Penny keeps me updated on New Zealand terrorism and it s depressing to hear about it: 18 people detained and tried as terrorists for peace activism, protesting against environmental issues, and fighting for M ori rights. I d like to help spread the word and hope that avaaz.org picks up this issue soon! If you would, please pass this on. NP: Stars: Set Yourself on Fire

Ever thought that there should be an automated way to handle ssh keys? Do you know the administrators of your servers, and wish that SSH could verify new host keys from them automatically, based on your personal connections to the web-of-trust? Do you wish you could revoke and/or rotate your old SSH authentication keys without having to log into every single machine you have an account on?Do you administer servers, and wish you could re-key them without sowing massive confusion among your users (or worse, encouraging bad security habits among them)? Do you wish you could grant access to your users by name, instead of by opaque string? Do you wish you could rapidly revoke access to a user (or compromised key) across a group of machines by disabling authentication for that user?A group of us have been working on a public key infrastructure for SSH. Monkeysphere makes use of the existing OpenPGP web-of-trust to fetch and cryptographically validate (and revoke!) keys. This works in both direction: authorized_keys and known_hosts are handled. Monkeysphere gives users and admins tools to deal with SSH keys by thinking about the people and machines to whom the keys belong, instead of requiring humans to do tedious (and error-prone) manual key verification.We have debian packages available which should install against lenny (for i386, amd64, powerpc, and arm architectures at the moment), a mailing list, and open ears for good questions, suggestions and criticism.If you have a chance to give it a try (as a user or as an admin), it would be great to get feedback.

I just commited to phpMyAdmin trunk (will be released once as 3.1) few small patches, but the change is quite important - phpMyAdmin will now default to cookie authentication method and it will not allow to login as root user without password (unless it is explicitly enabled in configuration). Reasons for both changes are simple - most people change default authentication to cookie in production environment anyway, so why not to make it default and giving remote access to freshly installed MySQL server has been always considered a bit security issue. Well it was an user problem, but why not to prevent such issues?

At the dayjob, we've been evaluating various OS options for a customer project. Without going into details, it involves installing embedded software on a ThinCan for a special usage case. The basic needs are simple: graphic environment to run a custom application (OS neutral), plus a few drivers for hardware attached to the ThinCan. That's it. Nothing to excited about. Comparing various team members' proposals to implement the OS base was the real shocker: no matter how optimized the software base and compiler options, no matter which build environment was used (Thin Station, Open Embedded, Gentoo, etc.), we couldn't get a performance that was remotely usable:

• Boot time goes well over a minute, which is way too slow.
• The graphic environment is sluggish, to say the least. True enough, distributions like Thin Station come with rather outdated versions of everything, but still... that slow?!
• Refactoring IceWM to provide clean 95-ish functionalities using current XDG standards would require a fair amount of work. By the time we'd be done, IceWM would probably gain a thick footprint like XFCE progressively did.

Then came the proposal from our team's lone Windows guy: XP Embedded. Booted in less than 10 seconds, has a graphical environment that is usable out of the box and integrating the customer's application was a breeze. Heck, the demo is practically a finished product already and took just a couple of hours to assemble! To make matters worse, the total we'd be paying in licensing fees, for all the Windows components we choose, would amount to far less than what it would cost to polish either of the Free Software -based proposals. Before anyone goes and puts on their asbestos suit, I'm already aware that the point of Free Software is to keep people employed and to make the community at large benefit from everyone's code improvements by contributing patches to upstream. Please keep in mind that, in contrast, business requirements are to get results at a reasonable cost, reasonably fast and to produce a well-polished product. The Free Software community has finally conquered the challenges of the desktop and was already on the server ages ago, but we ain't quite there yet on embedded devices, I'm afraid. While I personally refuse to run anything else than Ubuntu on my laptop, let's face it, in the above case, the savings in time=money were obvious and the resulting product quality, even at demo stage, spoke for itself. Thus, another Tux bit the dust.

I bumped into this while reading various things: http://beebole.com/blog/2008/09/02/web-application-on-erlang/ And was interested, because it fits nicely with a half-formed idea of my own: Erlang is never going to be a nice language for doing HTML templates, but getting JSON into and out of it is pretty easy, so it could potentially work very well where your application is divided between Javascript for all the template/rendering/frontend duties, and Erlang on the server, with something like Mnesia, Couchdb or Postgres as the data store. That sort of application wasn't really possible several years ago, but with the right target audience, you could probably get away with doing an app that requires Javascript to function these days.

I was today just too lazy to do much actual work, but I spend time on playing with something new - this time it was Google Chart API or better Python Google Chart module. I wanted to have some visualisation of growth of data in Gammu phone database for a long time and this module seemed to be good way to achieve good charts. After a bit of playing I got following chart: What we can see from it? Number of garbage grows very fast. Mostly it is caused by Wammu, which asks user for feedback after some time of active usage and this sometimes leads to duplicate records (but it also brings information which phones are really being used). The bad thing which is visible here is that mostly half of reports is about unsupported phones! I think we should do something about this as the reality is not really that bad and from my POV, most of failure reports are caused by wrong configuration being used. I know it is sometimes tricky to find working one especially when you use Nokia phone with cable, where exists simply too much possibilities. It's time to tweak up autodetection so that it can handle most of such cases (and recent HAL features to export capabilities of modem devices might also help in this area).

Yesterday I made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler. This fixes a bug in the handling of comments. Previously comments were sorted badly, when they crossed a month boundary. Now they are always sorted first to last - which makes reading entries with multiple comments more natural. Other than that I've been readying for the launch of a new MX machine for my mail filtering service. The process went pretty smoothly, and so I'm happy.Still have that paranoid feeling that something will break, but at the very least I'll hear about it quickly thanks to the SMS-alerts! ObMovie: Brief Encountery

When Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he probably didn t expect the rise of the cellphones we ve been seeing over the last 20 years. At first, there were C-net phone too huge to carry, but mobile still, as they communicated wireless. Then, devices became smaller, networks faster and ubiquitous, and today, the number of cellphones sold worldwide has exceeded the population. Much like everything else, it used to be better back then . When phone calls were still ridiculously expensive, people were able to enjoy their peace and life progressed slow for everyone to think enough, not do or say without engaging their brains. Then, when the first cellphones stuffed people s pockets, they did their job pretty much from the start: you could make phone calls. Some genius discovered SMS as a splendid tool to rip off customers, so phones grew pager abilities, but other than that, they just worked; I remember my first phone, which didn t break in years. Obviously, if you re a phone manufacturer, you don t like that, because once you sell a phone that works, the customer won t come back to give more monies in ten years. Clever as you are, you devised two schemes to ensure your cash flow: make phones more brittle and crap, so that they break within a year, at most two; and drag ever younger people into the debt trap. For the truly stupid, sites and services offer ring tones and games and what not, and the lesser challenged you keep close by the continuous addition of new features that noone needs. So these days, almost every phone can play music files, which is mighty convenient to spice up your work commute with some tunes, but our youngsters are overburdened by that, it seems. I almost soiled myself laughing at a group of five Italians at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, who were sitting around waiting for a bus, every one of them ear plugged and grooving to the beats (you know how dorky it looks when people silently sing along rap songs?). That s not the funny part. The funny part is that every minute, one of them would say something, which would cause the others to unplug one ear, and form their lips to bleat what (making sure to add just a little bit extra of the tone of general disinterest, which is cool ). This elicited one of two responses: either the original speaker would say oh, nothing and everyone nodded, or he d repeat his wisdom, causing everyone to laugh and nod before in both cases they replugged and returned to luff themselves. I wonder how they made it to the airport themselves, and why they travel as a group. Worse than that, however, is that cellphone manufacturers remembered that their phones had speakers (for fancy ringtones) and consequently added the ability to blast tunes through them. As a result, groups of kiddies walk around or sit in trains, with one (or more) of those cellphones blaring into the environment. Apart from being generally inconsiderate, what I don t understand is how they put up with the sound quality. It s mostly hip-hop music you know that genre that makes some homies out there install 5000 watt subwoofers into their cars so make sure the windows rattle with the base but these phones have a frequency spectrum comparable in width to that of your grandfather s, way further up the scale (meaning they just don t do base). Playing hip-hop through those is like putting a flute concerto on a subwoofer, just worse, because high-pitch tones are harder to filter by those who don t want to hear them. And yet, I see it all over the place, kiddies listening to music through cellphone speakers. Is it because silence would kill them? NP: 65daysofstatic: The Fall of Math

Back from Argentina, back from DebConf. As always, the ~3 weeks I spent there were really great, in as many fronts as I can imagine or describe. But I won't go into that now - For the purposes of this posting, the single thing that I got out of DebConf was looking with envy at all the people that had something that used to be called a sub-notebook some time ago, and now morphed into the more modern(?) name netbook.
Several people were seen with their tiny Asus Eee machines, of various models. And I definitively decided I want one - I was quite close to buying one in Argentina, as they are readily for sale there (surprisingly, in Mexico Asus sells motherboards, but no netbooks)... But I've always prefered waiting or paying a little premium for having an on-country seller and warranty.

Back home, Pooka told me that several stores in Mexico do sell the Acer Aspire One. After a little research, I decided to go for it. Office Depot sells the AAO for MX$4500 (around US$450). The only model they carry comes with Windows XP installed (instead of Linpus Linux), which is a shame I thoroughly repeated to the vendor - But it does come with 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD, much better for my needs than the other model, with 512MB RAM and 8GB SSD. This is, after all, a full (although very small) machine. It has an Intel Atom 270 CPU - I haven't yet measured how it fares, but it feels quite responsive so far for typical desktop tasks.
But what made me really happy about it is the Debian support. The only tricky part was to get the installer going, as it does not have a CD drive to boot from (and I didn't want to completely overwrite my only available USB stick's data). Don't try installing Debian Etch, as its kernel will not support the built-in Realtek RTL8101E network card (maybe etch-and-a-half's kernel does?). My greatest ally in this was, of course, the wiki.debian.org article on the Acer One - I rebooted with Lenny's debian-installer, and everything was smooth from that point on. Propietary firmware is required for the wireless AR5007 card and webcam, but -exactly as documented in the wiki- they are covered respectively by madwifi and linux-uvc.
I did a very regular install, with basically the default desktop and notebook setup. I continue to be amazed... Everything just works! It is not even fun, there are no funny drivers to recompile, no bang-your-head-against-the-wall... Even suspend-to-RAM. It just works.
The only glitch I found so far is that, after suspend-to-RAM, the madwifi module must be removed and reloaded to have wireless network. This is a well-known glitch that can be easily worked around. But besides that, it is... as easy as it gets. And, at such a price, and under 1Kg weight... This computer will get used to go out with me quite often! Battery life is just 2 hours, but for most situations, it's more than enough.

gksu-polkit gets pipe support One of the features I really wanted to get into gksu-policykit early was working correctly with pipes. With the current gksu you cannot do something such as echo blah gksu tr a-z A-Z. It is actually very hard to work correctly with input/output with su and sudo bellow. I do think it also has something to do with me not being too clever in UNIX file descriptors at the time I originally planned how gksu works. I did get an email from someone at Sun offering to write support for that who never mailed me again, but anyway… gksu-policykit is currently able to get all the input and output forwarded to/from the process by using an interface similar to glib’s g_spawn_async_with_pipes. Here’s what we are able to do already:

$ echo test string   ./gksu/gksu-polkit /usr/bin/tr a-z A-Z
TEST STRING
$

It’s impressive to me that all the input and output goes over DBus quite nicely.

A few weeks ago we released version 2.2.0, and now version 2.2.1 of DOMjudge, our programming contest jury system. I'm actually very satisfied with the 2.2 branch because it implements some important wishes that users of the system had, especially moving nearly all state into the one central database instead of spread over db, files and hosts. It is getting more and more complete on the functionality side. Our next target, 3.0, will focus on a different part: installing the system and getting it running is not quite trivial. The system has grown organically, and the current setup procedure tries to install everything at once, from building the judging environment, setting up the web interface to generating the documentation. We aim to pull that apart so it gets easier and the administrator keeps better oversight. But that's all for the next contest season. Meanwhile, the 2.2.x branch will be maintained for bugfixes at least until ultimo 2008.

Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is an agent for the Phone Co-op. Particularly with Free Software, cost-efficient ways of downloading data is a good companion service to have and the Phone Co-op has given a good ADSL and calls service to my own home and office for a few years now. When there are problems, they’ve worked pretty well to fix them. Just last week, I had a phone call to tell me when routing problems in LINX were fixed… which was a great help. I don’t remember an ISP doing that for me for years. I think the last one was my university’s dial-up service, 10 or more years ago. Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy [...] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case. Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for 7.95 a month (normally 9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies - if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look. The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, 25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi. Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.

After 11 years 1 month and 28 days it's time for me to farewall Catalyst IT. While this is something that I've been working towards for the last couple of years, my reasons for leaving don't reflect any large dissatisfaction with Catalyst, but rather my own disinterest in fulfillling a role which is deemed appropriate to an executive director of the company it has become. As well, it is Catalyst's current and continuing success which provides me with the opportunity to fade out, like the cheshire cat, without the need to have strong plans. I do believe that the use and understanding of free and open-source software in New Zealand has matured to a point where there is the potential for an independent to make a few dollars reviewing or planning for open source projects in corporate and government areas. I hope I'll find out. And a great big thank you to every one of you staff, clients, suppliers and friends who has made Catalyst such a fantastic place to be a part of. It really will be a hard act to follow. :-)

I was playing racquet ball with Kendall yesterday, and I was running backwards, towards the front wall to try and get behind the ball, and my right ankle rolled underneath me as I was putting my right foot down. There was a really nasty internal crunching sound, and it hurt like hell, so I thought that maybe I'd broken it. I was able to walk home from the Club, so I figured it wasn't broken, but the swelling was pretty bad. Several hours later at Urgent Care, they confirmed with an x-ray that it wasn't broken, so it's now strapped up and in an ankle brace. I have to keep off it for 10 days. I seem to have pretty bad ankles in terms of rolling. I quite often stop myself from stepping down on my foot when the ankle's rolled inwards slightly. Back in May I rolled my left ankle a bit, just crossing the street, and it's still sore.

One of my favorite things to watch are the “making of [movie, documentary etc] segments that are now routinely included in any DVD. It is nice to look behind the curtain and see exactly what choices are made, what is excluded, and why they are made. I wish that more books, especially academic ones, had a “making of” section, giving a window into these choices. We are not exactly encouraged to include this commentary in the book itself but one can find this type of insight in author interview. I recently read one such interview with the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The interview is on his site and the original is here. There are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting, such as how to treat iconic figures such as RMS and ESR [not as researchers, for example ] and the importance of letting your research and thinking brew over a fairly long period of time, despite the pressure of publishing fast, quick and dirty, which is especially strong with anything “digital.” The book is hefty and long, but as is emphasized in the interview, it is also pragmatic and readable. If folks on Planet have not yet checked it out and are not ready to commit to a long book, I would checkout Chapter 6 on the creation of the copyleft. It is sure to please academics and geeks alike.

I just read an interesting post about latency and how it affects web sites [1]. The post has some good ideas but unfortunately mixed information on some esoteric technologies such as infiniband that are not generally applicable with material that is of wide use (such as ping times). The post starts by describing the latency requirements of Amazon and stock broking companies. It’s obvious that stock brokers have a great desire to reduce latency, it’s also not surprising that Google and Amazon analyse the statistics of their operations and make changes to increase their results by a few percent. But it seems to be a widely held belief that personal web sites are exempt from such requirements. The purpose of creating content on a web site is to have people read it, if you can get an increase in traffic of a few percent by having a faster site and if those readers refer others then it seems likely to have the potential to significantly improve the result. Note that an increase in readership through a better experience is likely to be exponential, and an exponential increase of a few percent a year will eventually add up (an increase of 4% a year will double the traffic in 18 years). I have been considering hosting my blog somewhere else for a while. My blog is currently doing about 3G of traffic a month which averages out to just over 1KB/s, peaks will of course be a lot greater than that and the 512Kb/s of the Internet connection would probably be a limit even if it wasn’t for the other sites onn the same link. The link in question is being used for serving about 8G of web data per month and there is some mail server use which also takes bandwidth. So performance is often unpleasantly slow. For a small site such as mine the most relevant issues seem to be based around available bandwidth, swap space use (or the lack therof), disk IO (for when things don’t fit in cache) and available CPU power exceeding the requirements. For hosting in Australia (as I do right now) bandwidth is a problem. Internet connectivity is not cheap in any way and bandwidth is always limited. Also the latency of connections from Australia to other parts of the world often is not as good as desired (especially if using cheap hosting as I currently do). According to Webalizer only 3.14% of the people who access my blog are from Australia, they will get better access to my site if hosted in Australia, and maybe the 0.15% of people who access my blog from New Zealand will also benefit from the locality of sites hosted in Australia. But the 37% of readers who are described as “US Commercial” (presumably .com) and the 6% described as “United States” (presumably .us) will benefit from US hosting, as will most of the 30% who are described as “Network” (.net I guess). For getting good network bandwidth it seems that the best option is to choose what seems to be the best ISP in the US that I can afford, where determining what is “best” is largely based on rumour. One of the comments on my post about virtual servers and swap space [2] suggested just not using swap and referenced the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing) cloud service and the Gandi.net hosting (which is in limited beta and not generally available). The Amazon EC2 clound service [3] has a minimum offering of 1.7G of RAM, 1EC2 Compute Unit (equivalent to a 1.0-1.2GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor), 160G of “instance storage” (local disk for an instance) running 32bit software. Currently my server is using 12% of a Celeron 2.4GHz CPU on average (which includes a mail server with lots of anti-spam measures, Venus, and other things). Running just the web sites on 1EC2 Compute Unit should use significantly less than 25% of a 1.0GHz Opteron. I’m currently using 400M of RAM for my DomU (although the MySQL server is in a different DomU). 1.7G of RAM for my web sites is heaps even when including a MySQL server. Currently a MySQL dump of my blog is just under 10M of data, with 1.7G of RAM the database should stay entirely in RAM which will avoid the disk IO issues. I could probably use about 1/3 of that much RAM and still not swap. The cost of EC2 is $US0.10 per hour of uptime (for a small server), so that’s $US74.40 per month. The cost for data transfer is 17 cents a GIG for sending and 10 cents a gig for receiving (bulk discounts are available for multiple terabytes per month). I am not going to pay $74 per month to host my blog. But sharing that cost with other people might be a viable option. An EC2 instance provides up to 5 “Elastic IP addresses” (public addresses that can be mapped to instances) which are free when they are being used (there is a cost of one cent per hour for unused addresses - not a problem for me as I want 24*7 uptime). So it should be relatively easy to divide the costs of an EC2 instance among five people by accounting for data transfer per IP address. Hosting five web sites that use the same software (MySQL and Apache for example) should reduce memory use and allow more effective caching. A small server on EC2 costs about five times more than one of the cheap DomU systems that I have previously investigated [4] but provides ten times the RAM. While the RAM is impressive, I have to wonder about CPU scheduling and disk IO performance. I guess I can avoid disk IO on the critical paths by relying on caching and not doing synchronous writes to log files. That just leaves CPU scheduling as a potential area where it could fall down. Here is an interesting post describing how to use EC2 [5]. Another thing to consider is changing blog software. I currently use Wordpress which is more CPU intensive than some other options (due to being written in PHP), is slightly memory hungry (PHP and MySQL), and doesn’t have the best security history. It seems that an ideal blog design would use a language such as Java or PHP for comments and use static pages for the main article (with the comments in a frame or loaded by JavaScript). Then the main article would load quickly and comments (which probably aren’t read by most users) would get loaded later.

• [1] http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/08/27/killing-servers-virtualisation-and-swap/


• [3] http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=201590011


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/28/xen-hosting/


• [5] http://www.protocolostomy.com/2008/08/27/more-adventures-in-amazon-ec2-and-ebs/

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I've never been a fan of the word "blog" - I believe it sounds like something one calls a plumber to deal with. Even worse is "blog" as a verb. "I blogged it yesterday". Did you really? Was it expensive to get cleaned up? Here are some alternatives that I came up with:

• Write. It's been a pretty effective word for hundreds of years, over the course of many, many new and varied technologies.
• Affirm
• Announce
• Attest
• Aver
• Chronicle
• Comment
• Communicate
• Divulge
• Document
• Express
• Inform
• Make known
• Narrate
• Note
• Notify
• Outline
• Pass along
• Proclaim
• Pronounce
• Publish
• Record
• Recount
• Relate
• Report
• Reveal
• Speak of
• State
• Wrote up
• Report
• Recount

I'm sure I'm missing some good ones...

As I start this blog post, I'm on the train between Amersfoort and Osnabr ck, on my way to Kiel, where there'll be a meeting of the m68k porters, kindly organized by m68k kernel maintainer Christian Steigies. I took the 8:40 train in Mechelen this morning, and if all goes well, I'll be arriving in Kiel at 17:22 tonight. Some train trip... but I certainly prefer that to any flight. Anyway. The days of Debconf were very nice. Debconf is a lot of things to me. Travel. Hacking. Mao, evolving into a drinking game. Beer. Attending talks. Giving talks. Meeting people. Face-to-face non-flaming. Gesturing for an extra knife at luunch. Hangover. Whiskey. Talking to the person next to you—over IRC. Getting killed before knowing what the rules of the assassins game are. Filing bugreports in person. Pictures. Kilts. Streaming video. Not being sick, hopefully. Name badges. Flying. Sleeping. Yes, sleeping. Most of all, though, this year, Debconf was just great. Thanks. You know who you are. After debconf, I flew to Buenos Aires, where I slept for one night in a Youth Hostel somewhere downtown. They were affordable, but the bed wasn't great—the mattress sorely needed replacement. Since I had a day in BA, and since there were apparently not enough people on the schedule, I'd agreed to hold a talk, and came up with the idea of a 'debian secrets' talk—about Debian-specific commands, such as dpkg-divert and update-alternatives etc—so that people could learn how to use their Debian system more efficiently. As I was sitting in Andreas' talk, who was right before me on the schedule, suddenly Dag walked up to me and said hi. This was unexpected; Dag is a fellow Belgian, who's involved with the CentOS project, and who maintains a positively huge RPM repository at his site—if you maintain an RPM-based system somewhere, you'll probably know about that site. So while I recognized him, I immediately wondered what he was doing there. Turned out he was invited to hold a talk at the Free Software event to which Debianday was attached (and which would not start for another day or two), and that when he saw my name on the schedule, he decided to attend. Fun. He learned a thing or two from my talk, and was talking later about writing some tools for RPM-based systems that would perform the same or similar functionality implemented by some of the Debian tools I talked about. Great. We had a picture together (in front of the DebConf banner—hah) that I still should upload, and then went out for lunch together with some other CentOS guys. The talk itself seems to have been well-received, and I'm glad about that; I only gave it because there was a need for more talks, not because I felt confident I was very knowledgeable about that subject. In fact, I did have to ask on the debconf-discuss mailinglist for some input (which I received) so that I could make sure the talk would actually be useful to people. That helped a lot, I guess. After that, we played some mao in the lobby of the DebianDay venue. While doing so, I overheard Dag talking about CentOS, advocating it to some of the people there, which I must say felt pretty weird on a Debian event. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. Except that Dag was supposed to be writing his talk slides. How did that work out, Dag? ;-) Eventually, I got in a cab to the EZE airport, and flew home. That wasn't fully without issue, but I did get there. And now, I've been, eh, overloaded. Still have to follow up on a question a customer asked me, but I've barely been home or at the office, just enough to sleep really. Should do something about that, I guess... Two days ago, I also managed to forget my camera somewhere. For 12 hours, I was worried, even though I had a pretty good idea of where it was; but since I'm getting quite good at taking pictures now, and since I really like doing so as well, I really didn't want to lose my camera. Fortunately, when I called this morning to the place where I thought I'd lost it, they told me it'd been found, and where to get it. In other words, it's safe, it's taken care of, Philip went to get it, and I just need to arrange to get it when I get back. Which is a relief. Let's not be so stupid anymore in the future... Finishing up now, a day later, and I'm at Christian's office, playing with his and my coldfire board. As it happens, it appears that Freescale has brought out a new BSP for these boards, so that's nice. Let's see whether we can get those to boot again...

Our Belfast office has finally got large enough to have to partake in the NI Equality Commission monitoring. This covers religion and gender. The options for religion are:

• I consider myself a member of the Catholic community
• I consider myself a member of the Protestant community
• I consider myself a member of neither community

Which all seems fine, except for the bit below that says "If you do not complete this questionaire, we are encouraged to use the "residuary" method, which means that we can make a determination on the basis of personal infomation on file/application form". It turns out that also applies to the neither option. So I clarified with the poor guy who's having to deal with this what he'd do if I ticked neither. And he rang the Equality Commission for some advice. And it turns out that although the wording in the step-by-step guide for employers is "we strongly advise" essentially if you end up with more than a certain number of neithers then you put yourself at risk of an investigation.

FFS. How the hell is this country supposed to get any better if even the Equality Commission is forcing us all to be one side or the other?

(I ticked the neither box and told the guy handling it that if he had to apply the residual method then I'd provide him some suitable information to support whichever side was most convenient. It's not his fault some silly buggers want to make me a Protestant or Catholic atheist, or imply I only hang round with one side or the other.)