I keep having what I've started to think of as the "calendar conversation" with various people. I start by outlining what I think are some fairly reasonable requirements. I'd like to have multiple calenders viewable by different sets of people. So Simon would be able to view my work calendar, while Katherine could see my personal calender (and possibly small bits of work calender where I was going to be away from home). I also want to be able to view my calenders from a variety of devices. My desktop, my phone and my laptop, for example. A web interface might be nice too, though less important to me. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask. My general hope is that whoever I'm boring about this will then say "Oh, you need to look at foo and maybe bar". After all, that's the case with most software related things I need - it's already been done, and there's a good solution available. What actually happens is the person I'm talking to nods in agreement and says they'd like the same sort of things but don't know of anything that manages it. I think the problem comes down to syncing. Sharing my calendars with other people is effectively allowing them to sync their calendar(s) with mine, with some sort of filtering so we each see only what the other wants to see. Likewise, multiple devices is all about syncing. Changes made via one method need to be visible on all of them (ideally as soon as possible). Decent syncing also brings another advantage; client independence. If I can reliably sync my information to a variety of devices/clients then I can try a different client with little risk. We have this already for mail - anything that can talk POP3, IMAP and/or mbox is easy to try out and if you don't like it then you can just change back to what you had before or try something else. Calendaring doesn't seem to have that. I don't think that the interface a client exposes needs to be complex. At a basic level what you need is a way to find out what the client thinks has been added, removed or changed. You also need to present this information in a standard format. Unfortunately iCal (RFC2445) appears to be what we've got here. I think it's a bit overly inclusive, which seems to lead to incomplete implementations. Is there a complete iCal parser library out there? The best hope for syncing that I'm aware of is OpenSync. And I haven't been that impressed; while I managed to get it to move the contacts from my SonyEricsson v600i to my Nokia E70 some of the details got mangled on the way. And lack of things like recurring event support in some of the plugins (eg the Google Calendar syncing adaptor) or warnings about data loss in the Sunbird plugin aren't encouraging. Speaking of Sunbird, I'm not impressed. Last time I looked (and it doesn't appear to have moved very far since then) it didn't make any attempt to support syncing. I'm sorry, WebDAV isn't a syncing system. It's a way of storing files remotely. Sure, I found the interface ok, but I need to make my calendaring data accessible for it to be useful. The Windows approach to all of this seems to be ActiveSync and the use of Outlook. I don't believe that it really handles more than the desktop client and a remote device though? And group calendar sharing requires an Exchange server? Not exactly the flexible solution I'm looking for. I think a key point is that all of this needs to be reliable. I didn't spend time debugging my OpenSync contact syncing issues partly because I didn't notice straight away that there was a problem (it was with additional details like email addresses rather than names/numbers IIRC), but also because it was a lot of work to delve into the code and find out just what on earth was going on. A while back I started looking at writing some calendar syncing code (called Pony) and hit a problem with complete inconsistency in handling time zones between clients that put me right off. If it's not reliable it's not useful. If it's not useful people won't test it and fix it. I think a starting point is a reliable iCal implementation that can handle everything in the spec. From there you can write plugins that will take whatever bastardised variant your device/client supports and translate to and from it. The syncing tool will need to keep a master copy of all the data, because there's no guarantee anything else will be able to support all the fields. A local complete copy should enable appropriate frobbing of data to/from any device/client without losing the information if a new device/client that can handle the data is added. Of course almost all the above applies to contacts as well; I have work contacts, personal contacts, boring house contacts (plumber, garage etc). vCard is the appropriate interchange format for that (why did vCalendar become iCalendar, but vCard not change?), but contacts feature similar issues to calendars I believe. Does this seem reasonable? Please tell me someone has already done it. Point me at Debian packages that will let me sync my phone, my Google Calendar and a local client and make me very happy. I have visions of a suite of tools all chatting over DBus; a little client that looks for my phone to appear over bluetooth and then syncs when it does, a little client that monitors Google Calendar for changes. Sunbird reporting when something changes (and accepting notification of changes). Some other client ([Dates http://www.pimlico-project.org/dates.html]?) doing the same. Another sending the data over WebDAV or SFTP so that my laptop can pick up the info when I'm on the move. I don't think I'm the only person looking for this sort of stuff. Where is it?

Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress. It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief. Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

• monospace font
• remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style. That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much? It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document. But wait ... how can I solve my problem now? I see only two awful ways:

1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text
2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

Quoting from the Release Notes for the firmware v1.54.2 for the Thomson ST2030 VoIP telephone, in the “Relevant known limitations” section:

3.1 The display doesn’t show the name of the incoming call when received display name starts with the letter “O” (uppercase).

This raised quite a few eyebrows here, and raised quite a few concerns too. I refuse to even imagine how this kind of bug can happen. And for those who will have a hard time believing this, we did the test, and, indeed, the CallerID name doesn’t appear on the phone when it starts with an “O”. Shrug.

I forgot to say, I payed for it yesterday. Now I have to buy another suitcase since the one I bought 2 years ago was ruined by the people which do the luggage handling on the Otopeni port, when I returned from Spain in September last year.

Eddy writes about Mozilla not implementing feature requests. His post basically reads: "You, free software developer, do not implement my wish. You suck big time.". I think that's a very sorry attitude to have. As a developer for a free software project, I occasionally get that attitude from users aswell: "Please implement this feature." And then later: "Why haven't you implemented my feature yet??" I always make sure to lecture such people like the following. I'm sorry, you don't get to tell me that I suck because I do not spend my voltuneer efforts according to your wishes. Eddy is free to supply a patch. Another strategy would be to put up a bounty. Or he can help in any other way he can think of. Maybe he can ask his money back. Better options to consider instead of blogging "Mozilla sucks big time"?

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. The biggest change is new API. It is probably not yet completed, but I want to release it right now to receive feedback from other developers. Full list of changes:

• Support for some new Nokia fields.
• Made SMSD mode case insensitive.
• Fix iCalendar export typo (Alin N stac).
• Better compatibility with Sharp phones.
• Completely changed public API to avoid too often ABI changes.
• See PORTING file for changes you have to do.
• Dropped autoconf support, use CMake instead.
• Please note that new API is still work in progress!

I was reading some of the debate regarding this guy and his business: The man who owns the Internet and got to thinking about the comparison between domain names and real estate. One of the things that irritates me about domain name squatters is that they can essentially sit on a good name forever, at very, very little cost. You can't do that in real estate, because you have to pay property taxes, which acts as an incentive to actually do something productive with the property, rather than simply let it sit there until someone comes and offers to buy it from you for even more than you paid. So you can't let the space go completely to waste - you have a big incentive to at the very least rent it out to someone who can make money with it. You can't really rent out a domain name, though. Since it's an integral part of your brand and identity, it would be insane to borrow one for a few years, whereas with a physical business renting space, people will still be able to find you if you move. Perhaps an annual tax based on the purchase price of domain names would encourage people to either do something valuable with them or pass them on to someone who could? I don't think anyone would be sad to see pure speculators gone, but on the other hand, I have a strong suspicion that all the extra taxes and red tape would make the idea a net negative, and taxes on 'real' domains like google or ebay, would simply be passed on to consumers, and so wouldn't be desireable. In any case, it's something interesting to think about.

A while back I set up a d-i test lab, a kind of automated mechanical computer torture rack, which has been trying (and frequently failing) to automatically install Debian onto a half-dozen varied machines every day for a couple of years. Problem is that hardware sucks, even when it's tucked away in a friend's basement and so not blaring at you with its combined total of 100 fans and 50 disk drives. It has an annoying habit of dying, especially if it's oddball machines for different architectures. Cords have a habit of getting unplugged. It's hard to automate booting from installation media. And so on. A while ago I decided to go virtual. Now, thanks to Dann and Matt and HP, I've gone from this: to this: HP donated hydra, a maxed out 8-way Xeon with 4 (soon 8) disks. The idea is that it can run 7 or so virtual machines, all doing test installs, in parallel. Fast. I'm using kvm for the amd64 and i386 tests. Since Debian has mips and mipsel kernels specially built for running under qemu, I'm able to test the installer for both those arches. Hercules will cover s390, once the kernel gets fixed. This leaves some architectures still todo:

• arm should be supported by qemu, but Debian doesn't yet have a kernel for it. Please, please kernel team, add an arm qemu flavour!
• sparc's qemu support seems very rough. I haven't tried to get it working yet.
• powerpc probably has an emulator I can use. Any suggestions? I need something that can run headless. Qemu would work, if we had an appropriate special kernel for it.
• m68k I have not researched emulators for yet.
• hppa, ia64, and alpha all lack a usable emulator, AFAIK. Luckily I have machines for all of these, so I can pare the physical hardware down to just those 3 boxes.

I also still have to write enough installation test cases to keep this monster machine firing on all 8 cores all day long. It can probably handle around 300-400 installation tests per day. Since hydra has the disk space, and these emulators are generating lots of disk images with Debian pre-installed, I have also set it up to retain the disk images. I imagine that some of these disk images will eventually be useful for devleopment, since it's much easier to boot a disk image rather than sit through a slow qemu install on an arch like mips. I haven't worked out how to make these images publically available yet, but hydra is located on the name network as gluck.debian.org, if anyone wants to get access to them. Update: I also have qemu doing a 'savevm 1' before shutting down, so you can even restore the running system from the disk images. Especially useful if the install failed somewhere in d-i! :-) BTW, I can give out accounts on hydra to any Debian developers who need a fast machine to run kvm/qemu on, or to anyone who is interested in setting up their own installation tests.

I should have known better than to even hint that life was getting back to normal. We're back on weekends and overtime at work. Personal life is also a bit hectic. So, Debian stuff is postponed in favour of sleep in most cases. I'll clear what bugs I can, but new code is at the bottom of the list. On the good side, my daughter Caoimhe, started Walking! Its good to get home and see the kids. Spring is coming. I'd like to get out and see some of it. Tags blogging, family, caoimhe

I just saw an ad on VT4 that they're going to be broadcasting the excellent Battlestar Galactica series—that is, the reimagined version. Caught me by surprise there, because I was actually expecting Kanaal2 to broadcast this—they're usually the SciFi channel in .be. Not that this matters, of course. Luckily, they're also going to broadcast this at an excellent time slot: Sunday at 23:25 (or something), meaning, not prime time; as a result, I might actually be able to follow it this time around. Living together with people who like to watch prime time pulp would make watching this rather impossible during reasonable hours, otherwise. Not this time. As it happens, I bought the original 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica only a few weeks ago. That one's a bit dated though, and not half as much fun.

Tonight I turned 27. By chance, this fell onto a Tuesday, and there is a great dancing party every Monday. This monday, there was also a great band, the Souvenirs. They're pure fun and great for dancing - so I obviously opted to celebrate my birthday there.This probably was the nicest birthday party I've ever had: lots of friends showed up (though mostly girls, but thats fine with me :-)), we danced a lot. And danced. And danced. :-) And I'll probably spend some more hours today dancing later this day.And with dancing I mean: Swing, Lindy Hop, Balboa. I just love this music and these dances. So playful, sometimes cheeky - swinging...

Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar

Todays music was also great, a nice speed and patterns you could play with... I don't know what it is, adrenaline?, that makes dancing so much fun. And probably the communication. Dancing is all about communication. There was this class titled "Moves that make the follow smile" once... That is the best moment in a dance, when you managed to lead the follow into some slight variations or some fun move matching the music, it worked out great and you see this flash of delight in their face... this "I'm not sure what we just did, but it felt just so right"-smile. The "I didn't know we could do that"-smile. That's what I'm striving for. Sometimes there are some moments in a song where this works out great, and occasionally there is a song where it works out through most of the song. These are the really great moments when dancing.Sorry, no pictures or videos. Just memories.Keep on swingin'!I'm really looking forward to events such as Senigallia (Summer Jamboree) or the Munich Lindy Exchange.And of course our regular events here in Munich, such as our Thursday open air get-together at Hofgarten, sundays in Salon Erna and mondays in Cord.

subtitle: Break up GnuCash into lots of forks

With an ISP problem throttling my broadband to 4000B/s, I've switched to developing in C instead of building Emdebian packages - downloading Debian sources was taking an hour or more even for small packages.

This has made time for a long overdue project: gpe-cash - double entry accounting for handhelds. It's a spin-off from the stalled cashutil project and it just might provide the impetus to get cashutil into a releasable state.

gpe-cash uses QOF (Query Object Framework) which itself was spun out from GnuCash some years ago when it was described as "the gnucash engine without all the financial stuff". So gpe-cash is a happy reunion of the engine and the financial stuff along with Gtk+, only a lot smaller than GnuCash. Yes, it is a fork but a fork done for, IMHO, very good reasons. (Why write free software and then frown on forked projects?) There's little hope of getting GnuCash to run on any embedded hardware (it would probably end up as a laptop instead of a handheld in the process) so it has to be broken up: forked into a few smaller bits and simply dropping larger bits.

I've long wanted to break up the GnuCash behemoth and this is how this fork will work:

1. Package the basic GnuCash objects as a shared library with -dev, -dbg and -doc


2. Package the GnuCash business objects as another shared library, with ditto.


3. Leave the commodity (stocks and shares) objects for a later date due to QOF compatibility issues with the GnuCash code.


4. Use the pilot-qof Default Currency Table to create a tiny set of gnucash compatible currencies. (Also used by gpe-expenses already.)


5. Share live expense data with gpe-expenses and gpe-cash (prevent duplication)


6. Share contacts and live calendar data with gpe-invoice (calculate invoices)


7. Drop direct file compatibility with GnuCash until GnuCash itself supports a sane backend, a suitable data import or cashutil is fixed, whichever comes soonest.


8. Retain object compatibility with GnuCash at the QOF level - permits removing certain parts of GnuCash specific code from the objects whilst retaining functionality.


9. Drop all reports, graphs, CSV import, QIF import, Scheme and other complexity of GnuCash.


10. Use a simple SQLite backend via QOF.
    

Best laid plans . . . etc. It always ends up a bit different to the plan but you have to have a plan of some kind. (No?, well I do.)

The code is a combination of gpe-expenses and cashutil. It will (eventually) live within the cashutil SVN at SourceForge but I haven't committed the first changeset yet. The basic structures already work, it is tying the C objects to the Gtk that is the bulk of the remaining work.

If anyone is interested in upstream development, subscribe to the (very low volume) QOF-devel mailing list and let me know.

I'm Going to Play Some Number at the Lotto The Lotto Game is a really popular gambling game in Italy, run by the state itself. As in all good gambling game: you, the player, can win a lot of money while who is running the game (the Italian state in our case) will win a lot of money for sure, no matter what. Anyhow, to the facts, it's a well-known folklore that people win playing Lotto FOR SURE by playing numbers told while dreaming by parents, friends, kitties, whatever, ... As a scientist, I've no reason not to trust this folklore, why should I? As a strange coincidence (another fact that strongly hints I HAVE TO PLAY), this night I had a dream (well, it was more this morning while reading the planet, but it doesn't really matter..., folklore is folklore!). There were a lot, really a lot of people whispering this to my ears:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

well, ok, they aren't in decimal notation, and they aren't even comprised between 1 and 90, ... but what would you expect from a bunch of geeks??? They are probably trying to exploit some overflow in the hands of the lotto extractor or something like that... But I won't desist, I'll play those number! Open questions:

• on which wheel(s) should I play the numbers?
• how should I handle overflowed numbers? throw them away? modulo 89 operations + 1?

any proficient Lotto player to answer them around?

Sometime someone connects his computer to mine using a network cable, to transfer some files or similar. In a perfect world, both computers would run something like zeroconf or avahi-autoip, and IP adresses were taken care of. But in the real world, this is not often the case. Then, this would be easiest:

$ ifconfig eth0 192.168.42.1
$ simpledhcpd eth0

Where simpledhcpd would, without any configuration, start listening for DHCP requests on eth0 and serve IPs from the just configured subnet. No configuration file, no leases, not even a deamon mode. Just Real Simple IPs for your ad-hoc-network. Does that already exists?

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <h1><a name="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic" id="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic">hi, planet // iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic</a></h1> <p> <em><strong>Hi, Planet!</strong> <br/> Welcome to my blog, and thanks to <a href="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" title="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" rel="nofollow">Martin</a> for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on <a href="http://freenode.net/" title="http://freenode.net/" rel="nofollow">freenode</a> or <a href="http://www.oftc.net/" title="http://www.oftc.net/" rel="nofollow">oftc</a> (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).</em> <br/> <br/> After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at <a href="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" title="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" rel="nofollow">work</a>: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">UTF-8</a> for file names instead of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15">ISO8859-15</a>. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way. <br/> In theory this is easy, as <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" title="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" rel="nofollow">convmv</a> happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol">Apple_Filing_Protocol</a>) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX<a href="#fn__1" name="fnt__1" id="fnt__1">1)</a>. Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:<br/> Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" rel="nofollow">CAP encoding</a>. So we had to find a way to </p> <ul> <li> convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 </li> <li> replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character </li> </ul> <p> Luckily netatalk ships the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" rel="nofollow">uniconv(1)</a> util<a href="#fn__2" name="fnt__2" id="fnt__2">2)</a> which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID<a href="#fn__3" name="fnt__3" id="fnt__3">3)</a> Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" rel="nofollow">CNID backend</a>: </p> <ul> <li> uniconv assumes that <em>cnid_metad</em> is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time! </li> <li> If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your <em>AppleVolumes.default</em> (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished. </li> </ul> <p> Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_wink.gif" alt=";-)" /> </p> <p> Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":-D" /> </p> <p> <strong>update:</strong> full html in the feed. </p> <div class="tags"><span> <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/debian" class="wikilink1" title="tags:debian" rel="tag">debian</a>, <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/linux" class="wikilink1" title="tags:linux" rel="tag">linux</a> </span></div> <a href="#fnt__1" id="fn__1" name="fn__1">1)</a> and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X">UTF-8#Mac_OS_X</a>), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms <a href="#fnt__2" id="fn__2" name="fn__2">2)</a> it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with <a href="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" title="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" rel="nofollow">netatalk</a> <a href="#fnt__3" id="fn__3" name="fn__3">3)</a> Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac <acronym title="Operating System">OS</acronym> versions </div>

Creating a new db on MySQL The grant syntax is designed in such an arbitrary way that it's impossible to remember it properly unless you use it every day. So I write it down, hopefully once and for all, here:

# mysqladmin create dbname
# mysql dbname
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dbname.* TO enrico;

Follows a list of keywords that I'm likely to use in the future to look for this information in case if I forgot that I wrote this note:

• create new database
• mysqladmin create database
• grant all to enrico
• create mysql test database

I've got a new desktop system, after going two years without a desktop at all. My last desktop, which served me well for about five years, was one that I built myself from parts. This time, though, I was feeling a little lazy, and I decided to order a computer from System 76, one of the few companies that will assemble and ship a computer to you with Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) preinstalled.



The cats were curious about something new appearing in our apartment. They were even more excited when they found out it was full of cat toys! Sadly for them, though, I confiscated all the styrofoam peanuts and stuck them in a cat-proof trash can.



The usual box of random CDs still exists when you have preloaded Linux. I was surprised to discover that it did not include an Ubuntu CD or five, which seems to me like a no-brainer.



Of course, this post wouldn't be complete without a picture of the actual box. It looks just like it did on the system76 web site; no surprise there.



I used the included Ubuntu install for a little while, and it looked like everything was configured reasonably well. The one piece of weirdness was that Ubuntu uses a program called network-manager to configure the network; while it has some nice features (like doing network discovery for wireless, letting programs easily get notifications when network devices go down or come up, etc), these are offset, at least for me, by the fact that it likes to randomly break the computer's network access. This isn't exclusively an Ubuntu problem, of course; etch also installs and configures network-manager by default, and I had the same problems on etch until I purged it. I assume that network-manager works for someone, so probably something to do with the network environment here breaks it.

The system is currently running Debian etch, with Xen domains booting testing and unstable that I use for development. Even without the NVidia graphics drivers and with one of the Xen domains running a computationally intensive job, it's quite snappy; a lot snappier than any other desktop system I've owned recently. And while it's doing this, it's one of the quietest computers I own.

So, in summary, I'm quite happy with this system and I'd suggest System 76 as an option for anyone who wants a Windows-free computer.

Openbox Reading that keeping X in 3D mode tends to use more power convinced me to finally drop compiz. Back to metacity, I found it unusable. I've always used Super+Right mouse drag to resize windows, and metacity refuses to do that. I haven't found a way to resize windows with it other than dragging the super-thin, impossible-to-catch window corners or using the keyboard. I had a look at debtags search x11::window-manager (I found x11::window-manager using debtags tagsearch window) and picked openbox. Quite light, standardards-compliant, it seems to handle everything as it should (gnome panel, popups, fullscreen applications, name it). It has a very simple configuration dialog, just like metacity. Unlike metacity, it also has a configuration file in which I can tweak those things that are not in the configuration dialog. And it supports much more of those than metacity does. So, here are three use cases that weren't covered by metacity (or compiz, in case of RaiseLower) and are now fully covered by openbox:

• I now have resize on right-mouse-drag: useful because applications don't often start with the size I'd like them to.
• I now have RaiseLower on Super+Esc, to quickly see what's in that partly covered window and then but it back where it was.
• I can now move windows beyond the top edge of the screen, to reveal those "Ok" buttons of stupid dialogs that for some reason are taller than my screen.

And also, the fan of my laptop is not on all the time anymore. Updates:

• many people wrote me to say that it's possible to resize a window in metacity using Alt and middle mouse button drag; it is however impossible to configure it to use Alt and right mouse button drag, which would be nice to have on a touchpad.
• I've also been pointed out that it is possible to move a window beyond the top edge of the screen with metacity. It is not possible to do it with compiz, though.

Megan s back after spending most of the early part of today in Casualty following a minor head injury. (Did you see what I did there? Good job I m not an apostrophe Nazi or I d never have let myself abuse language in such a way!) Not a great day, but not as bad as it could have been.

Busy day yesterday; the first day of RoCoCoCamp, and the first day seeing a lot of friends and friendly faces from out of town. I was out of bed at 6AM yesterday. I stopped at St. Viateur Bagel on Mont Royal and got 10 dozen bagels -- enough for our expected crowd. I got to SAT at about 8AM, just in time to start the coffee machines. The big percolators I rented for the event require about an hour to make coffee, so if people were going to be coming in at 9AM, I really wanted to get them started by 8. Alain Bernardeau from computation.to got there soon after, and set up the spare computers his organization is lending us. Brandon Sanders, Mark Dilley and Nathan R also came in early, looking for work to do. I got them all into the job of setting up the food for breakfast. By 9AM we were trucking along, and I figured I'd go try a cup of joe, which should be ready. But all I got from the carafe was cold water. The percolators draw so much current that they'd blown a circuit. Guillaume, the SAT tech, and I tried about 8 different ways to keep them running, but nothing worked. Finally he put them on the 220V industrial circuit, which they didn't blow. Awesome, but at 9:30AM, with almost everyone there, we had no expectation of coffee for another hour. Yikes! But by the time people started filtering into the circle for starting the event proper, coffee was rolling and I was much relieved. Our facilitator, Deborah Hartmann, gave a great bilingual introduction to Open Space Technology and got the ball rolling. I always have a moment of dread during the beginning of a Open Space event: what if this is the time that Open Space doesn't work? But it did, again, which is great. The first session I went to was Zach Copley's, about consensus-supporting software features. Brandon Sanders had some great cases from AboutUs's adult content policy. We shared a lot of Wikitravel's culture, too. I also stopped in to talk about Wikitravel:RDF with Reini Urban, who was demoing Semantic MediaWiki. It's a neat project, and it's a different tack than I've taken with Wikitravel. I'd like to see the two approaches harmonized at some time in the future. Lunch came quickly, and we had far too much to eat. I spent a lot of time talking to Simon Law about possibly using Open Space in some way for BarCampMontreal. I think it's a good idea -- it's growing to a point where our current format is straining under the load. We also talked about ubiquitous wikis and the cool browser Amaya, where Web pages are in edit mode by default. It's a good idea. After lunch I had a chance to hang out with Earle Martin of Open Guides and talk about wiki and the geospatial web. Mark Jarowski of Wikevent was there, and together we've decided to hammer out a RDF vocabulary for exchanging RDF data about business listings. It's the kind of productive talk I like having. I also spent some time with Jack Herrick talking about wiki entrepreneurship. Jack had a prepared presentation about wikiHow's business experience, which was really great, and provided a great case study for talking about commercialization of wikis in general. With Angela Beesley and Ray King around us, we had most of the interesting wiki content businesses represented. Pretty neat. It was a really productive first day, but by the time we got around to 5PM I was exhausted. Maj, Zach, Mark, Niko and I all went to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac to meet Allegra and their two daughters, No ma and baby Anoushka. We got pizza and had beers and sat on our new couch and had a good old time. Technorati's rocococamp tag shows a lot of other positive responses on the Web: Matt Forsythe's sketches from RoCoCoCamp, NathanR's continuing paranoia, CITIZENShift (which quotes me, when I was talking about wiki entrepreneurship), and Patrick Tanguay.

I'm off to SAT again this morning. Should be a fun one, and I hope to get a little more time to myself before the event starts today. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp wiki wikitravel