I agree with Destiny -- this letter from wp:Steely Dan to wp:Luke Wilson is just excellent. If only all creative property disputes were handled this way. tags: steely dan luke wilson destiny

Hot in the City tonight It's been a hot last couple of days in Montreal -- I mean, not hot like wt:California or wt:Europe but hot enough that it feels pretty bad. According to Sacr Blues -- one of my favorite books about wt:Quebec -- Montreal has the highest variation in temperature of any inhabited place on earth -- from highs of 40C in the summer to lows of -40C in the winter. We're at the high part now. Yesterday was my Primary Caregiver ("PCG") day, so I took the opportunity to take the baby for a long walk in Parc La Fontaine, under the gigantic poplars, where it's always cool and fresh. We also went for a nice dip in the baby pool. That kept things pretty nice.

Bonne F te Speaking of hotness, last night was the 30th birthday party for my friend Niko Ritoux. Maj and I took the opportunity to do our first evening out as a couple without the baby -- our great babysitter Julia came by with her boyfriend Antoine and took Amita June to a jazz concert at the Theatre de Verdure in Parc La Fontaine. How great is that? Anyways, we had a good night with Niko. We went to Le 2, the teensy but uber-cool bistro-bar our friend Daran co-owns. It's in possibly the most valuable real estate in all Montreal -- the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke -- but it's unassuming and doesn't have that Lower Main clubbed-out fake tan feel. We had a great dinner of "international tapas" -- the little appetizers that remind me a lot of Toqu -style gourmet micro-meals -- and lots of liquor and good fun. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while -- P.E. and his girlfriend Ode, who were living in Taiwan for a long time; Fred; Daran and his new friend Annie; Joannie; and our own lovely Italian princess the Other Annie. After dinner (11:30PM!) we hustled up to Bily Kun on Mont Royal and then Plan B across the street. Nicely, for a Friday night, everything was open and airy -- Montreal bars can get so damn crowded, but in the summer everyone's in Cottage Country and there's plenty of room for dedicated barflies. I'm not sure when I got home, but I think Niko had a good time. tags: birthday niko jf joannie le 2 bily kun plan b

And more time Today I spent my time creating data feeds of Wikitravel content for researchers at the University of Zurich who are doing some sort of work on the reliability and development of online travel information. I can't wait to find out how their research comes out. Maj, Amita June and I went up on the Pont Jacques-Cartier tonight to watch the last event in the International des feux at La Ronde. One of the great things about being in Mtl for the summer is this months-long fireworks festival, in which national teams compete every Saturday and Wednesday night. This is the first time I've been on the bridge for the event, and it was amazing -- much louder and bigger than when we've watched from home. Amita June, of course, was dumbfounded by the fireworks -- she gawked open-mouthed through the whole thing. I thought she'd be scared by the lights and noise and the crowd, but she loved it -- reached out and pointed for each explosion, and even said ooooooooh for the big finale. She conked out on the 8-block walk home, which gave Mama and Papa a little extra rest. tags: amitajune fireworks montreal la ronde maj

GPLv3 and license compatibility According to this article on Linuxworld.com, compatibility with other licenses like the Apache 2.0 is going to be a major focus of the GPLv3 development process. I say huzzah to that. Trivial differences between licenses are a shameful waste of time and energy for hackers who have better things to do. The world needs too much good Open Source software for us to waste time with license incompatibilities. Hopefully this same philosophy will bleed over into the FDL. Creative Commons made an overture for unilateral compatibility between the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and the FDL, which got stony silence from the FSF. It's time to start thinking of the users and playing nice with each other. tags: gplv3 licenses open source compatibility

Put one foot in front of the other I nearly forgot to mention: Amita June took her first step today. She's been "cruising" (walking around holding onto furniture) for about 6-8 weeks now, and she loves walking around holding onto Mama or Papa's fingers. And she's been spending longer and longer periods standing on her own -- up to about 20-30 seconds. Today, she was standing up, and she wanted to walk so I held out my finger just a little out of her reach. She extended her arm for it, then took two little steps to get to me. Ta-da! Maj and I took turns getting her to stand up on her own then walk to us. She's only got about 3-4 steps in her right now before she freaks out and sits down, but it's still pretty amazing. tags: amitajune first steps maj baby

Well, I haven't been much active blogging these days. I indeed was quite busy at work with a reorganization taking place in my department and a few more responsibilities to have for me. My biggest holidays of the year begin right now. I'll leave today and visit my mom and my sister's family in the region of St-Etienne, in France. Then back home three days later and we will leave for a 18-days trip in Mexico on Thursday. This year is my mexican year..:-) That means a 3-week break in mail and Debian activities. See you in late August with, hopefully, a new beta of the installer which will have been released by our tireless release manager Frans Pop. I will come back and the base system will already be frozen and all of us on our way to the Etch release. Great. Hugs to those of you I use to hug and kisses to others!

I am not happy with dh_pthon in the current state that it was (NMUed into) debhelper. It is preventing me from feeling good about or generally maintaining debhelper. This is a plan for fixing that.

1. Transform dh_python into a perl module or program by some other name and possibly different interface, and put this in some other package(s).
2. Modify dh_pysupport and dh_pycentral to call above so they take over dh_python's part of the work.
3. Reduce dh_python to a no-op warning script and put on deprecation track for removal.
4. Add a regression test to debhelper that fails if any debhelper script exceeds 150 lines, excluding POD docs. (Done in svn)
5. If at any point the python maintainers find an approach that does not invole multiple competing implementations and that is either simple or has the complexity encapsulated into some other program, I can add back a dh_python. Until then the current mess will be Not My Problem.
6. Be much, much, much more cautious accepting niche programs into debhelper in the future. :-(

Possible technical complications:

• dh_pthon supports params for passing additional module directories. dh_pysupport does too, but it seems that dh_pycentral does not. Need to check if this means that noone using dh_pycentral can use it with non-standard directories, so none of them pass directories to dh_python.
• dh_python has -V and -X flags that affect its behavior and the other two programs would not have access to this information.
  • I doubt that -X is used widely. Grep.
  • -V is a redundant interface, since it does something approximating what debian/pyversons does. So things should be able to switch to the other interface, except in edge cases (although IMHO it's not an appropriate interface for a debhelper program), and for the edge cases, -V could be added to the other two programs.
• It's possible that someone might set dh_python's -n flag but not also set it on their call to dh_pycentral or dh_pysupport. Can't imagine why though.
• Not all packages use the new python policy yet. For example, debconf doesn't. I'm not sure if that's a bug or not. One alternative would be reverting dh_python to the pre-NMU version (plus a small shim to make it a no-op if it detects the new policy), to avoid breaking such packages until they transition.

Recently I discovered the (10+2)*5 dash courtesy of Merlin over at 43 Folders, and I thought that I would give it a try. The concept is fairly simple: work for 10 minutes, screw around for 2 minutes, repeat 5 times, and voila! you have filled an hour with 5/6 productivity. The first thing that I did was download a Konfabulator widget which keeps track of the time and pops up a warning box when you should be screwing around and working.

I worked for approximately 6 hours under this regime today at my Honeywell job, even though I don't use task lists as diligently as I should there. I found that tasks which I regarded as small were finishing in a snap, partly because I wanted to get them done before the next 2 minute break, and partly because if I didn't finish for a break, my mind didn't just stop thinking about the problem. It was very advantageous to think about something else for 2 minutes and then get back to the action because it was like taking a fresh start. I was using the dash to do some coding (the major portion of my hours right now) - finding bugs that normally would have me staring at the screen for a couple minutes seemed easy when I was just coming back from a break. The only issues which I had with it was when I got interrupted by Workrave rest breaks (I turned off microbreaks) or a coworker. I am definitely doing it again, the next time I have an hour uninterrupted.

• TiVo TV Diet: 2 hours - Daily Show, Colbert Report, Hustle


• A little over 2 years ago: "Things I can control: - Caloric intake - TV habits"

To hell with all this warm weather. Begin this week my thesis supervisor got back from the States, so I've been getting a much-needed kick under the backside. My thesis is improving with leaps and bounds, and although I've got a lot of work left I've also got a renewed sense of direction. I should find a few minutes somewhere to document, package and upload my python GA-toolkit code, it's becoming pretty neat and allows easy linking of GA's together. Optimizing algorithms sounds boring, and it is, but 'parameter calibration using meta-evolutionary algorithms' has a nice ring to it. In other news, Erich too has given me a much-needed kick regarding the Debtags AI SoC project. I've modified the old ai-tagger to also include the directories each debian package contains: The results are interesting to say the least. Take for example kde-i18n-zhtw in the tagdb changes webinterface. It clearly should get the culture::chinese tag, as it's the KDE Chinese i18n package for crying out loud. Yet, the old tagger gives it a mere 0.0003. Not good. The new tagger? 0.99004. Remarkable what a little bit of extra meta-data can do...

A month between postings. Who needs regular updates? I've got a few of these weekend weeviews piled up, so I'm going to do them two at a time every couple of days. Omega Man Charleton Heston makes this post-apocalyptic world view quite the masterpiece. Considering his current stance on guns, it is easy to throw a couple of cheap shots at the movie in which he plays a gun-crazed doctor. Thinking you're the only one left in existence has got to be pretty hard on the psyche, and it shows in the character. Robert Neville (Heston's character) obviously doesn't think he's really alone, just the only one left who shouldn't be shot on sight. The rest of the human race was hit by a crappy plague, 28 days later-style. This plague apparently doesn't kill all brain functions, but only crams you into a religious sect which could only be described as luddite. Movies aren't interesting without a love interest, so Heston finds out early about Lisa (Rosalind Cash) who is keeping a set of children who are immune. Robert is also immune, and hopes to create a serum from his blood. This 70's end of the world is remarkably watchable, although it has it's moments of Action Movie. The acting is well done, although the cult of luddites is somewhat overplayed and has strange overtones of vampirism for some reason. Omega Man gets a 7. (imdb, amazon) Conquest of the Planet of the Apes As a child of the 80s, I never saw any of the original Planet of the Apes movies, and always assumed they were campy and not well done. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they actually have a plot and are interesting. This fourth movie in the series of 70s movies presents it's moral message with a generous heaping of.. it's moral message. Years after his parents travelled backward in time in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, the only talking ape left, is incognito with the circus master who raised him and comes to the city for the first time. At this time the plague which killed all pets has already ravaged the nation, humans have decided that apes are more useful as slaves than pets, and already have a large monolithic "Ape Management" section of government. Caesar gets thrown through the system when his "owner" gets brought into questioning for.. questioning the treatment of an ape. Being highly intelligent, he quickly gets snatched up for his skills by a top government official. Starting an underground resistance movement is the next step, and dominos start to fall from there. Conquest.. then degenerates into a large-cast action film, with hundreds of extras in a street-level ape vs. human fight. It's not the most interesting movie ever, but considering my expectations I can happily give it a 6. (imdb, amazon)

Mark Jaroski asked if I had any recommendations for Web hosting. I thought I'd share them here. Mostly I find Web hosting really difficult to evaluate -- there are just too many options. It's a really competitive business, and the hosting companies have SEO-saturated the Web hosting keyword at Google. On top of that, there are a ton of fake "hosting comparison" sites -- really just fronts for the bottom-feeders of hosting. When you get to even a good hosting company's Web site, there'll be a lot of flashing lights and gewgaws. A lot of companies try to sell you add-on features you don't need, and they'll have abusive UI to get you to click on the wrong thing, like:

 You're eligible for a big discount on our
 blogging software! Only $3.95 a month! 

 [Continue] Cancel

... where the "Continue" button adds the add-on to your account and "Cancel" is what you need to go on with your order. I think this is borderline fraud, but as far as I know nobody's been shut down or fined for it. For contrast, there are a lot of really good community-oriented and Open Source-friendly hosting services out there, like Montreal's Koumbit. They'll usually be able to devote more time and energy to individuals' technical needs. Often, though, small companies and community groups can't get the same economy of scale and thus price level to compete with the big guys. Of course, what you usually trade away for that $0.75 a month is any customer service or friendliness or control of your own site. The big guys are organized around selling hard to inexperienced people on price, then ignoring their requests for help and treating them like idiots for asking until they go away. Getting help with real problems like server downtime or misbehaviour can be as humiliating as having someone explain what "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste" mean, and probably get you as many over-the-phone eye roll pauses. "My Web site is down!" <eye roll> "Did your AOL Chat window get in front of your browser window, sir?" I think the best option for people is to look around, find a group or company that has a price you can live with and business practices that don't turn your stomach, and give them a try. Make frequent local backups of your site, and be ready to leave if you need to. tags: web hosting community comparison customer service

Dumb Contest Julien has started a dumb bug reports contest (you be the judge of what "dumb" applies to here). What's the point? I guess if it catches on we can humiliate Debian users and keep them from filing bug reports at all. And as we all know, no bug reports means no bugs, right? Being abusive towards users has never helped a project improve the quality of its software. Our bug tracking system is one of the things that's made Debian a top-tier operating system. Making fun of Debian users for using it is a very bad idea. tags: bts debian contest

Yay Akron The Akron Beacon Journal has an article about suggested Akron-related topics to add to Wikipedia. That seems like a great idea. tags: akron ohio wikipedia

Wow Douglas Self has some cool items in his Museum of Retro Technology about old technology -- like this rocket bicycle and this gyro-stabilized monorail. Thanks to Nick Moffitt for the links, even though he probably cribbed them from somewhere lame like Slashdot or Boing Boing. tags: douglas self museum retro rocket bicycle monorail nick moffitt

Supportworthy So, I have two blog items about technical support people looking down on those who are reporting problems. And I was thinking how much I work to gain the respect of technical support people so they'll listen to my problems when I have to make a phone call. As little as I like it, I find myself working to qualify to get my questions answered and my problems fixed. So I wonder: what if there were some kind of standardized computer user certification? You could take a series of increasingly-harder tests at some training centre, and you'd give your certification level (or -- better -- your standardized identification number) when you register software or hardware or when you report a bug. People will then know that when you say, "I think postfix isn't accepting connections!", you might actually have a point. tags: certification computer user technical support

JAM on it Maj, of course, was the one who pointed me to the page for a new Wiki engine in development. Ho-hum, I know... there's already too many wiki engines. But this one is interesting in that it aims to be MediaWiki compatible and run in a Java Servlet container. That seems like a killer combination for those people who want "the wiki that Wikipedia uses" but with an "enterprise-strength" Web technology. I've only tried the software a little bit, but it definitely looks like it's already more featureful than 70% of Wiki engines. Taking MW as a model is a great idea for a new Wiki engine -- it's an extremely featureful wiki engine that "fits well in the hand" of writers and users. Already the use of images and the special support pages look good on JAMWiki. And the integration of lucene means an excellent search engine -- something MediaWiki lacks out of the box. The Roadmap looks to have some good plans in the future. Anyways, Maj likes JAMWiki since JAM is MAJ backwards. I can't tell you what to make of that, though. What I do know is that the project needs a logo real bad. tags: wiki wiki engine java jamwiki jam servlet logo

Ajax in 10 weeks So, wp:AJAX is no longer as bonerific a word as it was six months ago, but it's still pretty hot. I mean, we've all stopped nattering about how fantabulous Ajaxical UI is, and just started writing code to make it work. It seems like nobody even uses "Ajax" and "Web 2.0" as synonyms anymore (well... I guess only the people who still call it "CGI/PERL".) But I was interested to see when I was looking for the Java Servlets link above that Sun is part of the cryptic Open Ajax Alliance. They've got an Ajax project incubating called jMaki to integrate Javascript programming on the server and on the client. Neato, say I. Most interesting was an external link to a 10-Week Free AJAX Programming Online Course. Starts August 4th, seems like a nice self-training tool. tags: ajax sun java javascript

Stuck in ol' CGI again So, I've been getting some non-deterministic 500 errors from WiLiKi, and I'm starting to think they're concurrency problems with searching the database the WiLiKi pages are stored in. I also think there may be a FastCGI tie-in, so I've rolled-back to CGI for a while to see if it cuts down on the errors. Annoying, indeed. tags: wiliki wiki cgi fastcgi

I'm looking forward to meeting people at OSCON tomorrow (Thursday) we decided to skip Wednesday, because we're still a bit tired from the trip over, and... we're on vacation. One thing I'm considering while I'm in the states is getting a new laptop because 1) Oregon has no sales tax, and 2) I can get one with a US keyboard (I can't stand Italian keyboards for programming). The OS would be Ubuntu. Any recommendations?

... at least when running rockbox. ;-) [Update: 15 hours, my > 1 year old regular X5, starting at a measured level of 91%, but which increased to 94% first ;-) So the battery lifetime gain is pretty much the factor 2.5] [Update: the X5 is sold as having 14 hours of runtime; which usually is a too high value, and measured with 128 kbit mp3 - I'm using lots of oggs, and mp3 up to 320 kbit; so I think the rockbox firmware actually uses less power than the official one!] So far, the biggest drawback of using the opensource Rockbox firmware on the iAudio X5 was battery life. I got only about 6 hours out of my X5. However, current CVS versions include a patch to solve this - apparently it powers down the USB OnTheGo chip and maybe the radio chip, too. Saving huge amounts of power. The unit also doesn't get warm anymore. My battery benchmark is still running (somewhere around 12 hours now I think); and in the forums, users have reported battery lifetime of 30 hours for the X5L version. So if you are already using rockbox you might want to upgrade; if you have been kept back by the bad battery performance - it's time to switch to rockbox now, and get all the goodies you've been missing for so long! That is: gapless playback, crossfading, album art, next song information, bookmarks, quicker startup, playback resumes where you powered off etc. I think I read about some audioscrobbler/last.fm plugin, too. Apparetly most iPod models are also supported, and rockbox has Ogg Vorbis support... one of the reasons I bought the X5 was vorbis, back then.

Yesterday was such an insanely long day -- we woke up in a tent, had breakfast over a Treo, then released a lot of software and went to sleep in the middle of the night. It seemed like 4 days, not 1. And this morning I had to take our new mini-SUV into the shop for its first maintenance checkup. For the last 6 years, I've driven a beautiful old wp:Citro n DS station wagon, but around the time Amita June was born I decided I wanted her to learn to drive on it. Maj and I decided that that meant it had to be taken care of a little better, so I put it in storage and we bought at 2005 Hyundai Tucson. (The Hyundai people here in Quebec pronounce it like "Tux-awn", to our endless amusement.) It's weird having a new car -- like, newer than 1972. Parts are not only plentiful but inexpensive. There is a selection of multiple mechanics in my major metropolitan area that can service the vehicle. And people don't point and wave when you're driving, or stop you on the street to tell you stories about how their grandfather used to drive one on their family farm. We'll be driving the car to wt:Boston next week for Wikimania 2006, so I'm glad it went to the shop. It should be in good shape for the drive -- I hope the rest of us are. tags: hyundai tucson citro n ds quebec new car

Slides Speaking of Wikimania -- I'm nowhere near ready for my presentation. Jeez, how'd it get to be almost-August already? Thankfully, no one else I've talked to is really ready to talk, either... so at least I'm not the last one to get my homework done. tags: wikimania presentation slides

Software The OpenID software I did for MediaWiki went out yesterday, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. OpenID requires that some state data is stored between participating servers, and the code I wrote uses the memcached client built into MediaWiki to store it. Not optimal but it works. Well, better today than yesterday, that is. There were some pretty gruesome bugs in the implementation that were only showing up for some exceptional circumstances. So I adapted the JanRain unit tests for the other storage classes to my Memcached class, and that helped a whole hell of a lot for debugging. Yay, unit testing! Some people are still having problems with the software, though. The main thing I've found is that the key-value pair output required by OpenID for its inter-server communications is sensitive to extra whitespace thrown in. Why would there be extra whitespace? I've found that a lot of PHP libraries have bits of whitespace at the end, after the closing ?>, and that will show up in the output. Whether it matters depends on how sensitive the output format is to whitespace. In the case of OpenID, the answer is: pretty sensitive. But I'm looking forward to having some more people try the OpenID MediaWiki extension out. tags: openid mediawiki extension unit test php whitespace

Wikipedia's 25th of July Spot-on satire from The Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence. I quote:

• "On July 25, 1256, delegates gathered at Comerica Park to sign the Declaration Of Independence, which rejected the rule of the British over its 15 coastal North American colonies," reads an excerpt from the entry. "Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG*** know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America."

Does the fact that I find an Onion article funny say more about my declining humor standards, or about their recent improvements? I don't know. tags: the onion wikipedia satire

Four ideas I was very interested to see Tim O'Reilly's Four Big Ideas About Open Source. I think that there are some fascinating developments over the last few years that have fallen under the rubric of wp:Web 2.0, and I think they affect those of us who put our hearts and minds into Open Source software. I think this was part of his keynote at OSCON 2006, which, y'know, I'm not techically at or anything. It briefly crossed my mind, but I've got too much to do for Thermidor and Fructidor to flit off to yet another conference -- this one only tangentially involved with what I do for a living. Still, it's interesting that Open Source software and Web services are crossing paths. FLOSS has been critical for making Web services possible, but taking that up to the meta-level and seeking the same freedoms from Web apps that you expect from "regular" software... that's a Moebius strip of rights right up in there. tags: floss open source oscon tim oreilly

My life as a toolbar So, sometime in the last year I started installing Firefox toolbars. The main one that's useful to me is Chris Pederick's excellent Web Developer Extension, jam-packed with little tools that make my job as a developer that much easier. But I also install, well, pernicious toolbars. Judgemental toolbars. Toolbars that make me forget what really matters and turn the Web into a horserace or a highschool popularity contest. They're horrible, and they're addicting, and I can't stop using them. The Google Toolbar has some diddly little useless gadgets that I don't give a shit about, like searching my Gmail account for the given search terms (whoopee). What I loooove, though, is the wp:PageRank indicator. PageRank, of course, is the patented algorithm developed by Google founder Larry Page to estimate the importance of a page on the Web. It's incredibly accurate and valuable and though no longer the only criteria Google uses for ranking pages, it's still critical as a measure of the intrinsic value of a page. So, there's this little wp:progress bar on the Google Toolbar that shows the PageRank of any page you're looking at. It's an apparently logarithmic scale from 1-10, with the number showing up in a popup tooltip. Creative Commons? 9/10. Ted's story about the great worldwide race? 2/10. Technorati home page? 8/10. Male Secretary? 6/10. Wikitravel's France discussion? 3/10. And so on and so on. Even worse is the A9 Toolbar, which (again) has a whole bunch of bogus boring features, but also shows the Alexa ranking of any site you're looking at. Alexa ranking isn't some egghead hooty-tooty algorithm about the importance of a page -- it's a ranking on the Big Board of who's the most visited site in the world and who doesn't matter in the slightest. So, I can see that Flickr is ranked #41 today, le Sans Fil is #347,296, and wikiHow is #2248. Alexa is a lot more coarse-grained than Google's toolbar -- it measures the traffic to a given second-level-domain, not a particular URL. So any LiveJournal or Blogger site gets LJ's entire Alexa ranking -- not very useful. Still, I've taken to thinking almost entirely in terms of PageRank and Alexa rank. It's unreasonable. Every site I go to, my eye drifts up to my toolbars to confirm my idea about it. Do I really like Achewood? Sure, but it's only got an Alexa rank around 20,000... Doc Searls's blog has a PageRank of 8, which is really impressive; but... my page for 22 Prairial (Journal/22 Prairial CCXIV) apparently has the same PageRank. Holy moly! Why could that be? (I think it has something to do with the wp:Law of 22 Prairial, but I could be wrong.) Really, putting these numbers on everything is ruining the Web for me. It's turning me into a total jerk, too. I kinda want to go back to the time when I just found stuff on the Web and didn't think, "How do I measure up?" Thankfully the Yahoo Toolbar doesn't include anything remotely like rankings... just as well. Of course, that's the reason I uninstalled it, too. I can find my way to Yahoo! Canada Greetings just fine on my own if I need to. tags: google a9 alexa toolbar pagerank

I can't understand Bush's (and the typical Republican position in general) opinion on life issues. He recently said that it is wrong to "destroy life to save life" and that every being is a valuable person in the context of the stem cell debate. He also said last year that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the Iraq war.

So, here's a Handy Chart:

Topic	Bush Theory	Bush Moral Judgement
Death penalty	Kill known murderers so others won't kill more people	OK
Iraq war	Kill 30,000 Iraqi civilians during operation to overthrow Iraqi government	OK
Stem cell research	A small minority could become babies if implanted	Wrong
Abortion	Killing an unborn person	Wrong

I can't figure out any possible way that the first two should be OK for someone that believes that the last two are wrong.

In fact, to me, the items in this list that most clearly are wrong are the first two. There is no question about whether life has begun with them. Treating 30,000 people as regrettable results of an operation is not treating them with full human dignity. 30,000 people were killed. That's more than 10 times the number of deaths from Sept. 11.

You can get a second proposed security build for mozilla suite from my security archive. Version is 2:1.7.8-1sarge7.1. The last one I released in this blog entry contained a serious regression, making all bookmark folders displaying as empty. In order to fix this regression, I added two more patches for issue CVE-2006-2775. So now this issue comprises three patches:

mozilla-thunderbird 1.0.2-2.sarge1.0.8a has been uploaded to the security buildds. It addresses the same issues recently fixed in DSA-1118 for mozilla and DSA-1120 for mozilla-firefox. I don’t expect hard regressions, but if you find any, please let me know. Otherwise, this package will enter stable-security soon. You can obtain this build from: http://people.debian.org/~asac/security/

I just received word that there will be a Debian developer gathering in Bangalore, India, on the afternoon of Saturday, August 20th, at the International Institute of Information Technology. The target audience is current or aspiring Debian developers, and interested and sophisticated users of Debian in Bangalore. A registration page is available, and apparently there's an event mailing list. While I won't be able to attend, I think this sort of low-key, techie-focused, regional Debian gathering is a great idea... and it would be wonderful to have more Debian developers in India!

Just home from West Virginia, where my wife's family gather at her grandmother's house to celebrate Thanksgiving. The traditional turkey feast was pleasant as always, but the real culinary high point of this trip was on the way home... The closest major airport is Pittsburgh, we had a couple of extra hours on Saturday before our flight, and Karen and I are both graduates of CMU. So we decided to detour into Pittsburgh and and drive around a bit to see how things had changed over the years and what was still familiar. The biggest visible differences to us were on the river fronts, from the new stadium that replaced Three Rivers to what looks like a technology park built along the Monongahela under the parkway, where steel mills once stood. We didn't take time to do more than drive around the CMU perimeter, but even that let us see that the campus landscape has changed dramatically since we were students. Otherwise, most of the major landmarks that matter to us remain unchanged, including the apartment on South Millvale I lived in for all but my freshman years at CMU. But best of all, 'the O' was still alive and well on Forbes avenue! I'm sure I ate there an average of at least once a week from the time Steve Fisher introduced me to the place until I moved to Colorado. I often tell people that the best part of having to travel a lot for work is that I get to sample interesting foods from around the world... and many of my strongest travel memories are of meals enjoyed with interesting people and wonderful food. However, despite all those experiences, 'O' fries continue to rank near the very top of my list of foods I'm willing to go out of my way for. Even my 5-year-old son, who can be a lot pickier about what he'll eat than I like to admit, thanked me repeatedly on the flights home the rest of the afternoon for "making me try those french fries with cheese". Sometime, I'd love to spend enough time in Pittsburgh to see how many of the other places I used to love to eat are still around... In the meantime, a regular fix of chili dogs and fries at the 'O' are one of the few things I really miss about the years I spent in Pittsburgh.

Following about a month of irregular activity, I just uploaded three source packages (along with related binary packages, of course) to Debian unstable: gforge (4.5.14-9), gforge-plugin-scmcvs (4.5.14-3), and gforge-plugin-scmsvn (4.5.14-2). I hope unstable will give them more exposure than experimental did. Plans for the future: I’ll focus on getting these packages into testing, without too many changes if possible. I haven’t managed to get dbconfig-common to work reliably (or at all) with PostgreSQL so far, so I’ll consider the migration to its infrastructure as a nice option, but not a blocker. The problem is that it would make the install scripts simpler and (hopefully) more reliable if it worked. Again, help would be very much appreciated. (And yes, I will be submitting bug reports when I get some time to do some more thorough testing of dbconfig-common.)