Sunday was a quiet day for the top teams. Neither Australia nor New Zealand were in danger against Fidji (55-12) or Scotland (44-0). I'm still impressed by the australian team. They didn't show much weaknesses against Fidji, despite the strong physical contest bringed by the Fidjian forward players. The australian rear lanes were impressive, particularly Matt Giteau, scoring 27 points and designed as MVP for Australia-Fidji. The All Blacks crushed a B team from Scotland. The scottish staff decided that winning against New Zealand is nearly impossible and therefore they choosed to have their key players resting, which is a wise choice, but not a gift for the Murrayfield supporters. As a consequence, New Zealand quitely won the match and therefore qualifies for 1/4th finals (and they'll win their pool unless Romania plays with 30 players against them....). No match for yesterday and two matches today. Unfortunately, Canada-Japan (12-12) in Bordeaux was broadcasted too early for me and I haven't seen it. For Japan, this is the end of 13 consecutively lost matches in RWC for Japan, so kind of victory. I've seen parts of Romania-Portugal. I wished Portugal wins that one as they're clearly the most courageous team in the RWC and certainly, among the non top teams, the most promising one. The Portuguese lost 10-14 even though they lead 10-7 for a while. Quite a deception for me but surely these players will never forget the support of the French crowd (most of these being the strong portuguese community we have in our country). Tomorrow will feature Georgia-Namibia and Samoa-USA. I'll try to watch the latter, which is played in St-Etienne, my welcoming home town (ask the Scots supporter and team!).

Since the closure of SoFlow and adding myself to LinkedIn, I've been thinking a bit about Professional Associations and using Social Networks (SNs) for business. I've not worked out my answers, so this is a "dear lazyweb, what pieces of this jigsaw am I missing?" post. Much of the recent mainstream news has been about the legal problems of SNs - for example, see BBC: Web networkers 'at risk of fraud' (which was also in items on a recent Click show on BBC World and News24) and BBC: Facebook site faces fraud claim - or about how they could Save The World, like BBC: Social net offers new perspective I think there's a bigger problem which will stop SNs making a deep-change to online activity. Each time a SN like SoFlow closes, it wastes some resources of its members. I'm starting to side with other developers in being tired of seeing my input turn to bitrot, through buggy software or buggy business models. I'm not alone: see Gunnar Wolf: On social networks for example. A good idea seems to be on Slashdot: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up but how? Each SN seems to guard its dark corners as vital elements of its business model. Should we look to our Professional Associations to create new Open Social Networks (OSNs)? After all, SNs aren't the core money-makers for professional associations. But, the biggest problem with Professional Associations is picking a trustworthy one - one which will do what it says on the tin, instead of taking your subscription, then undermining you. Consider the British Computer Society and its OSSG License: how many of its members really wanted another software copyright licence? Fortunately, it was spotted - Volunteer brickbat thrower needed in London (Tuesday 24th 6pm) - and the Report from BCS OSSG meeting on a new FS license suggests the negative feedback was loud and clear, so hopefully we won't see that again. If I was a BCS member, I'd probably not renew after helping to fund that harmful activity. librarian.net: choosing your battles and choosing your professional associations talks a little about some library associations as a sort of case study which many will recognise as familiar, but there's an interesting comment from Blake there:

"I think there's an association out there for everyone."

Is there? What association is out there for liberal hackers and webmasters? I don't think I've found it yet. So, should we be looking at ourselves, rather than existing professional associations? Can we do Open Social Networks peer-to-peer in a meaningful way? Are we already doing it with blog feeds? How should we expand on that? Although I disagree with the conclusion that using another Social Network site with an uncertain business model is How to succeed with social networking, the article also mentions that

"social networking is in its infancy and that it will not really get underway until we have portable profiles and interconnectivity"

In other words, it's our revolution - let's steal it back. (Update: 2007-09-27: 1 comment)

I’m just completing Jeff and Pia Waugh’s Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census [1]. There are some things that can be improved with that survey in particular and surveys in general. It seems to be assumed that everyone is trying to work full-time. I admit that there are probably few people who have decided that they don’t need as much money as they would earn in full-time work and reduced their work hours to match their financial needs (as I have done). Surveys that just ask a for a figure of how much is earned add to the pressure to earn as much as possible, which isn’t what’s best for most people. I have the impression that the questions about “how long have you been doing X” assume that doing so is contiguous. If that’s the case then asking “when did you first do X” and giving a drop-down list-box of the last 20 years to select from would probably be better (more precise and remove confusion). Debian wasn’t listed as a Linux distribution! It only has Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, and SUSE. The question mixing kernels and distributions was a little strange. It gives BSD as a kernel option but no BSD option in user-space, so apparently it’s assumed that there is only one user-space/distribution for BSD (there have been some attempts to release Debian with the various BSD kernels). Also it wasn’t clear what you have to do regarding the kernel to select it (is the couple of hundred lines of patches I submitted to the Linux kernel adequate to let me list it?). There were a bunch of questions that would get very predictable answers. Do you want to have access to official government web-sites and documents with free software? I guess that they want to get a large number of people requesting such things. Incidentally much of that is in the Greens IT policy… Immediately below the buttons on the screen to go to the Next and Previous pages there is a link to clear the form and exit. When doing something difficult like sys-admin work it’s expected that a command to wipe out your work will be immediately next to something innocuous, but for something that generally doesn’t require much concentration (such as filling out a survey) it would be good to have the dangerous options a little further away. At the end of the survey there are questions about whether you want to be contacted about events held by various companies. I think that it would be better to have an RSS feed of such events that we can poll when we have spare time. I’m sure that the PR people running the events are happy when they see a good number of people signed up to their mailing list. But if you actually want to get people to sign up without prior contact the best thing to do is have it on a web site with an RSS feed (either a blog or a CMS) so that it can be polled, syndicated, and googled.

• [1] http://waughpartners.com.au/research/census2007″

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Dear Lazyweb, im looking for a “password management” application that does not suck. Any suggestions? I am currently using fpm for some low-security passwords and a gpg encrypted textfile for some more important ones. (And having some really important ones only in my head, stored nowhere else). While it works its not really comfortable or fun to use. Now, I would want an app where i can trust its encryption (while I do have my harddisks crypted the file should still be encrypted), so usage of GPG would be nice. It should also be able to group passwords, like fpm can. I do not care about any kind of “URL launcher”, thats a feature i never use. Most important - it should be able to merge its dataset. Use case: I want to use it on multiple systems and have it synchronize the data itself. The sync can be a process I manually have to start, I dont care. But trying to keep the datafiles in sync and hope I never accidently overwrite them just does not work. I also dont care about X or not (as long its not one of the gnome or kde integrated keyring things), as long as I can easily get the password out of it into a copy/paste buffer, without displaying it… Suggestions?

I was looking for some easier solution than using web forms, but no minilab seems to support Linux here. Windows applications I tried so far does not seem to work in Wine, so this is also not an option. Only thing that seems to work is Picassa, but it is quite big tool to make just uploading photos and it is anyway some beast using Wine. So the only option was to write something myself. Using cURL from Python is quite easy so I hacked simple script to upload photos to minilab using PycURL. It currently supports only Droxi, but it might be later extended to support others. The code is also now a bit fragile as it does almost none error checking, but I was able to upload first set of photos to minilab and continue order in browser. You can download my proof of concept code at Photo uploader page, but don't expect anything clever from it, but it should basically work :-).

Unfortunately I will have to disconnect my FONera and buy a real WiFi router to replace it because that small box is a glitchy piece of crap compared to every other WiFi router out there. The killer: if the LaFonera can not connect the FON authentication servers, then it thinks that there is no network available and does not let me use my Internet. There is even no way to force it to pass connections to outside which is required in many cases such as partial network failures (when you can not get to FON servers for some reason, but rest of the Internet works just fine) and for web signup pages that some ISP’s use to login users to their network. And you can not use another PC for that, because it records the MAC address. The box frequently freezes and the DNS server stops responding. I can continue working by editing my local DNS server settings to the DNS of my ISP, but that is no way to work! The damn thing has no idea about uPNP which is a must nowadays for peer-to-peer transactions. And lastly there is absolutely no way for me to fix any of this because the FON keeps a tight lock on the firmware. In the time when all good software and community projects go to the open side, the FON moves further and further to the dark side and that is disturbing. I consider this a permanent failure on FON’s part that negates my ability to hold my side of the Fonera promise. It would be so much easier if I could ssh into the thing - ping stuff, traceroute stuff, put some kind of flag file to say that network in fact is there, release or refresh the DHCP lease or even restart the damn thing remotely. Nothing of this is available.

The UCI Road World Masters are showing on Eurosport and BBCi.
BBC have posted the BBCi schedule in a handy form. (Thanks BBC!) Most BBCi video channels are visible to most of Western Europe at 28 east (instead of the UK-centric beam that is used for BBC Two and the other national channels). Eurosport’s site still won’t give simple listings, so here’s their schedule for the free-to-air channel at 19 east as far as I can make out: Wed 26.09.2007 - ITT Women 16:00-17:30 CET Thu 27.09.2007 - ITT Men Under 23 11:30-12:30 CET, highlights? 12:30-14:00 CET, ITT Men 16:00-17:00 CET Fri 28.09.2007 - ITT Men 13:15-14:00 CET Sat 29.09.2007 - highlights? 09:00-12:45 CET, Men U23 16:15-18:00 CET Sun 30.09.2007 - Women 09:00-0930 CET, Men 10:30-14:00 CET, Men (highlights?) 16:00-17:30 CET Mon 01.10.2007 - highlights? 15:15-16:15 CET I think it will also be on RAI Tre at 13 east, but I don’t know if that will be free-to-air. Show times should appear here the day before broadcast. Which other free-to-air satellite broadcasters are showing this?

We took a tour of Mountain View with Leslie yesterday. It was nice to look around and see what was actually around here for shopping / things to do / how to escape to somewhere else. It looks like the biggest redeeming feature of MTV is that one can leave. It reminds me of Coquitlam. It's the last place we're considering outside of the city - but considering that we're not going to really be out partying in the next year, the crime rate is very low, and rent is sometimes half of what we'd pay, it's definetly worth considering. It also will keep the commute down to something reasonable (probably 15 minutes on a bike, almost too short).

Weird American thing of the day: Apparently for everything you need your SSN here. At home, the only people who are allowed to ask for the Canadian equivalent (SIN) are people who are going to pay you money. So a credit check can't require it. Your health card can't require it. Your driver's license can't require it. Angie not having one is going to get sticky in a few cases.

I actually walked just under 10,000 steps on Friday. I didn't bike because I wasn't feeling well, and it seems that the walk to the commuter train is somewhere between 2 and 3 thousand steps.

If you hadn't the occasion to see RSA-TON, just look around for it, find if it is broadcasted at a later time and watch it. The Tonga team just had 10 minutes of weakness, with South-Africa scoring three tries. But they never gave up, scored two tries and finally ended up 25-30, winning the defensive bonus point and really worrying South-Africa. For sure, the repeated failures of RSA on penalties also helped for this scenario, but Tonga became the stars of this pool and Finau Maka is the star of Tonga..:-) The Bollaert stadium in Lens is more used to the fights of the local soccer team than high level rugby but they supported the Tonga team the very same way they support the "Sang et Or". I think that the Tonga players will remember that one. England can *really* worry.

After that blog post, I decided to write a mail asking a first set of questions. I sent it to developers’ mailing lists of Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE, and of course Debian and Ubuntu. I got really interesting answers from everyone, except …. Debian and Ubuntu.

• I want to wait some more before publishing the answers. If you are a Debian or an Ubuntu developer, and were interested in that initiative, please answer ASAP my mails sent to debian-devel@ and ubuntu-devel-discuss@ (respectively). Not having answers from Debian and Ubuntu people would really be a shame, since everyone else I contacted was really helpful and interested.
• I plan to use a mailing list archiving software to publish the mails. Can you recommend a good mbox->html converter, that would work well in a “run once” use case, and that doesn’t take ages to set up?
• Can you think of another distro I should have contacted? At first, I don’t want to include simple derivatives of the “big distros”. I also chose to limit myself to the Linux distros, so I didn’t contact the BSD or Nexenta folks. Both of this could change: my current plan for the future is to try to setup a mailing list+wiki, so everybody could join.

Russell Coker, commenting on my last blog, and apparently after exploring some of the links stemming from the SFWA kerfuflle, apparently stumbled on a post from former SFWA VP Howard V. Hendrix, where he took the amazing position (for a SF writer) that he hated the using the internet, and that people who posted their stories on the web for free download were web-scabs, has taken the position that since such comments were an attack on our (Open Source Developer’s) community, that he would resolve “to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read”. Obviously, that’s his choice, but while I don’t have much respect for SFWA the organization, and certainly not for their choice in past and current vice presidents, there’s another side of the story here. First of all, Dr. Hendrix comments are not the official position of the SFWA, and there are many others who are SFWA members who would very strongly disagree with both the attitudes of Dr. Hendrix as well as the ham-handed DMCA pseudo-invocation by Dr. Burt. In addition, to quote Rick Cook:

The first thing you ve got to understand about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is that it isn t. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which in Voltaire s phrase was neither holy, Roman nor an empire, SFWA is not an organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. While some of the leading SF and Fantasy writers belong, the vast majority of the members are people who barely meet SFWA s extremely lax publication requirements. They are not professional SF or Fantasy writers in any meaningful sense of the term and many of them haven t published a word of either science fiction or fantasy in years.

Secondly, there are plenty of Science Fiction writers that do really understand this issue quite well. In addition Rick Cook, whom I recommended in my last post, another example of a Science Function writer who has penned a very cogent series of articles about copyright, science fiction, and the business issues of being a SFF writer is Eric Flint. I strongly recommend his series, “Salvos Against Big Brother”,which includes a back-to-the basics examination of copyright quoting and reprinting two speeches by British Parliamentarian Thomas McCauley in 1841. Definitely worth a read, and again a demonstration that there exists Science Fiction authors that aren’t stuck in the dark ages; few (at least it is to be hoped) are like Dr. Hendrix. Eric Flint is also a senior editor for Baen Books (read more about the founder, Jim Baen here). Baen makes all of its titles available in e-book form without DRM, and many of its authors have agreed to make their books available completely free of charge. Eric Flint does so for all or most of his books shortly after they are published in mass-market paperback form; others only make a few of their books available, typically the first or second books in a series (in the hopes you will buy the rest of their books) — a wise strategy, as he explains in one of his Salvos Against Big Brother columns. More importantly, I strongly believe that if we enjoy an artist’s works, we should support the artist. That’s why I’ve directly reached out and given money to musicians, authors, and Debian release engineers. (Yes, that last was controversial, but to me and personal ethics, it’s all of the same piece.) Is patronage the right way to support musicians? Well, it’s one way, and I’ve always been fond of the “distributed patronage” model where we use the Internet to allow a large number of people to each contribute to support an artist’s work. The Big Meow is a good example how it might work. (By the way, to people who are wondering what is happening with The Big Meow — I have very recently pinged Diane, and she’s working on it. Between health and family emergencies, the last 12 months have thrown a lot of delays into her writing schedule.) Are there other models other than patronage that might work? Well, there is the traditional one — just buying the author’s books. But what if we don’t want a dead-tree copy and just want to be able to read it on our Irex Iliad, and the book wasn’t published by Baen Books, or one of the few enlightened publishers who make non-DRM’d eBooks available? That’s a harder question. Personally, I don’t find “Copyright Theft” immoral per se. Illegal, yes, but immoral only if I haven’t done something to materially support the author. If I’ve purchased a new copy of a book, and the eBook version isn’t available via legal means, I don’t believe it is immoral to download it from a site like scribd so I can read it on my laptop. Of course, that brings up other questions, such as what if the book is out of print (because the publisher don’t think it’s commercially viable to reissue the books), the author is dead, and the widow needs money? Lots of hard questions, and no good answers…. But in any case, I think it is the right thing to do to support those authors we care about as we can, and boyotting all SFF books isn’t necessarily appropriate or helpful.

The geek like me should have a special birthday cake. And my girl knows it :)

The new house has a prepay electricity meter. My initial reaction was that I'd have to get NIE to come out and replace it with a normal meter, as I have a perception that card meters are awkward and expensive. However some investigation revealed that a keypad meter gets the same 2.5% discount that paying quarterly by direct debit does. The only way to get a larger discount (4%) is to pay a fixed amount monthly by DD. That would still leave the annoyance of having to remember to top up, but it can be done over the phone with an automated system (you get a 20 digit number to key into the meter) and won't turn off supply overnight or at weekends apparently. Plus, and this is the real reason I'm giving it a while before switching away, it has a nice little satellite keypad/LCD unit. Connected to the main meter unit via a 4 core low voltage style cable. Bets on those being power, ground, rx and tx? You can query the meter on various things, some of which are crying out to be hooked up to a Munin plugin. The meter is made by PRI and seems to be a Liberty 1E. PRI have a vague page about comms, but little useful information about how to do anything or if the end user can buy anything suitable. I'll drop them an email, but it might just be a case of trying to reverse engineer the keypad protocol so I can talk it. The processor in the satellite is just a Mitsubishi M38223M which has some serial pins, so hopefully it'll be RS232 at TTL levels and something fairly basic over that. However, before I go about doing this, has anyone else any experience of these meters and care to share details?

Hello World, a tape streamer of one of our customers died two days ago and we haven’t anymore warranty on this device, a new infrastructure will be realized soon anyway. So, we needed a cheap temporary solution. We bought a WD network harddisk for home use and “remote access over the internet”, even if we only need local access to it. It’s a 500 GB harddisk and you find several short GPL references in the crappy 5-pages-manual. Ok, this sounded already interesting. I read the manual and see that only Windows 2000 and Windows XP are supported and that you have to install a very proprietary Windows tool to start using the harddisk. Later there would also be a webinterface available, after the initialization. Ok, so I wanted to know if it’s possible to access the drive also with other operating systems. I connected the RJ45 port of the harddisk with my ethernet card with a cross-over cable and started to sniff with ngrep on the interface. After waiting a while I got this message some strange from a APIPA address to a Multicast address. Ok, assigned my local interface an address in the APIPA range and connected with my browser to it: T 169.254.71.58:80 -> 169.254.71.57:56819 [A]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK.
Transfer-Encoding: chunked.
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:12:51 GMT.
0: no-cache.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8.
Server: lighttpd/1.4.3.
Very interesting… lighttpd The device asks for a password, I went to the website of WD to read the “full manual” (as the CDROM isn’t readable with Linux as it seems), in the support part I found something about “admin” and “123456″. With this information I could login on the device and saw that it does nothing else than Samba (3.0.14) and it’s also accessible via smbclient. Without the proprietary tool, without sending personal information to Westerndigital and getting stupid newsletters. Maybe I will remove the harddisk from the case later and install it on my workstation (it isn’t reachable except port 80 and the netbios stuff) to see what exactly is on it. At least I know that it’s an ext3 filesystem. I think vendors who use embedded Linux systems for their devices and use such proprietary clients, give not more information about it are just crap. It’s something like unfair for the free-software community. (even if it works unofficially with an uncommon way) [Update] A little codesnippet from the Webinterface… very useful function moveArrow(ycord) // vert cord of layer

// ignore this function
//
// if(document.layers). //NN4+
//
// document.layers[”MenuArrow”].moveToAbsolute(xcord,ycord);
//
// else if(document.getElementById). //gecko(NN6) + IE 5+
//
// var obj = document.getElementById(”MenuArrow”);
//
obj.style.top = ycord;
//
// else if(document.all).// IE 4
//
// document.all[”MenuArrow”].style.top = ycord;
//

There are many situations where multiple DNS names for a single IP address that runs a single service are useful. One common example is with business web servers that have both www.example.com and example.com being active, so whichever a customer hits they will get the right content (the last thing you want is for a potential customer to make some trivial mistake and then give up). Having both DNS names be equal and separate is common. One example of this is the way http://planet.ubuntulinux.org/ and http://planet.ubuntu.com/ both have the same content, it seems to me that planet.ubuntu.com is the more official name as the wiki for adding yourself to the Planet is wiki.ubuntu.com. Another example of this is the way http://planet.debian.org/ and http://planet.debian.net/ both have the same content. So far this month I have had 337 referrals to my blog from planet.debian.org and 147 from planet.debian.net. So even though I can’t find any official reason for preferring one over another the fact that more than 2/3 of the referrals from that planet come from the planet.debian.org address indicates that most people regard it as the canonical one. In times past there was no problem with such things, it was quite routine to have web servers with multiple names and no-one cared about this (until of course one name went away and a portion of the user-base had broken links). Now there are three main problems with having two names visible:

1. Confusion for users. When a post on thedebianuser.org referred to my post about Planet Ubuntu it used a different URL to the one I had used. I was briefly worried that I had missed half (or more) of the content by getting my links from the wrong blog - but it turned out that the same content was on both addresses.


2. More confusing web stats for the people who run sites that are referenced (primarily the bloggers in the case of a Planet installation). This also means a lower ranking as the counts are split. In my Webalizer logs planet.debian.org is in position #5 and planet.debian.net is in position #14. If they were combined they would get position #3. One thing to keep in mind is that the number of hits that you get has some impact on the content. If someone sees repeated large amounts of traffic coming from planet.debian.org then they are likely to write more content that appeals to those users.


3. Problems with sites that have strange security policies. Some bloggers configure their servers to only serve images if the referrer field in the HTTP protocol has an acceptable value (to prevent bandwidth theft by unethical people who link to their pictures). My approach to this problem is reactive (I rename the picture to break the links when it happens) because I have not had it happen often enough to do anything else. But I can understand why some people want to do more. If we assume that an increasing number of bloggers do this, it would be good to not make things difficult for them by having the smallest possible number of referrer URLs. It would suck for the readers to find that planet.debian.org has the pictures but planet.debian.net doesn’t.

The solution to this is simple, one name should redirect to the other. Having something like the following in the Apache virtual host configuration (or the .htaccess) file for the least preferred name should redirect all access to the other name. RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI ^(.*$) [NC]
RewriteRule . http://planet.example.com/%1 [R=301,L] In my posts last night I omitted the URLs for the Planet Searches from the email version (by not making them human readable). Here they are:

• Search Planet Linux Australia: http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=008627835083532581857%3A7j_t83ytzca


• Search Planet Debian: http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=008627835083532581857%3Ak8pyp2qk8lm


• Search Planet Ubuntu: http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=008627835083532581857%3Acexvbhdg9k8

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I was asked for a story on good or bad media sponsored online conversations. I'd not really had much to do with them until this summer. itv is the UK's biggest commercial broadcaster and it had rights to show the Tour de France here this year. Its coverage was pretty good, with daily highlights and live coverage at weekends, mostly on the itv4 satellite/DTT channel. The end of every show plugged their web homepage, which had a prominent link to their forums. I've been on a couple of cycling forums for a while, so I signed up and tried to help explain things that I knew. After a while, I noticed that when I answered a question properly, with links to other authoritative sites like the race teams' own sites, my message was silently removed. This happened a few times. Then I found out that the forum terms of use prohibit linking to any other web sites! This is a big problem, because itv's cycling pages are pretty limited. As a result, the forum was full of hearsay and it's hard to verify anything anyone posts. To cap it all, itv closed the forums for a weekend for an upgrade. Then a weekend became a week, which became a month, which became six weeks. When they finally reopened it, at least they sent me an email, so I tried to login. My login doesn't work and I can't view the forum as a guest any more. I've emailed their support address and had no reply. I don't know if this is a general problem - I can't contact other forum members because I don't have their details. I only saw them on the web forum and members couldn't link their homepages. So, it'll be a long time before I spend much time participating on any media-sponsored sites again, except in a casual throw-away way. Now most of my sports messages will be posted to Cycling Fans and BuzzinFootball like my local news posts go to the community-run WSM Forum. The trouble with media-sponsored forums is that they just don't have the interest in any particular community to want to sustain it. Somewhere, there's a bean-counter saying "so what if we kill this community? We started it from scratch and we'll just do it again." Any messages you post to those forums are usually gone, out of your control, lost to you. Is it worth posting to them? I think Andrew Savory is also spot-on about the problems with forums for technical communities in Bagel Belly Blog: How Open is your Open Source project? He certainly seems in fine form so far this week. I know not all forums are that bad. I'm on a couple of phpbb-powered ones which work well, with added XML feeds and so on. Are any "old media" companies brave enough to run a liberal phpbb? Are there other examples of particularly good or bad forums that you'd like to tell me about?

If anyone was wondering why I've been quiet / claiming to be busy for the last week or so:
gpe-cash finally has a stable "main window" that supports creating new accounts along with the transactions and splits necessary to support an opening balance in the gnucash objects.
Current SVN requires current QOF CVS, accessible via the respective SourceForge repositories. gpe-cash is nowhere near release right now - the actual balances don't show up for one thing and I still need to write the window that will allow the creation of transactions within the accounts - but one step at a time. I'll see about some screenshots eventually but the gpe-cash main window is quite similar to that of gpe-expenses.
The main side-effect of all this is a much improved SQLite backend for QOF that is closer to being able to properly support double-entry financial data.
Note this does not mean that GnuCash itself will be able to use the QOF SQLite backend - the GnuCash currency/commodity handling is incompatible with QOF so gpe-cash uses the currency handling from gpe-expenses which in turn came from pilot-qof and the range of currencies supported by the Palm Expenses applet. The currencies are directly equivalent to the respective GnuCash currencies but not all GnuCash currencies are supported by pilot-qof, gpe-expenses or gpe-cash. The biggest change in gpe-cash is that this conversion is now working so that the gnucash code sees a gnucash currency when actually it is handling a pilot-qof currency.
gpe-cash is GPL-3+ and single-user (== single-file or single-book) as well as single-currency. Adding multi-currency support is possible but not a priority.
Once gpe-cash is closer to release, the codebase will be able to support gpe-invoice using the GnuCash business objects which will interface with gpe-cash to create invoices from other GPE data and store the payments and charges in gpe-cash.
If multi-currency support can be achieved, it would be possible to create "gpe-shares" as a different add-on to gpe-cash, although that is only theoretical at this stage.
The SQL-type query support inherent in QOF, together with perl support for the XML backend data via libxml-qofqsf-perl and XSL support for same XML backend via datafreedom-qsfxsl should make report generation trivial. I may also be able to add QOF support to the still experimental quicklist. I also plan to include support for import/export from all the datafreedom packages with HomeBank data which is returning to a NEW queue near you quite soon . . .
Overall, I'm getting closer to having a full range of individual applications that achieve a long term goal - the breakup of GnuCash source code into small, individual tools in the Unix tradition, all built on SQL-type queries, multiple backends and generic data handling. (See data-freedom.) Down with bloat!

<rant>
It's about time users had free financial data as well as merely free financial software. The lack of data interchange between existing free software "financial solutions" is a scandal, IMNSHO.
The rest of the "Office" dataset have a range of file formats and a range of filters. Financial data relies on the horribly broken QIF file that was never designed to be a standard and OFX where support is horribly patchy and doesn't provide data interchange between programs on the same machine.
</rant>

Lately I have been wanting to buy a lot of fairly expensive stuff that I don’t really need. It started with the telephoto zoom lens, which I ended up getting, and love. I’m really happy that I got it, especially since Lisa and I will be going on a hot air balloon ride in Napa for our anniversary, and then to the Salinas Air Show the following weekend. Then it was the new TiVo HD. We already have a Series 3, but we’ve occasionally thought that we might like to get a second TiVo for our other TV. Now that it’s been confirmed that Multi-Room Viewing is coming to both the Series3 and TiVo HD soon, there’s even more incentive to get one. Fortunately right now they’re selling them to employees at a discounted price (limit one per employee). And now it’s the iPhone. I can’t explain why I feel compelled to buy this other than iWant. A few of my coworkers have one and they look pretty slick. Plus my current iPod battery can’t hold a charge very long. Plus I like the idea of having an integrated iPod and phone (it’s part of the reason why I got my current phone, the Motorola SLVR L7). Plus it’s roughly the same size as the SLVR and only slightly heavier.

In “Documentation - the chicken and the egg” [1], Matt Palmer wrote about the problem that noone writes documentation because noone reads it and that noone reads documentation because the few documentation in existence usually isn’t very good. So he, like me hs the habit of searching for help on the net instead of in a projects documentation. However I disagree with him in the consequences a bit. Because I noticed that on several projects with good documentation (subversion is an example that immediately comes to my mind, but postfix isn’t too bad either), the internet search returns a reference to the docs more often than not. Of course, this means that the documentation needs to be searchable for those webcrawlers. So if you have the task to write documentation, I strongly suggest to make it searchable in some way. For company-internal projects, this obviously means that the documentation must be reachable via an internal search engine. In a project a few years back, we implemented an internal search engine which included company internal information (even with user based access rules so that each user only got those results he could actually access) as well as an external search engines results. It was closed source, but a pretty nice idea. It didn’t, however, index any locally (user’s desktop) stored documents, only what was on some company web page (but including .doc, .rtf, .pdf and the like which where retrievable via http). [1] http://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/general/documentation_the_chicken_and_the_egg.html

if you like to monitor the number of RC bugs, you are probably annoyed by the graph on http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/. The graph starts in 2003, making it impossible to read short-time changes. There’s a bug about that: #431299: RC bug status graph timescale is too long. And I provided a patch a few months ago, but it hasn’t been included yet. So, in the meantime, you can use my private copy (generated daily):

• Graph for the last two years
• Graph for the last 6 months
• Overall graph (same as the one on bugs.d.o, with the added captions)

Also, if you like graphs, Yves-Alexis Perez (aka Corsac) generates cool graphs about Debian:

• NEW queue
• NM stats

And if you want to have all the interesting graphs on the same page, you can use this page.