What a great day. The weather in Montreal has been fantastic the last few days -- we've had sunny, hot, clear days with showers at night to clean up the air. It's been really spectacular to be out. Of course, this is the time of year that Montreal really shines -- festival season. It kicks off this weekend with the Grand Prix du Canada, which includes a giant party in the downtown area, on St. Laurent, and in the rest of the city as well. In my neighborhood (old and new), we have the Nuit Blanche sur Tableau Noir, a street fair that closes down av. Mont-Royal for auto traffic from June 7 to June 10th. There are huge murals painted on the street itself, and every business, retail outlet and restaurant expands onto the street, while people rove up and down all day and all night. And soon we get the International Fireworks Festival, which kicks off in only two weeks. One of the hallmarks of summer in this city is that just about every Wednesday and Saturday there's a gigantic fireworks show on le Ste. H l ne, at La Ronde amusement park. You can see the lights all over the city, and feel the thumping in every house and bar. It's disconcerting and awe-inspiring. We've already started having Piknic lectronik events, with another going tomorrow. Wow. tags: montreal travel festivals grand prix nuit blanche fireworks piknic lectronik

SXSW talk online So, my talk at South by Southwest 2007 is now available online as a podcast. You can get the audio at the sxsw.com site and you can follow along on the OpenOffice.org or Powerpoint slides at Talks/SXSW07. I liked listening to this recording, although I realize that I need to do some speech practice for future talks. I say "ummmmm..." after every sentence in this talk, which would probably drive me crazy if I were listening to it. I'm surprised that the applause at the end is so strong -- I'd probably have thrown food at this guy. tags: wikitravel wiki sxsw07 podcast audio

Wikimania On that note, I'm glad to point out that my and Maj's talk for Wikimania 2007 was accepted. I guess that means we'll be going to deliver it in Taipei. The subject is Extending wikis with social networking tools. We're going to cover Wikitravel Extra: our motivations for it, implementation issues, and results. It's going to be pretty interesting. tags: wiki wikimania social networking

For about nine years, my domain deuxchevaux.org was hosted (which means web, DNS and a catchall e-mail forward) by Internett at Saarbr cken. Although it was a sponsered hosting without much support I was quite happy with their service. But especially my ideas and demands regarding spam filtering grew out of the possibilities of a mass hosting solution. Since I run my own web, mail and name servers for a while now, it was no question that also deuxchevaux.org should become self-hosted. Since I run a root-server at Hetzner and their “robot” also offers domain handling, I planned to transfer deuxchevaux.org to them. Therefore I first had to register my two DNS servers (sym.noone.org and virt.noone.org) with them. In the documentation there was a note that for .org domains, name servers in a .org domain have to be registered with the same registrar. And just a few hours after registering the name servers via their web interface I got a mail from Hetzner Support that the domain of my name servers are not registered with Hetzner and so I cannot use them form .org domains. Asking for the cause of this rule, I got the answer that this is a rule by Hetzner’s upstream registrar, Cronos AG. Well, since I don’t understand such arbitrarily looking rules, I was looking around for another registrar with usable web interface. On the DaLUG mailing list, someone recommended eDNS. Since their single user account is free of setup and monthly fees, I signed up with them and started playing around with their web interface. When I tried to transfer deuxchevaux.org using the Auth-Code, I got the response that the transfer failed and when I clicked on “Details”, I got “$VAR1 = [];” as detailed information about the failure. Data::Dumper says hello. I wrote them and asked if they can tell me, what that should mean last Thursday and got no answer so far. I don’t think, I’ll register domains with them anymore. So where to try it now? Someone recommended GoDaddy, but I neither like their website (way too much targeted on beginners and mainstream) nor do I want to apply for a credit card or a PayPal account to be able to pay their bills. So a bill from my UML hoster Korypet (aka VD Server) caught my eye: They were lowering prices for registrations at some top level domains (and in comparison to the recent lowerings at eDNS the new prices also apply to existing contracts) including .at and .org (and I only have .at, .ch and .org domains). I didn’t knew they also do domains outside of selling them in packages with UML hosts. So I wrote to Korypet support, if they offer a web interface for domain handling and got a reply less than two hours later: Not yet, but they’re working on it. Until then, I can request domain handling tasks by e-mail to their support. Since I know their UML managing web interface – which works fine – and since I’m happy with their support, service and prices since years (I’m customer there since 2003), I replied with all the necessary data for the transfer. Well, the transfer failed, too. But in comparsion to Hetzner or eDNS, they made the effort to exactly find out, what happened. So what did happen? The rule which the Hetzner support guy told me that it was from their upstream registrar wasn’t from there but from Public Internet Registry (PIR) itself. And the rule seems to match not that often, so that many people involved in domain registration don’t know about it (and usually neither understand its existence when they hear about it). Also I have no understanding for this harassment and so I felt the strong urge to get one over on them. Korypet suggested several solutions fitting my needs (i.e. the usage of my DNS servers for my domains). They even offered A records under some of their PIR registrered domains pointing to the IP addresses of my DNS servers for no fee, but luckily some A records under my own .ch domain sufficed. So the transfer was successful on Friday evening, 6pm local time, my own mail server (running Postfix) was happily rejecting a lot of spam to (and even from) non-existing users (which came in over the catch-all before) as well as hosts greeting with not fully qualified or invalid HELOs and greylisting others via David Schweikert’s Postgrey. The number of accepted mails and recognized spam sunk immediately by approximately factor four on the whole mail server, although deuxchevaux.org isn’t the only domain that receives mail there (but was the only one which had a catch-all before). So in the long run, I’ll probably move all .org and .at domains over to Korypet since they have not only fair prices but also a competent and individual support. (And yes, this is a recommendation. ;-)

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it. When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company. So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work. Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network. So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card. At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

Quick poll: What do you think of when you hear the name “OpenSolaris”? It’s an operating system? The community version of Solaris? Right? Not quite. Like Linux, OpenSolaris is a kernel. Except that it’s more than a kernel. Or, rather, more than a kernel but not quite a complete operating system. Are you confused yet? This comment from a recent Register article sums up the problem quite nicely:

If you go to the OpenSolaris web site, all bright eyed and eager to download a new operating system, you will walk away in bitter disappointment. Sure, it says the word “open” in two dozen languages on the web page, but when you go hunting for an installer disk to download, suddenly you are cast into a maze. Nevada builds? What the hell is Nevada? Oh, it’s what they’re calling the OpenSolaris code base. You’ll need to download these components and build them. Well, how do I install it? Oh, you can’t do that, you need to have a Solaris machine up already to build on. But you can get started if you go to Sun’s site and download their Solaris Express Enterprise Pro Champion Edition (after dutifully registering), and then enjoy that pleasant install experience. And when that’s done, you still have the work ahead of you of getting ON (what the hell is that? Oh, OS and Network. Sorry, I don’t work at Sun) built and updated. Did I miss anything? We haven’t gotten to packages to make the system usable yet.

Now, I’m willing to wager most of you reading this have probably heard about DTrace, ZFS, Zones, and the other great stuff Solaris has to offer, not to mention that Solaris is about as enterprise grade as they come, having been at the heart of the data center longer than many of the alternatives have even existed. And don’t forget about more mundane but critical things like backward compatibility, where Solaris has excelled for a very long time. But how many of you have actually experienced this great stuff first hand? How many hands go down if you’re under 30 and don’t remember the Sun workstation—i.e., you’re one of the many for whom Linux = Unix for as long as you’ve been in the computer business? How many of you would take Solaris for a spin if doing so was as easy as, say, downloading the latest version of Ubuntu and installing it? In other words, with all the buzz about making Solaris more familiar to Linux users, it turns out the widest part of the familiarity gap isn’t even technological. So, how do we bridge it? We need to make “OpenSolaris” something you can touch, something you can “Download Now!” and run on your laptop to try out the latest and greatest from the OpenSolaris community. We need to clearly articulate the link between Solaris and OpenSolaris in ways the industry understands—namely, that OpenSolaris is the rapidly moving version that delivers the latest innovations, and that Solaris is the enterprise-grade, supported-for-many-years, backward-compatibility- guaranteed version for the data center. Furthermore, the link needs to be more than just “OpenSolaris as upstream for Solaris”. Given how many more copies of Fedora and Ubuntu are running in the world than the enterprise Linuxes, there is significant opportunity here if we can get the model right. In short, to make OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) more familiar to Linux users, the first thing we need to do is make it a “distro” in the Linux sense of the word. After all, when people say they know “Linux”, that’s what they’re talking about—how many people really care about the Linux kernel underneath? What they care about is the GNU tools, the desktop, the development environment, and all the other things their favorite distro bundles—and the package system that holds it all together. There’s no reason in the world why (Open)Solaris can’t deliver those same things. Oh yeah, and DTrace, ZFS, Zones, enterprise grade security/scalability/performance/etc., backward compatibility, etc. too. Put this way, it’s easy to imagine what OpenSolaris needs to look like. That’s why the issues here are not primarily technological. This is the essence of the Project Indiana you’ve read so much about in the past several weeks. Our goal is to create a binary distribution of OpenSolaris that simultaneously delivers what people have come to expect from “Linux” alongside the great stuff that make Solaris unique. What comes next? We’re working that out in real time. If you’re interested in following along, participating, or just giving us your two cents, I encourage you to join the indiana-discuss mailing list we just created. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you consider yourself a “Linux user” and have been interested in taking Solaris for a spin but, for whatever reason, have considered the gap too wide. What would it take to get you running Solaris?

It's been a topsy-turvy week, but I'm finally getting my head above water again here at our new home. A lot has happened, which I'll try to capture here, but I'm not sure I can get it all. On Tuesday, Maj, Amita June and I spent the morning in Central Park in New York City. It was a beautiful day -- the rains had cleared overnight, and it was warm and crisp everywhere. We went to the big playground near Columbus Circle, which had about 1000 kids from 2 to 14 running in every direction, and a huge water spray fountain which meant that most of those kids were soaking wet. We went and grabbed lunch at the Whole Foods Market on the circle itself, and ate it out on the grass. AJ and Maj went back to the hotel for a nap, and I got a haircut for the awards ceremony that night. Then I had coffee with Tim Wu, creator of the concept of net neutrality and a writer for Slate. We had a great talk about net neutrality, the future of Wikitravel (Tim wrote a critical piece in Slate in April), and new projects we're both working on. It was really pretty fun. Unfortunately, I took too long talking to Tim, and not enough time buying myself a pair of pants for the awards ceremony. So by the time we were done, I was in a huge hurry. I ran down to the Old Navy on W 34th, picked a pair of black khakis off the shelf, and jammed in a cab to get back to our hotel room in time. Maj was done up to the nines, so I jumped in the shower, shaved, threw on my sport jacket and slacks, cut off all the tags with nail clippers, and ran out the door. The event itself was pretty incredible, and I don't want to flood this blog post with all of my comments and recollections. So I'll add a more detailed report later today. tags: newyorkcity maj amitajune travel wikitravel timwu wholefoods webbyawards webbies

Drive time Suffice it to say that we were out really, really late. We got up at 6AM the next morning to make our 8AM train back to Montreal, and it was clear to everyone (even Amita June) that if we tried to make this train it would be one of the worst days of our life. But there's only one train from NYC to Montreal per day, so we'd have to stay in town another night, and then have the same problem the next morning. So Maj canceled our Amtrak train tickets -- which were 100% refundable, even a couple of hours before the train leaves. Bravo, Amtrak! Then I got to work trying to rent us a car to drive home. It turns out that it's hard to get a rental car for a one-way trip from New York to Montreal. I tried Budget and Avis and National, and none of them would let me rent one-way into Canada. Annoyingly, none of their Web sites gave straight error messages on the subject -- I got "no cars available" or "unable to find your destination" (!) -- and I had to call the 1-800 numbers for each one in turn. I finally got a car from Hertz, on-line, and there was even a little note in my confirmation email to the effect of "ONE WAY TRAVEL CONFIRMED". I guess there's a reason that some companies get to be number one -- the more flexible you are, the more grateful your customers are going to be. I, for one, am planning to use Hertz in the future. I picked up the car at the W 55th Hertz office, and it took me 45 minutes to get back to our hotel at 7th and W 47th. The garage at Hertz goes onto W 54th, which is a "Thru Street" -- no turns allowed until you're halfway across town. And, it was bumper-to-bumper, of course. I finally gave up and made an illegal turn, and was promptly pulled over by a motorcycle cop. D'oh! Luckily, he let me off with a warning. Our trip out of New York was uneventful, but pleasant. It was a beautiful day, and the Catskills and Hudson Valley are a beautiful place to drive in the early summer. Deep, cool woods and bright green fields -- they're lush and fertile-looking. We stopped in Lake George for an early-afternoon dinner, and then had a pretty sunset drive through the Adirondacks up to the border. We got in late -- 10:30PM -- but it was overall a pretty good trip. And nice to have left at 2PM rather than 6AM. tags: rentalcar amtrak newyorkcity hertz

MANA Yesterday Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka stopped back through Montreal as they wended their way home to Lausanne?. We had a nice lunch at Zyng and then took a walk down av Mont-Royal, where a pedestrian fair is going on this week. They got off yesterday evening, which makes the last of our RoCoCoCamp visitors to leave. tags: mark allegra no ma anoushka

Pecha Kucha Montreal I'm very interested to hear via Boris and James that we'll be having a Pecha Kucha night here in Montreal. It's going to be on 14 Jun 2007 at 20:20h (8:20PM) at the SAT. Pecha Kucha is an unconference for designers (not necessarily Web designers). I think it sounds like a really interesting event, and I hope to go. tags: pecha kucha unconference montreal

Consumers Are Killing the Welfare State. Some excerpts, if you don t want to read the whole thing:

The average shopper at Karstadt, Metro and Lidl is a downright globalization fanatic. He compares price and service and always goes for what s cheapest. In doing so, he destroys massive numbers of jobs in Europe -- including, eventually, his own.

Nowadays, almost everything money can buy can be produced without the extra ingredient that we call the welfare state.

Indeed, 75 percent of the world s population has no unemployment benefit. And while this may put workers at a disadvantage, it certainly provides a boost to their product sales. It is the workers alone -- and not the products they produce -- who must bear the risk of illness, poverty and aging. In the West, exactly the opposite is true.

Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.

Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrer as y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
Navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.

El olor de las peluquer as me hace llorar a gritos.
S lo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana,
s lo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines,
ni mercader as, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.

Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis u as
y mi pelo y mi sombra.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.

Sin embargo ser a delicioso
asustar a un notario con un lirio cortado
o dar muerte a una monja con un golpe de oreja.
Ser a bello
ir por las calles con un cuchillo verde
y dando gritos hasta morir de fr o

No quiero seguir siendo ra z en las tinieblas,
vacilante, extendido, tiritando de sue o,
hacia abajo, en las tapias mojadas de la tierra,
absorbiendo y pensando, comiendo cada d a.

No quiero para m tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de ra z y de tumba,
de subterr neo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muri ndome de pena.

Por eso el d a lunes arde como el petr leo
cuando me ve llegar con mi cara de c rcel,
y a lla en su transcurso como una rueda herida,
y da pasos de sangre caliente hacia la noche.

Y me empuja a ciertos rincones, a ciertas casas h medas,
a hospitales donde los huesos salen por la ventana,
a ciertas zapater as con olor a vinagre,
a calles espantosas como grietas.

Hay p jaros de color de azufre y horribles intestinos
colgando de las puertas de las casas que odio,
hay dentaduras olvidadas en una cafetera,
hay espejos
que debieran haber llorado de verg enza y espanto,
hay paraguas en todas partes, y venenos, y ombligos.
Yo paseo con calma, con ojos, con zapatos,
con furia, con olvido,
paso, cruzo oficinas y tiendas de ortopedia,
y patios donde hay ropas colgadas de un alambre:
calzoncillos, toallas y camisas que lloran
lentas l grimas sucias.


Pablo Neruda

To follow up on my early post Christopher Hitchens v. God, Jonah at the Frontal Cortex has some insightful comments on religion and secularism. The money quote:

When people like Dawkins attack wimpy agnostics or moderate believers, they forget that many atheists aren’t uber-rationalists. They carry around tarot cards, not The Selfish Gene.

Jonah also makes a good point that science and religion may not have irreconcilable differences:

It’s important to note that science isn’t necessarily in conflict with our need to believe in some sort of mystery. Modern science, after all, has discovered some of the craziest ideas around, from the principles of quantum physics to the fact that our head holds a trillion cells trafficking in minor jolts of electricity. These ideas are both materialist and mysterious, since they hint at a universe that exceeds the current capacities of our imagination. What Hamlet said to Horatio is still true.

This sort of analysis seems to me far more nuanced and interesting than that advanced by what I’ll call the “vulgar atheists” — Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al.

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Dear Lazyweb, I am prone to downloading random documents (usually PDFs) from the interweb. Often these have helpful filenames like 30430.pdf. Renaming them helps, but I seem to collect lots of them. Is there a simple document management system I can import them into that will let me at least categorise things, and then search for titles etc (bonus points if I can actually search the text in the documents, but I can cope if I need to manually enter the info on import)? PDF is the most useful format for me, but I'm sure I'd end up using Word or whatever support too. apt-cache search dms turns up MyDMS and Owl though both look a little heavy - I only need it for local personal use.

A friend recommended me Steve Miller and Sharon Lee’s Liaden books. The first question, reading order, was not very easy to find an answer to. I went with publication order within the Agent of Change sequence – Agent of Change, Conflict of Honors, Carpe Diem, Plan B, and I Dare. In retrospect it would have been better to start with Conflict of Honors followed by Agent of Change, as this corresponds to story chronology, and AoC and CD have the same protagonists while CoH doesn’t. The story speed between Plan B and I Dare was too fast to break the sequence, but it might have made the latter book fuller if I had read the first batch of prequels Local Custom and Scout’s Progress before it. The second prequel sequence Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon works well at any point in the series, as does the third (single-book) prequel sequence Balance of Trade. I’m still reading Fledgling and the first short story collection. Confusing? I thought so, but it definitely is worth the investment. Instead of all the usual superlatives, I’ll say something unique to this series: These books changed my perspective in that I now cannot read (in any fiction) about a character bowing without asking in my head “in which mode, dammit!?”. (Update on 8th June: The friend referred to above, after reading this section, said (I paraphrase): “In the peculiar mode of humans, of course”.) The Liaden books are romances in a (very good) science-fictional setting. With two exceptions, each book creates at least one new lifetime romantic pairing, and they’re in my opinion convincing romances. One of the exceptions deepens one of the earlier relationships, so there is no lack of romance there. The only place I know where one can get all the novels reliably is Webscriptions, as e-books. Some of the paper books seem to be hard to find, and the recent closing down of the main publisher Meisha Merlin cannot help there. * * * The promotional material for The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle includes a quote by Robert Heinlein: Possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read. It is hard for me to disagree with that statement (including the qualifier, in all honesty), having recently read this book. Mote is a complex first-contact story, set in Pournelle’s alternate history (originally future history) universe. It begins in the year 3017. The recently created Second Empire of Man gets a visit from the aliens, leading to a counter-visit by humans to the aliens’ star system. The aliens seem friendly, but are they? What could they possibly be hiding? In retrospect, the Moties remind me (in style, not in detail) of Orson Scott Card’s Piggies (Speaker for the Dead and sequels); I would be surprised if Card had not read this book before writing his. The sequel, The Gripping Hand is not the masterpiece that Mote is, but I had no trouble enjoying it. The solution to the Motie problem has held for decades, but it won’t hold forever, and it might actually be breaking down now. The mission: save both humans and Moties from an eventual assured mutual destruction. * * * I actually started reading Pournelle’s alternate/future history from the cronological beginning. This is another series where reading order becomes a complicated matter, as many of the books tell parallel subthreads of the story; and it becomes even more complicated by the fact that there is an omnibus edition in which the story is told in chronological order, this having been accomplished by breaking the books down into chunks and then arranging the chunks in chronological order. My reading order went as follows: West of Honor, The Mercenary, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta. This is a good reading order; my only problem with it is that the protagonist of West of Honor fails to appear in most of the other books. The following is not in my opinion a real spoiler, even though it reveals certain key events of the series. The premise is that sometime between the 1970’s and the early decades of the 21st Century the United States and the Soviet Union form a union, called the CoDominium, which dominates the international politics of the Earth for most of the 21st Century. In early 21st Century, faster-than-light travel is discovered, and the CoDominium starts to colonise other star systems, first with voluntary colonists and then with convicts and involuntary colonists. The series takes place in the final decades of CoDominium, and focuses on the actions of one John Christian Falkenberg (though he is not the protagonist of all the books), first as an officer in the CoDominium (extraterrestrial) military, and then as the Colonel of a mercenary outfit, Falkenberg’s Legion. The Legion is at the center of events that eventually (after the events described in these books) leads to the creation of the first Empire of Man. The books are entertaining military science fiction, solid, enjoyable journeyman pieces.

If these two links [1] [2] don't manage to convince you that Estonia is the place to be if you're really serious about innovating in the ICT sector, then I really don't know what will.

Via Michael Kaplan:

I was talking with someone the other day who is working on/with the new Finnish keyboard standard. [PDF in English]

Kyll vain, suomalaisilla on sittenkin uutta n pp imist n oletusasettelua! The novelty is the integration of several new deadkeys, accessible via AltGr or Shift+AltGr, that enable the composition of accented characters needed for the minority languages of Scandinavia, such as Faroese and Sam , and for those of significant immigrant groups such as Turkish and Vietnamese. Then the caron, macron and ogonek open the door to Baltic languages, while the double-accute allows writing Hungarian using a normal Finnish keyboard. Ihanat painomerkit! Lis ! Laitetaanko saman tien consolelle ja X:lle kaikki n pp imist n oletusasettelut uusiksi? Now, if they could only get around integrating the Russian keymap on top of that, I would be such a happy boy... PS: this post is dedicated to another Kaplan, Mr.RTL himself, Lior Kaplan, for officially becoming a DD. Congratulations!

Being in the process of compiling a diminutive Debian GNU/Linux -based OS image to boot an embeded device, I ran into a few problems that, I would guess, have already been resolved by other Debian developers working in the embeded device industry. My main questions are: Obsolete (c)deboostrap package list for Etch I notice that debootstrap's idea of which packages to install has never been updated for Etch, which currently installs pretty much the same packages as Sarge. One exemple is fetching dhcp-client instead of dhcp3-client. Would anyone have an updated package bootstraping list for Etch? Overcoming the footprint of a default Debian install with Busybox Reading its documentation, it appears that Busybox can effectively replace about 80% of the packages rated with a priority Standard or higher. However, since neither busybox or busybox-static offer any Provides line, it becomes fairly difficult to figure out which packages can be safely removed without hosing the system. Would anybody happen to have more details about exactly which packages Busybox can replace while still providing just enough functionality to boot a Debian-based system up to an X display manager? This equivalence list would need to be up-to-date with the Etch bootstrap requirements mentioned in the previous question. Having clear answers to the above two question would go a long way towards helping me get started on this project. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide relevant answers!

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox? Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany. Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific. This must be fixed.

This week, following the announce of the freeze, I upgraded most of my home cluster to Etch. The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly, although I had a bit of a scare when the kernel upgrade pulled in a bunch of dependencies that resulted in the forced removal of all previous kernels. This minor scare asides, kudos to everyone who made this new Debian release possible! My only disappointment about Etch is that we're stuck with Firefox 1.5.0.7 instead of 2.0.1 or Iceweasel. Then again, speaking of Iceweasel: Forget it! Breakages it introduces have been marked as pending or patched for a number of weeks and yet there's still no updated package. At this rate, better wait until Etch r1 or Lenny to introduce it, rather than release Etch with a browser fork that has not undergone several months of thorough testing! This got me thinking about life after Etch, or more specifically, about what I'm gonna do with the packages I maintain. The Dunc Tank debacle and similar other unfortunate events that overtook Debian this year have prompted me to reevaluate my motivation. Another unrelated issue is, I've been working in software development for more than 10 years and my guts are telling me that it's time to move on so, while my computers will still run on Debian or Ubuntu, I don't intend on doing any more development per-se. Thus, I have already taken the initiative of soliciting co-maintainers for most of my packages. The Debian GNOME team agreed to be added for Planner, which is nice given the sheer number of bugs that are regularly found against this package. CUPS-PDF, Gaim-IRChelper and NumlockX haven't seen a meaningful bug in ages and can be rebuilt using bin-NMU magic, so they're pretty much taken care of. This leaves the issue of the Estonian and Russian dictionaries (plus a large patch in my personal repository that would upgrade Aigars' Latvian dictionary to generate the Aspell wordlist from his MySpell wordlist) open. For these, native speakers that develop for Debian or Ubuntu would be welcome to join me. What next? I have a couple of interesting offers, one on the Business side of computer hardware manufacturing in Estonia and another one as the manager of a western company's Latvian office. The tricky part in either case would be the immigration process: despite close to 9 years of living right here in Europe, I am still perceived as foreign labor whose hiring must be thoroughly justified (in the case of Estonia, I even need to request an explicit exemption to the immigration quotas), whereas if I had been granted EC Long-Term Resident status or Finnish citizenship, I could just sign the contract and notify the local authorities of my change of address. Instead, 9 years later, I'm stuck at the passport control queues for non-EU citizens with its disgustingly suspicious border guards. Sigh! Thus, while I indeed have shares in Linutop (yes, we are finally shipping - stay tuned for details) that might eventually turn into gold, I also have close to zero motivation left in my personal life, because lingering European bureaucrazy prevents my talent from reaching its customers - turning all my attempts at having a career into a neverending series of bitter disappointments. Is it any wonder that I'm so adamant about getting out of the Rat Race to return to more gratifying creative activities like composing and photography, then? Post Scriptum Actually, there is a second disappointment about Etch: we are stuck with Evince 0.4.0, at a time where upstream just released 0.7.0 with strong recommendations that everyone upgrade to that. Heck, even Ubuntu has 0.6.0 already. I find the Evince situation way more annoying than the Firefox one, because, from a user's perspective, Evince 0.4.0 fails to display several PDF documents that more recent releases handle just fine.

I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

I've been slowly refactoring bits of Sound Juicer to make it more manageable and in the end usable with plugins, and I'm ready to commit a chunk of refactoring back into Subversion. However before I do so I'd appreciate it if some others would test the changes. The changes are in this Bazaar repository, branch, build and use it like you would any other Sound Juicer release. I've refactored the track store and view into separate objects, which meant that the spagehtti code that held the UI together had to be rewritten. I think I tested all of the cases, but if someone could give it a go, and check that the buttons are correctly enabled and disabled as you select tracks, that the sorting is correct and so on, I'd be very happy. Thanks! NP: Live EP, Bonobo

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

• stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
• thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
• the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release 0.5 (newsbeuter is the best available console based rss reader) looks rocking - killfile!!1! (thanks to andi for implementing this cool feature)
• using zsh-mime-setup might result in unwanted behaviour
• the catalyst web framework seems to rock (thanks, koki and tom!)
• I should take a closer look at template toolkit as well (thanks again, koki)
• even though I’m not a perl monkey attending to YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna (Yet Another Perl Conference) would be cool (meeting people like Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus)

I was responsible for the booth of grml (Linux live-cd for sysadmins and texttool users) as well as for the ones of Debian and Debienna (Debian in vienna) - especially in the first two days, until Markus and Kira joined. Regarding the grml booth: It was once more amazing to see how many people already know and use grml. I had the pleasure to meet people from a professional data rescue organization who use grml in their daily business. Not to forget to mention all the people who let me know how often grml managed to save their lif^Wdata. Oh, and some nice ideas were brought to my attention and are now part of the todo list for grml. Very geeky was the 13 year old boy who visited our booth and when asking him whether he knows how to work on the console (he was staring at our grml-CDs with shining eyes) he replied: "YES, of couuuuurse!" I couldn’t resist in giving him a grml-CD. Oh, and we were running out of grml-CDs earlier than expected. Thanks to my girlfriend - who can even explain the difference between grml meilenschwein and grml64 to you now - I had the chance to attend some few talks - besides my own one about grml of course. I once more didn’t manage it to take just a single picture but I just received a pointer to the linuxdays photogallery of jostusz, thanks Sven.

IPMI is a standard protocol which allows out of band access to hardware features like reading sensors and error logs, turning the power on or off or accessing the serial console. This is made possible by the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), an independent CPU which is accessed from the operating system or by sharing an Ethernet port with the OS. Most modern servers offer an IPMI 1.5 or 2.0 interface and usually loading the ipmi_si driver is all that is needed to verify if it is supported, but some may need additional parameters and/or a kernel upgrade. dmidecode is also useful to determine if the system has a BMC. After loading the ipmi_si and ipmi_devintf drivers the BMC will be accessible from Linux, e.g. using the ipmitool command. The ipmitool package will also install the ipmievd daemon, which logs events like overheating a failed fan (beware: it uses local.* syslog facility which on Debian systems is not configured by default). It is also useful to install the ipmi_poweroff driver, which will generate an ACPI power button event when a clean shutdown is requested by the BMC (you need to install acpid too). The details of accessing the BMC over an Ethernet connection varies depending on the server model and manufacturer, e.g. IBM xSeries servers are shipped with the same default IP address, username and password which means that anybody on the same L2 network (no gateway address is configured) can shut down your system: ipmitool -I lan -H 10.1.1.97 -A PASSWORD -U USERID -P PASSW0RD shell The most convenient way to experiment with IPMI is to run ipmitool shell locally and trying the available commands. These are some trivial examples:

# show the parameters for Ethernet access
lan print
# reset the system
chassis power reset
# cleanly shut down the OS and then power off the system
chassis power soft
# at the next boot, boot from the network
chassis bootdev pxe
# turn on the locator LED
chassis identify 255
# print the system event log
sel list
# read a specific sensor
# (with enough servers you could create a 3D thermal map of the room...)
sensor get "Ambient Temp"