Search Results: "reg"

2 May 2006

Simon Richter: Windows sucks, film at 11

Argh. I need a specific thread to call a function that is guaranteed to be safe to call at any time. Under Unix, I'd have the thread register a signal handler for one of the realtime signals, and use pthread_kill to deliver the signal. Windows has a pretty elaborate mechanism for doing stuff from another thread, named Asynchronous Procedure Calls, however for that to work, the thread that is supposed to call the function needs to be in "alertable" state, which it only gets into by means of a few functions, all of them ending in -Ex, i.e. there are ways a thread may sneak around becoming alertable all the time.

30 April 2006

David Welton: Rails Annoyances

First, let me say that I'm actually enjoying Ruby on Rails quite a bit. I agree with the large number of people who, like me, are finding that Rails hits a sweet spot between too much structure, configuration and overhead, and anarchy, on the other side. It's good code, fun to use, and for the most part I enjoy Ruby as a language. However, being a bit of a perfectionist, and since Rails is "opinionated software", I thought I'd fire mine right back at it regarding a few of the things I don't like. Mostly minor nitpicks, but I'll likely add to them as time goes by and I use Rails more (I'd like to use it more at work, for instance) - after all, I'm opinionated myself.

28 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Rain

I passed the remainder of yesterday essentially doing nothing, not even reading (I am trying to make Murakami's book, my last one, last as long as possible -- it's really good and has me thoroughly in its grip). So instead, I roamed the streets and observed people, tried talking to one or the other, but unfortunately did not get very far. What makes it all a little different is that the Burmese always say "ja" and shake their head, whether they've understood or not; effectively, this means paying attention that e.g. the motorcycle driver is going the right direction and aborting the trip as soon as you sense a misunderstanding (despite the convincing and assertive "ja"). Following breakfast (Bamar-style Mohinga, a noodle soup with seafood and unidentifiable cracker-thingies I'll just call corn flakes for now, vegetables or whatever else the cook decided to put in -- I've developed a strong liking to this dish in the morning), I took a taxi to the airport to board my flight to Heho, from where I would continue to Inle Lake. I still travel on a budget, so you may be surprised that I am hopping around the country with planes, but the $22 I had to pay for this trip (incl. taxes) and the 10 hours I saved compared to the $8 bus ride were well worth it to me. After all, I only had a few days in this country and tried to maximise the exposure I experienced. One thing is for sure: I will come back. Pwin Oo Lwin was nice, but I did not manage to go further east; A day in Mandalay is surely not enough. Bagan didn't do much for me, so I don't think I'll return there, but Inle, as well as the countless regions I skipped, including the pictoresque and untouched beaches, really make me want to plan my next trip now already. Arriving in Inle, it was raining, and the rains intensified towards noon. I am here to stay for two days, and the weather is unlikely to change, so after confirming that I could not take the next flight a day earlier, I bit the bullet, put on my rain jacket and sandals, rented a bike, and went off to visit the cultural museum, also known as the "Museum of Shan Chiefs" -- which was kind of disappointing. Set in a beautiful house (the sight of which was worth most of the $2 entrance fee), the items on display were scarce and almost exclusively labeled in Burmese. None of the folks working there seemed to be inclined to show me around, so after 20 minutes I left into the pouring rain, stopped by at a kitchen for a Burmese-style beef curry with jack fruit soup, and eventually returned to my hotel. I am staying at the Aquarius Inn, a cute place with simple and clean rooms, a cozy porch, and a little garden out front. The staff, a girl maybe a little younger than me, is very attentive and speaks good English, studies geography at university, and took a particular liking to making me feel good for the two hours I decided to flip pages in Murakami's book on the front, bringing me tea, fruits, and little snacks on a continuous basis, always with a huge smile on her face, and eager to help organising whatever I would want to do during my stay in Inle. But with the rain coming down non-stop, I am somewhat puzzled as to what I should do. The compulsory thing here is at least a day on a boat out on the lake, visiting floating villages, as well as the peculiar rowing style the people from this area developed -- using one arm and one foot instead of two arms --, hoping from floating market to floating market, and enjoying the scenery of the Shan hills surrounding the river. The Lonely Planet describes the places as a mirage. But with clouds and fod and water from above, it loses all its charm, and that's not because I fear getting wet. Not that I am bored or afraid of being bored, I'll just have to make sure to find some alternative programme, which could include spending the morning watching the market, reading, and talking to some fellow travellers who are in a similar situation as myself, but readily indulge in elaborate discussions on scientific topics, it seems. This much as an update. Internet access here is even more difficult than in Bagan, so all the other thoughts I meant to push out to this blog have to wait until Yangon, Bangkok, or Zurich. Thanks for reading along. PS: I don't think I'll travel with Lonely Planet again, it's just too inaccurate, and I disagree with their approach to research (e.g. not reconfirming facts researched a year before printing before the book goes to print), and happened upon too many errors this time around. Plus, I have sent them elaborate updates on four previous trips and have never heard a single word from them, no acknowledgement, thanks, nothing. Maybe I am spoiled by Open Source development. I have been recommended the Rough Guides, so I'll give those a shot for the trip to Debconf in Mexico.

Barry Hawkins: Nokia USA, TigerDirect, and caveat emptor

So I have been loving my Nokia N90 phone as far as functionality goes, but there are a few design issues that bug me. One is the rather primitive battery cover, which I managed to re-fasten a number of times until it finally came off without me realizing it. Beside that, a piece of the metal inlay by the camera button keeps popping loose on one end. I figure US$650 is way too much for a phone with pieces popping off, so I contact Nokia to send it in under warrantly. And that’s where we pick up in the story… I bought the phone from TigerDirect; they had the best price on an unlocked Nokia N90 that I could find while still being a store I knew of and felt I could trust. When the phone arrived, to my shock it had a UK charger. Weird! But, it was 2 days before I was going out of town for 10 days, and I had the phone rushed so I’d have it before leaving. I popped over to Radio Shack, bought an adapter, and got on with life. So I am on the phone with Nokia USA support, going through the steps for a warranty repair scenario. After they run my serial number, I am placed on hold for several minutes. The representative comes back to chide me for having bought a non-US phone, and says that if I ship it they will return it to me unrepaired. He goes on to explain that less-honest retailers will purchase overseas unlocked GSM phones and then sell them here. Purchasers of these phones basically forego any support or warranty for these phones except in the phone’s country of origin. Who knew phones could have nationalities and be refused care when not in their home country? Perhaps Nokia should set up embassies for these poor, displaced phones. Well, as you can imagine I am totally ticked by now. I call up TigerDirect and start in on them. Right now there’s an agreement of working out an exchange, though I am having to reiterate in every paragraph of the conversation that I do not want another UK phone. Heck, I didn’t want a UK phone the first time. My “case” is awaiting manager approval; I have to call back my phone’s social worker tomorrow.

27 April 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Unnamed pie recipe

Note: Somebody help me name this thing! :) Serves 8.
Base liquid
4 dl water
2 dl (red) grape juice
0.5 dl white vinegar (10 % acid)
50 g baker’s yeast
100 g sugar
Base solids
2 dl oatmeal
1 dl oat bran
1 dl rye bran
2 dl textured soy protein
Seasoning
1 g cardamom
to taste:
garlic
oregano
mint
Flour
ca. 6 dl wheat flour (bread flour)
Finishing touches
1 dl oil
100 g grated cheese
  1. Mix the base liquid ingredients in the tin, making sure that the finished liquid is lukewarm (~37 °C), and that the yeast is thoroughly dissolved. The tin must be large enough that this mixture takes less than a third of the volume available.
  2. Add the base solids and mix thoroughly.
  3. Add the seasonings.
  4. Add the flour in small batches, kneading the would-be dough well after each batch. There is enough flour in the mixture when it starts behaving like dough instead of gruel. The dough can well be fairly loose.
  5. Mix in the oil.
  6. Put the tin containing the dough in a warm place with no draught, cover it with a cloth, and let the dough leaven for about 30 minutes, or until the dough has doubled in size.
  7. Bake in an oven preheated to 200 °C for an hour.
  8. When the pie is almost ready, cover it with the cheese and put it back to the oven, letting the cheese melt.
Serve warm (reheating if necessary) with fresh vegetables. Rough nutrient breakdown Computed from recipe and individual ingredient nutrient content.
recipe
Energy 16200 kJ
(3870 kcal)
Carbohydrates 494 g 52 E%
– sugar 100 g 10 E%
Protein 143 g 15 E%
Fat 139 g 33 E%
Dietary fiber 38 g 2.32 g/MJ
This pie is high in both fat and sugar, but both are within the limits of recommended intake for healthy adults. Just make sure to have the other parts of the meal to be similarly or better balanced in terms of sugar and fat :)

Jonathan McDowell: Anyone out there with a VT8235 datasheet?

Argh. A long time ago I got LinuxBIOS up and running on a Via EPIA-M mobo - someone else had done the initial work, but it had bitrotted. As part of that I got auto power on working, such that if you removed power from the box it would come on when you reapplied it, even if it had been turned off before. However I never checked this into LinuxBIOS as it's a bit intrusive - not everyone wants boxen auto powering on. What I now find is that not only have I lost the code to do this, but the copy of the vt8235 (southbridge in use on the EPIA-M) datasheet doesn't have the details of which register I need to twiddle. I'm sure it used to, but that might have been an older copy which of course I no longer have. So, does anyone out there have a copy of the vt8235 datasheet and can tell me what magic value I need to poke to what register(s)? Please? I've tried creatively Googling, I've tried running Via's factory BIOS and seeing if the PCI config registers changes when I flip the option in that, but all to no avail. Someone save me. I don't want to have to disassemble the BIOS trying to find this one tweak. :(

Clint Adams: Not the Atari game

I was reading a Gregory Maguire book. I won't say which one; that would be telling. A man, perhaps 45 years old, with a shaved head and a bit of drunkenness, informed me that he had just been mugged. I did not care in the slightest. He then commented on the anthropomorphized animal depicted on the cover of my book, and went into some detail about the creature's inner thoughts. He was still boring the hell out of me. Then he caught me off-guard. You ever read the Foundation series? he asked. Yeah, I mumbled, wondering where this was going. He proceeded to ramble on, inching closer and closer to me. Perhaps he thought that my name was Harry. It was not. The drunken spray of his saliva became more excited, and then he made his most impressive confession. I'm the Mule, he announced confidently. While I pondered this fact, he made sexual advances. Luckily, Arkady Darrell and Bliss and that little hermaphrodite girl swung by and rescued me. Well, no; I only wish it had ended so well.

26 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Mandalay to Bagan, and 2700 temples

Leaving the computer centre in Mandalay, I decided to settle my further itineraries and headed to an Internet shop in the hope to arrange some online bookings, using Aline's credit card (because mine was lost and I would rather preserve the cash dollars I have, given that there is no way to get more money in this country. I managed to book myself hotel rooms for the One Night in Bangkok I have before returning home, as well as the five days of Yangon before. Other than that, however, I could not get any flights; Myanmar-internal flights cannot be booked online, and Thai Airways refuses to take passengers when the name on the credit card does not match the passenger's. Given that my plans for the evening where set, I had to leave the place with my mission unaccomplished and headed for the Green Elephant restaurant, which the Lonely Planet describes as up-scale. For a whopping $7, I treated myself to beer, pickled ginger and green tea leaves, and butter fish in a tomato curry. Very delicious. Afterwards I attended the Mandalay Marionette & Culture Show, which was quite lovely despite the atonal music that came with it. Mandalay marionettes (or Myanmar marionettes in general) are very elaborately made, and the style to guide them is very unique to the country, the art having been the popular art back in the days when kings ruled the land. The artists are devoted to keeping this art alive, and you could really feel their enjoyment as they showed fights between ogres, princes and snakes, riding horses and trolling monkeys, princes engaging in "hackysack"-style football artistics (which is very popular over here, and people are rather good), as well as synchronised dances between marionettes and real dancers. I can recommend this show to anyone visiting (as I recommend to anyone visiting Hanoi to see the water puppet theatre) and am glad I chose this option over the "Moustache Brothers" performance, which is political satire and slapstick on the edge of legality. I ended the evening talking to some other travellers, most of which had no interest in listening to others but to tell their stories instead. The next morning saw me rising at 4:30 to catch the ferry to Bagan at 6:00 o'clock. The boat had comfortable seats and a restaurant, and only a handful passengers, so the 10 hours went by reasonably fast (no comparison to the ride we took on the Mekhong last year to get from Chiang Khong in Thailand to Luang Phrabang in Laos). We arrived in Bagan on time and together with some Australians I found the May Kha Lar guesthouse (following again the Lonely Planet), which is a rather pleasant place with a lovely, elderly, English-speaking lady running it. SHe also arranged my further air travel for me and wanted about $30 less than the official booking offices. I decided to spend an additional day in Bagan, so I am heading out from here by plane on the 28th, going to Heho, then spending two and a half days at Inle Lake, and flying to Yangon on the 30th. From there, I am leaving for Bangkok on 4 May. With the tickets in my pocket, I felt relieved, showered, and went for a traditional Burmese massage, which turns out to be completely different from the Thai style (which Laos and Vietnam copied more or less) and was rather painful, both because the lady literally tormented my legs far too long and spent only a very short time on my pained shoulders, and because neither the mosquito coils nor my repellents warded off the beasts as I was lying there out in the darkening sky right at dusk. No Malaria in this region, fortunately. Following a very traditional Burmese dinner (goat meat curry), I went to bed because... ... the next day I rose again at 4:30 to meet a guide, and left the hotel at 5:00 o'clock on a horse cart for a tour of the temples. Bagan is what could be called the heart of Myanmar, and on a 42 square kilometre area, you can find 2700 temples (of the 4500 originally built), dating back to the 10th century AD. Unfortunately, the wall carvings and paintings in most temples has been washed away, and it was nowhere near as fascinating to stroll along the endless corridors as it had been in Angkor Wat or Bayon Wat in Cambodia, but from the outside, these temples still look spectacular and are well preserved or restored. Also, climbing up on one or the other, the sight was almost overwhelming: a vast landscape of strupas and temples as far as the eye would reach, and all that under a lovely sunny sky. Haha. The "sunny" bit is what made me get up so early, because the temperatures are bearable only up until 11 o'clock or so. Between noon and 16:00 o'clock today, the thermometre measured 46 degrees Celsius -- I don't think I've ever been in a place so hot (if you leave out our trip to Death Valley in an airconditioned van. So in order to escape the heat, I went to the archaeological museum at noon, then back to the city and into the swimming pool of one of the nicer hotels in town, which cost me $3 for a pool that was green (they don't have the money for chemicals), and the water about the temperature of my bathtub at home. I did not swim, but fortunately, the showers there were pleasantly cold, so I lay in the shade to read ("Kafka on the Short" by Haruki Murakami), taking a shower every ten minutes to cool down. Going back to the hotel, I find the electricity to be gone once again. I think that this town (and Mandalay as well) has maybe 4 hours of electricity a day, it coming and going every few minutes (which makes computer use quite unpleasant). This also means that there is no aircondition most of the day, at least in the budget hotels which don't have their own generator. I am meeting my guide again at 16:00 hours for another 2-3 hours, then will follow the hotel owner's suggestion for a "back massage expert", eat, sleep, and climb Mount Popa tomorrow morning. I'll try to get online again in the afternoon. Thanks for reading along.

25 April 2006

Jonathan McDowell: It's really happening.

Kathy and I went to Norwich Register Office yesterday to confirm the date for our wedding and show them our various documents (proof of age, address etc). All very scary, especially the way it seemed to be a test to about whether we knew each other or not (checking about middle names, age, whether we'd been married before with each of us while the other was out of the room). I mean, it's still months off, it's not like we're rushing into this. And the proof of address was our council tax bill with both our names on it. Anyway. It looks like we're actually really going to get married. Gulp.

Erich Schubert: More thoughts on XML differencing

Last year, I gave a talk on XML differencing at the Extreme Markup Languages 2005 conference in Montr al. Since then I didn't have much time to work on that project. The prototype app is opensource, and available at ssddiff.alioth.debian.org. The slides are there, too, and so is a link to the article. XML differencing is actually a two phase process; I've been mostly working on the first phase. Traditional approaches intertwine the two phases. In the first phase, you build a mapping between the two documents. I called this a "nodeset correspondence" in the slides. Basically you decide which node from the first document corresponds to which node in the second document. When you have found this mapping (the "marked" output writer of ssddiff will output this information in form of two XML documents marked with numbers in a certain attribute), the actual differencing is done. But much of the work remains. When doing a diff, the output (format) is just as important as the actual result. While the "marked" output explained above is very precise, it doesn't give the user an overview of what has changed in the document. That's why I added two more output writers, the "xupdate" writer and the "merged" writer. The "xupdate" writer does obviously produce an XUpdate script. It goes a long way to optimizing the output (read: minimizing the number of operations), and employs a longest-common-subsequence algorithm for that (LCS is what regular diff uses on lines!). Fortunately we already have a 1:1 mapping, so this boils down to a longest-increasing-subsequence which can be computed very efficiently. Then the writer employs some XUpdate tricks to do real moves (by storing parts of the tree in variables to be inserted later), and avoids collapsing of text nodes (it will eventually insert dummy nodes for that). But all this gives just a glimpse of the complexity I've encountered in what I considered to be a "remote" part of my project. It isn't even described in the paper, because I just hacked this code together to work somewhat (attribute handling is incomplete IIRC). The "merged" writer turned out to be much more powerful than I had imagined and actually rather easy. After "merging" two version of an HTML document, I could add some CSS rules and have a visual presentation of the changes in my browser. Very cool. I'd love to add this html merge functionality to the prototype, but I didn't have enough time yet (you'll find some refactoring of the merged writer in SVN though to get there someday). But let me get back to the difficulties in the "XUpdate" writer. Not all of these difficulties are actually of technical nature. It is (like with the semantics of differencing) a matter of the intended data model and use. When you are doing a diff to be applied by a computer (e.g. via XUpdate), you may have the requirement, that the resulting document is identical to the original document. In that case, the diff is likely to have to restore whitespace. If you are interested in analyzing the differences, you will want to skip any irrelevant information. Let's assume we have an address book: 
<abook><entry name="tom" /><entry name="jerry" /></abook>
Ordering of the entry nodes is likely to be irrelevant. You address book applications will sort the entries on demand. So a "semantic diff" shouldn't include any changes to the ordering of "entry" nodes, should it? The XUpdate writer doesn't have any functionality in place to skip such changes from being written to the output file. This will likely be not possible without some DTD magic and extra user information. However, to have the benefits of the "-u" context option of good old "diffutils" - fuzzy matches, and somewhat reliable merging of changes without having all revisions available - such semantics are needed, too. But this will even further increase complexity of the output writer, which for example would need to detect somehow that the "name" attribute in my address book is a unique key, and therefore xpath expressions like /abook/entry[@name='tom'] are preferrable to expressions such as /abook/entry[1], which will easily break when merging. The specification of an "XUpdate-replacement with context information" is probably a whole thesis in itself, I guess. P.S. I'm occasionally asked about a Java version of ssddiff. Sorry that I have to disappoint you there. First of all, I'm very short of time. Then I'm not too comfortable in Java, and I estimated that the Java version would need at least twice as much memory, because of certain optimizations I can't easily access in Java that I can just hide in a template in C++. And memory is the key limiting factor at least in exact mode.

24 April 2006

Marco d'Itri: yet another irrtoolset replacement, 1.0

Today I released version 1.0 of rpsltool, my router configuration generator. It can generate the complete BGP configuration (neighbor statements, route-maps, prefix and as-path lists) of peering or customer-facing routers using RPSL data, a local configuration file and a configuration template based on the popular Template::Toolkit perl package. Currently I only provide an IOS configuration template, but it should be easy to write one for JUNOS (patches are welcome!). I know that it's being used in production by several ISPs in the RIPE and APNIC regions, so if you are not satisfied by IRRToolSet I think it's worth some consideration. Major changes since the last public release:

Erich Schubert: RSS needs threading.

Please correct me if any of RSS/Atom/etc. do already have threading. On a mailinglist I'm on (large number of subscribers, and often threads become quite long but only interesting for like 1% of subscribers, but with days with now new mails inbetween) there is a discussion every now and then by people who'd prefer a forum. A forum however is a totally non-working solution. First of all, web UIs (even Ajax, Web 2.0) suck. None offers threading as comfortable and smooth as a real email reader such as Evolution or Thunderbird (Outlook seems to have quite bad threading, or disabled by default, thats why many novice users think forums do better threading...). Secondly, a forum requires you to frequently visit it, whereas email will patiently sit in your email folder waiting to be read, just like your regular email. That is much more workeable with an increasing number of lists/forums. You can easily be subscribed to 20 mailing lists. Can you imagine visiting 20 forums every day? Even with smart browser (e.g. Galeon that can open a bookmark folder into tabs, did I mention IE sucks?) this is quite a pain. Now imagine that some of these forums are inactive for weeks. Visit the forum just to see that there are no new posts? Now RSS comes into mind. But for a Forum? Should it list every post? No, it needs to have thread support, so I can easily kill whole threads. Or I'll just stick with email and tell everyone who wants a forum to fishing. Or write a forum with reasonable email support. Oh, and RSS doesn't solve the writing problem either. No, RSS is not the answer. Email is. Update: A couple of people have send me emails about NNTP/Usenet/News. While there are excellent clients for it available, and the distributed nature is also a nice feature, it also has drawbacks. For example, you basically need to setup a separate service (especially if it's a private newsfeed, and you can't use gmane), which is much more difficult that running a mailing list or a RSS feed. You can run a RSS feed with basically any provider. You can get a private mailing list with many. Then you usually need to setup a new profile for each NNTP server, because it's designed totally around the server model, not single groups. Furthermore, while you can usually access RSS feeds with your regular web browser (in form of their HTML counterparts, or some built-in filter), and mailing list with your email program, users need separate software for using News at all. (Granted, many email clients can do news) Oh, and then people seem to be afraid of NNTP, unfortunately.

23 April 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Offline in Burma

Our last night in Chiang Mai saw us eat at the market and take our rented motorcycle for a spin around the town, before falling into bed in order to get up early the next day. In the morning, we ran our last errands, including the buying of a lovely 14 litre Deuter backpack as my hang luggage -- Aline took the backpack I originally brought along with her as a shopping bag -- at a 30% discount, as well as breakfast, before we were off to the airport to part ways. Even though at first I really did not want to take Aline along (because I had planned this vacation as my first ever vacation alone in an unknown area), we had a great time, and I am glad I did. This way, she got a first glimpse of Southeast Asia, which may well be my future home, and if it turns out that way, hers too. In the checkin queue for Mandalay Air, I brushed up a conversation with the gentleman in front of me who turned out to be a regular visitor of Burma. He -- Adam -- supplied me with plenty of advice, and as we ended up sitting next to each other on the plane, he told me a lot about his business and the friends he was going to meet, eventually inviting me to come along to a lodge in Pyin Oo Lwin, east of Mandalay, for the weekend. Adam apparently knows the drills and by his side, I passed immigration and customs in a jiffy, without having my bags searched and no questions asked (not that I had anything to hide, but it saved us some time). His friends were waiting at the airport and gave me a ride into town (about one hour), dropping me off at a nice hotel right by the railway station. I am not yet decided whether and how long I will come along, but it's certainly a great offer, especially to get in touch with some of the people who could pull the right strings to help me in case of problems, or in the future facilitate further "clothing expeditions" into the country. I am to meet them again for dinner in about an hour but decided to check out the town a bit on feet, as well as investigate the Internet situation. As it turns out, it's pretty much all locked, so if you end up reading this entry, it means I either found a backdoor, or managed to sign up a freemail account somewhere, and mailed it off to a friend with write access to my blog. In Pyin U Lwin, I am supposed to meet James, a British expat who runs the only computer in the town, so maybe I'll be more lucky there. He'll surely be an interesting person to talk to with respect to the Linux CDs I brought along, and the Internet in Burma in general. It's a shame I did not set up a DNS tunnel before the trip, but the connection seems too slow anyway. Oh well, good thing I bought that USB stick! Mandalay so far strikes me very similar to the outskirts of Bangkok or Hanoi, I have not encountered too much poverty yet, but it's generally dirty and loud. I will probably not spend too many days here, but am always flexible to go along with what comes around. I do find myself stared at a lot more than I am used to from other countries on this side of the globe. Usually it takes them a while longer to respond to my smile, but if they do it is generally followed by an invitation to come sit with them. "Generally"... ha! I've only just come here, we'll see what time brings. Stay tuned.

Zak B. Elep: Aren t I free to blog, or what?

It begins like this:
  1. Charo posts; gets syndicated on Planet Ubuntu-PH
  2. Some bloke notices it, and eventually gets into rant mode talking about freedom of choice’.
  3. Same bloke posts something really stupid:
you’ve completely diverged from the topic. the original question is why this individual is advocating non-free and proprietary toolchain in a group that is supposed to advocate free software. Freedom is subjective and we will not be able to end up this topic when we go to technicalities and social relevance.
Um, I’m having a difficult time parsing this. See below:
I guess what the Geekette should do next time is fix her drupal to categorize her blog and have only those free stuff aggregated to the community site then let her non-free stuff just stay here and its case closed.
Or get a better feed reader that filters out what you want to filter out. Be as persnickety as you can be. Go figure. You’re free to do the above, just as the Geekette is free to blog what she wants to blog, in whatever category she feels like posting in. After all, its her blog, and definitely not yours (or mine either.) Which is why I chose to post this as my post, not as a comment. Feel free to be an ignoramus. Planets, for those of you playing at home, can be thought ouf as just fancy RSS aggregators on the Web, especially for those who don’t have the luxury of a good RSS reader (or those who choose not to read via RSS, like me.) The Ubuntu-PH administrators could in theory impose some Draconian criteria for selecting which blog posts from persons to show, but in practice, they just don’t, probably because they feel that contributors are smart enough to be able to judge for themselves what they want to blog. I can understand this bloke’s pain, since our Planet is, after all, a “window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu Team Philippines community members.” However it should also be obvious that the world is not so perfect, since even if we do get to use Ubuntu freely, we also get to have the choice to use some shackled software for some end. Freedom may be subjective, but it is definitely also self-referential too; you may have the freedom to not have a particular freedom to do something, and vice versa. A little Matrix philosophy is in order, care of the Oracle: “You’re not here to make a choice, for you have already made the choice. You are here now to understand the choice.” Now, figure me as stupid. I’ll just move along DhIconCacheChanges, help my fellow cadet in the X-SWAT, fix Debian Bug#360950 (despite lacking an amd64; readers, care to donate one? ;-) and continue to give my love for FOSS…

22 April 2006

Tollef Fog Heen: Am I spoiled?

(By way of magnio) Go through the list. Tick everything you have or have done. If you can tick 40 or more, you're spoiled. Do you: Are you: Have you: Did you: 24, so a bit more spoiled than Magni. Not that much, though.

Joachim Breitner: Silencing my Slug

Some time ago, I bought a LinkSys NSLU2, that’s a very cute little box with power, usb and network plugs, and nothing more. Inside sits an ARM processor and 16MB RAM. The great thing is: You can install linux on it, even a complete Debian sarge installation.The box is not very performant, even after I de-underclocked it by scraping away a resistor from 133MHz to 266Mhz, but it is quite cheap and very handy. I use it for nightly backups. Unfortunately, the attached external Maxtor OneTouch harddrive is quite loud, even when it is idle. Here are the steps I took to make the setup zero-noise as long as the slug is doing nothing:Some further plans for my slug involve a USB attached LCD display and a temperature sensor, so I can be informed about various stuff, incuding the outside temperature, even with my regular computer off. Suggestions of what hardware I could use is highly appreciated.

Randall Donald: Collaborative maintenance

Raphael Hertzog's post to debian-devel-announce regarding Guidelines for packaging projects on Alioth has got me thinking about trying out the collab-maint project suggestion. It seems a great idea for people who want to help out.

21 April 2006

MJ Ray: Spammers: point and laugh

Over at the Register, they think it's good to simply point and laugh when spammers claim to be Tom Jones, son of a Python. Yes, some of this spam is truly bizarre. Do spammers like ridicule?

20 April 2006

Gunnar Wolf: Hot

Ok, the time has come: Now I work with my 20" fan on. Lucky me, my office has no windows, it's in the middle of the building - A bit cold in the Winter, but that's OK with me... But the people with real windows have been sweating for some weeks already. Well, design details of a 50 year old building which cannot be moved :)
Anyway... For people coming to Debconf: Be prepared for hot weather. April-May is Central Mexico's hottest season. For Mexico City, it means we have reached 30 Celsius, and will probably reach them again a couple of times (this week's forecast says we will be under 28, which is good news)... But for the Oaxtepec region (the closest cities are Cuautla and Yautepec) we are reaching 33-35 Celsius every day.
By May, we will have the first scheduled rains (although this has been a rainy Spring, but still, it's formally the dry season), so I hope it will not be _that_ bad... But be prepared to sweat.

19 April 2006

Simon Richter: Spanish for Finns

Liquorice = Regaliz

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