Past weekend Warp had its first WARPtivity (which, as you may suspect, stands for WARP activity, you know, team building and that stuff). We (including all partners and almost all workers) spent a night and a day in the breathtaking Ordesa valley. I’m quite biased as I love the valley since I was a child and have enjoyed lots of weeks there, but it’s indeed one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately our regional government (PSOE and PAR, kick them out on the 27th May election) are spoiling most of the Pyrenees, I hope there is something left for the next generations. We arrived at Torla (a little village near Ordesa) on Friday evening, had a great dinner and some drinks and played table football. Next morning we woke up quite early and hiked through a nice forest path to the Horse Tail waterfall. After having lunch by the waterfall some of us decided to return by the Faja de Pelay, a higher path above the forest, with awesome sights. As it was still early May, there was some snow remaining in the path, making it a bit dangerous, as there is a 300 hundred meter cliff. Luckily enough we managed to survive and blog it

I am currently with Optus, and while they were acceptable a few years ago, they have descended in the last couple of years so that they're chair-throwingly obnoxious now. So, as I really, really dislike giving retarded monkeys my money (I'd get rid of govco if I could, really), I'm looking to move. Specifically, I want a telephone communications provider:

• Whose phone monkeys are clueful enough to be able to execute the things I've requested be done, and can actually do what they tell me they're going to do (detailed story there is available on request);
• Who doesn't summarily raise line rental by 40%, and insult my intelligence by telling me that it's better because I get a pile of "included minutes" that I'll never use;
• That doesn't use one of those horrendous, useless voice recognition systems (they're slower and more error prone than just pressing the damn numbers) -- I'd love a real person on the line when I call, but I'm realistic enough to accept that that's just not going to happen;
• Who, if they do decide to outsource their phone support, at least sends it to a call centre who has people who don't have an overpoweringly strong accent;
• That just lists their charges (all of their charges) simply and easily, so I can say "that's what it's going to cost me to use these guys", instead of the endless twisty passages of bundling, "special deals" (which expire a couple of months after you sign up to them), and other customer-confusing effluvia;
• Who employ someone to proofread their website (I'm looking at you, Southern Cross, with your grocers' apostrophe

). Do I really have a hope in hell here? At this point, I'll pay a bit more for phone service if it doesn't involve getting screwed over at the telco's whim, and dealing with incomprehensible Indian call centres. Answers on a postcard, or (if you're feeling really technical) in an e-mail to mpalmer@hezmatt.org. We're talking about Australia here, in case anyone's wondering -- moving to another country for phone service is probably a bit too drastic. Switching to pure VoIP would be an option if I didn't need to have a fixed-line service for my ADSL.

python-gammu 0.20 has been just released. New features:

• Fixed call information conversion.
• Support for last modified field.
• Support for latest Gammu version.
• Added python wrapper around C module, C module is now gammu.Core.
• Moved some generic data from Wammu.
• Added asynchronous wrapper around StateMachine.
• Added example for async operations, see examples/worker.py.
• Main library is now gammu.Core, but gammu.* still works.
• Support for service numbers.
• New example for service numbers, see examples/service-numbers.py.

Paul Dwerryhouse blogs about mobile phone etiquette.

1. Taking excessive calls at a restaurant is annoying, but keep them short and it’s no big deal.


2. Strange ring tones are OK as long as people answer their phone. It’s when they decide that they don’t want to answer a call that the entire Avril Lavigne song annoys people. In regard to this issue wearing headphones in public with the volume turned up high enough that everyone else can hear is a much worse problem - which will incidentally deafen the person using the headphones in the long-term as well as annoying everyone else in the short-term.


3. I used to work with Paul and we had a colleague who repeatedly chose not to answer his mobile phone because he didn’t want to talk to a particular recruiting agent but refused to say so. Eventually the agent tried calling the office and got to me, I told him “if someone never answers their mobile phone when you call it means that they don’t like you, take a hint and stop calling”. There were fewer unanswered calls after that.


4. I have to agree with that, having a phone call in the cinema (or even worse the theatre) is just wrong. If you are on the list for organ transplant (the only time you really MUST have your phone on all the time) then turn the phone to vibrate mode.


5. When on the train the range of things that I can do is limited. Rather than waste time I make calls that I don’t have time to make on other occasions. The only exception is when I was in Japan, in respect of their cultural standards I turned my phone off most times when on the train.


6. Walking and talking? Unless you are crossing a busy street then why not? People who inappropriately use mobile phones while performing dangerous activities will tend to be weeded out by Darwin. They usually don’t give Darwin Awards for mundane things such as not seeing an oncoming truck while talking on a mobile phone.


7. In regard to the issue of whether you have to answer a phone, some people believe that it’s an issue of courtesy to the person who is calling to answer the phone if reasonably possible.


8. Whether “call me back” is adequate depends on who is calling. I generally find that when someone leaves such a message they have been correct in their assessment of the value of their call to me. The people who leave such messages are generally the people who’s call I will return on the basis of such a message. Leaving a long voicemail message adds to the profits of the telco used to making the call as well as the telco that maintains the voice-mail box. My 3 voicemail service charges me to receive the messages and I prefer them to be kept short.


9. Anyone who thinks that having a fancy phone, car, computer, etc will make them a better person or impress anyone has bigger problems than the choice of a phone. Also if the $600 a year that you might spend on regularly updating your mobile phone makes a significant difference to your savings then you will probably never be able to afford a house either.


10. Bluetooth headsets do make you look like an idiot, but they do have some benefits. When doing tech-support it is a real benefit to be able to use both hands for typing. The only reason I don’t have one is that I don’t do tech support enough to justify the expense of buying one or the inconvenience of carrying it everywhere. Note that when you define “tech support” in the most broad sense (which includes helping all your relatives with their computer problems) most computer people do quite a lot of it even if it’s not their job.

Apparently, it is fine by him if others flood planet debian with repeats because they screwed an upgrade, post questionable career advice or misleading documentation links, make fun of unrelated computer companies, or discuss the weather or traffic, but I posted about Eurovision and Martin Zobel-Helas unlinked my entries and sent me a rude email. Isn't planet debian a planet of debian developers, not just a planet of debian development? Even if you only write about debian, please don't force that on everyone else. I like reading about the other stuff developers do - even the loony political views that I don't agree with... Didn't someone put up a Planet Debian Tech a while ago? Maybe that's what Martin Zobel-Helas should read. Whatever happened to it?

When I have a longer comment on someone else's blog post, I usually write it up on my own site and then send a pingback or trackback. I've written my own really basic pingback and trackback clients and servers, which seem to work. I'll package them up Real Soon Now. Sooner if anyone asks for them. I don't have much sympathy with people who complain about losing comments because their Javascript or Cookies died when their own blog post has a stupid eyetest on it and its trackback settings are a bit screwed-up. Update: Cord Beermann commented:

"If you have a problem with the trackback function of my blog, then please be more specific what is wrong with the trackback function, because the software may be part of Debian soon."

Your page includes trackback:ping="" which seems obviously wrong.

"The 'stupid eyetest' however is a personal decision for my blog."

So what if it's a personal decision? It's stupid and I'm going to say that it's stupid. Are you the sort of guy who takes a personal decision to kick guys in wheelchairs, but then protests if they run over your foot in return? I'm disappointed if more stupid software is going to be in debian. Update 2: the image test seems to have been replaced by some numbers now. Thank you for removing the eyetest, but it still won't save a comment for some reason.

"However: both isn't related to the initial problem."

I think the broken trackback/pingback support is related to your initial problem. If your trackback/pingback support worked, you could use a real editor on your own site instead of a web browser on someone else's. In other news, here's Alexandre Vassalotti's review of Emacs weblogger-mode.

Even if one could ask why I’ve such a blog were I wrote next to nothing, I can use it to test the new Emacs mode : weblogger. I’m afraid there will be difficulties with the line breaking… I will have to look again on a different way to auto-fill on Emacs. Or may be a way to tell to weblogger to not put br every time there is a line break…

While I usually agree that users are idiots and we know better than they do, I must recognize that the developers of the instant messaging program formerly known as GAIM are being totally wrong in their crusade against protocol icons. Hello? If I wanted a simple-minded client I would install gossip. When many people in a few days take the time to find and reply to a closed bug report then maybe they have good reasons to want a feature. And please refrain from serving us bullshit like "a preference would add too much complexity to the code", some of us actually know about pointers and switch statements. (Advanced preferences is something which the gajim developers got right. It's too bad that the Jabber transports lack many protocol features, are resource hungry, highly unstable and generally crappy.) One of the reasons for requiring native protocol icons is that each protocol has subtly different presence values, whose exact semantics are now lost. And in some situations the protocol used by your contacts has a semantic value in itself. Yes: I know that you already replied to these arguments, but you are still wrong.

As Moray blogged last week, there are spare beds in the hostel block booking. If you haven’t already written in ask for one, and you would like to stay with the sponsored DebConf attendees, please write to accommodation@debconf.org now. The plan is to close this option in about 24 hours, so please be prompt. The spare beds will be allocated to people in the order emails are received; the price per night will be 12 (currently 17.60), which is a special reduced rate due to our large bookings.

Now I've got my tickets, I've put some tips about finding cheap debconf land travel onto the debconf site. (I know that was selfish, but debconf's travel deadlines sucked and it refused to help pay for travel, so please excuse me looking after myself first.) Damog emailed me, grumbling about how hard it is to find cheap/quick land travel from a major English city to Edinburgh. I sent back three options for under GBP 35 return, but I've heard nothing more. Hope it worked. Simon Richter wrote GyrosGeier's blog - Why the environment loses out, again. complaining that Deutsche Bahn quote 426 ? (EUR, I guess) to go to Edinburgh from Munich. Well, I just asked Lufthansa and they quote up to EUR 1400 to fly Munich-Edinburgh, but I'm sure you can find that cheaper too - obviously, if you get only one quote from a dominant supplier, that may not be the best price available. I don't know about travel from Germany, but someone already left a link to another ticket agency in the comments.

Yesterday we released version 1.4.10a of SquirrelMail. It fixes mostly small-time bugs and glitches, and a security bug in the HTML filter. While the 1.4 branch is getting very solid, the HTML filter remains the main point of sorrow. The problem is that we receive incoming HTML in a mail message, and then need to transform that into HTML that's safe to present to the user. This is done by stripping out anything that could cause trouble. You wouldn't believe which degenerated content is still parsed by some browsers, so this is a never ending fight. A proper solution would be to white list what is allowed. This essentially means implementing a full HTML parser that parses the incoming mail and only accepts things known to be good. Co-developer Marc Groot Koerkamp has done good work towards this already, but it's no simple feat and not quite finished yet. So we'll have to keep patching up the current filter for a while I'm afraid.

Another beautiful day here in Paradise. Montreal is fantastic in the late Spring/early Summer -- it's a great time to be here in the city. Yesterday, Amita June and I went to Parc Jean Drapeau, the beautiful park on an island in the St. Lawrence, the former site of Expo 67. We played at the (really cool) new playground, ran around in the grass, and looked at the river rushing by. Today I rolled out a new table-of-contents layout on Wikitravel; you can see an example on our page about France. It's the culmination of about 11 months of debate and compromise amongst Wikitravellers, me, Maj, Internet Brands, and pretty much everyone else under the sun. It took a looong time, but we eventually got something that most people could live with and (shock!) some people actually liked. It wasn't easy, and my earlier unilateral decisions about it were so upsetting to people that it produced our current Wikitravel:Technical infrastructure policy. It's been great to finally reach some closure on this particular issue, since it was such a source of learning for me. tags: wikitravel wiki montreal amitajune toc

RoCoCo -- one week and counting We've got about one week before RoCoCoCamp starts. It's going to be pretty exciting; we've had a lot of responses and the list of participants is growing strong. But there are still a lot of infrastructure things to be done -- I'm going to be really impressed if we get them all done before next Friday. I'm getting more and more amazed that the folks in Portland (Oregon) manage to put on RecentChangesCamp there. It's pretty hard to do a three-day unconference. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp

Kanren So, I've just finished re-reading The Reasoned Schemer, the sequel to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. Reasoned is a really nice introduction into what seems to be a classic compulsion for Scheme freaks: re-implementing the logic language Prolog more-or-less in Scheme. The little language that unfolds in Reasoned is elegant, simple, and best of all, extremely Scheme-y. There's a really long digression into binary mathematics and deriving bitwise operations for arithmetical functions, which all seems to be the long way around the block since it's unlikely that users of their system would use anything but the math system built into the host language, Scheme. The implementation in TRS is laid out at the back of the book. It's a learning version of a bigger project, called Kanren. I've been fiddling with the system, which has re-inspired my dream of creating a declarative language framework for Web applications. I'd like to see what Web programming in Kanren would be like... I'll see how it goes. tags: kanren scheme the reasoned schemer logic prolog

Domains Another way I spent my time today was that we've finally gotten around to transferring the wikitravel.org/.net/.com domains to IB. IB's owned the site for a while, but we've never really had a reason to switch the domains over, so it's gone undone for a long time. And I'm kind of glad. It sucks transferring domains between registrars. wikitravel.org was on Joker. which used to be my registrar of choice, but which has been superseded by Godaddy. Transferring a single domain took 6 Web forms (on two different sites), 3 security codes, and 4 email confirmations. Thankfully, this also gave me a chance to transfer over my speculative domains phonojournalist.com (for telephone photos) and phrygiancap.org, for general freedom issues. I like the phrygian cap, what can I say? All right, so I have a lot of domains that I'm unlikely to ever exploit. If that's so wrong, I don't want to be right. tags: domains ib joker godaddy phonojournalist phrygian cap

Some time ago I've filled ITP for libtool-cvs. I needed the new libtool for fakechroot project. The stable release of libtool is badly broken and causes that autoconf generates ./configure script which fails if C++ compiler is not installed in system. The cure is the newest libtoolize taken directly from CVS. I rather want to see the libtool package in Debian because it is hard to install it manually. So I decided to make the new package. Fortunatelly, the current stable libtool maintainer (Kurt Roeckx) is very helpful person and he don't see any problem if I prepare the experimental release of his package :) So here it is: fresh and brand new libtool Debian packages. There was some controversy with versioning schema. The current CVS snapshot is labeled as 2.1a. The upstream's authors promised that the next release should the version number greater than previous. I hope they really don't release new libtool i.e. as a version 2.0. Whatever. This is the experimental package at least. I don't know, why the package is not indexed by packages.debian.org yet. It is strange as fara as it came into ftp.debian.org.

As there are currently four persons working on the next stable release (Dann Frazier, Luk Claes, Julien Danjou and me), we decided to track all issues for the next stable release (4.0r1) also in the Debian BTS. So if you would like to look what we currently consider for 4.0r1, have a look here. Before adding a bug (eg. with the command bts user debian-release@lists.debian.org . usertag 420759 + SRM) please contact the stable release team first, or even better, let the stable release team add your bug there on their own. Also, not all uploaded packages to proposed-updates will automatically considered for the next stable release. Update: With “contact the stable release team first” i do mean, please send requests to debian-release@lists.d.o, not contacting release team members in private over IRC or direct eMail. And NO, h01ger, cellphone is also not an option!!!1!!!elf!!!! release

My new employer pays for an ADSL line for me. A second line, adding a ADSL connection on another copper pair I was told. Perfect I though, let's order it. Little did I know what problems I would get into.

Two days ago our ADSL went dead. No messages, no calls, no nothing. I call the provider (mobistar) who tell me we cancelled the contract and then hang up on me! The day after I contacted the company that does the ADSL stuff for $employer, asking them if this was their doing. Their reply: "search, search... no we have no documents on you, it must be something internal to $employer, we know nothing". Two hours later I get an email from them asking for dates for the installation of the ADSL modem. On the 21st at the earliest.

Coincidence, right? I send an "un-fuck this right now!" email shortly after. 24h later I still have no reply.

No looking forward to 2 weeks without internet we started searching. So after some hacking and a good idea from my wife it turns out skynet "just" re-enabled my account of 2 years ago, same userid, same password. As if I never left.

Not good...

One of my co-operatives, The Phone Co-op, has set clear monthly data allowances from 5GB to 20GB on its residential ADSL Max packages. If you exceed that, you get emailed (a bit before you hit the limit) and then billed GBP1.50 for each extra gig. When telling me about this, they wrote

"Unlike other ISPs, we will not impose any other restrictions to your service or how you use it"

which surprised me. Are heavy users still TOS'd off the network by other ISPs? They also announced a pound a month discount for combining ADSL and line rental, which suits me fine!

Traditionally, the german ministry of the interior has been taking patronage for the LinuxTag. Which per-se is a good thing.However, the current minister of the interior has been publishing some "anti-terror proposals" that pretty much all opensource people see as a serious attack on their freedom, and that actually violate the constitution (or even the human rights, such as his statements towards torture).So this is a very odd situation: everybody would like to say "no" to him, but at the same time, welcome his ministry because of the good cooperation with opensource people the last years.IMHO, LinuxTag needs at least make a statement that while they welcome his efforts to establish the use of open source software in public administration, they can not agree with his political efforts with respect to the "war on terror", which pose a serious attack on the freedom of individuals.After all, there will be security experts at LinuxTag, and who if not they are capable of judging that e.g. the famous "federal trojan" won't be able to help much against organized crime (including terror organizations) because these can also organize computing safety (e.g. by not using Windows and not accepting executable data in email...). Or show up how much data abuse his proposals with respect to data gathering allow.

We did it again! The GRML Team proudly presents the first release candidates for the GRML 1.0 branch. This includes the brand new GRML64 and also the GRML-Small Live CD. This release includes several new features, here a small selection:

• updated to X.org 7.3
• updated to libc6 2.5
• use of UTF-8 as default encoding
• ?LaTeX: switch from tetex to texlive
• grml-x: use of evdev (dropped options -nousb and -nops2, added -ps2 and -usb instead), improved error handling and execution
• grml-autoconfig: dropped userspace/powernowd stuff in cpufrequeny scaling in favour of the ondemand-governor
• integrated grml-quickconfig within zsh-login
• got rid of grml-sysvinit, using plain sysvinit from Debian without any hacks now
• support basic rescanning in live-cd initrd
• grml-debootstrap (install plain Debian fast and easy)
• grml-quickconfig: get fast access to some basic grml-scripts
• Kernel 2.6.20

And much more. Please help us testing and get your copy from our development mirror:

Release	Codename
grml 1.0-rc1	Meilenschwein
grml-small 0.4-rc1	Release Codename: Springginkerl
grml64 0.1-rc1	LiveShell

• Please report any issues via our bts.
• If you have any feedback join us via IRC in #grml@freenode

I left there four years ago and I finally return tomorrow for a few weeks. It will be great to be back.

I'm impressed. Via Google Apps, I was able to register a domain (squeezedbooks.com - nothing there yet, though) for $10. But it's not just a domain, it comes with email, google calendar, and a bunch of the other google apps thrown in for free. That's a lot of stuff for ten bucks - especially for the large portions of the world where the currencies are appreciating against the dollar. The service does have some drawbacks though.

• It doesn't do .it domains, something that I would find handy. For that matter, it only seems to offer .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz, which is sort of limited. I guess I don't blame them for not wanting to take on the Italian domain registry and its stupid, bureaurocratic rules, but having some other TLD's there would be nice.
• It relies on another site for DNS fiddling. Google partnered with enom.com for their registration service, and one notices the difference between the nice, clean google interfaces, and the enom app when you get shunted off there to make DNS changes. The app isn't even that bad, it would just be nicer if it weren't necessary to log on to something external.
• The amount of power that google is ammassing is scary in some ways. I have happily used gandi.net for a number of years, and would have continued, but 14 Euro vs 10 Dollars + the apps is simply not a contest.