That SCO managed to postpone the trial in SCO vs. Novell by trying to get
Chapter 11 protection one more time is old news by now. It just occurs to
me that the continuation of glowbulb jokes by SCO is now “How many
lawyers do you need to file for bankruptcy” (paraphrasing PJ.) In
SCO's case it seems to be “As many as you can pay, and then some
more.”
On Friday I finally made the decision - from the two cameras that
left in choice, I bought Pentax K10D. And first experiences
are quite positive. In fact I didn't find anything really disappointing
during first weekend of usage. I only learned, that I should better
check manual choices I've made in the past, because changing white
balance at interior, going out and taking photos there does not really
produce great pictures.
The camera feels really good in my hands and I was able to figure out
most settings without reading manual, but I think now it is time to do
so :-). Maybe it will help me to get even more out of it, especially in
controlling manual modes.
I have to admit that most of photos were left to automatics and I just
tried what I can do with it. Combined with trips to Kyoto,
Nagoya Castle and Inuyama, it is no wonder that I took almost
1000 photos during weekend.
Thanks to everybody who helped me with their suggestions, it really
helped me in the decision!
(In case anyone has missed it, Debian Live is a neat framework for creating live Debian distributions on CD, DVD, USB or netboot media.)
Debian Live’s primary utility, live-helper, is implemented using what Daniel calls the “Debhelper” design pattern: that is, a number of small shell scripts (or helpers) that are run just below a configuration directory. Each helper should ideally perform a single task, and running a helper is always ’safe’, meaning that any logic for determining whether the helper’s actions should take place is in the helper itself, rather than in the caller.
This arrangement results in a somewhat modular design (for shell scripts, anyway) and allows for simple debugging - simply run the helpers manually, or ‘set -x‘ the helper you are interested in and re-run the lot.
live-helper currently has a total 69 helpers, and included in this are a number of ‘meta-helpers’ such as lh_build, lh_chroot, etc. whose job it is to simply call other helpers in the correct order. In an attempt to tame this large number, I made this SVG (45KB). Each edge corresponds to a call in the direction of the edge. Source is available 
Sunday's matches featured three interesting games.
We didn't watch much of Fidji-Canada because it was scheduled at 14:00 but
announced at 21:00 on the schedule I had..:-(.. That's too bad because these
two teams are the only two I haven't seen during an entire game yet. Fidji
won after being menaced by Canada up to the last minute. So Fidji keep their
chances of qualifying, which they'll have to win by beating Wales.
Samoa-Tonga (15-19) was very promizing and turned out to be a deception for me. We
watched only the first half of it (Eurosport wasn't broadcasting it live...
suckers!). The suspense was there, particularly at
the end of the game, when Tonga were playing only with 13 players for five
minutes, while leading by 4 points only. However, Samoa obviously played
quite badly and never really succeeded during that match to push their very
physical way to play rugby. Tonga keep their chances to qualify, which
they'll have to defend against England.
France-Namibia was the last match and was obviously eagerly awaited by most
of my fellow French supporters. Seen as "the match of revival" (as if losing
to Argentina was a shame....), this was indeed a mor ethan easy match, as
one would expected. Anyway, France played it well and played it the way it
had to be played, so even if 87-10 doesn't really mean anything
(particularly when playing against 14 players most of the time), they used
all the strength of the team to build that victory and I believe there are
still many strength in the French team. Critical rendez-vous against Ireland
on Friday.
Today (Monday): no match. Tomorrow, only one (Scotland-Romania in
Murrayfield: critical match for the Scots). Everybody, us included, is
resting.:)
Although slow, development on svn-buildpackage still continues. Sorry for the delays, but both myself and Eduard Bloch have been unable to assign more time to svn-buildpackage development in the last few months.[ Eddy Petri or ]
* IMPORTANT: changed default behaviour of saving the configuration in
.svn/deb-layout by default to avoid stale data to override the
configuration options that were updated in the repository.
(Closes: #414581)
As a consequence, a new option --svn-savecfg was added to allow a
mechanism for easily overriding options locally
Sound Juicer "The Best Blue Is Through The Trees" 2.20.0 is out.
Tarballs are available on
burtonini.com, or from the GNOME
FTP servers.
to refer to a class of military robots that have no compunction about killing humans.
Among the fall-out of the SFWA actions was the removal of a free novel by Cory Doctorow [4]. Incidentally my favourite free to download Cory Doctorow book is Eastern Standard Tribe [5]. craphound.com has Cory’s blog as well as links to other free Sci-Fi that he’s written.
Reading the links from Ted’s post took me to a blog entry by the current SFWA vice-president [6] which describes authors such as Cory Doctorow as “webscabs“. This offends me greatly. My work and that of my friends in writing free software could be described in the same way (and in fact is described in a similar way by some software monopolists). Every blogger could have their work described in a similar way by paid journalists.
The fact that the SFWA VP is not representing SFWA when writing such comments does little to allay concern about this. It seems to me that people with such ideas are intent on attacking my community, and that it would be wrong of me to give any of them $0.50 by buying one of their books. I resolve to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read. After that I will prioritise my book purchases with a significant factor being how well the author gets the concepts of copyright etc. If nothing else an author who can’t understand how copyright (something that is essential to their own livelyhood) interacts with current computer systems will have significant difficulties in predicting how technology and society will develop over the next hundred or thousand years.
My problem in reading Sci-Fi books is not in discovering books that are enjoyable and which contain interesting concepts, but in finding time to read them. Thanks to SFWA for giving me an extra criteria to cull the list of books to read.
Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-
My Python development environment consists of a GVim window for editing code and a gnome-terminal for running the unit tests. This works out well, but leaves some integration to be desired. In particular, jumping to a test failure point is a little cumbersome. I used to do it this way: copy the filename from the traceback, switch to vim, then type :e, paste the filename with middle-click (now I know I can use * instead) and press Enter, then enter the line number and press G. That is barely acceptable; this particular wart has even contributed to pushing a ex-co-worker towards Emacs (the horror!).
I have written a small vimscript function to make the aforementioned use case slightly easier. Now to jump to a failure point, just triple-click the corresponding line in the traceback (that selects the whole line), switch to Vim and invoke the function, which scrapes the clipboard for a filename and line number and opens it in the active buffer.
Installation: paste the OpenFileFromClipboard function in your ~/.vimrc and bind it to a key by adding the following lines to your .vimrc:
nmap :call OpenFileFromClipboard() imap :call OpenFileFromClipboard()These commands bind the key F4 to our function. The first command handles normal mode, and the second handles insert mode (hence the to momentarily escape the insert mode). You can of course change the shortcut to whatever you like. The function should handle following types of references from the clipboard:
/etc/passwdJohn saved his work to ~john/doc.txt and left.File "/home/gintas/devel/project/tests.py", line 123, in tests.py/usr/include/stdio.h:333:extern int sprintf (char *__restrict __s,
Satellite TV
commented:
"Wow, all that seems pretty complex to me. The U.S is so much more simple, we just chose Dish Network or DirecTV or some kind of cable and call it a day. Then again I don't know if thats a bad or a good thing."That's a bad thing. Look at the situation: In the US, there seems to be very little free-to-air (FTA) satellite TV for most of the country, except PBS and religious channels. The main US FTA FAQ answers "Should I drop cable/Dish/DirecTV and switch to FTA?" with "Probably not." I'd say "Probably yes" to similar questions in Europe, as long as you aren't dependent on one of the few incompatible pay-TV channels. Channels like MTV, Nick, TVEi and DW are all pay-TV in the US, but FTA in Europe. But if you're in the US, look on the bright side: Canada seems even more behind on this. In Europe, you can still call whatever satellite broadcaster (such as Canal Satellite, Premiere or even Sky) and get a system installed if you choose, but you can also install your own. That's what my FAQ is about: giving people in "the land of the free TV" some starting info on how to do that. Some broadcaster-supplied systems only really work well with one broadcaster's "approved" channels (Sky are particularly bad for that), are more expensive to upgrade than standard systems and don't give viewers the equipment to repair it when it breaks, which encourages them to keep paying the broadcaster's agents. Some of those agents do some pretty dishonest tricks when installing dishes, such as putting them far higher up than necessary, to discourage viewers from fixing it themselves and to advertise satellite TV to the neighbours. It's pretty easy to install a standard satellite system... if you can put up a wall bracket and tune in a video, you can probably do it. Alternatively, there are independent installers who will do it for you, who might seem like they charge more than the broadcaster's agents, but remember that a good one won't keep charging you every month or try to sell stuff to you forevermore!
Scientific papers always have a “related works” section, where the authors describe how the work they are presenting compares with what others did. In the Free Software world, this is nearly non-existent: in a way, it seems that many of us are thinking of their projects as competing products, fighting for market share. On a project web page, I would love to read something like:
This project is particularly well suited if you want XX. But if YY is more important to you, you might want to have a look at ZZ.Or simply links to similar projects for other environments, etc. All in all, I think that the goal is to improve the global satisfaction. Not to win a few users, who won’t be totally happy, because the project doesn’t really suit their needs. While some projects cooperate and share ideas, like I think desktop environments do inside freedesktop.org, most just ignore each other. I am both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer, and I’m sometimes amazed that Ubuntu discusses technical choices that were discussed (and solved) a few weeks earlier in Debian. And it’s even worse with the other big distros out there. Couldn’t we try to improve this ? We could just create a mailing list, where developers from various distributions could present the way they do things. This would allow to discuss future developments (”We are planning to improve this, what are you doing about that ?“) or simply to improve people’s knowledge of the various distributions. Of course, this could easily turn into flamefests, but they are technical ways to avoid that, like moderating posts from trollers… Does something like that already exist ? Do you think that it would be interesting ? Would you like to contribute to such a forum ? Some examples of things that could be discussed:
Argh... I know it seems like I've given up on blogging entirely, but that's not the case. I've just been spending a lot of time working on Evan Prodromou instead of on evan.prodromou.name, which has been a whole different kind of world.
I'm mostly poking my head up to point to an article in the Montreal Gazette about my new project, Vinismo. Montreal entrepreneur uncorks Wikipedia of wine, says the headline. I guess that "Montreal entrepreneur" is little ol' me. Go figure!
The article is nice and balanced -- it covers the obvious fact that one month after launch Vinismo is not the definitive end-all be-all of wine information... yet. Roberto Rocha, the article's author, is doing a great job covering local entrepreneurs and the startup Internet scene, and I'm glad that our site got his vote of approval.
And check out the photo they took of me and Niko at the excellent Pullman Wine Bar. How sophisticated.
Glad to be getting some press about the site, and good news for Vinismo.
tags: wine vinismo montreal gazette me press
I just read Sun's announcement of "Project Hamburg". I am not sure what
it is about, but that is not very important in this context. I have
worked a bit with Intel lately and gotten introduced into a whole new
world of code names such as Mccaslin, Menlow and so on. Up until now,
most of them were obscure enough that I thought they were just random
names picked from somewhere, but they are, like Sun's names of
geographical features, be it towns, cities, rivers or something else.
The reason for this naming is, like Sun's, that geographical names can't
be trademarked, though in this particular case, Sun supplied a short
list of "why Hamburg" with some references to Hamburg's history.
Just completed the migration of the next version of apt-cross that is due to be uploaded once dpkg-cross pre2 can be uploaded to experimental. (This in turn is waiting for dpkg to support removal of the dpkg-cross diversions: #439979.)
I need to learn about posting plans.
As was to be expected, this didn't work out the way I wanted to. Step one of my plan was rearranging everything so I could work without the laptop, which means moving the Pegasos back into my room. Since I still need it as a DSL router until I find a better solution, and there is no cable between the modem and my room, I thought about using the wireless network for that (the AP is right next to the modem).
So I switched off VLAN mode everywhere (the AP cannot mix tagged and untagged traffic on one port, and the modem cannot do VLAN tagging either), and plugged a zd1201 USB network adapter into the Pegasos. Worked so far with an Ad-Hoc network, now let's make it talk to the AP. Fire up wpa_suppos^H^Hlicant, see the mess. After some googling I found out the problem: the zd1201 Linux driver does not support WPA.
As my flatmate might need the network tonight and cables around the place are bad for moving in, I shall make it work in the most ugly way imaginable: with WEP. This means: if you drive by my place and crack one of the networks with WEP, you only risk a 50% chance of ending up in my honeypot.
I wonder if I should write a shell script that occasionally "negotiates" a new key with the AP by setting it over SNMP.
After Dell, Lenovo decided to ask users which Linux distribution they should put on Thinkpads. Seriously, who cares? If I buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre-installed, my first step would be to reinstall it from scratch, exactly like with a laptop with Windows pre-installed. Because the choices that were made wouldn’t match mine (think of partitioning, etc). Or simply because I wouldn’t totally trust the hardware manufacturer.
So, what would make me happier about a laptop?
If you know of an occasional passerby who takes the time to extract the contents of Debian source packages to see whether the RFCs are here or not, please let us know. We are always looking for new potential contributors.— Josselin Mouette
Since some time, Robert Millan has been working at a tool to make the Debian GNU/Linux installation easier for Windows users[1]. His work has been integrated on Debian Installer daily images and now on Debian-CD (tool used to produce the Debian .iso images) and hence provinding a better user experience.
1. http://packages.debian.org/sid/win32-loaderUp to now, the user would see a “MS-DOS Window”[2] while running Debian autorun to open the README.html existent inside of the CD. It was ugly and user would need to know how to use the CD-ROM to boot and maybe even know how to set the BIOS to allow it. It has improved a lot since it now instead loads a nice graphical application that loads the README (and uses translated versions if available) and minimize itself[3], the tool allows the user to reboot the system and use the Windows bootloader to load the installer without requiring any special knowledge from the user.
2. http://people.debian.org/~rmh/d-i/win32-loader/autorun/before.ogg 3. http://people.debian.org/~rmh/d-i/win32-loader/autorun/after.oggUpdate: Those screencasts were done by Robert, not by me.
Next.
