The GUADEC 2007 paper submission deadline is rapidly approaching: five days left and counting! That's right, if you want to talk at GUADEC this year in Birmingham, England, then you have until Monday 12^th March to submit your proposal. We need talks about desktop integration, embedded systems, large deployments, and profiling. We need tutorials on using GNOME from Python, or Perl, or C#. Sessions explaining how to use a certain application, or why a new library being developed is the best thing since sliced bread. Scheduled hackfests to fix bugs in certain applications, and discussions to work out complicated problems we have. Basically, we need you. Propose your session for GUADEC now! NP: The Man with a Movie Camera, The Cinematic Orchestra

Problem:
accessing a PostgreSQL database from OpenOffice.org base under Debian.

Solution:
apt-get install unixodbc odbc-postgresql
# odbcinst -i -d -f /usr/share/psqlodbc/odbcinst.ini.template
$ cat /usr/share/doc/odbc-postgresql/examples/odbc.ini.template >> ~/.odbc.ini


1. Set connection parameters in ~/.odbc.ini (username, password, host...)
2. Check "Connect to an existing database" from the oobase Database Wizard, select ODBC, click on "Browse".

At this point your PostgreSQL database should be listed among the available data sources.
Yay!

In the KDE team we are have too many notforwarded bugs open. Most of these bugs are upstream bugs and feature requests. Many bug reports already fixed upstream, but not yet marked as such. And many that just needs to be located in the KDE Bugzilla. Some of the bugs already fixed upstream is probably by readers of Planet Debian. If the readers of Planet Debian (That’s you), could go quickly thru their bugs and check if it still applies and add a note if it does and else close it with a comment, it would be really really nice. To get a list of all the reported bugs pr email address, you can use the following url: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=your@email.invalid with your reportbug email inserted. If your bug still applies, it would be very cool if you could find it upstream and mark it forwarded. Our goal is to make the red and the een line much more close than they currently are:
Click for full size Any other help with the bugs is also much appreciated. My hero is still Olivier Vitrat who came out of the blue and is doing a amazing job with pinging and forwarding bugs.

La prochaine formation Web Component Developer sous Linux pour demandeurs d'emploi (gratuite) aura lieu partir du 2 mai 2007 place Delcour Li ge ( preuves de s lection le 27 mars 2007 9h): Plus d'info sur le site officiel:
http://www.stefi.fapse.ulg.ac.be/formations/emploi/webco/ Ou sur le site Ressource-toi.org:
http://ressource-toi.org/annonces/webco/2007

I recently wrote an article or two about distributed version control systems.

I've been using Darcs since 2005. I switched to Darcs, in fact, 10 days after the simultaneous founding announcements of git and Mercurial.

Overall, I have been happy. I continue to believe that it is the most distributed of the distributed VCSs, which is a Good Thing.

However, I have lately started having trouble with Darcs hanging while working on my Debian packages. My post to the Darcs user list drew out a few other people whith this problem, which is a design flaw of Darcs.

So I revisited the VCS landscape. I re-examined git, Mercurial, and bzr. I eventually decided to give Mercurial a try. I avoided git because I write some code that is portable to Windows, and git isn't (or isn't very well). Also, git is complex to pick up for me, and I certainly don't want to force something complex onto my contributors. bzr seemed to still have some strange behaviors that it's had for awhile, and I couldn't find even one advantage of it over Mercurial. So off I went with Mercurial.

I quickly learned a bit of a philosophical difference from Darcs to Mercurial.

Darcs avoids conflicts at all costs. Mercurial makes handling conflict easy and, in many cases, automatic.

It is exactly this Darcs behavior that permits both is excellent "darcs send" feature (still unmatched in any other VCS), but also causes its hang problems.

I found Mercurial quite pleasant to work with, and *fast*. It seems to be edging out git in speed tests sometimes these days.

It is easy to get started with Mercurial. The mq system -- similar to quilt or other patch-management programs -- is really quite an amazing hybrid between patch management and version control. I frankly don't see any need for other patch-management tools anymore.

Mercurial has a "patchbomb" feature where you can select a range of changesets to send off, and it will generate nice emails with one changeset per email, and send them to your selected destination, optionally with an introductory message. The normal way of interacting with other Mercurial users is via the hg export/import commands, which send around simple unified diffs plus some additional header information, optionally in the git extended diff format.

I am happy with Mercurial and am in the process of converting my Debian repositories from Darcs to Mercurial. I'm going to keep my personal code in Darcs for the moment because "darcs send" is still easier than "hg email", but that may change before long, depending on how my experience goes.

I'd encourage others to give Mercurial a try. The community is also very nice and helpful.

I have contributed patches to Tailor to make it make exact copies of Darcs repos into Mercurial, which are now in its Darcs repo. There is also a thread on the Mercurial list with some of my initial questions/concerns coming from a Darcs perspective.

This morning there were two or three classes from a local primary school on board my tram taking up all the seats (mostly three children to a seat).

So to answer some email and write blog entries I had to sit in a stair-well. Melbourne trams are symmetrical so that they can just change direction at the end of the line (unlike some other trams - the Amsterdam tram line 10 that I used to catch has a circle at each end of the line for the tram to turn). Being symmetrical means that the doors on the left side of the tram are used for passengers to get on and off, and the doors on the right are locked - so the right stairwell is a place you can sit to use a laptop if all the seats are taken.

While I was sitting on the floor some women started talking about me, I heard comments such as "he's answering his email", "it must save a lot of time, he could do half an hour of email on the way to work", and "he must work for an Internet company - look at his shirt" (I was wearing an Intel shirt given out at LCA 2007). At that point I decided to briefly explain the work I do, there's a limit to the amount of time I can refrain from joining the conversation when people are standing around me and talking about me.

They didn't seem to understand enough to enable me to explain anything about Linux.

Wrein, I'm not going to create a wordpress account.
As you can see I already have unmaintained blogs here and there. :-)

After asking for useable CA Software, I have finally settled on using EasyRSA. This is what I did to come across the packaging shortcomings of EasyRSA in Debian. Storing your CA Be sure that your CA is stored in a secure place. Don’t store it online, and make it accessible only to yourself. In my opinion, storing the the CA in a cryptoloop container file on a small 32 MB USB stick is a good idea. Cryptloop is rather easy today and available in the stock Linux kernel. I commonly use grml-crypt to manage the crypto loopback stuff:

sudo grml-crypt start /media/usb4/cryptoloop $MOUNTPOINT

Gotcha: don’t confuse sudo’s “password” prompt with grml-crypt’s “Enter LUKS passphrase” prompt, the cryptoloop password won’t bring you anywhere on the sudo prompt. Preparing the CA directory For the CA, create a dedicated directory in the mounted cryptoloop file system. You’re originally supposed to copy the entire EasyRSA directory tree in there, but I’d recommend to only link the files from your system’s EasyRSA directory to automatically take advantage of distribution updates. You’ll need at least these links:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 mh mh   56 Dec 25 23:23 openssl.cnf -> /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/openssl.cnf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mh mh   52 Dec 25 23:22 pkitool -> /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/pkitool
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mh mh   60 Dec 25 23:23 whichopensslcnf -> /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/whichopensslcnf

ln -s /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/openssl.cnf .
ln -s /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/pkitool .
ln -s /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/whichopensslcnf .

Configuring your CA The only thing you cannot link is the vars file which contains your CA’s local settings:

export EASY_RSA=“$(pwd)”
export OPENSSL=“openssl”
export PKCS11TOOL=“pkcs11-tool”
export GREP=“grep”
export KEY_CONFIG=$($EASY_RSA/whichopensslcnf $EASY_RSA)
export KEY_DIR=“$EASY_RSA/keys”
# Issue rm -rf warning
echo NOTE: If you run ./clean-all, I will be doing a rm -rf on $KEY_DIR
export KEY_SIZE=1024
export CA_EXPIRE=3650
export KEY_EXPIRE=3650
export KEY_COUNTRY=“DE”
export KEY_PROVINCE=“”
export KEY_CITY=“”
export KEY_ORG=“Zugschlus.de”
export KEY_EMAIL=“mh+easyrsa-mh-openvpn@zugschlus.de”
export PKCS11_MODULE_PATH=“dummy”
export PKCS11_PIN=“dummy”

Comments have been removed from this file. Better copy the file from /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/vars and edit it to your needs. I added the two PKCS11 variables since you won’t otherwise be able to issue certificate requests. Creating the CA Next, decide on a shell instance where you will do most operations, and source vars in there. Next, run /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/clean-all. If you do this in a directory of an already-in-use EasyRSA CA, you’ll need to restore your backup. To actually initialize the CA, run pkitool --initca --pass. If you do not give the --pass parameter, you’ll create a CA that can issue certificates without asking for a passphrase, which might not be a brilliant idea. Choose a reasonably secure pass phrase. Creating Certificates - the simple and suboptimal way You can now simply proceed to create an arbitrary number of pairs of “private” keys and associated certificate by simply calling pkitool <clientname> and/or pkitool --server <servername>. Depending on your security policy, you can mandate the private keys to be protected by a passphrase (adding --pass to the command lines), but you’ll have the expense of being asked for the passphrase every time you start a new openvpn daemon. Creating Certificates the Right Way I have put the “private” in quotes since the keys created this way are not really private: The key was created on the box hosting the CA, was stored on the local (crypted) file system and needs to be moved to the target system via a secure channel. Doing so the right way is harder than expected, so it is usually the better way to keep the private key really private by creating it directly on the target system. On the target system, you need OpenVPN installed, and openssl. After the certificate was created, you can remove openssl again. Creating a private key is part of a key-pair generation process that also leaves a certificate request. The contents of the certificate request is public, and you can safely move it to the CA box and convert it to a certificate by signing the request. You only need to make sure that nobody exchanges your target system’s certificate request for her own before you sign it as you might end up certifying a wrong identity. For the rest of this document we’re going to assume that you have ssh access to the target system and have verified the ssh host key, so that you can be reasonably sure to be connected to the right system. To create a certificate request, you can use this script, which I have called create-easyrsa-cert-req:

#!/bin/bash
set -u
TMPDIR=“/tmp”
export OPENSSL=“openssl”
export PKCS11TOOL=“pkcs11-tool”
export GREP=“grep”
export KEY_CONFIG=“/usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/openssl.cnf”
export KEY_DIR=“$TMPDIR/keys.$$”
mkdir -p $KEY_DIR
export KEY_SIZE=1024
export KEY_EXPIRE=3650
export KEY_COUNTRY=“DE”
export KEY_PROVINCE=“”
export KEY_CITY=“”
export KEY_ORG=“Zugschlus”
export KEY_OU=“$(hostname --fqdn)”
export KEY_EMAIL=“mh+$(hostname)-ovpn-cert@zugschlus.de”
export DEBUG=1
umask 077
if [ “$ 1:-foo ” != “server” ]; then
  /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/pkitool --csr $(hostname)
else
  /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/pkitool --csr --server $(hostname)
fi
mv $TMPDIR/keys.$$/* .
rm -rf $TMPDIR/keys.$$

When called without parameters, it creates a certificate request for an OpenVPN client certificate, and when you call it with “server” as parameter, it will create a server certificate request. In any case, it will leave two files in the current directory. They are named after the current host name, and have the extensions .csr and .key. The .key file is your private key. keep it private! The .csr file is the certificate request which you can now move to the keys subdirectory of your CA directory via scp or other means such as an USB stick. To do the actual signing, invoke pkitool --sign <hostname> and enter the CA passphrase. You can ignore the error message that there was no .key file to chmod. Gotcha, when signing a server certificate, use pkitool --server --sign <hostname>. Move Certificate to the target host You can now move the certificate to the target system. Since you’re probably going to need the root certificate and the certificate revocation list as well, you can move the .key file (if created on the CA system), the .crt file, and ca.crt to the target system. These files are public, so there is no need for a secure channel. Revoking Certificates Since an OpenVPN server’s only means of authentication is to check whether the certificate presented by a client is signed by the “right” CA, the only way to revoke VPN access is to revoke the certificate. This is also done on the CA system by calling /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0/revoke-full <client-name>. This creates a crl.pem file which contains a list of all revoked certificates. You need to have a mechanism to distribute that list to all systems that might need it, and it is recommended to have this automated. Remember, if you do not distribute the .crl file, the systems are not going to know about revoked certificates.

The important thing first:

I'm pleased to announce the birth of our child, Leif Alexander Bailey. Leif is a bio-boy, so we've chosen the male pronoun. He was born at 12:41 (-0500) at the Lasalle hospital by cesarean. Angie is recovering from the surgery. Father is stunned, but has learned how to change a diaper and how to cuddle a newborn to sleep.

For those who want it by the numbers: Leif was born 60 hours after the membranes first ruptured (which was significant, but still just a trickle once we saw what water breaking is *really* like, holy crap). After 49 hours, we transfered from the birthing centre to the hospital since labour had stalled (7cm dilation). Angie was in active labour (4 cm dilated) for 39 hours. At the hospital, after 8 hours, the doctor determined that she was fully dilated and encouraged her to push. Labour had stalled (head was transverse), and so the c-section was ordered.

The result - A healthy baby weighing 4660grams/10 pounds, 4 ounces. 55.5 cm long / 22 inches.

Pictures are up on my flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbailey/

We're still not answering emails, calls, or taking visitors yet, really. The messages are being received however, and are much appreciated.

* Finally, I got my new digital camema Samsung DigiMax S700!. Now, my adventure in digital photography is about to start. Thanks Hiral & Atin for this! Some cool/bad features:
+ 7.2 MP, 3x Optical Zoom, 5x Digital Zoom
+ Large 2.5″ LCD
- No Viewfinder, so battery eater! * LDTP Package is fixed now. * I forgot that it was Holi yesterday and couldn’t found any shop open in my native Palanpur. Meet Vinay/Anil/Manish in hurry and back by night bus. Well, bus was jam packed and I had to standup during the whole journey.

This little piggy was given the bottle and rocket-launched to space.

Back in October I mentioned that I may soon try out Zotero, “The Next Generation Research Tool” that they claim is “easy-to-use.” Well after various upgrades, it has been installed and I am up and running with it. And I have to say it made me as happy as my morning cup of coffee, which is basically ecstatic. The software was not only a snap to install, but so amazingly smooth in terms of user interface and functionality. While I wish this existed years ago, well, I am just happy it does now. I know it will make my life dealing with the infolanche of books, articles, and blog entries so much much less overwhelming. So thanks to all the people and organizations that have made Zotero happen. I love you all.

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a "beamer". He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it's a better option than the word "projector". The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it's pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn't be a problem.

One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.

When I give lectures at conferences I'm always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.

Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.

Linux Conf Au has an event called the "Professional Delegates Networking Session" which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don't attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it's more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.

If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).

These are some random thoughts based on a not very thorough reading of candidate platforms of the DPL Election 2007, and my subjective view of the candidates based on the mailing traffic I remember reading. Wouter Verhelst: Has quite a broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. Aigars Mahinovs: Quoting from his platform: “My goal of running for DPL is not to be DPL, but to get a few concepts closer to real life.” So don't run for DPL, but start doing these things you're thinking about. Not being DPL has the advantage that you don't have to spend time on DPL stuff that would detract you from these goals. Speaking about your goals: (i) No release: I've thought about that, too, but I feel this would quickly make Debian irrelevant. (ii) $HOME configuration files organisation: take it up with the upstream developers of all the application. I think this is a very good idea, but freedesktop.org would be a better platform. (iii) Old Maintainer Process: Idea looking for a problem. (iv) Dropping Trademarks: not sure what to think about this. Gustavo Franco: Some focus on the desktop, and a constructive attitude towards Ubuntu, both positive in my book. (The first one primarily because on servers Linux is already quite well established, while the desktop is where more work is still to be done. Not because servers are less important.) His goals: (i) Core teams: as with Wouter, he sees that people and what goes on between them are where the problems are. (ii) Release goals: I think building the release based on release goals could be a driving force, but this is more RM area than DPL. (iii) Adding features to the bts doesn't need DPL powers. (iii) New developers: certainly an area that still needs attention, but the intended course is not entirely clear to me. (iv) NEW queue: same. (v) CTTE: Not sure what the idea behind this is. (vi) Groups: yes, but again not entirely clear what and how. (vii) Backports: yes, new versions of some software should go into Debian (stable) faster. Officially supporting backports or something else, I don't know, but this is an area where a DPL could pull together the RMs, security team(s), backports.org people etc. (viii) Universal OS: is this about more media coverage or about more face to face meetings? Both are good, but we should set clear goals beforehand. (ix) Much work is needed, especially in the area of buildd management (meaning: the processes and people behind it!). Does Gustavo have previous involvement here? (x) Vendors, Website, Publicity: This is more or less all about media coverage and popularity. Much needed, but as Debian as it is will never be able to commit to a public official opinion of anything, we'll need to think hard about what to do here. (xi) NMU: I don't see a great need for action here, personally. Overall: this platform contains too much material, I fear trying to tackle all these areas will lead to a burned out DPL within three months and little actually getting anywhere. Sven Luther: It's true that it always needs at least two people for a flamewar. But having a DPL who is always ready to provide one side of an argument is not a good idea. Sam Hocevar: Everything is high-level on his platform. Both good and bad. Not sure how to rate this platform, but I see myself nodding along. Learn from other OSs is good, but I hope he also means active cooperation and not just passive let's see how they do it. Steve McIntyre: Should have won 2006. Certainly did a lot of both behind-the-scenes work and some good communication. The platform lacks mention of relations between Debian and the outside world, which is an area where I feel some work is missing (and where the DPL as the only person with a official role also known outside Debian can make a difference), and also lacks mention of legal problems (trademarks and patents) where I'm not sure how solid Debian's work is. Additional argument in favor of Steve: Having a 2IC and promoting him to DPL the year after might be a good idea overall. Maybe we should actually elect the 2IC and only have a confirmation vote to promote him to DPL? Raphaël Hertzog: I like the DPL board idea. I also like how Raphaël focuses, in his platform, on the DPL board idea and some selected problems. On the other hand, the platform is wholly focused inward, outside relations are important, too ! Anthony Towns: Not sure what to think of the current DPL. I think he had good ideas, and I still think the original “spend Debian funds for the release”-idea was not that bad, but seeing how it all worked out was very, very painful for too many people. The platform seems pretty much empty, so I guess ajt won't have my vote this time. Simon Richter: Maybe I miss something, but I only see “don't repeat the dunc-tank flamefest” in his platform, which seems a bit thin. His observation that the real power of the DPL is to get everybody's attention may be partly true, though, even if this power will be spent as soon as a DPL, trying to mediate, lets himself be drawn into the flamewar instead (I don't accuse Simon that he ultimately will do this, but I fear that it happens all too quickly). Now what? I really don't have the time to thoroughly follow the campaigning, but I'll certainly have a look at the rebuttals, and perhaps somebody will do some summary. So the ballot below will certainly change. (You might also be able to buy the vote if you're rich enough ;-)

 [ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
 [ 5 ] Aigars Mahinovs
 [ 3 ] Gustavo Franco
 [ 6 ] Sven Luther
 [ 3 ] Sam Hocevar
 [ 1 ] Steve McIntyre
 [ 2 ] Raphaë Hertzog
 [ 5 ] Anthony Towns
 [ 4 ] Simon Richter
 [ 5 ] NOTA

Mr Chopra, at Decoding Liberation has made some very fine points concerning why so-called high-failure in open source is nothing to fear. He is responding to a piece by Chris Holt who is responding to a piece by Clay Shirky recently published in the Harvard Business Review. I tried today and faild miserably to getthe Shirky piece. Can anyone get access to the HBR? If yes, please do send me a copy!

Recently, I got a comment on an older blog post on Edmonton that basically agreed with another comment that Edmonton was so not the cat’s meow. Despite the winter and many months later, I guess I still do think it is, although in saying so, it is not I think their assessments are wrong, I think my take has as much to do as what has come before (like NJ, which was not the high point o my life), my experiences here, and what is to come in the future. I tend to like Edmonton because there is enough stuff to do but not too much to do. It is that whole freedom from choice that I like because I often shut down in the face of too much choice. What also colors my experience in a positive light is that generally, Canadian politics, social policy, and way of life, are a step up or two (or maybe three) than that of the United States. So the worst of Canada (if you are even to call Edmonton that, which I would not), in this regard, beats out the best of the United States. And I have lived most of my life in the US so that is my point of comparison. Even if you are living in a fantastic American city, you always face the possibility of struggling in ways that will *never* happen in Canada. It makes for a calmer, less aggressive society. For example, I recently learned that Edmonton has the highest murder rate in Canada, at a whopping …. 36 people per year (population of Edmonton = 1 million). I grew up in a place, Puerto Rico where the yearly murder rate hovers at about 700-800 per year (population = 4 million). And yet people here are freaking out over the high rate of murder, which is a good thing because hopefully they can bring it down but this fact should make the US pause and think about what they are doing up north to keep the murder rate so darn low (and the answer I think is pretty easy to find). But perhaps a lot of my love of the place has as much to do or more with my state of mind. After a grueling year of finishing a dissertation under pressure as I had deadline, and then living in NJ where I was on the job market (which meant spending so much time churning out application after application and then flying around interviews), in addition to flying 7 times in one year to visit my mom, my life here just feels so much more sane than it has been in years. What sealed it all was that right before I moved here in August I was lucky enough to be offered a permanent job (which means this summer I will be moving to NYC to join this department and I will be back to the land of overwhelming choice), so that for the first time in 5 years I did not have to apply for anything in the fall that would guarantee my livelihood for the next academic year. I was not faced with a year of lots of travel (and actually traveling in out out Edmonton is really one of my least favorite things). With that firmly in place, I could just concentrate on things like my work, my friends, brewing kombucha and do things routinely, like exercise, which I had not consistently done for years. There are things about Edmonton that I find totally obnoxious like the cities inability to plow roads leaving a thick glaze of black ice on the roads so that when you drive in the city, you basically are at real risk for an accident (and this is despite a 6.6 BILLION government surplus). There are a tad too many strip malls in the outlaying areas, and of course there is the infamous winter. We are still deep in it. The cold temperatures have been with us steadily for months now and according to folks, there are still two more months to look forward to. The cold and the constant layering of clothes are getting to me a little, although I do appreciate that the cold is just not as cold as one would think with the actual temperatures. The lack of wind, the dry conditions, the cute as chubby-as-anything- bunnies that run through the snow, and the overpowering sun all help to make -6 F much more mild, so it is not as bad as you would or I would think it was. So while I am thrilled to join the department where I am moving too, I will be sad when I leave, though perhaps not as sad as Edmontons “darling” hockey player, Ryan Smith, who was just traded by the Oilers to the NY Islanders. The day he left, he literally was shedding tears at the airport. And I have to say, even though I have no attachment to hockey, I found the pictures endearing because there is nothing like seeing a grown Canadian man cry over hockey! : )

More comments, which I think help to narrow my choice to OpenWRT or FreeWRT. Kris Marsh commented:

"I can't comment on dd-wrt, as I've never tried it. I can, however, say that OpenWRT is great. Personally, I don't see the point in X-WRT, as I use vi and /etc/ to modify configs. Assuming you're handy with Debian (;-)), then you should be just fine without X-WRT. Tip: If you want to use WPA, you need to install the "nas" package: "ipkg install nas". I believe this non-free package is what a previous commenter was referring to."

Yes, I want to use WPA (I think some of the machines here can't do IPSec and WEP just isn't good enough) so I guess I have another freedom problem. I'd be happy with ed, but I might try X-WRT just to see how it copes with my web browser (I expect badly, like many embedded web apps, but then I could file bugs or fix it up). ranf mentioned:

"There is also a OpenWRT fork named FreeWRT ."

Argh, another candidate! Seriously, thanks for the tip. I'm not sure what it offers me over OpenWRT, as FreeWRT doesn't list either my router (Belkin POS) or my office host system (gobo) as supported and I don't intend to install svn any time soon. I'll probably try its Web Image Builder. Taneli commented:

"I believe Kamikaze has open source broadcom drivers (it's using 2.6). No idea if backport exists, but I'd venture no. Using Kamikaze sounds quite dangerous, but I haven't tried."

nbd wrote:

"Hi there. A few comments on your blog post: The main reason why the free Broadcom drivers haven't been included yet is because they're simply not ready. The Broadcom SoC needs to be handled differently than the MiniPCI cards and I'm working with the bcm43xx on that. Actually the new 2.6 based port is almost complete. As to which Firmware you want: As an OpenWrt developer I very much recommend installing X-Wrt on OpenWrt :) Anyways... Have fun!"

Yes, this is definitely a "fun" choice! I guess I won't know what works until I JFDI and pick up the pieces. Glad to hear the Broadcom drivers are still being worked on: I've met a lot of Broadcom cards and some of them can only be coerced with ndiswrapper, which isn't good. I wish I knew enough about network hardware to hack sensibly, but I don't know where to start and there's so much else to do. Finally, it looks like dd-wrt isn't a good choice. Yammering (Clint Adams) linked me to this rant and Simon Farnsworth commented along similar lines:

"X-WRT is just an easier UI that installs over OpenWRT. DD-WRT is a competing project to OpenWRT, based on the OpenWRT code, but using such "free" software techniques as product activation, and per-seat licencing to stop you "misusing" your GPL rights. I'd recommend OpenWRT/X-WRT, just because they tend to be more respectful of licences, and less prone to demanding money with menances."

I've no problem with commercialism itself, but I dislike broken promises and playing fast-and-loose with copyright. If there's evidence the other way, please let me know!

Enrico: if you extract the platforms using lynx -dump -nolist (or w3m -dump ), you’ll only extract the text, with no HTML, and the keywords will vary slightly:

• 93sam: jobs, deal, dds, nms, asking
• aigarius: applications, choose, trademarks, apps, formats
• ajt: effective, neat, hoping, success, interview
• hertzog: broadly, serve, represent, pushed, chosen
• sho: deadline, icons, helps, excellence, freaks
• sjr: published, yet, inc, feb, wed
• stratus: stable, websites, feature, submitter, involving
• svenl: weekend, publish, banning, unfair, protest
• wouter: controversy, seem, background, delegates, therefore