First time I had read the Bible
It had stroke me as unwitty
I think it may started rumor
That the Lord ain't got no humor Put me inside SSC
Let's test superstring theory
Oh yoi yoi accelerate the protons
stir it twice and then just add me, 'cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling From the maelstrom of the knowledge
Into the labyrinth of doubt
Frozed underground ocean
melting - nuking on my mind Yes give me Everything Theory
Without Nazi uniformity
My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice, it's instant family! I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice dlja prekrastnih dam... Do you have sex maniacs
Or schizophrenics
Or astrophysicists in your family
Was my grandma anti anti
Was my grandpa bounty bounty
Hek-o-hek-o-hej-o
They ask me in embassy! 'Cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling And my grandma she was anti!
And my grandpa he was bounty!
And stir it twice
And then just add me!
Partypartypartypartypartyparty
now afterparty...

That's the Supertheory of Supereverything, by the gypsy-punk Gogol Bordello. I was really surprised to find their Super Taranta! at a local music shop. Of course, five minutes later, we were heading home with our shiny and oh-so-very-green purchase. Highly recommendable!BTW, does anybody else think that Eugene Hutz is Larry Wall's evil twin? (No, and I don't only mean it because of their choices in background colors)

I have seen the "right tool for the job" comment one too many times, and felt like writing something about it. Real tools are pretty simple, really. Things like saws and hammers have been around for thousands of years, and don't require a great deal of thinking to understand. Some people are masters with hand tools and create wonderful works of art with them, but the tools themselves are not complex. My programming language, Hecl, is a pretty simple one in a lot of ways (it has to be, to fit on cell phones), and at last count, the core has 7670 lines in a rough count that includes comments. That entails quite a few "moving parts" compared to even something like an electric drill. Programming languages are complex. Certainly to create, but even to use well; to understand the nooks and crannies and ramifications of the language's design is not something that is accomplished in a few days for most people. Your average programmer really doesn't know all that many languages, and even those who know many probably don't use most of them on a day to day basis. I like learning new languages, yet still wouldn't relish the idea of going through the mental task-switch required to move between too many in one day. What this means, is that when there is a job to be done, most programmers will reach for what they already know, rather than the best possible system, and that makes sense. If you know Python, why not write web software in Python, if you get asked to create something for the web? Or if you know Tcl because you create gui's with Tk, you're still likely to pick it when you need to create a little server. There are reasons why something like Erlang might make for a better server platform than Tcl, but is it that much better to justify dropping everything, learning a new language, committing to a new set of infrastructure requirements, and adding another thing to ask of people joining your organization? Most likely, it is not, unless the server you're writing is for a telephony switch that has to be on all the time, in which case, yes, maybe you do need Erlang. If, as is often the case, it wasn't something that had to be the best in the world, all that extra time to learn a new language would have been mostly "wasted" (ignoring, of course, the fact that for individuals, learning new things is almost always good, but that's not what we're talking about). Even the smart folks who hack away in languages like Haskell are fond of using what it has to offer, rather than jumping ship to something else at the first hint of the "something else" being better at their language of choice for a given task. So both Tcl and Erlang were up to the task of creating a little server. You could have used Ruby or Python as well. Java might prove a bit more verbose, but it's certainly up to the task. Any number of languages would be, of course. So it's not like there is a "right tool" and a "wrong tool". Maybe a better analogy is languages are like toolboxes, or even whole workshops, full of tools. Most of them have most of the common tools like hammers and saws, some sort of web libraries or the means to create tcp/ip servers. Where they differ is in things like the amount of tools available, the specialized tools that you get for free, the craftsmanship and ease of use of the tools in the hands of both experts and beginners... or in some cases (lisp, say), some fancy tools and supplies that make it possible to build yourself some new tools if you need to (that only you know how to use, but that's another topic). Some sets of tools really aren't very good for some jobs - you don't want to build blazing fast 3-d shooter games in PHP, just as you wouldn't want to use a regular set of screwdrivers on a delicate watch. However, even though you'd want to use a toolset that also has some specialized tools for working on the watch, you'd rather own a toolbox that came with the watch tools as well as the regular Phillips screwdrivers, because those are pretty handy around the house, and it wouldn't do to have only the watch tools for fixing common household items. The point being, languages are big investments, so those that do more, even if they're not the absolute greatest or first choice for a given task, are generally going to be more useful to more people, especially those just starting out who want a "safe" choice, a language they know will let them do a variety of things, rather than only one or two things (pound nails, say) really well.

So much for the idea that you can buy anything you like online, whenever you want. My laptop's screen has been acting dicky lately, and research suggests the most likely candidate is the backlight inverter. Luckily, there's online guides that show me (with pictures!) how to get at that and get the FRU number off it. Easy so far. Now I just need to find a new one. $SEARCH_ENGINE to the rescue. Plug in the FRU number and up come pages and pages of results. Oh goody, I should have no trouble here. Except that, when I visit this myriad of sites, there's a lot of similarity in pricing and content (not the look of the sites -- no, they're all completely different -- just the prices and textual descriptions). I've only managed to identify four separate stores, from visiting a good couple of dozen search results:

• One which sells the part I want for $35, but will charge me $79 to get it to Australia;
• One which sells the part I want for $59, but won't ship outside the US;
• One which sells the part I want for $24.70, but will ship outside the US only via some "ship to a US address and we'll resend it for you" service which is certain to (a) cost a fortune, and (b) take aeons to get the part to me;
• One which sells the part I want for $10, but which is otherwise running a completely stock Yahoo store interface (complete with "Site content copyright © Your Company Name Here" in the footer, and "put your shipping terms and conditions here" in the FAQ).

My choices, then, are: extortion, impossibility, slow extortion, or probable scam artist. What a set of choices. So, I've come to the conclusion that e-commerce is a complete and utter joke unless you're in the US. So much for the global market and all that bollocks. Back to shopping the old-fashioned way for me.

I ask myself again and again: why it is always a challenge using a laptop with a beamer? It is not rocket science, but I always find problems due to lack of sync with certain beamers and certain laptops combinations. If you are lucky, you can see an image, but probably some parts of the screen (and of your slides) are invisible. It happens also under Windows, but it happens too many times under Linux.
Lately, I'm finding difficult to use my Thinkpad X31 under that respect, even if I always managed to use it without great issues until some months ago. Does it need a macumba before use?

And hopefully my last :-)

I've decided I'll stay with awesome and not go back to ion3. True, it doesn't fully support xrandr, but so does ion. And it's on the roadmap for awesome 2.1, so I figured I will probably switch between two screens and only one maybe ten times or so, until the feature is there. And, adding and removing screens is a PITA with ion as well.

The second missing feature is a panel or the ability to run docker, but then, I only use this to run nm-applet. My current workaround is to run xfce4-panel in tab9 and run nm-applet there. Looks a bit ugly, but hey, it's tab9, I don't care (for the time being).

Besides those two issues I'm really happy. It's fast, it's slick, it doesn't get in the way, floating mode rocks, switching between modes rocks, the default keyboard shortcuts make sense and I use the mouse less often. Plus the author is a nice fellow. And by now it even got documentation!

Oh, another issue: The cat is gone. That's totally unacceptable. Therefore I propose to fork awesome and bring back the cat and call the fork TWMFKAA ;-)

Specifically, Wifi. Connecting an ipw2200 to a rt2400 in ad hoc mode turns out to only work with 40 bit WEP or unencrypted, and then only with bit rates that remind me of analog modems (as I write this over an assh connection, the cursor lags several characters. Nominally, the connection is 11Mbps, but as soon as there's a bit of traffic, it drops to 5.5Mbps, and the actual data transferred is always at the 4kBps level. Hmm. Fun, now the WiFi suddenly decided to drop to 2Mbps, and it seems that I actually have 2Mbps, so probably I should hardwire it at this setting. Of course I didn't expect the rt2400 to magically acquire WPA capabilities, but I'd at least expect the specified stuff to work... This is not bleeding edge hardware, after all, so even the Linux drivers should have had time to mature. (OTOH WEP is b0rken regardless of the bit strength, so I should replace that rt2400 stuff anyway.)

The mail client that made me realise there were worse options than Outlook was Notes. The operating system that's making me realise there are worse options than Windows is AIX. What are IBM on? In particular, please tell me how I can list all the SCSI devices connected to an AIX box, including those that AIX is refusing to talk to. Or, ideally, tell me how to get AIX to bitch about SCSI devices it finds but can't talk to. Solaris manages a useful (if cryptic) error message. Windows manages to have a way to list devices, once you realise it can't cope with luns beyond 254. Linux has the lovely sg interface. AIX just has bloody silence.

So I run a blog. You might have read bits of it in passing, probably more due to syndication than actual desire. Initially I started off using Wordpress, but that was later purged once I bit the bullet and decided I'd rather be blogless than install PHP upon any server I cared about. To replace my blog I looked for different solutions and eventually decided to try something built upon Ruby (on Rails). That lead to me trying Typo. After a little bit of pain I decided this wasn't a great solution. So in the hunt for something new I moved to Mephisto, but over the past few months I've noticed that my virtual machine has been running low on memory - and the culprit has always been the Mongrel isntance which was running the blog. So once more into the breach. This time I had a new plan. I'd actually use a piece of blog software which I wrote for a couple more sites, a static system which outputs RSS & HTML files - with no dynamic-fu at all. That system is the chronicle blog compiler. In performing the migration I accidentally flooded a couple of Planet-Planet installations. It took me a moment to work out why, and that was because my RSS feeds didn't include valid "pubDate" files for the entries.. So now I've made a new release of chronicle which supports valid RSS feeds, as tested against the feed validator and all is well. Well almost. Users no longer have access to post comments, and whilst I've successfully migrated 700+ entries through to four different blogging engines I've managed to lost most (all) comments along the way at different points in time which is a real shame. In the future I'll setup a simple CGI system to write comments to text files, and then allow them to rsync'd and merged into the entries. I just don't have the concentration to manage that right now. In the meantime hello to Planet Sysadmin - never heard of you before, but thanks for carrying my feed. I'm suprised I qualify, but I guess at the very least I'm spreading interesting lyrics... (Remind me to post the mod_rewrite rules I'm using now; I've kept all links at the same location through successive blog migrations which means I have numerous mod_rewrite rules which are probably obsolete, but I just don't want to touch them because cool URIs don't change....)

A while back, I needed to do something with a mainboard made by Intel. The mainboard doesn't have a PS/2 connector; so I had to use a USB keyboard. In itself, this is horrible; USB is an incredibly bad interface to connect a keyboard to, IMO. But, well, sometimes the decision isn't yours, you know. Bad Intel. Given my above-stated opinion on USB, I guess it's not surprising that I don't have a USB keyboard; I don't believe in them. But, well, a mainboard without a PS/2 connector doesn't suddenly get one because I look at it, so I went to a nearby computer shop with the intention to buy me a keyboard. While it's bad enough that I had to get me a USB keyboard, they managed to make things worse. The particular model that I'd bought is broken in ... well, let me count the ways.

1. Blue LEDs are annoying. Yes, a keyboard needs LEDs to show that num lock (etc) are enabled, but a yellow LED works too, and is far less flashy or distracting.
2. A "Fn" key is nice if you want to overload keys on your keyboard. However, if there is not a single key on your keyboard that is overloaded using the Fn key, then you're silly.
3. The particular model used a "condensed" layout, rather than the standard 105-key be azerty layout. I'm used to the standard 105-key keyboard layout, and having to type on one that is different is no fun. When I mentioned this to the salesguy, he told me that I'd "get used to this pretty quickly". Well, perhaps if that were my only keyboard. But I also have my home desktop (standard 105-key layout), my laptop (apple azerty laptop layout), some m68k macs (mac azerty 105-key layout), and some more; then, it doesn't get so easy.
4. They keys on the keyboard were flat as on a laptop keyboard, rather than thick as on a desktop. This makes it harder to disassemble when it gets dirty, with the risk of breaking it (I've had to have my laptop's keyboard replaced when I broke it by disassembling it because the keys started to get stuck and I wanted to clean it...)

Now obviously it's possible to fix most of these issues by simply buying a decent keyboard—except that the shops that I went to simply don't have a decent keyboard anymore these days. At least this one still had 105 keys; for reasons that totally escape me, some keyboard manufacturers today seem to think it's a good idea to drop the insert key on their keyboards. WTF? People just don't make decent quality keyboards anymore these days... Bad hardware manufacturers. Bad, bad, bad!

awesome 2.0 just released. Great. Someone on #awesome pointed me to a post of Don Stewart comparing the rise of the new tiled window managers. This is quite encouraging, and I hope awesome will grow more with the next releases!

HAL Sleep Quirks is definitely good site for people having problem with suspend/hibernation in Linux. However I would like to find there one very special quirk: how to stop Gnome Power Manager (or whoever is responsible for this) thing that my suspend failed! It works without problems (and worked since I have this notebook), but I always get the popup that it failed. I know I can disable the popup, but there must be way to force this beast understand that suspend works for me :-).

I'm back (again) but I'm not feeling 100% well (again). I'll write about the various events I attended and share the pictures as soon as I get bluetooth file transfer working (is that obex?) but here are some sites I commented on recently:

When is it going to be the norm for JavaScript?

Never, I hope.

Down with the Press Release!!

I wonder if I didn't like this because open letters aren't very common here.

Print before you think! - Atomo64's Blog - by Raphael

Reposting the old psnup -2 trick... works in Mozilla-based browsers, at least

How Old Are ProBlogger Readers? Poll Results

I whinge about ProBlogger's misuse of bar charts again...

How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging?

and again... guess I should stop doing that. But histograms ROCK. Excuse me - I'm still ill...

blog.aksw.org Blog Archive Open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org

I've seen a couple of these cooperative free software funding ideas recently. Here's one...

Information Unlimited A proposal for user-driven commercial free software development.

and here's another...

gmane.org.fsf.europe.discussion

and here's a little background on the first.

Sustaining Alternative Media - Bristol Indymedia to Bristol Social Forum

It's just too damn awkward to contribute to BIMC.

Miriam Ruiz: Journalists avoiding writing about Free Software?

Since when have journalists avoided writing about stuff because of criticism? Sounds like an excuse to me.

Issues Forums in the UK, Meet Tim Erickson in November at London E-Democracy 07 Conference E-Democracy.Org - Project Blog

I did meet Tim. Which was nice.

Labour: Queen's Speech - full statement

I saw this site advertised on TV after the speech, visited it, asked a question. No answer. 'nuff said. I asked a question on another page and it was deleted unanswered. Control freakery at its best.

ConservativeHome's ToryDiary: Cameron takes Tory message of social justice to Labour heartlands

My question about the surprising Conservative Cooperative Movement announcement. No answer. Are all the political parties similar? Do any of them have any answers?

BBC Internet Blog - Linux Figures

Part one of the reaction of the BBC director who thought they only have 600 Linux users.

BBC Internet Blog - Open Standards

Part two of the reaction "The BBC is committed to open standards [...] wherever possible" - yeah, tell that to their satellite system and the Ceefax-killers! (Warning: may contain Andrew Suffield...)

BBC Internet Blog - Operating System Figures

Part three - explains just how their analysis system got the numbers so horrendously wrong. "All of the BBC's regular reporting mechanisms use the User Agent string" - D'oh!

Debian Admin

It looks like the fine DebianAdmin.com site is at it agian:

• how to setup cisco router enable pasword
• Original source: Cisco Certifided Network Associate Study Guide : 3rd Edition

Word-for-word copyright infringement by the user "admin". See the other cisco articles for more infringements. (OK I'm still bitter their site is pimped all over the place, including wiki.debian.org, and their name is confusingly similar to my sites...)

Apache SQL

After yesterdays frustrations with SQL::YASP I moved to parsing logfiles to an temporary SQLite database. I now have a tool which you may use to load an arbitary number of Apache logfiles to, and query via SQL. It looks something like this:

asql> load /var/log/apache2/acc*
Creating tables
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log.1
asql>   SELECT referer,COUNT(referer) AS number from logs GROUP BY referer ORDER BY number DESC,referer
- 4807
http://localhost/stats/ 2
http://foo.ocm/stats/ 2
asql>

Very useful :) A Debian package is available if you're interested in testing / using it, as is a mercurial repository. The package now stands at 0.4 and is essentially done. It has tab completion on filenames and does enough for me. It might be nice to allow it to auto-read certain files on startup, or persist the database but I'll not bother unless people ask for it.

Debian Admin

It looks like the fine DebianAdmin.com site is at it agian:

• how to setup cisco router enable pasword
• Original source: Cisco Certifided Network Associate Study Guide : 3rd Edition

Word-for-word copyright infringement by the user "admin". See the other cisco articles for more infringements. (OK I'm still bitter their site is pimped all over the place, including wiki.debian.org, and their name is confusingly similar to my sites...)

Apache SQL

After yesterdays frustrations with SQL::YASP I moved to parsing logfiles to an temporary SQLite database. I now have a tool which you may use to load an arbitary number of Apache logfiles to, and query via SQL. It looks something like this:

asql> load /var/log/apache2/acc*
Creating tables
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log
Loading: /var/log/apache2/access.log.1
asql>   SELECT referer,COUNT(referer) AS number from logs GROUP BY referer ORDER BY number DESC,referer
- 4807
http://localhost/stats/ 2
http://foo.ocm/stats/ 2
asql>

Very useful :) A Debian package is available if you're interested in testing / using it, as is a mercurial repository. The package now stands at 0.4 and is essentially done. It has tab completion on filenames and does enough for me. It might be nice to allow it to auto-read certain files on startup, or persist the database but I'll not bother unless people ask for it.

It seems that -- again -- I've managed to catch something nasty on the way back (probably I should only check in my coat if I know that it won't take long until boarding). So, two days later than anticipated, I am officially back and working. I have yet to clear the autobuilder backlog of the last three days (these ARM boxes are blazing fast these days; and a lot of packages failed due to GNOME being uninstallable) and also catch up with the real world (I turn off my phone when I have a migraine attack, keeping a log of calls but this time there's just a batch of unknown numbers with some calls having dropped off the list already -- please send emails instead of calling if it is important, there is a reason why I don't use my phone for business). In other news, this posting needs paragraphs.

* Flickr pics says whole story. Foss.in == Fun! I learned a lot while managing Debian/Ubuntu stall. Next year we will have more better stall and representation from community. Debian Tshirts were given to 3 nice people (Thanks - Prasad, Amod and Anivar) who maintain stall during my mysterious gaps. Sorry to Cydork - yeah, size does matter! * Thanks to team at foss.in, You people rocks (always)! * Finally, back /home (as usual, flight was delayed). Kavin is crawling much intelligent way and demands things (he want to chew everything..). So, time to alert!

Some time ago, I had explained why I thought would never use network-manager, especially because of the gnome-keyring password which should be typed in at every new session. The last evolution-data-server upload introduced a gnome-keyring binding which forced me to inquire again on how to avoid this annoying gnome-keyring password. This led to the libpam-gnome-keyring which allows the keyring to be unlocked automatically at login from the display manager. This is great! I am now using network-manager on my laptop! I am still puzzled about the fact that there is no network connection until someone logs in, but I guess I will live with this, especially with a desktop machine.

Chris Messina wrote an interesting post on his blog about his OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist for 2008. (I'm going to briefly try to remember if using the word "shit" is cause for alarm on Planet Debian, and then I'm going to ignore the problem and move on.) I think it's a good post and it really identifies some of the key players that are helping and failing in the OpenID space. I got a shout-out for Wikitravel and for the MediaWiki OpenID extension, which yay for me. I think Chris was probably a little unfair about Wikimedia's lack of support. The site is moving very slowly towards a unified login for all its wikis, which is a really difficult task to make happen. OpenID is slated for installation some time after that, so it's going to be a while. But I hope that it will be useful for Wikipedians. My main impression from this blog post, however, is that OpenID's day in the sun might be over. That's not a bad thing -- usually the hard work gets done after the cameras are turned off. Zealots like myself tend to think that if only the world knew about our latest-greatest idea or technology, they'd fall right into line and adopt it immediately. But my experience has been that things work a lot slower than that, and I'd guess that OpenID is probably going to have a similar adoption curve. In thinking about opening up the Social Web, it's probably good to compare the opening of the Web Web in the mid-1990s. At the time, most Americans who were "online" were subscribed to a proprietary network like AOL, Compuserve, Delphi or MSN. (I'm not sure how things were in the rest of the world... Similar? Worse?) Many of these services either walled their users from the Internet entirely, or made it a one-way interaction. AOLers could read stuff from the rest of the Web, for example, but others couldn't see what AOL folks were doing. That system looked impenetrable; after all, AOL was paying millions of dollars to make great content and manage forums and the like, and why would they give that away to Internet leeches for free? But eventually it came apart because the Web became more interesting than the on-line services. (I personally think the watershed was the Ate my balls meme, but others might differ. I just kind of picture hundreds of thousands of AOLers calling up technical support asking to see the Mr. T pictures, and that's what finally broke things down.) Today, on-line service "walled gardens" are a negligible part of the on-line world -- those that still exist are more or less big ISPs. I think that the parallel with the Social Web is probably pretty apt. Today, Google, Facebook and Digg are reluctant to open up their identity silos to a distributed social Web. Their main asset today is their collection of identities and the relationships between them -- why give away the crown jewels? My guess is that it's not going to be until a mature, standardized and distributed Social Web exists outside the walls of the big social-networking players that we'll see them really willing to sit down at the table and come to the party. Of course, by that time, it'll be a moot point. But that just means there's a nice big fat market for somebody smart to take advantage of. tags: socialweb openid walledgardens

While I'm still running awesome as my window manager currently and though I do like it, I will switch back to ion on the next login. "Some XRandR support" is not yet enough... it crashes when I add or remove a screen.

Besides that, the only other thing missing is that I have not yet found out how to use

docker

sensibly. Hints welcome.

So overall: looks very promising, but not yet a feature complete replacement for me. But good things will come to those who wait :-)