Since I never got managed to reemit my credit card, I was forced to reserve my plane ticket to DebConf7 via phone.

The good news is that, this time I was able to find e-car.ro which apparently has some better search engine since I still found some cheaper (not much) flights than I did in January (I have a printout of the flight I thought of initially).

The price now is NOT a lot bigger than the one I found in January. Back then it was about 400 , now I'll have to pay around 425 [*]. Is not the same set of flights, but I don't mind.

So, now I have these flights:

• BUH - EDI, 16th of June :
• KL1358 OTP, 06:00 - AMS, 07:50
• KL1279 AMS , 09:25 - EDI, 09:55
• EDI - BUH, 24th of June:
• KL1276 EDI, 06:00 - AMS, 08:35
• KL1389 AMS, 09:35 - OTP, 13:20

I would have liked to have a wider window at return, between the flights, but, although there was some flight that left from AMS at 13:00, it was not possible to couple with that flight and keep a low fare :-( . So, my visit to Amsterdam must wait for another occasion.

So,

1. if anybody else will be on any of these flights, I would welcome company.
2. Helooooo, DebConf

Now I'll just have to have the confirmation mail and go myself to do the payment at e-car. Fortunately e-car is somewhere in the center of Bucharest, in the Roman Plaza (Pia a Roman ).

[*] If this sounds like a contradiction with the previous, is not. Now I found some of the previousely found flights and some new cheaper ones (all "now" prices), but since the booking is done later, all "now" prices are bigger than "January" prices. So if I had done the same booking back in January, I would have payed less; but back then I didn't found the flights I booked now.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

Today, MJRay asks how to make MakeMaker (no redundancy!) do what he wants. Incidentally, I faced this issue just yesterday, preparing an application for internal use in my job. As sysadmin, I want all the homebrew software to be Debian-packaged, even if they're not the most policy abiding packages. I was installing some modules for mod_perl2, some utility modules and a couple of scripts. Of course, it also needed accesory files, like images for the web or templates for HTML, and configuration too. After reading the reply to this post, written by Randal Shwartz himself, I got convinced that there wasn't any frigging way to make the thing do it. So my solution was far from ideal, as I wanted to put everything in the Makefile, but it wasn't so ugly, considering that it was only meant for use in a Debian package:

• mod_perl and regular modules, using the standard method: put them under lib/ and MakeMaker takes care of them. As I didn't wanted site-wide modules, I changed INSTALLVENDORLIB in the debian/rules to point to /usr/share/pkgname/lib
• for scripts, perl or not: you list them in EXE_FILES, and then point INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT to where you want them. In my case it was /usr/share/pkgname/bin, but if you need to install CGIs, it would be valid to point to /usr/lib/cgi-bin.
• For support files, at first I put them under PMLIBDIRS control (as the rest of the modules), but I didn't like the resulting directory layout. So I processed them, along with configuration files, and stuff with debhelper tools.

In a nutshell, if you only want to process modules and CGIs, you can do it with MakeMaker

After a long time talking this as a mere potential would-be-nice thing, finally we are putting some action behind our words: One week from now, Sergio Mendoza and I will start a ~2 month long extracurricular course on Debian. The students? We have 12 students of the Facultad de Ciencias at my University. The students are pre- and post-graduate (licenciatura and maestr a), from the Phsyics and Astronomy areas. Sergio got this group as he is a teacher and researcher at Instituto de Astronom a.
While this first iteration is completely extra-curricular, unofficial and by invitation only, we expect this pilot course to be later presented as an official course in the Faculty.
Many people will remember I usually don't like general courses on Unix, Debian or whatever. What made me accept this time - even more, be enthusiastic about it? First of all, the requirements: We assume the students already know their way (at least as users) in a multiuser Unix-like system, so we won't be hand-holding them all the way through. Second, the focus: Sergio (who is among the first Debian users in Mexico and who got us our first full Debian mirror - which is actually a bit sick, but awaiting for prompt hardware upgrade ;-) ) wants them to focus on becoming developers. Not only developing science-oriented applications and libraries, but properly packaging and integrating them in Debian (and, hopefully, some of them will become interested in joining the project). We will also spend a good portion of the course on teaching them good practices on system adminsitration, teaching the principles behind what we do (i.e. I'm looking forward to participating, and in this case as one of the more students, in the sessions where different cryptography-related topics will be explained, starting from their mathematical foundations and going all the way up towards the implementation, where I'm more comfortable at).
It will be a nice experiment. I will be away for at least five of the lessons (Blame Debconf!), but I'm really looking towards the process and the results.
We will be making rough documentation of what we teach. We don't have a planned complete program, as we want to go with the group's real skills and interests, planning not more than three lessons ahead. This will be, however unofficial it is, my first time in front of a group in a university-esque setting (i.e. not short sessions, not capacitation built for a company, but with people eager to learn what we want to teach. I'll post again on this topic :)

It's been a busy week here and I've been lax in updating my blog. It's probably a good thing to put on the chopping block -- of all the possible things going on in my life -- but I'm regretting not keeping up with it. We had a good weekend last weekend. Maj's Mother's Day present request was to clean out all our closets in the house and take extra clothes to the Petits Fr res up the street. It took most of the day Saturday, and we finished with twelve garbage bags full of clothes for the Fr res. Check out Maj's photo of the pile of clothes. Sunday morning Amita June and I made Mama a nice breakfast of waffles and (tofu) sausage. Amita's job was to stir the batter (which she did a good job at) and not to touch anything hot (not so good). That afternoon, Maj went to get a haircut at the salon down the street, and I took the opportunity to give Amita June her first haircut. I think she looks like Twiggy. This week has been a maelstrom of activity. We have RoCoCoCamp coming up on Friday, and we're still tying all the loose ends together. I had most of my tasks done yesterday, so at the organizational meeting last night I saddled myself with more. D'oh! I think my main work this week is going to be encouraging local Montreal tech scenesters to come. I especially want to make sure that important women in the local Internet scene are present, so I'm going to copy Hugh McGuire's invite for BarCampMontreal2 and do some link-baiting:

• Martine Page, filmmaker and journalist who's an anchor of the local blogging community
• V ro B., vodcaster and blogger and general communicator
• m-c turgeon, podcaster and blogger and founder of Stars of the Web
• Marie-Joe, who provides a crucial link between the local blogging and game communities and is obsessed with Wikipedia

tags: mothersday amitajune rocococamp barcampmontreal montreal women

Interview There's a really good interview with me and Maj on the Internet Brands Developer Blog. It's gotten into the short list of interviews I point press to when they want background about Wikitravel -- along with the Creative Commons interview. I'm really glad that IB has started this blog to give the outside world a peek at what's happening out there in El Segundo. And it's also a great way for IB to highlight some of the Open Source work they're doing, like the neat-o new AJAX tool kit IBDOM. tags: interview ib ibdom ibbydev

A few years ago we needed to introduce employement contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property. This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software. It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen. I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear? Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain. Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of $ COMPANY , remains the property of $ COMPANY , subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining $ COMPANY remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at $ COMPANY , $ COMPANY will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at $ COMPANY .
3. If $ COMPANY asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at $ COMPANY s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of $ COMPANY to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with $ COMPANY .
5. $ COMPANY may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. $ COMPANY will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publising it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else. A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.

Not to be missed: well-known enfant terrible James Grimmelmann is guest-blogging on PrawfsBlawg. His opening commentary on the relationship between law practice and computer science:

Practicing lawyers, like practicing programmers, are professional pragmatists. Both must make their cases (and case mods) out of the materials they have available; both starve or eat steak depending on whether their creations work. The day-to-day practice of law is unlikely ever to require much high theory. We can mourn that fact because it means that they look at us with suspicion, or celebrate it because it frees us to chase Truth and Beauty and it will remain a fact either way.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat steak, I think this is correct. Via a commenter on James’ entry, I learned that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is implementing a wiki (the entry page could surely use some more content). Surprisingly, it was not Posner but Easterbrook who spearheaded the effort. This is a very interesting development, but I expect it will be quite a while before any other circuit takes up the idea. Finally, I have been meaning to write about this New York Times story describing Jonathan Coulton’s success as a musician breaking with the traditional distribution /promotional channels (via 43 folders, a productivity blog that is still on my “probation” list). Unfortunately, slashdot beat me to it. I first re-discovered Jonathan Coulton during his guest episode of the Show with Ze Frank. In any event, the article is well worth reading:

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as a reasonable middle-class living between $3,000 and $5,000 a month by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140 . In total, 41 percent of Coulton s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online

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Currently I am considering the priority scheme to use for some highly available services running on Linux with Heartbeat. The Heartbeat system has a number of factors that can be used to determine the weight for running a particular service on a given node. One is the connectivity to other systems determined by ping (every system that is pingable can add a value to the score), one is the number of failures (every failure deducts a value from the total score), one is the weight for staying on the same node (IE if the situation changes and the current node is not the ideal node you might not want to immediately move the service to a different node as that gives some seconds of no service), and one is the preference for each node that may run the service. For a given node to run a particular service then the score has to be greater than all other nodes and also greater than zero. If all nodes have a score that is zero or less then the service will not run. Now in the case of a service that repeatedly fails (EG a filesystem mount that relies on a hardware RAID which is not connected) then what should we do? One option is to have the score for running on a particular node be for example 100 times the value that is subtracted on failure. In this case after 100 failures on that node (and an appropriate number of failures on other nodes which are permitted to run the service) it will be disabled. Then the service has to be explicitly re-enabled (or a node rebooted) before it will run again. The other option would be to have the value that is subtracted on failure be less than a billionth of the score for running on a particular node, so that the service will keep trying to start for the next few hundred years. The up-side of this is that there is less fiddling required, the down-side is that some CPU and disk resources will be kept active in repeatedly starting the service. Now I have to decide which option to take in this regard, any comments would be appreciated.

I am currently with Optus, and while they were acceptable a few years ago, they have descended in the last couple of years so that they're chair-throwingly obnoxious now. So, as I really, really dislike giving retarded monkeys my money (I'd get rid of govco if I could, really), I'm looking to move. Specifically, I want a telephone communications provider:

• Whose phone monkeys are clueful enough to be able to execute the things I've requested be done, and can actually do what they tell me they're going to do (detailed story there is available on request);
• Who doesn't summarily raise line rental by 40%, and insult my intelligence by telling me that it's better because I get a pile of "included minutes" that I'll never use;
• That doesn't use one of those horrendous, useless voice recognition systems (they're slower and more error prone than just pressing the damn numbers) -- I'd love a real person on the line when I call, but I'm realistic enough to accept that that's just not going to happen;
• Who, if they do decide to outsource their phone support, at least sends it to a call centre who has people who don't have an overpoweringly strong accent;
• That just lists their charges (all of their charges) simply and easily, so I can say "that's what it's going to cost me to use these guys", instead of the endless twisty passages of bundling, "special deals" (which expire a couple of months after you sign up to them), and other customer-confusing effluvia;
• Who employ someone to proofread their website (I'm looking at you, Southern Cross, with your grocers' apostrophe

). Do I really have a hope in hell here? At this point, I'll pay a bit more for phone service if it doesn't involve getting screwed over at the telco's whim, and dealing with incomprehensible Indian call centres. Answers on a postcard, or (if you're feeling really technical) in an e-mail to mpalmer@hezmatt.org. We're talking about Australia here, in case anyone's wondering -- moving to another country for phone service is probably a bit too drastic. Switching to pure VoIP would be an option if I didn't need to have a fixed-line service for my ADSL.

I finaly got some time to do development. I decided to use this for extending cdebootstrap. And it got several new features and cleanups. Most notable change is the support to check Release files against the pgp-signature. This feature is enabled by default and uses the keyring supplied by debian-archive-keyring. It now also includes definitions for newer Ubuntu releases and it works in my testcases. The keyring needs to be supplied manualy. The rest are usual cleanups on the codebase and deprecation of some not longer used features.

Paul Dwerryhouse blogs about mobile phone etiquette.

1. Taking excessive calls at a restaurant is annoying, but keep them short and it’s no big deal.


2. Strange ring tones are OK as long as people answer their phone. It’s when they decide that they don’t want to answer a call that the entire Avril Lavigne song annoys people. In regard to this issue wearing headphones in public with the volume turned up high enough that everyone else can hear is a much worse problem - which will incidentally deafen the person using the headphones in the long-term as well as annoying everyone else in the short-term.


3. I used to work with Paul and we had a colleague who repeatedly chose not to answer his mobile phone because he didn’t want to talk to a particular recruiting agent but refused to say so. Eventually the agent tried calling the office and got to me, I told him “if someone never answers their mobile phone when you call it means that they don’t like you, take a hint and stop calling”. There were fewer unanswered calls after that.


4. I have to agree with that, having a phone call in the cinema (or even worse the theatre) is just wrong. If you are on the list for organ transplant (the only time you really MUST have your phone on all the time) then turn the phone to vibrate mode.


5. When on the train the range of things that I can do is limited. Rather than waste time I make calls that I don’t have time to make on other occasions. The only exception is when I was in Japan, in respect of their cultural standards I turned my phone off most times when on the train.


6. Walking and talking? Unless you are crossing a busy street then why not? People who inappropriately use mobile phones while performing dangerous activities will tend to be weeded out by Darwin. They usually don’t give Darwin Awards for mundane things such as not seeing an oncoming truck while talking on a mobile phone.


7. In regard to the issue of whether you have to answer a phone, some people believe that it’s an issue of courtesy to the person who is calling to answer the phone if reasonably possible.


8. Whether “call me back” is adequate depends on who is calling. I generally find that when someone leaves such a message they have been correct in their assessment of the value of their call to me. The people who leave such messages are generally the people who’s call I will return on the basis of such a message. Leaving a long voicemail message adds to the profits of the telco used to making the call as well as the telco that maintains the voice-mail box. My 3 voicemail service charges me to receive the messages and I prefer them to be kept short.


9. Anyone who thinks that having a fancy phone, car, computer, etc will make them a better person or impress anyone has bigger problems than the choice of a phone. Also if the $600 a year that you might spend on regularly updating your mobile phone makes a significant difference to your savings then you will probably never be able to afford a house either.


10. Bluetooth headsets do make you look like an idiot, but they do have some benefits. When doing tech-support it is a real benefit to be able to use both hands for typing. The only reason I don’t have one is that I don’t do tech support enough to justify the expense of buying one or the inconvenience of carrying it everywhere. Note that when you define “tech support” in the most broad sense (which includes helping all your relatives with their computer problems) most computer people do quite a lot of it even if it’s not their job.

It's voting time in the lunacy that is the Eurovision Song Contest. Here is a summary, including some strange bits of Euronglish:

1. Bosnia+Herzegovina - nice but no chance;
2. Spain - 4 guys in tight white and pink lights - creepy;
3. Belarus - Medallion man with a rock ballad to bukkake - "when you cast your loving potion over me";
4. Ireland - Folksie, charming, dark yet jolly;
5. Finland - more noisy dark rock with drums;
6. Republic of Macedonia - up/down ballad with drums;
7. Slovenia - Opera in black with drums;
8. Hungary - Bluesy rock angst. No drums. Phew;
9. Lithuania - Guitarry song with "lonely shades walking";
10. Greece - an odd disco/dance at the "heart of attention";
11. Georgia - a nice slice of trance;
12. Sweden - revenge of 70s glam! Maybe "with my head in the can" was deliberate;
13. France - Franglais pop. How did monoglots follow this?
14. Latvia - a singalong. In Italian. But it looks like Italy aren't here this year. So how's that help?;
15. Russia - another fun girl band, singing different (ruder) lyrics to the official song sheet;
16. Germany - sexism swings;
17. Serbia - a red up/down song;
18. Ukraine - dance nonsense - the first song I walked out on this year;
19. UK - an example of Britishness and why I call myself English, not British;
20. Romania - a fun little polyglot guitar song;
21. Bulgaria - drums, dance, squeaking;
22. Turkey - "How much I crave for you" - a dancey whirly song;
23. Armenia - the tearful stalker's song;
24. Moldova - gothest song of the night - "each people will gnaw our wishes no more"???

I can't pick a winner from that. I only voted to try to stop Ukraine.

Apparantly not everyone knows binNMUs. Sometimes bugs are filed when binNMUs can solve the problem. Some people even wonder about breaking NMUs without any notice. A binNMU:
* no source changes * sheduled on the build daemons by someone with wanna-build access * for versions of packages which already exist in the archive * can be requested on debian-release@lists.debian.org, no bugs should be filed So a binNMU is used often for library transitions with ABI changes but without API changes (libFOO-dev has not been renamed, but libFOObar has been renamed to libFOObaz) or to fix an upload of a package that was not built in a clean environment. Note that it is a good idea to contact the maintainers of packages that reverse depend on your library before starting a library transition in any case so people know why their packages don't build/install anymore and maybe can even coordinate uploads they were going to make anyway. Informing the Release Team about library transitions of more than a couple of packages would also be appreciated....

Turbogears quirks when testing controllers that use SingleSelectField Suppose you have a User that can be a member of a Company. In SQLObject you model it somehow like this:

    class Company(SQLObject):
        name = UnicodeCol(length=16, alternateID=True, alternateMethodName="by_name")
        display_name = UnicodeCol(length=255)
    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')

Then you want to make a form that allows to choose what is the company of a user:

def companies():
    return [ [ -1, 'None' ] ] + [ [c.id, c.display_name] for c in Company.select() ]
class NewUserFields(WidgetsList):
    """Fields for editing general settings"""
    user_name = TextField(label="User name")
    companyID = SingleSelectField(label="Company", options=companies)

Ok. Now you want to run tests:

1. nosetests imports the controller to see if there's any initialisation code.
2. The NewUserFields class is created.
3. The SingleSelectField is created.
4. The SingleSelectField constructor tries to guess the validator and peeks at the first option.
5. This calls companies.
6. companies accesses the database.
7. The testing database has not yet been created because nosetests imported the module before giving the test code a chance to setup the test database.
8. Bang.

The solution is to add an explicit validator to disable this guessing code that is a source of so many troubles:

class NewUserFields(WidgetsList):
    """Fields for editing general settings"""
    user_name = TextField(label="User name")
    companyID = SingleSelectField(label="Company", options=companies, validator=v.Int(not_empty=True))

I'm not convinced. It looks to me like they're aiming at something a bit more dynamic/higher level than Java, in more or less the space that Javascript, Ruby and Python operate in. The declarative GUI stuff looks pretty good, but I don't know if the rest will make that worth it. The language itself seems neither here nor there. It's a lot like Javascript - but not quite. It doesn't have real hash tables, something I don't care for in JS, and I didn't see an eval() method in the documentation, which means that their aim is to make something that you compile, and that doesn't carry around an interpreter with it like most dynamic languages with eval have to. I wonder what kind of support it will get from Sun and the open source community? Will the internal Java group view this as some sort of competitor? I wonder what sort of discussions went on during the creation of this system at Sun. They can't have take the decision to make a new, incompatible language very lightly. A new language has to have a killer app to drive acceptance, and I don't quite see one for this. The FAQ sheds some light on where they'd like to go:

Why did you create another scripting language? JavaFX Script is specifically designed to optimize the creative process of building rich and compelling UIs leveraging Java Swing, Java 2D and Java 3D for developers and content authors. Why isn't Groovy enough? Groovy and other languages have two specific traits which don't precisely meet these needs, namely that they are generic in nature and don't provide the appropriate abstractions necessary to optimize the UI design process and similarly are designed specifically for programmers other than content authors.

So it does look like they're aiming for a language that makes it easy to quickly create GUI's for people who perhaps aren't expert enough (or patient enough) to deal with Java itself. Pity they didn't just stick with Tcl and Tk, which have had a more or less declarative syntax for specifying layout for something like 10 years, and in any case have a flexible enough syntax to "run DSL circles" around most languages that are currently popular. As the author of Hecl, I'm particularly curious about their mobile strategy. If I may be permitted a bit of hubris, it's nice that they see things my way, that mobile apps need a good scripting language in order to make them more accessible to the masses, but it wasn't too hard to see that coming, with the ever increasing capabilities of higher end phones, and the "scaling down" that scripting languages bring to programming (making it easier for people to get started even if they aren't experts). I wonder what sort of diffusion they'll get with their phone system, and how fast, and how easy it will actually be to program the phones. For many people it's probably not as important, but by creating a real interpreter, rather than something that's compiled and doesn't have an eval function, Hecl lets you download and execute code, which makes for some very interesting possibilities (as well as some risks, of course). That's probably not important though, if they can actually make a system that's widely used, and easier to create applications for than J2ME currently is. I wonder if they'll allow J2ME on the phone platform, or close that down in favor of JavaFX? Even for Big Companies, launching a new language is a difficult endeavour[1], and it will be a number of years before we see where this ends up, but I'm not convinced. [1] The Economics of Programming Languages

GCC 4.3 changed pedantic preprocessor warnings in C++ code into errors, in line with the C++ front-end. Because of this change, preprocessor warnings are now errors. This leads to a number of errors that are in my opinion too strict and I've started a discussion about this problem on the GCC mailing list. I hope this change will be reverted, or that some of these errors are downgraded to warnings again, but users of current gcc-snapshot package might encounter these errors. I haven't filed bugs about these issues since I'm waiting for a census from GCC developers. Nevertheless, it makes sense to fix these problems if they are present in one's package. This change has caused at least the three following errors which are all fairly common. error: "xxx" redefined It's not allowed to #define something twice, as in this example:

#define TEST "foo"
#define TEST "bar"

This code will lead to the following error:

test2.cc:2:1: error: "TEST" redefined
test2.cc:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

Most typically, this occurs because something is defined in a header that is included and then redefined in the current source file. It can also happen when a #define is put in the code but also on the command line, e.g. via -DTEST="bar". This will lead to:

test2.cc:1:1: error: "TEST" redefined
<command line>:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

The correct solution is to avoid redefinitions directly or to use #ifndef to make sure that something has not been defined already. extra tokens at end of #endif directive While an #ifdef obviously needs a second parameter, it's not allowed to give one to #else and #endif. Unfortunately, this is commonly done as a reminder for what is being tested for:

#ifdef TEST
#endif TEST

This code will lead to the following error:

test3.cc:2:8: error: extra tokens at end of #endif directive

missing newline The last line of a source file has to end with a newline. If this is not the case, the following error is now shown:

test4.cc:1:19: error: no newline at end of file

While reading the newest print version of the German LinuxMagazin i found an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, which made me partly wonder. There he says: “Bei vielen Sachen, die einen gro en Einfluss auf Systeme wie den Kernel, X.org oder Open Office haben, bernehmen wir die F hrungsrolle, wir stellen die Pakete und viele gelangen so zu Debian. Also sind wir in vielen F llen der Upstream von Debian.” (english: On many things, which do have a great influence on systems like kernel, X.org or Open Office, we take the leadership role, we supply the packages and many of those getting into Debian this way. Therefore we are the upstream of Debian in many cases.) I know of certain packages, like python, gcc, apt and maybe X.org, which are mainly maintained by Ubuntu developers. But is this really true: Is Ubuntu really upstream of many Debian packages? Can someone please enlighten me, and give me some statistics where Ubuntu is upstream of Debian, and where Debian is upstream of Ubuntu? I would really like to know the facts. No Tags