It's high time I redesigned my weblog and site. Except I am oddly paralysed. For the last four or so designs, I've done the work myself. It may never have been beautiful, but it's been clean and tolerable. I've taken elements and motifs I like from the best-designed sites of the time. But now I've spent the last year reading web sites mostly through an RSS aggregator--the dull tones of Bloglines, as it happens. I'm completely out of sync with good design ideas. And it's not just me--see how many people are happy with the bland default templates of Movable Type and Typo. This realisation actually has me pretty annoyed and frustrated with the grey-blue monotony of my web existence. After a brief look around sites I read, I find I rather like the style of Project.ioni.st. Other suggestions are very welcome. I really don't want to have to run out and spend over 2000 on a MacBook Pro and iWeb. Honest.

Just killed all the remaining comment spams (I hope) and implemented a simple regexp based blacklist which should get most medicaments, potence pills, casinos, lotteries and other frequently posted junk. I hope, it does not hit too many valid posts. If you have problems posting comments, feel free to contact me by e-mail or on IRC. In other news, I installed the blosxom plugin comments_recent and adapted the mail feature of writeback notify to my (in the meanwhile heavily modified) instance of the comments plugin v0.6. I also made it symlink-safe for use with multcat.

Last October I filed an RFP for GyachE, a feature-rich Yahoo! Messenger client that supports, among other things, webcams. I requested so because Eric wanted to package this, and at the time I didn’t have any time to allot for packaging. Now, Eric has asked me to take over the packaging. And indeed, this is a difficult package, since upstream (aka Ms. Erica Andrews) seems to have a rather snobbish attitude with regard to providing support for GyachE (well, it is not required anyway, remember about the non-warranty clause.) She can’t even provide a decent autotooling of the software, and what’s worse, is that the source itself seems to be a mixture of two different applications, one involving GTK2 and the other Python. Hell, I couldn’t even get the source to compile, and when I tried fixing the autotools, it was even more hell I almost gave up on it, until I came across gyach-improved from Google. Mick Howe, thank you for being such a nice guy! /me proceeds to renaming the ITP…

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

Well, I’m not yet thirty. But it started a bit more than a year ago, when I was turning 27, with a hellishly vivid feeling of mortality. (No, not morbid thoughts, exactly. Feelings of mortality. I’m told that’s normal when one is approaching thirties.) Today, I’ve been crying a lot, you could say regretting past mistakes, but more regretting my current inability to move past them. Professionally, I don’t have that much complaints. It could be better, but it could be a lot worse too. My demons have always laid on my personal side. In the past 14 years, I’ve made choices. They haven’t always been informed choices, they have sometimes, quite often in fact, been reactions against my own perceptions of my own past actions. I suppose the gist is that I am terribly lonely. I have a couple of people I call friends. My relationship with my parents is in order. But… When I was younger, I had eyes for women. I was friends with many women. I’m not positive, but there were several, along the years, who probably were even interested. But it never clicked. Perhaps I was just then making eyes at someone much further away and I didn’t see the one sitting beside me. Perhaps, had I, or she, not moved out of town, things might have been different. There was one that I probably almost stalked. I’m not proud of that, and in fact, the shame of that memory is probably one of the things that is holding me back now. In some cases, clearly one-sided ones, my inability to reign emotions properly caused quite a few awkward situations. I remember them, too, with shame. So I’ve learned to grow a thick shell around myself. It helps in dealing with professionals in the proper manner, regardless of their plumbing. It is ia useful skill. But I notice that the thick shell repels those who clearly would like to know me better (there have been a few; I’m not saying it would’ve ever gone beyond friendship, but even that is out of the question when I’m unable to relate). And when I finally figure out how to get out of that damned shell, they’re long gone. In some cases, well enough gone that I don’t even know their names. In others, it’s just the window of opportunity that has gone. But it’s enough. And it doesn’t help that I have this huge barrel around me which I don’t seem to be able to rid myself of.
And so, I come back to this day. I read Weber & Ringo’s We Few (note that it’s book 4 in a series). Maybe I’m just a sucker for martial romances, I don’t know, but they often affect me. But none has affected me this much before. I’ve been hurting like hell after I finished that book. The ending is so beautiful that it seems to have opened some old wounds, and I’ve been crying. And I curse my shell, the one that is so useful at the office, the one I took several years to build around me just so that I could do my job properly. I don’t know. Writing this has helped a little. But I’m afraid I’m going to regret posting this in the morning. (And I wonder how this keeping awake is going to wreck havoc with my teaching tomorrow afternoon.)

Have you ever found yourself reading slashdot (what? you don’t read slashdot? well, play along) and coming across a banner ad (what? you block ads? well, play along) for the nth time and finally just, you know, snapping? Sadly, today it happened to me. To the tune of a ditty by Salt n’ Pepa at that.

Let’s Talk About ‘Nix (Yo, I don’t think they’re going to aggregate this on the planet;
And why not? Everybody hates ‘doze.
I mean everybody should be codin’ perl!
C’mon, how many guys you know codin’ perl?)

Read the rest ...

I think tomorrow I'll reconfigure Blosxom's idea of what timezone my posts are in from Australia/Canberra to US/Pacific. Carnage and mayhem will undoubtedly follow on the odd few Planet's that I am aware of being aggregated by.

Today our new DVD player arrived, as did the Linksys thingy to connect us up to Vonage. Nothing worse than having two new things to play with at once. The DVD player is cheap and nasty (you can flex the drawer) but it plays all regions and converts from PAL to NTSC, so it'll play all of our DVDs. It also does composite video, as does the cheapish and nasty LCD TV we bought, so it's all good. Minor wrestling with the TV and DVD player had them both agreeing to fill the entire screen (or thereabouts) with a movie. Vonage, on the other hand, took a bit more work to get up and going. It wasn't immediately obvious from their website what ports I needed to NAT through my firewall, and my home network is far from what they'd expect the typical customer to have, so I had to call up their support number. After about 3 layers too many of their automatic menu system, and too long on hold, I got to speak to a hard to understand Indian guy, who fortunately was able to tell me without too much prompting, that I needed to allow UDP ports 10,000 to 20,000 through. All good. Next, I was having problems logging in to their website. I'd requested a password reset via the site a few times to no avail, so another call to their support line, and another round of the pushing buttons and waiting on hold got me another hard to understand Indian who after trying to reset my password a few more times declared he was only good for "basic" support, and needed to put me through to the "advanced" people. The advanced guy reset my password again, and swore black and blue that he could log in as me. At this point, I twigged, and tried Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. Worked fine. So I can't believe that

1. in this day and age, Firefox isn't supported for some stupid reason
2. it isn't a known issue, and they didn't ask

Being a naturally curious and networky kind of guy, I ran a tcpdump of the entire initial setup, from when I first turned the Linksys doodad on, but I'll save writing about that for another time.

So I've been in the US for just over six weeks now, and I thought I'd reflect on the trials and tribulations of bootstrapping oneself in a foreign country. The Social Security Number is the primary key from hell I already had a fair idea of the importance of obtaining a Social Security Number (SSN). So much so, that after dumping our luggage at our temporary accommodation, the Social Security Administration office was the first place Michael and I went to, so we could lodge applications. We subsequently learned from another Australian who was about two weeks ahead of us, that you're apparently supposed to wait ten working days before lodging the application, to allow your immigration records to percolate through the bureaucracy that is the US Government. Our applications were duly accepted without any mention of waiting a bit, but we were sent away with a letter and a tracking number, saying that the SSA had to verify our existence with Immigration (this is despite the fact that we're standing in front of them with a passport with an I-94 stapled in it) and that it would take up to four weeks. So it's been six weeks, and still no sign of an SSN. Enquiries with the office are met with the same response - waiting on information back from Immigration. Apparently it can take up to three months. It's a real shame you can't start the application process when your visa is granted or something, as in order to apply, you need to quote your "alien registration number" (I still chuckle at how the US Government refers to me as an "alien" in all their paperwork), which is the number on your I-94, which you only get when you enter the country. So, whilst the SSN application remains pending, I cannot be paid, I cannot have my health insurance paperwork lodged by my employer, and whilst I'll be covered for health insurance retrospectively, I'm not technically covered right now, if I were to require medical treatment. Going back to how the SSN is the primary key of All Things... Next step is to open a bank account. We chose Citibank, because I've been told it's slightly easier to import money back into Australia with them. Fortunately we were able to open an account sans SSN, but it's called an "NRA account" (NRA standing for Non-resident Alien). We were told that we were only eligible for an ATM card until I had an SSN, yet they mailed me out a debit card about a week after we opened the account, and happily ordered one for Sarah, and a cheque book when we asked after opening the account. About the only thing it seems we can't do at the moment is transfer money back to Australia. No big deal, it's all coming the other way until I can get paid... Driver's licence requires an SSN ideally, so that's out of the question for the time being... Electricity, telephone and cable were all able to be provisioned with an SSN, although I think for credit-rating purposes, again, it is the primary key. We had to pay a deposit for the electricity, which is fair enough. The lady I spoke to on the phone when I got it connected said that they just treated us aliens like teenagers straight out of home with no credit history. I don't have a problem with that. It's just a shame that you can't import your credit history. Getting a cell phone account appears to be nigh on impossible with an SSN though. It was a battle just to get a prepaid SIM card for Sarah's phone, and this makes a great story of how much hoop-jumping is required. We walked up to a Cingular stand in a shopping mall to see what we could and couldn't do. I explained our situation (lack of SSN, lack of credit history, etc etc) to the sales droid, and he assured us it wasn't a problem to get a prepaid SIM card. He proceeded to take about 30 minutes to organise the SIM card. I watched as he entered a dummy SSN into the computer, and used his own driver's licence number. He was clearly battling the computer system to be able to do it. When we got home, and Sarah called up to try and put some credit on the phone with our Australian Visa card, she was told they only accepted credit cards with a US billing address. (So much for Visa being accepted worldwide). So we headed off again to Safeway to purchase a prepaid Mastercard. Funnily enough, when Sarah called up to activate that, she was initially asked for an SSN, so we almost had a dependency loop that we couldn't break, just to get a US cell phone. Fortunately they could cope with no SSN, so she successfully ended up with a prepaid Mastercard, with a US billing address, so she could put credit on her prepaid SIM. From what I can work out, a lot of the places that do request the SSN seem to using the last four digits as an authenticator, much like everyone just uses name and date of birth back in Australia, so I'm guessing for these organisations, I could probably just quote any old number that fit the pattern and they'd be happy. Just so long as they don't go trying to run a credit check against it... Foreign credit cards As I said earlier, a credit card with a non-US billing address is fine for most face-to-face purchases, but an amazing array of mostly telephone transactions will not accept them. Most notable was trying to add credit to a calling card for making international telephone calls. Couldn't be done. So it meant I had to forego any discounts or bonuses for topping up, and buy a whole new calling card. Car insurance and registration I'm not sure how this is going to go yet. Our Prius is supposed to be available around the 18th of January. I'm hoping I'll have my SSN by then, otherwise we'll have to import a heap of money to pay for it. I'm sure you can get insurance and own a car without an SSN, because you hear of people who do driving holidays across the US, buying a car on one coast, driving it cross-country, and then selling it. It might be more expensive, and I again, you can't import your driving/insurance history, so you have to start off at the bottom of the ladder again... In summary, I think you need to have relatively deep pockets to bootstrap yourself over here. You need to be able to function without getting paid for up to two or three months, and you need to understand that credit-wise and insurance-wise, you're going to be back at square-one again, irrespective of how good you might have been in your home country. The sooner you come to terms with these, and appreciate that you are moving to a foreign country, the sooner you can get on with enjoying the experience.

I've been relying on just Planet for reading blogs. I mainly read just Planet Debian and Linux Linux Australia, with a shortlist of other friends' blogs that used to be read via my own Planet instance, which is currently in a shipping container somewhere. This of course sucks in two ways: if you don't keep up, articles fall off the bottom and are gone forever, and you have to mentally keep track of what you've already read. So the next choice is a feed-reader like Liferea, but this then sucks in different ways: it's tied to the computer you run it on, and posts that have been previously read often seem to come back as new. I get this every time I refresh Planet Linux Australia. Drives me mad. So what I really want is a way of being able to centrally store what I've read, regardless of where I am, and what computer I'm using. Enter Google Reader. It has a nice clean interface, it's Ajaxed up the wazoo, and Just Works^tm. My only (minor) beefs are that it doesn't seem to allow you to mark posts as read or unread, and that it always wants to have the current article second from the top in the list. Other than that, the UI is very clean and simple (and even uses vi keys). Added bonus is that if any other user is already subscribed to the feed, you get all the historical articles for free, which in the case of the Planets, goes back a lot further than the feed currently provides. Ideally I'd like something like this, that I can run on my own server, because I like keeping everything in the family. In the meantime, this is a suitable alternative. Getting all the back-articles is a bonus well worth it. Full disclosure: I work for Google, but that's what's making me look for a more efficient method to read blogs.

I've still been extremely busy. Unlike my last fairly incoherent brain dump, this time I've been keeping notes on the things I wanted to write about, so hopefully I won't forget things. Here we go...

Squirrels

Squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They're very fast and very cute. They're kind of like possums, except diurnal. They run up trees with ease, and leap from tree to tree. It's quite cool to watch them. The damn things don't stand still long enough to be photographed (properly), and they don't let you get too close without scampering up a tree or running off. I'm told they're the number one carrier of rabies, so I shouldn't be trying to get too close anyway.

Sales tax

Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of consumer life is the fact that prices quoted are not inclusive of sales tax. This means you always need to part with more cash than you expect. Furthermore, there are some places (some fast-food outlets) that do quote the prices inclusive of tax, so it's really hard to know what you're in for.

Speed limits

I find speed limit signs to be either infrequent or harder to notice, or a combination of both. They're just a black text on white background sign. I'm used to them having the red circle. That said, no one seems to drive at the speed limit anyway.

Ethnicity

Canberra's a very white town compared to say Sydney, but I reckon at least the San Jose area of California blows the socks off what I've seen of Sydney for multiculturalism. You really notice it over here. I've been at the mall in Milpitas, and you can play "spot the white European" (a variation of "spot the Caucasian").

Different responses to thankyou

I think the fairly standard response to saying thanks that I'm used to is "You're welcome". Over here, you get "mm hmm" a lot, which is just strange.

Fractions vs decimal

They love their fractions. Petrol gets quoted at 221⁹/₁₀, which took me a while to realise was 221.9 cents per gallon

Alcoholic beverage labelling

Australia has the concept of a "standard drink". I remember as a kid the advertising campaign "rethink your third drink" (or for women, "rethink your second drink"). The idea being that men could drink two standard drinks in the first hour, and then one standard drink every hour after that, and be at 0.05% blood alcohol, which is the legal limit for Australia. And every bottled alcoholic drink is labelled with how many standard drinks it is. An average beer is about 1.2 standard drinks for example. No such labelling over here. You get the percentage of alcohol per volume, and that is it, which makes self-regulating very difficult. The limit is apparently 0.08%, but I don't think I want to be driving around on the wrong side of the road at that level (or any level really).

Christmas vs "Holidays"

Everyone and every piece of advertising goes on about the "Holidays". Retail people are always wishing us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I think this is because there's a large chunk of people who don't necessarily celebrate Christmas.

Tipping

I haven't really come across tipping in everyday life as much as I'd expected, but when I think about it a bit, I'm at work most of the time, so that's probably why. The general rule seems to be to tip "double the tax", so for a bill at a restaurant, or where you get personal service, such as a haircut, you tip. But you don't tip at McDonald's, nor Subway (where I would have expected you would).

That's about all my current observations on living over here. Tomorrow we get our townhouse in Central Park. Our air-freight was finally delivered today. (What was supposed to take about 8 days took 4 weeks). Not sure when we can expect our sea freight at this stage. We bought a couple of mountain bikes last weekend, and if the weather is okay tomorrow, we'll pick them up and ride them home. We've found a really nice off road (as in not shared with cars) bike path, which runs close to home all the way to work. I'm really keen to roller blade to work if it's feasible, and also to cycle in. I'm a bit disappointed to discover after we've been accepted for the place that we're right on top of a toxic waste dump (or something like that). If I grow a second head, you'll know why. The other piece of exciting news is that the bank sent me a debit card, when they'd previously told me they wouldn't until I had a Social Security number (still no sign if that yet). This thing (the debit card) is freaking weird. It's Mastercard branded, and in some places you use it like you'd use a debit card for EFTPOS back home. You swipe, enter your PIN and that's it. In other cases, you swipe and sign a bit of paper like a credit card transaction. In either case, money is sucked out of our checking account. The scary thing is that no one seems to check signatures in this country, and a lot of places will accept credit card payments electronically (like petrol stations where you just swipe the card at the bowser and enter the ZIP code of your billing address and that's it). Oh, and I can use this thing like a credit card for Internet purchases. What bothers me is that the level of authentication is so low, but it's sucking actual money out of our checking account, so with all the credit card fraud around, it's relatively trivial to draw actual money out of a bank account, as opposed to using someone's credit. That said, I just got the card today, and since then, it's made shopping so much easier. It's amazing how many places won't accept a foreign credit card, and I was a big user of EFTPOS back home, and this ability to use a debit card like a credit card means I can essentially continue in that habit. I wasn't looking forward to carrying lots of cash or having to use cheques.

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.

Where do I start? It's been an eventful couple of days... The flight to LA was uneventful. Qantas is certainly orders of magnitude more pleasant to fly with than United, even though we were seated in a bulkhead area. I had a 13-month old baby seated next to me (no, Mikal was on the other side), and he was about as well behaved as you could possibly ask a 13-month old baby to behave. Mikal also behaved himself. I had the intention of trying to get something approximating 8 hours sleep, as we arrived at LAX at 7am local time, but I only managed about 4 hours. I did spend about 8 hours with a mask on and my brain in idle, so I arrived at LAX being mostly coherent. Entering the US via LAX was a much less traumatic experience than I was expecting. The E-3 visa was accepted fine, and I now have an I-94 stapled into my passport. Quarantine involved getting looked up and down by a guy in a booth, who waved me through. We had 3 hours to spare (or about 2 by the time we cleared all the immigration/customs queues) and then hopped on a 50 minute American Airlines flight to San Francisco, hired a car and drove to Santa Clara. The accommodation we're staying in for a month is very spiffy indeed. It's a largish gated community of units. Mine's got a ground floor entry, but everything else (except the garage) is upstairs. When Sarah gets here, we'll put up some photos. The weather is lovely as well. Our first outing was to the Social Security office to attempt to get social security numbers. This wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, as we were too freshly in the country to show up on their systems, so we left with letters saying we'd get one within four weeks, when our details had been verified. Yesterday evening, we went for a general recce of the surrounding area, and checked out a supermarket. That was less disconcerting than I expected, although I don't think it was a terribly huge supermarket. Having a GPS certainly raises one's confidence when navigating significantly. Last night I discovered that all the keys in my apartment were not created equal, and that the two loose in the lock box on the front door were the only two that opened the unit, and the two sets on key rings on the coffee table only opened the amenities and my mailbox. So I got to spend a bit of time sitting on my front doorstep until the nice man from Synergy Relocations came out to let me in (except his key didn't work either, so he got to make conversation with a legal alien while we waited for someone else to come out with a key). Today, we drove around to see a shopping mall, and the first set of shops we found happened to be around the corner from an enormous (by my standards) apartment complex, which had some signage implying that it had vacancies, so we decided to get the low down on how renting worked before we did our rental tours. Casey drove us around in a golf buggy and gave a tour of what two different floor plans looked liked. It seems that in this part, it's standard for an apartment to include the refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, washing machine and clothes dryer, which is good to know. Let me just say that if this is what living in an apartment complex is like, it's more like living in a resort. The place had pools everywhere, tennis courts, two gyms, a community centre, it was just unreal. It was also cheaper than I was expecting. We then went to a massive shopping mall to do some window shopping. Discovered Wetzel's Pretzels. Hope they're not too fattening... Tomorrow, I'm going to avail myself to the complex's gym, and generally get ready for the week ahead. Future posts will be in a new category, which I won't be feeding to Planet Debian as not to bore people. I will inflict Planet Linux Australia readers with them until someone asks me to stop. If you'd like a custom feed that excludes my American adventures, please let me know. I wonder if adjusting Blosxom's idea of timezone buggers up existing posts and aggregators like Planet in general?

Greg Kroah-Hartman did say:

If you have a problem with the way Debian handles udev, I'll point you to the proper place to complain about that. Debian is slowly sinking into the muck and it's fun watching it happen.

That hurts.

I think tomorrow I'll reconfigure Blosxom's idea of what timezone my posts are in from Australia/Canberra to US/Pacific. Carnage and mayhem will undoubtedly follow on the odd few Planet's that I am aware of being aggregated by.

With Xorg 6.9, we've split xterm out from the main xorg package and have packaged it directly in its own source package taken from Thomas Dickey's site. He's been the maintainer of xterm for years now, and X.Org has just been pulling his stuff directly for their tree, so this way we skip the middleman. Thomas is also very notably a contributor and regular fixture on Debian lists, which is really cool.

David Mart nez Moreno did the grunt work a while back of making the individual xterm package, and he uploaded a version or two to experimental while 6.9 was sitting there. Now that 6.9 is in unstable (the next revision will hopefully be coming when I wake up tomorrow, btw) we needed the separate xterm package to join it. So today I did a little bit of work updating David's package to Thomas' most recent xterm version (208) and uploaded it to unstable, where it's already built on most arches.

This is the first bit of modularization you'll see, and I'm going to start uploading the more mundane bits of 7.0 to experimental this weekend if all goes well. The main requirement for getting 7.0 in to Debian is to have mesa updated. The package is ready for an NMU, and today I uploaded an NMU of libdrm to update it to the latest version. Once this package is accepted in to the archive, I can update mesa. From there on out, all the pieces will be in place to allow uploads of the modular tree to Debian as needed. Of course, these will go to experimental first until I'm confident in them, but my goal is still to ship them with Etch. Eugene Konev has started doing q&a; on the modular library packages, which will hopefully save us time and pain.

So that's where things stand with us. Once the major bugs are out of the way with 6.9, I'll be going full speed ahead for 7.0.

Today our new DVD player arrived, as did the Linksys thingy to connect us up to Vonage. Nothing worse than having two new things to play with at once. The DVD player is cheap and nasty (you can flex the drawer) but it plays all regions and converts from PAL to NTSC, so it'll play all of our DVDs. It also does composite video, as does the cheapish and nasty LCD TV we bought, so it's all good. Minor wrestling with the TV and DVD player had them both agreeing to fill the entire screen (or thereabouts) with a movie. Vonage, on the other hand, took a bit more work to get up and going. It wasn't immediately obvious from their website what ports I needed to NAT through my firewall, and my home network is far from what they'd expect the typical customer to have, so I had to call up their support number. After about 3 layers too many of their automatic menu system, and too long on hold, I got to speak to a hard to understand Indian guy, who fortunately was able to tell me without too much prompting, that I needed to allow UDP ports 10,000 to 20,000 through. All good. Next, I was having problems logging in to their website. I'd requested a password reset via the site a few times to no avail, so another call to their support line, and another round of the pushing buttons and waiting on hold got me another hard to understand Indian who after trying to reset my password a few more times declared he was only good for "basic" support, and needed to put me through to the "advanced" people. The advanced guy reset my password again, and swore black and blue that he could log in as me. At this point, I twigged, and tried Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. Worked fine. So I can't believe that

1. in this day and age, Firefox isn't supported for some stupid reason
2. it isn't a known issue, and they didn't ask

Being a naturally curious and networky kind of guy, I ran a tcpdump of the entire initial setup, from when I first turned the Linksys doodad on, but I'll save writing about that for another time.