Is there an existing system which will allow me to query Apache logfiles via an SQL string? (Without importing into a database first). I've found the perl library SQL::YASL - but that has a couple of omissions which mean it isn't ideal for my task:

• It doesn't understand DISTINCT
• It doesn't understand COUNT
• It doesn't understand SUM

Still it did allow me to write a simple shell which works nicely for simple cases:

SQL>LOAD /home/skx/hg/engaging/logs/access.log;
SQL>select path,size from requests where size > 10000;
path size 
/css/default.css 13813 
/js/prototype.js 71261 
/js/effects.js 37872 
/js/dragdrop.js 30645 
/js/controls.js 28980 
/js/slider.js 10403 
/view/messages 15447 
/view/messages 15447 
/recent/messages 25378 

It does mandate the use of a "WHERE" clause, but that was easily fixed with "WHERE 1=1". If I could just have support for count I could do near realtime interesting things... Then again maybe I should just log directly and not worry about it. I certainly don't want to create my own SQL engine .. it just seems that Perl doesn't have a suitable library already made which is a bit of a shocker!

... was a lot easier than expected. Just not very well documented.First of all, you need the appropriate utilities. Debian users can aptitude install libsmbios-bin Next identify your system. It will look something like this

$ sudo modprobe dcdbas
$ sudo getSystemId
Libsmbios:    0.13.10
System ID:    0x01D8
Service Tag:  ...REMOVED...
Express Service Code: ...although my warrany is over...
Product Name: MXC061
BIOS Version: A10
Vendor:       Dell Inc.
Is Dell:      1

The information you need is the "System ID".Now you need to get the so-called HDR file for your bios. This can either be extracted from their EXE file using wine (with -dump-hdr or so), or you can find it on the linux.dell.com server. This page contains a huge list, and there are tons of dirs like system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_0x01d8_version_a10. 0x1028 apparently is "Dell". The second hex number is your System ID. The last number (A10 here) is the BIOS revision. Pick the appropriate directory. There should be a bios.hdr file in there.You can verify if the file is appropriate for your system:

$ sudo dellBiosUpdate -f bios.hdr -t

And do the update by calling

$ sudo modprobe dell_rbu
$ sudo dellBiosUpdate -f bios.hdr -u

When rebooting the next time, your screen might be garbled for a few seconds. At least it was for me. I was scared I might have trashed my system, but then it rebooted and had the new BIOS. So just give it some time (Fortunately I've done enough BIOS updates to know to just wait. I've even done a 'blind' video BIOS update on a Nvidia TNT. The first update had trashed the card, but I was able to redo the flash process without seeing anything on the screen, and guess what, the card worked again!)In case you're wondering how this works: as I understand it, the dell_rbu driver will reserve memory for the BIOS update. Being a kernel module, it can just lock the memory in place until the next reboot. It will store that address in CMOS for the Bios and set the update flag. On reboot, the current Bios will check if that the stored image is still intact (I bet they do some checksumming here!) and then load that into the BIOS flash. That way, you don't need to boot into a low-level system such as Dos or Dos-Mode anymore to do an update.

Well the last few days I have updated many things in a lot of different areas, the most noticeable right away is I have updated my website theme, I’m still not 100% happy with it, link colors are a bit off and such but its “good enough” to go live, if your reading this via an RSS feed go check out my main page and drop me some feedback. ( if your really interested in the theme and want it for your own website you can grab it at http://www.imbrandon.com/misc/human_0.5.tar.gz
I’ve released it under GPLv2 , its not perfect but its exactly what I’m running as of this writing. ) The next thing is I changed ISP from Comcast Cable ( ugh ) to Yahoo! Branded AT&T 6M/768k DSL, not only is this faster and cheaper than my old connection, it has the nice side effect of giving me a flickr Pro account free* ( *included in the connection price somehow I’m sure ), that brings us to the next change … I’ve started using my flickr pro account and am loving it, with things like the fuse filesystem FlickrFS and kFlickr makes using flickr easy and painless. Along with that there is this awesome GPL wordpress plugin FAlbum that lets me integrate my Flickr sets into a photoalbum on wordpress very simply and looks great too. Visit my new web album here http://www.imbrandon.com/images/ ( I’ve uploaded just over 100 photos to get it started, I still need to tag and sort most of them ) And last but not least on top of my Ubuntu Core Developer Status, I’ve finally got in contact with a “full-time” sponsor for my contributions in Debian, this will make my application for NM alot smoother with an Advocate ( when I get around to filling out the NM form, LOL ), wish me luck.

Today I went for the second time[1] to emag's service[2] to have my laptop's[*] battery replaced since it was powering the laptop only for 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes. This after only 11 months since I bought the laptop[**].

I didn't observed this drastic reduction until recently (last time I remember was about 1 hour and 50 minutes, back in August), because I wasn't so mobile since August.

To make the long story short, I had to: wait, wait, argue, wait, argue, talk normally to the manager, wait, wait, argue, argue, observe sheer contempt from the personal when I asked again for the manager, talked normally to the manager, left after 4-5 hours wasted (+2 yesterday).

All this just to be able to keep my data safe by holding on to my hard disk, since they insisted they wanted the whole laptop[3], and making them write on the warranty receipt they were the ones who pulled out the HDD (I might be over-cautious/paranoid, but I wouldn't trust emag with the garbage bin).


Now I am on a forced vacation away from Debian for an undefined time, although I might be able to send mails and do make small patches from work.


Hey, emag:

• teach your employees to behave properly like the manager did! (I don't remember her name, sorry, I'm really bad with names)
• you'd better redirect clients with broken hardware to the actual services instead of acting like a useless buffer when is clear you're over your heads
• simple and obvious defects like it was in my case (I could have proven it in exactly 15 minutes) should be handled with minimum impact for the client, for example, keep the faulty battery, but let me take home the laptop
  

[*] Dell Inspiron 6400 / E1505
[**] when I think the long battery time was one of the most important points, it looks ridiculous now to have such a bad degradation in such a short time

[1] first was yesterday, but due to some support person's incompetence I had to postpone - I asked two questions, they gave me two wrong answers
[2] after all this I wouldn't recommend emag to anyone
[3] You might ask why would they need the whole laptop for a clear 'battery is broken' complaint? Apparently "the service can't test the batteries without the laptop". They probably have neither any spare laptops nor dedicated equipment to measure batteries.

As of late, I've shifted quite dramatically my sysadmining/development activities. On the development front, although Perl is still my mother tongue and I maintain many systems I wrote with it (and my main involvement in Debian is through the pkg-perl group, of course), I've been largely switching over to Ruby - both under the Rails framework and doing standalone stuff.But somehthing that's new to me (well, relatively - it has been observed I have been playing with the idea in and out for some more time) is entering this maze of twisty little passages, all alike called Drupal. What can I say? I'm quite surprised by it. It is such a reach CMS, and so twistable for almost-anything, that it still defeats me.I've been asked (ordered? pushed?) to propose a complete plan to replace my Institute's current static-and-butt-ugly-HTML site with something dynamic and manageable, so, of course, this last week has been an intensive Drupal crash-course for me.Drupal itself is quite complex, yes, and I thought I had it mostly mastered for the trivial tasks. But then, I started looking for some I-thought-quite-simple extra thingies - And I started discovering its user-contributed modules. I've been having quite a bit of fun with them, and as I hate messing up my clean and nice installation, I've even set up a Drupal5 modules APT repository for Etch, where I'm putting the modules as I process them.As I'm really not into PHP, and I still lack enough of the Drupal framework understanding to really step forward and become responsable for them, I'm not yet even suggesting packaging them for Debian - but a time might come where I upload them as well ;-)BTW, in case somebody is wandering about this Jaws-to-Drupal scripty I mentioned that other time: It basically works for blog entries (as you can see in my test site - barring some trivial latin1-UTF discrepancies). I have not yet migrated because I'm also trying to migrate my Phoo photo galleries to Acidfree albums... And it's quite a more challenging task than just migrating blog+comments. But soon, I hope - I have a bit more time than in the last weeks to be able to play with it. Anyway, here it is as it is.

My friend Hugh McGuire just launched a new Web site: earideas. It's a curated collection of the best podcasts on the Web -- kind of an interesting choice. Hugh's best known for the Librivox project -- a collaborative effort of thousands to make public-domain audio books freely available on the Web. He's also the leader of datalibre.ca and the co-founder of Collectik, the social sharing site for podcast enthusiasts. All of which is to say that he's a massive-collaboration kind of guy. So why the curated collection? Says Hugh, "It s built specifically so that you don t have to do anything much more than you do when you turn on a radio." In other words, they're finding the best stuff for you. I think the site makes a nice complement to Collectik. In any event: the gang at earideas has asked for lists of people's top 5 favorite podcasts. I'm still not very much into the podcasting thing; I don't have a portable digital music player, and I haven't found listening to music on my laptop or desktop really useful. But I do listen some of the time, so I figure I could give my suggestions.

1. Linuxcast by the personable and telegenic Don Marti. Great coverage of software and society in the Free world.
2. FLOSS Weekly. The "weekly" part is a bit of a stretch, but this is a very good interview show about Free/Libre/Open Source Software. I miss Chris DiBona as host, but Randall Schwartz is no slouch, either.
3. Destinyland. Destiny is perhaps one of the greatest pop culture researchers alive today. This very occasional podcast is just like having Destiny corner you at a party and talk for 90 minutes about the suspicious circumstances of Alfalfa's death. It's fascinating.
4. CBC Radio 3 Podcast. Yeah, it may make me terribly unhip, but I like Radio 3.
5. Radio Open Source. I want to hate this show for capitalizing on the name "open source" without actually providing any open content or talking about Free Software. But it's one of the best shows on the Web.

All right, that's my five. Good luck, Hugh and the rest of the gang at earideas.com. tags: earideas hughmcguire podcasts publicradio

Million-dollar idea So, I use a Logitech Trackman Marble for my desktop computer -- sometimes called the one true pointing device. I think it's awesome, and I've had it for maybe 10 years. The only downside is that every 6-8 weeks I have to pop off the cover and clean out all the finger oils, dust, hand hair and cookie crumbs that have amalgamated to a greasy, fuzzy crud inside. It may be one of the most disgusting things I do regularly -- and remember, I have a 2-year-old, so that's saying something. Anyways, here's my idea for a device, free for you to use. It's a self-cleaning trackball (or mouse). Just like a self-cleaning oven, every few weeks you'd click a special button on the device and it would heat itself to 800 F for about 90 minutes until the dang thing is just glowing white-hot and it vaporizes any crud that may be inside. Then, you can go about your business with a smooth, clean mouse (or trackball) again. Viola! I think the idea would work for keyboards, too, but I really rarely clean my keyboard. Filthy keyboards seem to work fine most of the time, and when they don't work well you can just throw them away and get a new one. But there's no accounting for taste and anyways people may want to buy a matching set of self-cleaning keyboard and mouse rather than just one or the other on its own. You, reader, can use this awesome million-dollar idea on your own, free of charge. Enjoy! tags: keyboard mouse trackball selfcleaning productrecall $1midea

I think that all Debian developers (including the brand new ones) will be delighted to learn that we not only have 4 indian DD's now, but we have an Indian DPL, at least according to his own words after a few beers. The first two days at FOSS.in have been quite busy. Sam's first talk ("Giving back to the community, how does Debian perform") was really interesting with ideas about a possible place where various distributions' patches to software could be collected and made available to upstream authors. I then had two talks in a row, which I feared a little but went pretty well. The first one was a brand new for me ("Contributing to Debian for dummies"). I tried to enforce the idea that contributing to Debian might be fun and opened to everybody, not only deep hard-core hackers (I funnily took my friend Andrew McMillan as example for hard-core hackers....). To make the talk less boring, I did choose to illustrate the various ideas I was explaining with photos taken from the various Debian-related events I attended last years. So, many of my Debian friends will recognize themselves on my talk slides. I hope you people won't mind being taken as examples (I should maybe have asked your authorization before....in case some of you want to sue me for using your public image). The other talk I has was a quite standard i18n talk. As I don't like doing the same talk over and over, I changed that one slightly to make it more suitable for the local audience, putting focus on localization for languages of India (even doing some of the "famous" bubulle-style maps especially for India). In case you aren't bored with that one, here's the link to slides. The next day features some other projects days. I will put focus on talks from the Indlinux project day. Indlinux is indeed an amazingly active project and the small room was entrely packed with people attending quite technical talks about Indic computing, Text-to-Speech, Indic languages spellchecking and such really specific topics. I also attended a very promozing talk by Dimitri Glezios, in the Fedora project day room, talking about Transifex, a very promising localisation material collecting platform with the interesting ability to be able to push translations back to thei respective upstreams, avoiding one of the major drawbacks of tools such as Rosetta. I'll have to come back on that one. Now for the Main Confeence days....that will be busy, too, for sure ! And I didn't even mention the awful Mozilla party we had yesterday night. Some people will remember that one.

One thing that's been interesting me lately is RSS. Yeah, I know, not exactly cutting-edge technology, but the format -- in its three different forms -- has become the default for machine-to-machine transfer of serial information on the Web. So RSS really represents our individual or collective presence on the Web spread across time, space, and theme. I'm particularly interested in RSS because I'm working on themed portals like Keiki. It's one of our goals to pull in the parenting part of a person's personality spread on other parts of the Web, so you don't have to re-enter it in Keiki if you don't want to. It's a fun problem to be solving. But as I was playing with the format, I realized that I'm spread pretty far across the Web, myself. I make most of my contributions to this blog, but I'm also part of other communities and a user of other services. What if I used some software like Planet to pull together the disparate threads of me into one place? So that's what I did. I ended up using a tool called Gregarius instead of Planet, mostly because I originally intended to install it on Godaddy's hosting service, which doesn't support cron jobs, which Planet needs. Once I realized how ad-infested GD's "free" hosting service is, though, I moved all my sites off of it, and back to Antipater. And my personal aggregator is there, too. It was interesting to pull in the accounts I've listed on About Me and see which ones produced RSS feeds. Some I expected (my Flickr feed, my del.icio.us feed) and others I didn't (my Upcoming feed surprised me). I was also surprised by sites that didn't produce a feed. I really expected something from Pownce and Tribe.net), but I couldn't get them to cough up a feed. Most disappointing was Facebook, which has a really nice mini-feed of my activity there that doesn't seem to translate into an RSS feed in any possible way. But otherwise things went very quick. I found Gregarius really easy to work with, although its inability to pull tag (metadata) and categories out of RSS streams. There's an autotagger plugin, but I haven't gotten it to catch any tags yet. Oh, and the OPML output was horrible -- I think it might generate HTML that looks like raw OPML -- totally useless. In any event, if you feel like cyberstalking me or just seeing what I'm doing around the rest of the Web, keep an eye on evanprodromou.info. There's even a handy aggregated RSS feed... just in case you want it. tags: rss identity aggregation gregarius feeds services

It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for over five years. And what is clear is that being an assistant professor is not all that conducive for blogging and this is materially evident in my sparse posting pattern over the last few months. It has been particularly bad in the last month thanks to a week long international trip, back-to-back sickness over Thanksgiving week, and finally going to Washington D.C. for the AAAs. But this retreat from blogging as well as teaching on so-called Web 2.0 software, like blogs, has made me rethink the value and limits of the craft of blogging and so I am going to take some time (that I feel like I don t really have, but oh-well..) to write them down as I am preparing a short piece for on the politics of Web 2.0 and I hope I can transfer some of these ideas there. So as I have already mentioned, I am an now infrequent blogger. Prior to the era of RSS, this could have meant the death of my blog because if people went to visit my page and there was no new post and then this happened a few more times, they would just stop visiting. The magic of RSS is that it brings the blog post to you and this alters the landscape of possibilities within the context of what has been nothing short of a seismic explosion of blogs. What I am finding and this will be no surprise to anyone is that it is just too difficult to keep up too many of a certain class of blogger the prolific poster who posts medium to long posts and worse, nearly everyday! To make a point about the effects of this, allow me to tell a story: Two blogs I really like are Joe Reagle’s blog on Open Communities as well as Tenured Radical. Both provide captivating posts but I recently unsubscribed to Radical Tenure and not Joe Reagle s. Why? My decision was purely pragmatic. Because she posts way too much, I just can t keep up. If I stop reading her blog for 2 weeks, and then pay a visit via bloglines, I am faced with a blogolanche and I am trying to avoid, at all costs, overwhelming situations. On the other hand, if I stop reading Joe s blog for 2 weeks, there may be one or two posts so I feel like I can spare the time to continue reading. Ironically, I will now visit Tenured Radical every month, much as I did prior to the RSS era, just to take a quick scan and see if there is anything I must read. There is another class of blogs, such as Sivacracy, that update their site frequently but the posts are tidy and short and so I can usually keep up and they provide important news for my projects. But the type of blog that provides longer ruminations has proliferated (and I really like reading those) but I suspect that as the blogosphere has expanded, less people can commit to those types of blogs. In other words, today, you may hang on to more readers, if you only blog 1 to 2 times a week instead of 3-5 weekly posts that are medium to long in length. Now I may be completely OFF the mark with this by generalizing my own experience so I would be interested in hearing people s experiences or better, if anyone could point me to someone who studies these types of pattern, I would really appreciate it. On a related note, last week I taught a now famous piece by Cass Sunstein on political balkanization on the Internet that is in part secured by blogging. His core argument, which I think stands to some degree, is that the blogosphere is less an arena where people with different inclinations and views meet to debate, and thus change their views, but is an arena where your pre-existing ideas are reinforced because you are simply reading and debating with people who hold your worldview. As I mentioned, I think this is true in so far as you don t see people on the left and right engaging in some debate that substantially transforms their ideas. But the argument is faulty or missing something crucial about the nature of politics, in so far as that the so called left or right or so called liberal and conservative positions are truly not unitary so that if different types of liberals/lefties are engaging with each other to change positions and ideas within that group, well then, the critical function of blogging is in fact well and alive. To state using an example, there are plenty of liberals who, in my opinion, could use a little radicalization and perhaps this is happening in the blogosphere because people come across a spectrum of ideas and positions from within their political pole. Finally and this point really is not mine but I am poaching it from Jeff Juris who made it last weekend at the AAA meeting during his presentation on activist videos. One of his findings was that activists were the only ones watching video s documenting protests when hosted on radical political sites like Indymedia. When they were placed on Youtube, the audience expanded considerably: conservatives were also watching them, but they effect was not to make their more sympathetic toward the left and their political points, but simply to reinforce their position, which is evident in the archived comments expressing their great distaste of the left. This is a perfect example of the Balkanization that Sunstein talks about but with an important reversal: it comes from confronting difference not avoiding it! But Jeff made the excellent point that there is a critical function in preaching to the choir: it ensures that the choir will not stop singing! That is, your political passions are not simply ensured, they must be renewed and given the massive amounts of apathy peppering our population, renewal by confronting what you believe in, is vital. So my advice is keep producing posts, keep reading even if it tends to be stuff you already believe in BUT please, post less. Less, I think, is really becoming the new more….

Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand was really a much bigger step. A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.

• We moved house to Castlerock. We knew this was likely for Katherine
  (she spent her first year at UU living in Portstewart and had been
  looking for somewhere new), but I didn't think I'd be moving back to NI
  just yet. Unfortunately we're still trying to sell the house in Norwich. :(

• Simon and I sold Black Cat. Really couldn't have predicted that this
  time last year.

• I got a new job with 3PAR in Belfast. I suppose
  that relates to the BCN sale, but if you'd asked me last year if I'd be
  looking for a new job, let alone have one, this year I'd have said no!

All in all I think I'm in a better place than I was last year. 5:30 starts are painful (it's 2 hours door to door with trains at 6am or 8am and nothing in between), but at least I get to come home to Katherine rather than an empty house, and it's nice to be working in an office again rather than on my own. We will eventually get the Castlerock house sorted (there are still lots of things in boxes, the TV isn't even hooked up, the wireless coverage is patchy in the study, the kitchen isn't quite finished yet, the living room is barely started yet, need I go on?). And I'm sure it'll stop raining for at least one day during the year. Please?

The people who think the default wiki.d.o theme is nice, should think again. Thanks to an anonymous reader I was pointed to http://browsershots.org and I looked at the wiki.debian.org default theme. Then I shrug.

This was after I made a few screen shots myself to prove that the default wiki.d.o theme looks like crap on MSIE or Opera even on a 1024px wide screen, not to mention 800px wide screen or smaller window be it of MSIE or Opera.

In case you think I have faked something, see for yourselves at http://browsershots.org/http://wiki.debian.org/ (the third request is for a 800px wide screen, so expect fun when is done uploading MSIE variants).

Like most things, the scale of decisions that have to be made by a person or organisation fall across a wide spectrum. At one end, you've got the fine-detail work: lines of code, individual config settings, IP addresses, that sort of thing. This is crucial work, because it's this detail that ultimately produces saleable results. Travelling all the way to the other end, there's the "big picture" decisions: the "visionary" stuff. What market segment will we target? What will we do (in large-scale terms) to get there? I am convinced that individuals naturally gravitate towards one end of this spectrum or the other, depending on their psychology. While people usually can work at all scales, they have a "most comfortable" point where they work the most naturally. The further away from this point they are pushed, the less comfortable and effective they are. No level of thinking is better or worse than the other; they're just different. While "large scale thinker" and "small scale thinker" could be taken as being insulting, I certainly don't mean it that way. I should point out that "Strategy" isn't (just) about setting goals. A strategist isn't someone who comes out with grand pronouncements like "By the end of next year this company should be providing telecommunications services to 20% of the Fortune 500" without knowing how to get there. That's not a strategist, that's a poor-quality management consultant. People whose only skill is making vague pronouncements should just be taken out and shot. They're not doing anything useful for anyone. A strategist is someone who is good at planning the goal of "20% of the Fortune 500". They're thinking about the big picture issues, without getting bogged down in the minutiae. A tactician, given the job of planning something at the macro scale, will chase some good idea down an intricately detailed rabbit hole, and miss the other dozen or so large issues that need to be considered. The strategist's planning needs to stop at a certain level and let other people take on the detail work. Conversely, a good tactician can focus on the individual details without getting distracted by the big picture. A strategist put into a tactical role will miss all the important minutiae because they're working out how their little part fits into the big picture, instead of working out how to make their little part work, in and of itself. It's important, for individual happiness, to try and work out what level you're most comfortable thinking at, and then trying to find a job that puts you there. It's almost as important to make sure that the people who are working at the more and less detail levels around you are equally comfortable. Take, for example, the micromanager. We've all either been there ourselves or have heard multiple stories on the subject. I think the micromanager is nothing more than a person who wants to work at a smaller scale than they're being forced to by their organisational rank. Since they can't do the detail work any more, their only outlet is working vicariously through their subordinates. Voila! Instant micromanagement. An even more painful case of micromanagement would be when the subordinate wants to think at a larger scale than the superior. In that case, the subordinate will naturally be thinking large scale, and will miss the details. To the small scale thinking superior, that is incompetence, and will naturally be dealt with by more micromanagement. In reality, both parties are incompetent at their jobs, and they should really swap roles, so that everyone is in their element. It would be nice if companies stopped thinking hierarchically in this way -- that a more "senior" person has to think at larger levels. Just because you've been somewhere longer (or have been working in an industry longer, or got higher marks, or whatever), it doesn't mean that you're more of a strategist. This is probably the Peter Principle restated: people get promoted to a level where they just can't comfortably think at the necessary scale any more. If instead people were put into a planning hierarchy based on their natural scale of thinking, we'd all be a lot better off. There'd be a lot less power games, though, which makes me think it's not going to happen any time soon. A business, at whatever size it might be, needs an appropriate mix of strategists and tacticians. A really small business (1-10 people) can get away without needing large scale thinkers, in the same way that a really small boat can get away without needing a rudder or pilot. If a really small boat gets itself into trouble, everyone on board can grab an oar or bucket and help get the boat out it's predicament -- it's small and nimble enough to be able to do that. As the company expands, though, it's important to make sure you've got some strategists around. If you don't have anyone to keep an eye out for problems and plan around them, your small-to-medium sized boat is likely to have a hole punched in it by a submerged rock. Even if somebody on board happens to notice the rock before you actually hit it, once you get to a certain size you can't physically stop or turn the boat in time. If you don't understand the growth issues in the company, you might not even realise that you're no longer the nimble and low-inertia dinghy until you're up to your knees in sea water. Although an obvious solution to this problem might be to say that all businesses should be small and nimble ones, it's as impractical as saying that all boats should be dinghies. A fleet of dinghies isn't going to be able to support the worldwide sea freight market, and a fleet of small companies doesn't have the necessary resources on hand to take on the big projects that are so often needed. Also, a dinghy is at risk of being swamped by one freak wave, while a larger ship can weather significant storms without going under. Regardless of the size of the business, there always needs to be a good supply of tacticians. A boat (of whatever size) full of people who are all looking out for rocks isn't going to go anywhere, because nobody's making the thing move. Similarly, a company full of strategists isn't going to be doing any of the day-to-day work that actually earns money, and no money means no company. The single most important thing, though, is be self-aware enough to know what sort of person you are, and try to find something that lets you work at the level you're most comfortable at. Otherwise you're just setting yourself up for unhappiness.

---

(I'm not really sure why I'm suddenly writing management blog posts; this idea of "levels of thinking" just came to me and I figured I'd put it out there. If it makes you feel more comfortable, there's a fairly transparent mapping of these ideas to the practice of software development, although I'll leave the execution of that mapping to the reader. Comments are welcome.)

From November 28 till December 2, 2007, I attended a Debian QA and release teams work session in Extremadura, which is an autonomous community of western Spain, that managed to install Debian on 90000 computers in every school (technically a Debian based distribution called gnuLinEx) and Junta de Extremadura also sponsored this meeting.

I took photos of all participants, see my first, second and third posts. When I arrived at the Madrid airport where we first met, I set myself a goal to remember all names and faces, so I used my blog to help me and I think I succeeded in the end. :)

See also our wiki page that we used prior and during the meeting.

So what did we do besides throwing candies?


Lucas Nussbaum will send a summary email soon about the meeting, so I'll just speak for myself:


I worked with Gon ri on svnbuildstat, that is a service for building packages and show statistics about lintian/linda/piuparts checks. It for example contains all packages of the Debian Python Modules Team (that I am a member of) and many others. We discussed and started to work on how to create robust buildbots, that can be installed as a regular Debian package with zero (if possible) configuration, so that many people can just install them without pain, thus providing a huge scalability to the project.

We wrote a preliminary patch to pbuilder for killing the build if it exceeds given memory/disk usage. I had to learn the internals of pbuilder and I lost quite some time squashing some stupid bug I caused while writing the patch.

I spent most of my time with svnbuildstat, mostly learning and discussing things. This will be important for the future, but to also have some real results, I also fixed some packages I comaintain:

Together with Kumar Appaiah we fixed the python-numpy package and I had it uploaded, then I learned how to work with quilt instead of dpatch to handle patches in Debian packages, thanks to Holger's webpage, that contains a nice tutorial. Then I switched from dpatch to quilt in python-scipy and backported a patch from upstream svn to fix a segfault bug and had the package uploaded.

Then I finished the Cython package and had it uploaded. Cython is a marvelous package to speed up Python programs and interface C/C++ programs. I greatly recommend to try. If you don't like it, you can try some of at least 10 other ways to wrap C code in Python. I also used quilt in there to backport a patch from the upstream Mercurial repository to implement parsing @classmethods. Quilt is really a pleasure to work with.

Impressions from the meeting

I've been using Debian since 2001 as my only operating system on all of my computers, so I am not a complete beginner. But it never occured to me I could get involved in Debian more than a user and an occasional bug reporter. What a mistake.

I started packaging new things and fixing packages that I need for my work and that didn't work. This got me involved quite a bit in Debian. But in M rida it was the first time I could dring a beer (well, especially wine) with Debian Developers and I found out they are really cool people. They are all very skilled. Also something, that I love about Debian, is that the people involved in it share two common features, that are very important for them - respect to democracy and personal freedom. When I think about it, those are probably the first two items on my presonal list of values.

Of course, everytime there is a group of 1000+ people, there are good and bad people, more and less skilled, but important is the overall atmosphere - and that is as I described. I think Debian is truly unique. There is Gentoo, that has maybe 40 (?) active developers. There is Ubuntu, that has maybe 100 (?) developers, but it's basically a comercial distribution and there is not so many interesting work for non employees of Canonical. There is opensuse and fedora, where I am not sure about the numbers. The atmosphere in Debian can change in the future, one never knows, but as of the end of 2007, I think it's very cool to get involved.

Maybe it's not for everyone, but it's the right place for me.

We spent the whole Friday hacking, Lucas will send a summary email soon. More people joined.

Ana Guerrero:


Amaya Rodrigo:


Mark Purcell:


Kilian Krause and C sar G mez Mart n


and Holger Levsen with red hair:


On Saturday we were again working and in the late afternoon we took a walk in M rida, visited the famous ancient Roman monuments. Now it's 3:30am and we will soon go to Madrid and back home.

I didn’t know about that movie. Funny. Will try to remember to use the poster in a databases course ;-)

I'm organizing a micro-coworking session here in Montreal for 6 December (15 Frimaire). "Micro-coworking session" is just a fancy way of saying "hanging out together and working at a caf ". Folks will be meeting in the back of Caff ArtJava from about 9AM to about 5PM. More info on the subStation Coworking event page on Upcoming. The event is for people interested/involved in (or supportive of) Station-C, the incipient Montreal coworking facility scheduled to open in February 2008. But everyone's welcome to come by -- heck, we'd have a hard time keeping you away. tag: coworking montreal microcoworking upcoming:event=350901 substation station-c

Private and public life in the age of Facebook One of the things I find interesting about life on the Internet is the distinction between public and private life. So much of our lives are on-line today; for many of us, the Web is where we make our living, make our friends, enjoy our social life, and plan our off-line activities. But what about those personal activities that don't jibe with our intended professional image? If we have out-of-the-mainstream political or religious views, or unorthodox social activities, how do we keep them to ourselves? How do you talk about things on-line with friends that maybe you don't want your parents or other family to know about -- or vice versa? How do we preserve our reputation in more than one sphere, in situations where those spheres are very different? I think there are a number of strategies for doing this.

1. Be discreet. In other words, just don't put personal stuff on the Web. Keep up your professional image at all times, and don't use Web sites or tools to make connections in more private ways. This is probably the safest strategy, and the one that most privacy groups and media recommend. But there are some downsides, too. You miss out on the Web's power to enhance your life as a well-rounded human being -- your personal life languishes for the benefit of your professional one. You give up on some important opportunities to connect with other human beings in a deep and meaningful way. Especially if your interests are shared by only a small percent of the human population, it's unlikely you'll run into other people who share them off-line. I also think there's something unhealthy about stifling your personal side for your professional life's benefit.
2. Use pseudonyms. Another way of being "discrete" -- here, I mean separated into different parts. I think this is one of the most common ways to deal with the problem. Use your "real name" for activities, groups, and opinions that you feel safe presenting to the world at large, and use made-up names or handles for activities you might not feel like discussing at a job interview. This can be very successful, but also nerve-wracking. What parts of life require a "secret identity", and what parts don't? What if one part of your life leaks into another? It can also be tedious to set up, say, two or three different Flickr accounts, two or three Facebook accounts, umpteen blogs, etc. Or, you keep a LinkedIn account for work and a MySpace one for your partying set, and hope that Google doesn't make a link between the two. But you can get sick of managing them, and other people don't know which name or pseudonym to use and when to "out" you to their other friends.
3. Integrate. By this I mean: let your personal and professional life grow together. Decide what parts of your personal life you're willing to make public, and bring them into your public persona. Parts of your life that you don't feel you can integrate, consider letting go of. I think this can be risky and difficult, but ultimately I think it's the most healthy psychologically for people who spend a lot of time on the Web. Most often, these people either work for themselves and don't have to answer to others, or they work in industries where offbeat or out-of-the-mainstream lifestyles are tolerated or encouraged (or the need for highly-skilled people makes those "quirks" easier to ignore). Or they just gamble that nobody at their work or in their family is really checking (quite often the case).
4. Wait for better software. I think the main reason that this is a problem is that social software developers aren't very good sociologists. Or, rather, we focus on the software rather than on the social. It would be nice to see the next generation of Web services support the multiple facets of a person's life. I'm an Open Source fanatic, a Web developer, a wikitista, an entrepreneur, a father, a Burner, a Montrealer, a man, a prankster, a partier and a cook -- among many other things. How can social software, or a federation of services, let me reflect these different aspects of my personality to my friends, coworkers, colleagues, relatives and strangers? Could I define finer-grained relationships with others than just "friend", and choose what parts of my life to feature or downplay with each? It's a fascinating design and implementation question, and my hope is that someone will take on the challenge in the future.

I think this is a situation where our society and our software both need to evolve and change. It would be nice -- very nice -- if edgy politics or weirdo culture didn't hurt your chances of advancing in your chosen field. And if friends, family and colleagues could accept us all for who we are, in all our parts. But it will also be nice if software and software usage patterns on the Web let us find a way to adapt to that, too. People have lots of different parts and lots of different personae that they inhabit at different times and in different contexts -- it would be great to match our social software more to that reality. tags: socialsoftware web privacy persona self

One-liners Some other things to note:

• Montr al has had an insane amount of snow in the last few days. I dug out our car for about 90 minutes this morning, and drove for hours in snow-blind traffic. Not an easy time, but boy the city is lovely like this.
• I'm doing a talk on extending MediaWiki at the PHP Qu bec meeting this Thursday, Dec 6. Meeting info is here.
• Pictures from Montreal Santarchy are available on Grimmwire's Santarchy Montreal 2007 set. Great group, fun crowd, loooooong night. Oh boy.
• Speaking of SantaCon, Santarchy in Second Life sounds totally nutso.
• My server overload problems seem to be getting better. I moved Vinismo to its own server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. I also moved SonaUiki and the Br leurs site to GoDaddy, where I have a ridiculous number of free Web hosting credits. It worked surprisingly well, and GoDaddy supports PmWiki out-of-the-box. Nice! Update: Apparently GoDaddy adds a whole bunch of ads in on their free Web hosting. I didn't notice; I have Adblock Plus installed. Gar. I'll have to move these sites back pronto.
• My light and convenient Toshiba Port g R200 has been throwing I/O errors. So I gotta get a new hard drive. Good news: the thing's still under warranty (yay!). Bad news: I gotta drive through this miserable weather to a place in St. L onard to get the HD replaced. Boo!

tags: montreal snow phpquebec mediawiki santarchy secondlife toshiba port g r200

New Gammu testing versions is out. This time there are no exciting new features, I still continue in bug fixing mode and cleaning up things. Full list of changes:

• Fixed detection of first free memory location if memory is empty (bug #434).
• Fixed mysql.h include path (bug #441).
• Fixed decoding of one char SMS (bug #442).
• Detect Nokia 3109c (thanks to David Meier).
• Automatically find MinGW compiler and allow overrides (bug #438).
• Fixed parsing of some memory entries (bug #450).
• Fixed decoding of some corner case SMS (bug #447).
• Phones capable of switching to OBEX mode from AT have it now automatically enabled. Please report problems with this.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/

I finally arrived in Bangalore. Unfortunately, alone, without suitcase, which Air India apparently managed to lose. So, it will be the first time I experience the happiness of people who don't get their luggage in an airport and have to live for a few days with nothing but the clothes they had on them while travelling. Running around in local shops to get socks or pants wasn't exactly what I planned to do here and I probably won't. So, I'll take the local stance and learn about patience, and wait. The place we're hosted at is *very* nice (B&B, probably with a few other speakers I haven't seen yet). And, it has a really good Internet connection so I feel pretty safe and can give news around. I'm currently waiting for Sam whose flight was apparently delayed (I hope *he* gets his suitcase).... I hope he won't be too much in trouble: we don't want to lose our DPL in India (maybe they want to keep him here, though).