* Even it was short notice, I got ticket (last ticket in Bhavanagar Express) luckily! Thanks to our receptionist Rochelle! Reached early in the morning on Friday and again it was headache to get rickshaw with meter working properly! I have to pay 50 Rs (Standard rate for any place for stranger ;)). We have got nice guest home at Ahmedabad. With warm welcome, my all usual weakness from traveling went away in seconds. Took some pictures from 8th floor. Buildings, Houses, Peacocks! * Day started with meeting, thank God, it was really good meeting than our imagination from previous experiences. Fixed some technical issues. And then we went to our new office. Awesome furniture, spacious area and yes, very good connectivity Again, went to GVP and came back late evening. Ah, before that, Ashok helped me to book tickets for Freed.in! Again thanks to Rochelle and of course Ashok. You rocks man! We then visited Reliance Fresh near Vijay Char Rasta. Damn good (and cheap) vegetables and food things. * Nirav came early in the morning. Had nice tea and breakfast. Office and GVP visits. Nice trip so far, except my wifi in laptop, didn’t worked. Came back in Shatabdi Express yesterday night. * How can I forgot to say thanks to Komalbhabhi for nice food

After the stunning match between RSA and Tonga, we watched an also very good England-Samoa (44-22). Even if their play was still far from perfect (lack of imagintation, mostly), the English players succeeded quite easily against Samoa who never gave up. Johny Wilkinson's come back is a success, imho, and England will then play against Tonga for qualification on Thursday. The winner of that match will end up 2nd of that pool (assuming that RSA wins over USA) and should logically play against Australia (while RSA will play against Wales or Fidji, this assuming that Australia wins over Fidji today). Argentina had to win against Namibia with the bonus point. They easily made it (63-3). As usual in such situations, Namibia resisted about 30 minutes (and were even leading 3-0 for a few minutes). However, the imprecision of their game (a disastrous kick play) left dozens of balls to the Argentinians who then could easily score lots of tries. The Argentinian were, at the end, obviously sparing their energy for the upcoming fight against Ireland next Sunday. In this pool everything can happen (even Argentina being eliminated, which is however not very probable). From what they showed, the Argentinians can definitely win over Ireland, which would then give them the first rank and an easier 1.4th final against Scotland or Italy. Two matches today: Australia-Fidji and Scotland-New Zealand. Australia and New Zealand have a strong advantage and I don't really expect any surprise here.

Some time ago I blogged about burnout. Some of the factors that might cause it are an overwhelming workload and powerlessness to change something important to you. This means that you get emotionally very involved in developing something, and you feel that whatever you might do to achieve it just won’t be enough. I feel a bit powerless and also that whatever more I try to do just won’t improve the situation. Sometimes I have the feelings of being fighting against a big hard wall and that it’s not worth it, and that whatever big effort I might do just won’t be enough. Of course these feelings will probably fade a bit after sleeping and resting, but they’re sympthoms that are alerting me to slow down a bit and don’t get too emotionally involved in all the stuff I’m doing, and I should better not ignore them, if I want to prevent myself from burning out. It’ll be good to take an emotional rest from all this, but knowing myself I’d probably use the spare energy to get involved in yet more projects.

There's a problem between gtk 2.12 and xfwm 4.4.1-2 and before. A deadlock may occurs which renders the session completely useless. The mouse still moves, and you can Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, but nothing else works. It's a gtk 2.12 change which is fixed in xfwm4 4.4.1-3, uploaded this morning. If you encounter this behavior, upgrade your xfwm and it should be ok. All archs aren't built yet, but buildds are keeping up.

Dear lazyweb,

I decided to track our (mine and my fince 's) expenses more closely and I am in search of some software for this task.

The requirements for the software:

• not to hard to use (I don't want to read a whole manual to know how to use it)
• possibility to assign a category for a given expense (so I can locate problematic type of expenses)
  
• can easily extract statistics (e.g.: top last month's expenses, expenses split per category)
• appropriate for domestic (small scale) accounting
• available in Debian (or will be soon :-) )
  
• preferably GNOME/GTK based

I have never used such software before, so I am a total noob in this area. Please be gentile if I might have naively described the problem.

Thanks in advance!

grml-live ist ein Framework, mit dessen Hilfe man mit nur 1 Kommando eine auf grml/Debian basierende Linux Live-CD bauen kann. grml-live baut auf FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) auf und nutzt dessen klassenbasiertes Konzept: In diesem Beispiel habe ich gerade ein gro es grml-ISO gebaut. Dabei habe ich einfach nur den Debian-Mirror in /etc/grml/grml-live.conf auf meinen lokalen Mirror gedreht (um Traffic und Zeit zu sparen) und dann folgendes Kommando aufgerufen:

# grml-live -t /grml/grml-live -c GRMLBASE,GRML_FULL,LATEX_CLEANUP,I386 -s sid

Ca. 50 Minuten sp ter habe ich im Ordner grml_isos unter /grml/grml-live/ (-t …) ein fertiges grml-ISO. Dieses wurde auf Basis der Klassen (-c …) GRMLBASE (da steckt alles essenzielle drin), GRML_FULL (Software-Auswahl wie auf der offiziellen gro en grml), LATEX_CLEANUP (ein paar sehr gro e LaTeX-Verzeichnisse aufr umen) und I386 (x86-spezifische Pakete wie z.B. der Kernel) gebaut. Als Debian-Suite (-s) wurde sid (unstable) ausgew hlt. Und das war es auch schon. Ein kleinere grml-Version auf Basis von Debian/stable gef llig? Kein Problem, machen wir es doch einfach mal im Shared-Memory (superschnell und mit genug RAM und den Mountoptionen rw,suid,dev auch kein Problem): Ein ‘grml-live -t /dev/shm -c GRMLBASE,I386 -s etch’ und keine 5(!) Minuten sp ter hab ich dann mein 135MB kleines grml: Mit grml-live kann man sich somit seine pers nlich angepasste Linux Live-CD erstellen, ohne sich erst mit Remastering im Detail besch ftigen zu m ssen. Auch muss man dabei nicht zwingend Debian/unstable nehmen, sondern kann auch Debian/stable als Basis ausw hlen. Durch das Erstellen einer neuen Klasse oder das Anpassen einer existierenden kann man auch spezielle Software-W nsche ganz einfach erf llen. Wird damit das offizielle grml-ISO etwa obsolet? Nein, auf keinen Fall. grml-live soll dem grml-Team als Buildsystem dienen (automatisierte Snapshots auf regelm iger Basis z.B. sind schon in Planung) und die langweilige Arbeit abnehmen, damit wir uns auf die wirklich wichtigen Sachen konzentrieren k nnen: Testen, Bugfixing, Implementieren von neuen Features, Arbeit am Kernel, Qualit tssicherung, Dokumentation,… grml-live hat den Anspruch, auf jedem Debian-basierten System zu funktionieren und wer Interesse daran gefunden hat, kann sich das Debian-Pakete aus dem grml-Repository holen. Den Quellcode gibt es nat rlich auf unserer Mercurial-Webseite. Wer jetzt noch Fragen hat oder mehr Details zu grml-live erfahren m chte, der m ge einfach auf die grml-live-Homepage schauen. Falls dort eine Frage noch nicht beantwortet sein sollte, jemand Feature-Requests, Bugreports oder Patches hat: meine Inbox freut sich ber Post!

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months. Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

• Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
• Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
• Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
• Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
• Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
• Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
• Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

DRI (3D acceleration) stopped working for me. The reason is simple (as revealed by looking at the Xserver log file): it was missing the DRI library for my graphics card.So if 3D acceleration isn't working for you anymore, try this:

aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dri

This package includes the library required for DRI on my Intel 915 graphics board. Not sure how it got lost, though. Maybe I purged it when trying to remove "unneded" packages from my system (in order to free up some space)... I tend to try to uninstall everything I don't think I need.P.S. Looks like you can now but ATI/AMD graphics again, given that they're releasing specifications for their chips - reliable opensource drivers on the horizon!I've fought both the Nvidia and old ATI driver hell - not having to do that was one of the main reasons why I wanted Intel graphics. Now ATI/AMD is back on my radar.

Every now and then I encounter a web page which I'd like to archive for later purposes, e.g. because I can see that it might be related to my research, or simply because I want to keep the information until eternity. I know of three ways to achieve this, but each of them has drawbacks:

• Using wget to download the page. This does not pull any dependencies (although wget could), nor does it stamp the downloaded file with the original URL and time it was downloaded.
• Printing the page to a PDF. Apart from being a cumbersome process, requiring at least five mouseclicks and way more attention than this should take (in Firefox at least), printed webpages don't look the same as on-screen. Even though Firefox stamps printouts with URL and time, this information is truncated if e.g. the URL is too long, and in a printout, you lose all the meta information, as well as links etc.
• Using Firefox's 'Save as' feature. Again, being too cumbersome for my taste, this actually manages to properly archive a webpage with all dependencies. However, it drops a file and a folder on your hard disk, which I find rather annoying. And it also doesn't stamp the downloaded files with neither URL, nor time.

So, dear lazyweb, how do you do it? I am aware that it'll be trivial to hack up a little script which uses wget to obtain page and dependencies, create a file with stamp data and produce a frameset to put this data above the actual file, but before I spend time implementing the wheel, I'd like to make sure it doesn't yet exist. NP: The Flower Kings: Paradox Hotel Update: Michael Stevens pointed me to furl.net, but I need a solution that I can use offline. Part of the reason that I want to archive web pages is because I don't want to come back in a couple of months and find a webpage removed, a server dead, or a site like furl.net discontinued. J rg Jaspert introduced me to Scrapbook, a Firefox extension I'll have to check out. However, even before looking at it: I really want files or directories on the filesystem, so that I can check them into version control and have them archived and replicated. I don't trust any data to Firefox or any of its extensions, or anything under ~/.mozilla. This is also the reason why I Slogger doesn't cut the mustard for me. Matej Cepl wants me to use konqueror to archive them. I don't want to install hundreds of megabytes for this feature, nor can I imagine that this feature will be much different or less cumbersome than Firefox's ability to save pages. I hate the mouse. Thanks for all your comments, regardless! Update: Just found this post about archiving stuff like digg/delicious.

I have just added two new categories to my blog, one is for the most popular posts [1] (as indicated by the number of hits on the permalink pages). The other is for the best posts [2]. My criteria for adding a post to the best-posts list is that it provides some information that is new or some analysis that others do not appear to have performed, that it doesn’t get refuted by someone else (sometimes an idea seems good but someone points out a flaw), and that there is some level of interest in it from readers (based on page hits, comments, and links from other blogs). Both of these categories may be added to posts some days or weeks after they are published. So adding the feeds for them to a syndication configuration might not be a good idea as they will always include posts that are old. I expect that a typical Planet configuration would never display posts from those feeds. I suggest that other people consider adding similar categories to their blogs. It will allow readers who quickly browse your blog to see the posts that you regard as your best content and other bloggers in the same space to see what gets the most hits (which is worth-while if you don’t consider blogging to be a zero sum game). I expect that someone will suggest that I only write posts that are eligible for the best-posts category. However this is one example of a post which I don’t consider to be eligible but which will still be useful to some people.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/most-popular/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/best-posts/

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Yesterday, I started porting some of my research notes to the Debian wiki. I wanted to use vim for the editing, and since the "Editus Externus" extension basically died, I went out on a quest and found It's all text, which does the job quite nicely. And it's bug-free, at least when you configure it that way in the addon's preferences dialog: NP: The Flower Kings: Paradox Hotel

I was thinking of getting an nc2400 after seeing one at debconf7. However lately I’ve been studying my house mate’s nc4400, which I think is roughly the same as the nc2400, except no CD/DVD drive and sadly a trackpad. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s the little things I like about the X40. The PGUP/PGDOWN buttons above and below each other. The escape key which isn’t tiny. I hate the thought that I am to upgrade to an X60 because of the keyboard. I can’t stand the fact that they’ve changed their PSU standard (like Nokia did I guess) and, omg have you seen the uninspiring Lenovo blogs?. :/

In Spanish, occurrence and stupid idea are the same word.
j= w3m planet.debian.org -dump -no-graph -l 200 tr -d -C [:alpha:] tr [:upper:] [:lower:] ; for i in seq $ #j ; do echo $j cut -b $i; done sort uniq -c while read w; do y= echo $w cut -f 1 -d ' ' ; echo -n $(echo "scale=5; $y/$ #j " bc); echo " echo $w cut -f 2 -d ' ' " ;done sort -rn

This past weekend I did the absolutely insane and attended a wedding and an ordination in Vancouver, without taking any time off of work. I've finished two weeks at the new job (and am loving it! I'll post more when I have something more than "done a bunch of classes, learned confidential pieces of Google knowledge, ate great food") and didn't want to go to my boss and ask for time off in the first month.

So, Friday night, 9pm, caught flight from SFO to SEA, rented car. We were sitting in Heather's room at 4am chatting away, slowly passing out. Next day, up at 9, go visit Jamu, sort out suit rental, go for lunch, back to his moms to get dressed. I hope to link to a wedding album sometime in here. He got married by the paperclip behind the Planetarium in Vanier park. There were 4 weddings that I saw there, all peacefully contending for the various views and trying to stay out of one another's photos. =) Saturday evening, the DJ was great. We tried an experiment to see if we could leave Leif with Sandy, and whether the solid foods would be enough for a few hours. He made it a couple of hours, and then joined us at the dance, being happier knowing that we were around. It turns out Leif likes dancing! I was a little worried about the volume, and at various times several of us asked the DJ to turn it down when the music was creeping louder. It was also fun to see a whole pile of friend that I haven't seen in something like 10 years and see how we've all changed. Thanks to Facebook, at least we didn't have to completely rehash the last decade. =)

I think we turned in at 1 or 2. The next day, up at 10:30 so that we could pickup the van, pickup Katy, pickup our mail, go to the Naam to meet Ernie, Janet, and Anika, drop off the suit, pick up a snack, go to MEC, drop off Katy, and then head to the Vancouver Unitarian Church to see Laura's ordination and meet Jon.

Laura's ordination was the most amazing that I've been to. Her ministry is centered around the Faithful Fools, and the people that she's touched and been mentored by were woven throughout the ceremony. I was invited to play the recorder, so I did the last part of the prelude, and played along with the choir for "Rise up, oh flame". People were wearing silly hats, there were stories, and tears, and another pile of people that I haven't seen in ages from when I was a member at that church. I'm also not sure that I've been to that church since getting married in it, so it was nice to be in that space again.

The reason for the visit to MEC was that my goal has been to start biking home. I'd acquired a bike, helmet, lights, and lock, but wasn't happy with my visibility in black clothing on a black bike. I got ankle reflectors and a vest for the backpack, and I biked home yesterday. I'm surprisingly not that sore for the 10 mile ride home. We'll see how I'm doing in a few days. ;)

On scienceblogs.com there is an interesting article about statistics and “The Surge” in Iraq [1]. It explains how there is not yet enough data to statistically determine whether The Surge is succeeding in improving the situation in Iraq. Some of the comments point out that the “ethnic cleansing” in some parts of Iraq has been mostly completed. When one of the groups in a disputed area is annihilated or driven out you can expect a reduction in violence. The Guardian reports that Alan Greenspan has stated in his memoirs [2] “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil“. His meoirs are published as The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. I’ve added it to my Amazon Wish List.

• [1] http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2007/09/the_statistics_of_the_surge.php


• [2] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2170237,00.html

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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.

From the changelog of the trunk package (unreleased 0.6.22):

  [ 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

BTW, did you know that svn-buildpackage is maintained in collab-maint and welcomes contributions and committers/reviewers (especially those)?

In case you want to help, this is the place to start from:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

or

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

If you don't have commit access to collab-maint yet (just make a request on the alioth tracker and that will be fixed ;-) ).

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Wed 19.09.2007

09:00-09:30 and 16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 20.09.2007

15:00-15:45 and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 21.09.2007

16:15-17:30 CET

Sat 22.09.2007

16:00-17:45 CET

Sun 23.09.2007

17:15-18:00 CET

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007 to Sun 23.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

Enjoy the finale!

Brice already mentioned it, but I've uploaded Xorg 7.3 to unstable this afternoon. This includes Xserver version 1.4, which has improvements all over the place, perhaps most notably by including input hotplugging (via HAL) and many improvements in EXA, the next generation 2D driver acceleration architecture.

Now that this is uploaded, I'll be ripping out large parts of the xorg.conf generation script. All the various improvements over the past few releases have made it possible to do this, and for lenny, if all goes according to plan, we won't have to generate a xorg.conf for installs at all. You can still use one (and many people will want one to customize their settings in some way) but for the most part people shouldn't have to bother with them. I'll be spending a lot of my time over the next few months tightening this stuff up so that a lot of the little things really work the way they should, and now that we have the updated server available I'll be able to actively work on these things in Debian so you'll be able to see the results quickly.

On a side note, I went to Software Freedom Day yesterday. I heard ari give a talk on the Gimp. At the last minute I almost gave a lightning talk on where X.org is headed, but they ran out of time. It would have been kind of weird though, since the talks were on things like software patents, free culture, and miro (formerly democracy-player) rather than the nuts and bolts sorts of things that I'm more comfortable with.

FYI, my new Miro packages (formerly known as Democracy Player) have now reached unstable. After lots of ugly, ugly trouble with even getting a successful build (boost/python/dbus related, you don't want to know) the packages are back in shape now, with tons of fixed (or no longer reproducible) bugs and lots of upstream impovements and new features. If you reported a bug against Democracy Player, please try the latest Miro package and check if it still occurs, thanks! The upgrade should be seamless, your existing config and videos will be migrated from ~/.democracyplayer to ~/.miro automatically upon the first start of Miro. Some of the new/fixed things in this release include:

• HTTP proxy support (uses the GNOME proxy settings, use gconf-editor to change them).
• Flash videos now play fine (non-jerky) and with sound!
• You can search various video sites (Youtube, Google video, etc.) online, and even save searches as channels.
• You can export your channel list into an OPML file (and also import OPML files, of course). I've been waiting for this for a very long time (it's a good way to backup your channel list, or move it to another machine)...
• Lots and lots of bugfixes and small enhancements, as usual.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started getting messages like this from the SourceForge:

Your membership in the mailing list whatever has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 15-Sep-2007.

It’s true - the systems that handle my mail do generate a number of SMTP time rejects for open posting SourceForge lists. My mail server does SMTP time rejection of some spam and these lists don’t appear to have much in the way of spam filtering. It’s a bit depressing since the main problem appears to be limited filtering on the SourceForge side which renders the lists in question rather difficult to read but it’s unsurprising given the nature of the service.