, creator of the concept of net neutrality and a writer for Slate. We had a great talk about net neutrality, the future of Wikitravel (Tim wrote a critical piece in Slate in April), and new projects we're both working on. It was really pretty fun. Unfortunately, I took too long talking to Tim, and not enough time buying myself a pair of pants for the awards ceremony. So by the time we were done, I was in a huge hurry. I ran down to the Old Navy on W 34th, picked a pair of black khakis off the shelf, and jammed in a cab to get back to our hotel room in time. Maj was done up to the nines, so I jumped in the shower, shaved, threw on my sport jacket and slacks, cut off all the tags with nail clippers, and ran out the door. The event itself was pretty incredible, and I don't want to flood this blog post with all of my comments and recollections. So I'll add a more detailed report later today. tags: newyorkcity maj amitajune travel wikitravel timwu wholefoods webbyawards webbies

Drive time Suffice it to say that we were out really, really late. We got up at 6AM the next morning to make our 8AM train back to Montreal, and it was clear to everyone (even Amita June) that if we tried to make this train it would be one of the worst days of our life. But there's only one train from NYC to Montreal per day, so we'd have to stay in town another night, and then have the same problem the next morning. So Maj canceled our Amtrak train tickets -- which were 100% refundable, even a couple of hours before the train leaves. Bravo, Amtrak! Then I got to work trying to rent us a car to drive home. It turns out that it's hard to get a rental car for a one-way trip from New York to Montreal. I tried Budget and Avis and National, and none of them would let me rent one-way into Canada. Annoyingly, none of their Web sites gave straight error messages on the subject -- I got "no cars available" or "unable to find your destination" (!) -- and I had to call the 1-800 numbers for each one in turn. I finally got a car from Hertz, on-line, and there was even a little note in my confirmation email to the effect of "ONE WAY TRAVEL CONFIRMED". I guess there's a reason that some companies get to be number one -- the more flexible you are, the more grateful your customers are going to be. I, for one, am planning to use Hertz in the future. I picked up the car at the W 55th Hertz office, and it took me 45 minutes to get back to our hotel at 7th and W 47th. The garage at Hertz goes onto W 54th, which is a "Thru Street" -- no turns allowed until you're halfway across town. And, it was bumper-to-bumper, of course. I finally gave up and made an illegal turn, and was promptly pulled over by a motorcycle cop. D'oh! Luckily, he let me off with a warning. Our trip out of New York was uneventful, but pleasant. It was a beautiful day, and the Catskills and Hudson Valley are a beautiful place to drive in the early summer. Deep, cool woods and bright green fields -- they're lush and fertile-looking. We stopped in Lake George for an early-afternoon dinner, and then had a pretty sunset drive through the Adirondacks up to the border. We got in late -- 10:30PM -- but it was overall a pretty good trip. And nice to have left at 2PM rather than 6AM. tags: rentalcar amtrak newyorkcity hertz

MANA Yesterday Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka stopped back through Montreal as they wended their way home to Lausanne?. We had a nice lunch at Zyng and then took a walk down av Mont-Royal, where a pedestrian fair is going on this week. They got off yesterday evening, which makes the last of our RoCoCoCamp visitors to leave. tags: mark allegra no ma anoushka

Pecha Kucha Montreal I'm very interested to hear via Boris and James that we'll be having a Pecha Kucha night here in Montreal. It's going to be on 14 Jun 2007 at 20:20h (8:20PM) at the SAT. Pecha Kucha is an unconference for designers (not necessarily Web designers). I think it sounds like a really interesting event, and I hope to go. tags: pecha kucha unconference montreal

Not so long ago, I blogged about my trials and tribulations with Blue Cross Blue Shield of NJ. I got a very interesting response that I will blog about later today or tomorrow, though I can’t say the outcome has been to my liking. While my problems with BCBS have not reached the status of truly horrific, I do think they are indicative of the how many insurance companies operate: with total lack of transparency and often, integrity (again more on this later). For those of you who have had horror stories, Michael Moore is now calling for collecting your horror stories as a consequence of the American health care system and health insurance companies. Do take the time to make a video if you have a story to tell.

Hi there! We are working away on preparing an infomail for DebConf7 attendees, which will cover the specifics of Hostel check-in times, what to bring, key arrangements, etc. etc. However, we could really use some figures on who might make use of the breakfast facilities offered by one of the two hostels, Budget Backpackers. BB offer an uncooked breakfast (cereal, toast, tea and coffee, etc.) at a rate of 2 GBP per morning, payable on the morning. They are keen to know who might be interested in this service in advance, so they can prep the kitchen if the numbers are huge. Both hostels have very good kitchen facilities and I’d expect that most people would be more inclined to group together and buy communal milk, cereal, etc. which is likely to work out cheaper too. If you are staying in Budget Backpackers (check here if you are not sure) and you think you will be using the breakfast service, please mail accommodation@debconf.org as soon as possible with the days you may be doing this so I can let the hostel know and they can ensure they are adequately prepared for the demand. Thank you!

What the World Eats

As I mentioned before, I'm getting quite harsh in unsubscribing from buggy feeds. I'm also being quite harsh in not subscribing to sites which have broken feedback systems like no comment box or email address, broken (rather than non-existant) trackback/pingback support, eyetests, or dumb tools like Spam Karma 2. Therefore, I'm not subscribing to Limes & Lycopene, recommended by Brane Dump: The Thoughts of Matt Palmer, because although it's an interesting site it has a broken feedback route, which makes it less attractive. It's more than a bit annoying to want to interact and then be blocked by a broken site. I still subscribe to about 100 sites, but that number will probably fall further. How do you decide what sites to drop?

Again I found myself wanting a pile of realistic vCards to test with, and decided to write a decent and extendable solution for once (instead of the hilarity of this). A while ago I discovered Barnum, which can generate pseudo-realistic data by containing large data sets of names, street addresses, zip codes and credit card numbers. I extended it a little, adding support for creating an email address from a given name (it looks weird when the contact's name is John Smith but the email is john.doe@bar.com) and generating birth dates, then wrote a tiny script to write valid vCards. Et voilà:

$ ./gen_vcard.py 
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
UID:barnum-1107705517
FN:Caleb Barone
N:Barone;Caleb;;;
BDAY:1955-05-06
EMAIL;TYPE=WORK:cbarone@blanditvelit.eu
X-JABBER;TYPE=HOME:cbarone@eratdolore.eu
ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;8270 Kahlden Lane;Thompson;CT;06277;USA
END:VCARD

If this is useful to anyone else, you'll want Barnum, my patched gen_data.py, and gen_vcard.py. NP: More Than Music, Murphin

Quite often I wonder whether not having Internet access would make me work more effectively. So I tried it out, resisting the urge to go on IRC, not reading email during a compile run, just focusing on the task at hand. Surely enough, after 10 minutes, I needed a piece of documentation I didn't have handy, and the whole project failed. This is probably the single advantage an IDE has over the "traditional" model: an integrated browser that only shows documentation and does not play flash games. Documentation is distracting enough as it is.

A few months ago I wrote a script to rebuild the archive using cowbuilder. This script had a subtle bug: If you where running a sid machine and wanted to rebuild testing, the script would fetch the sources from sid (via apt-get source) and build this package in a testing environment. Thanks to Gregor Herrmann (Currently unassigned NM with ~180 packages in the archive!) this bug is fixed now and it should be possible to rebuild the archive correctly for every host/build-environment combo. To rebuild the archive, just get the scripts and

sudo aptitude install cowdancer grep-dctrl
sudo cowbuilder --create --distribution lenny --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
./getlist lenny                  # get the list of packages
./buildall list.lenny.i386 lenny # build all packages in list.lenny.i386 in a lenny environment

Thanks Gregor for your patches and good luck with your NM process!

Via Hector:

Debian, Ubuntu and DCCA joint efforts for improving laptop support and for Linux kernel and X11 packaging on Debian -derivative software distributions.

This kind of group effort is precisely what makes the Free Software development model so great and, as this story demonstrates eloquently, it applies remarkably well to corporate software development, even among vendors that are competing for the same market segment. Awesome, isn't it?

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox? Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany. Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific. This must be fixed.

As I'm currently putting the finishing touches to "Project X", one remaining issue is ALSA support on the GX1 core inside the Geode SC2200. I'm just wondering if anybody out there implemented this already? Or perhaps someone would be willing to port AMD's old OSS driver to ALSA? PS: I am fully aware that AMD considers the SCx200 series as an end-of-line product. However, given the plethora of GX1-based hardware out there, having an ALSA driver for it would still be worth the effort.

In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France. 6nergies This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl... Xin c m n, ng Mai! I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations... Saaks mie puhuu suomee siin videoesittelyzz ? Eik ha? H ? The Food From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap! The Book Heaven France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French. Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura r ussi assimiler la langue de Moli re avant Debconf7? The People Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say? The Crossroad Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so... Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la r gion parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte exp rience de la gestion de produits bas s sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: le ons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak! The Paradox Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish). Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

I had the pleasant surprise to notice that Planner 0.14 was finally released last night, more than a year after development had stopped, this time under the direction of Kurt Maute. I packaged it this morning and uploaded it to Debian's repository. There's still 9 bugs remaining and help is welcome towards clarifying whether they still apply to this new release. Enjoy!

Via Free Software Magazine:

Dreaming about a free software competitor for Skype? Maybe your wait is over

And a very interesting alternative to Skype it indeed is! Developed as Free Software by a subsidiary of the French telecom operator Neuf Cegetel, WengoPhone comes as either a Firefox plug-in or as a QT-based standalone application. On top of the VoIP features, it also supports other popular chatting protocols, for a seamless integration of all one's Instant Messenging needs. Lovely! Now, when can we get a GTK2 version of that, messieurs?

I previously blogged about UTF-8 Migration Tool, a GTK2 wizard that helps users upgrade their legacy locale and recode text files to their UTF-8 equivalent. After merging a number of patches from Nicolas Fran ois to fix various parsing issues, I am now happy to report that the package has entered Debian's unstable distribution. Plenty of migration cases remain untested, though, and the Debian i18n team particularly welcomes testing for locales that utilize a non-default legacy encoding or that contain an @modifier part. If no major issue is found, the goal would be to release this package with Etch to help users migrate their system to UTF-8.

One funny thing about being a foreigner is the linguistic choices people make when communicating with me. Case in point: my new job at Artec. This being Estonia, there's a plethora of languages to choose from: Estonian, obviously, but also Russian, English and Finnish. Russian is possible because 30% of Estonians are ethnic Russians (or related Belorussians and Ukrainians) whose ancestors were relocated during Soviet times. Russian also remains strong as a language of trade, especially among the older generation, while English tends to replace it for the younger generation. Then, Finnish is widely spoken in Northern Estonia, because of Tallinn's proximity to Helsinki and despite Southern Estonian being linguistically closer to Finnish. People's choice, whenever discussing work-related matters with me, varies accordingly: some prefer to use English while, for others, Finnish comes naturally. Then there's a handful of older collegues who feel uneasy speaking either English or Finnish, so they address me in Estonian, placing special care on clearly articulating every word and on speaking at a slower pace than normal (to Finnish ears, Estonian essentially sounds like Finnish on fast-forward and with unusual choices of vocabulary). I have yet to see anyone try Russian with me, although a few people have noticed that I get the overall idea, just as long as they articulate clearly and speak slower than normal. Then again, our ethnic Russians are so well integrated that they speak Estonian all day long, even among themselves, and I have been able to observe the same pattern everywhere I've been in Estonia. From that perspective, I think that Russia's claims about "oppression of ethnic Russians in Estonia" are greatly exaggerated.

One aspect of Ubuntu that I really enjoy is the sheer amount of constructive feedback a maintainer gets about the usability of their packages. In my case, CUPS-PDF [1] [2] has been a landmark example of how beneficial this feedback can be: See, one long-standing goal at Ubuntu has been to include the capability to generate PDF documents "out of the box" and regardless of which Desktop Environment is used. Many people considered that CUPS-PDF would be an excellent tool, but various technical issues prevented this from working in a security-conscious way. Once that issue was taken care of, someone pondered how the PDF queue could be automatically created at installation time? It turns out that we're almost there: with the upload of version 2.4.6 into Debian today (which should propagate into Ubuntu within a few days), only one configuration step remains: the selection of a PPD driver. Everything else is automatically detected and configured by CUPS itself. Kudos to our friendly upstream, Volker, for implementing this driver magic in his back-end code! Enjoy!