Hi. Recently, on planet.debian.org, there were quite a few posts relating to blood donations. I must say that I really only live thanks to people donating blood. As many might know, I had a freaking motorcycle accident about 9 years ago. Well, apart from loosing my right leg in the weeks following the accident (irreparable damages to tissues led to amputation), I also lost a lot of blood after the accident. In the six hours following the accident, I got no less than 65 blood infusions (approximately 24-30 litres or 6-8 US gallons). As you can imagine, this is about 3-4 times as much blood as my body normally carries around. At least I can say that I didn’t receive blood without giving some before, though certainly I wasn’t able to give that much blood (I donated about 10 times, approx. 0.45 litres each time). However, due to the medication I now need, I can’t donate blood anymore. Anyhow, I strongly suggest to anyone who is capable of donating blood to do so. And regarding Thijs comment about the frequency of donation and payment: This is highly depending on the area you live in and the organisation who manages the donations. For example, while I donated blood in Dortmund, Germany, I had two options to donate blood: German Red Cross, who would accept a donation every 6 weeks, with free sandwiches, drinks and chocolate but without payment and the city-owned hospital’s blood bank, which allowed a donation every 3 month, with free drinks and a 50DEM (approx. 25EUR/30USD) payment. This sounds as if the city-owned blood bank could attract homeless and junkies who were in for the money, but from my experience, the blood bank did far stricter pre-donation tests (I can’t tell what they did after donation for either organisation) than the red cross. And knowing how much money can be earned with the blood donated, I certainly think that payment is fair, though not strictly necessary. And the blood bank people did a much better job when applying the needle than the red cross people did, which might be because they were used to taking blood from people with bad veins (mostly patients donating blood for themselves for use in a later, planned surgery). But to be fair: I know from other people who had very good experiences with the red cross staff in this respect. Once again: Please donate blood if you can. If you are uncomfortable with the choice you made on your first donation, check out other options for donations. For example, if you almost collapsed when donating blood, try out the plasma donation if it is offered. They usually take the plasma, but give back an equal volume of a substitution, so your circulation isn’t disturbed as much as by taking approx. 0.5 litres from it within an hour. If you feel that the person who applied the needle did a bad job, ask for someone else next time or try a different organisation altogether. cu,
Sven

I forgot to mention -- we got a last-minute call yesterday to be on Global Quebec at 8:40AM EDT for their morning news/entertainment show. If you're in Montreal, watch us! On a similar note, we'll be on Homerun on Friday the 1st of June (12 Prairial) at 4:10PM EDT. Craig Silverman, Writer did a good piece about Wikitravel in the Hour this week, and Montreal media being what it is, we're now getting all this attention. Yay us. tags: wikitravel montreal globaltv homerun cbc craigsilvermanwriter media hour

Summer of Code officially started today, and as such it was time to start hacking out some code for it. For the past couple of weeks I've been casually looking over an upgrade testing suite for Ubuntu (website, bzr repo). It's fairly sophisticated and does a lot of things that I'd like to bring to Debian. However, after considering it for awhile, I decided that I would prefer to start on the Debian version from scratch. This decision came about for a few reasons:

• The Ubuntu version focuses on upgrading between releases, whereas I would like to possibly upgrade between entirely separate repositories. While this could fairly easily be added as a configuration parameter, it was still a point of consideration.
• I would like to write the scripts for building the image as a seperate module. This would aid in the future goal of snapshotting and rebuilding systems based on a list of installed packages, versions, and config files.
• Until recently the Ubuntu upgrade tester used chroot and had no virtualization option. In addition to having this, the aforementioned process of building the initial image independent of backend should make the resulting scripts easily pluggable into any virtualization option.

At any rate, I will probably end up reusing many pieces of the code from that tester.

Updates posted here as progress continues.

A few days ago, some people in Venezuela were shocked by Mark Shuttleworth’s claims against Hugo Ch vez Government and supporting Mar a Corina Machado, a minor opposition leader in the Country. Today, at 23:59:59, the nationwide open air TV broadcaster RCTV will cease operations. In Venezuela, as in several other countries in the World, the economically profitable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is State’s property, thus requiring a concession to make use of it. RCTV concession was granted in 1987 for twenty years, and the Government has decided to deny the renewal, which is quite unusual (right-wing governments in the past simply would have shut up the antennas) Of course, RCTV is not a pro-Government channel, accounting between 90 and 100 percent of the airtime with anti Government news and opinions, which is not bad per se, though in Venezuela there’s a law requiring equilibrium in times devoted to political ads. Both situations (Mark’s comments and the Government’s decision) pose the threats of a now common situation in our Country: people taking very valid decisions with somewhat doubtful consequences. In the first case, Mark is using his right to freely write what he likes in his blog but it seems that it has damaged a little bit Ubuntu’s image in Venezuela (not that it’s Mark’s fault, of course) In the second case, the Government is taking a lawful decision, but it has actually raised an important discomfort in the population (polls, which are not always accountable, point out as much as 80% rejection rate), the journalists of other media and most foreign observers, which state that they’re actually closing a TV channel and destroying freedom of speech in the Country. Expressing political POVs is quite critical nowadays in Venezuela. Some famous etiquette bookwriters, such as the one at Emily Post’s, always tend to promote a be honest, be respectful position while listening or expressing your points of views in order to keep a productive attitude. I do think that politics are important: I just think mixing them with practical daily tasks, including FLOSS development and promotion, is becoming obnoxious and dangerous. Cheeseconf On June 15th., I’ll be departing to DC7 in Edimburgh. I’ll stay a night in Frankfurt, probably in a hostel, and then I’ll stay at one of the hostels in EDI. I plan to carry white cheese to the Cheese and Wine BoF, and I’d love any comments on how to transport them without posing a biological threat for Europe. I’ll be carrying a 65 liters backpack. How long will it take for the cheese to become a lifeform? Any special tips and tricks to avoid that? Copying files to embedded devices I’ve been trying to copy some binary files into an Axesstel D800 EvDO modem which runs Linux over a tiny ARM processor on less than 16 MB. of memory. I’m actually trying to get netcat in so I can get more useful stuff such as snmpd in. The modem has telnetd, but it has no zmodem utilities, particularly rz. Neither it has wget, nor ftpd. It has thttpd to serve the administrative webpages, but it can’t process shell CGI programs so I can’t send the file through a CGI form. Any ideas? I would love to read comments from hackers who have already managed their ways into embedded devices such as 802.11 devices with Linux, and any generic ideas on how to provide new firmware images for devices such as this Axesstel modem.

Incredible day here in Montreal. The temperature got over 31C today -- about 88 F -- which made for a steamy, jungly day. Remember how I said we had predictions of snow flurries two weeks ago? Things change quickly. Of course, hot weather and high humidity are a recipe for smog. Add on top of that the fact that Montreal is in the middle of a public transit strike, and you've got a serious air quality problem. Fortunately we should have some rain this weekend to shake that out. tags: weather montreal hot smog

EC2 I spent a big part of my day twiddling around getting a nice Ubuntu server running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon's EC2 is an innovative server-provisioning API; beta testers for EC2 can build or tear down servers for any purpose in a few minutes using EC2 and Amazon S3. I wrote a few years ago, in a widely-reproduced email, a reply making fun of Jeff Bezos and Amazon's supposed innovations. But let me be frank: Amazon Web Services are a shithouse crazy idea. I think that Jeff Bezos must have been a complete nutjob to bet the company on these zany technologies; I also think it's brilliant, and it's going to change the way we think about using computers. I included EC2 in Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. I think that decision was really justified. My EC2 instances now run Ubuntu Feisty Fawn; lighty, MySQL and PHP. It seems to be a winning combination; I'm looking forward to using EC2 for a production Web or database server. tags: ec2 amazonwebservices amazon jeffbezos oneeyedman

rel-edit I mentioned already the great work that AboutUs.org is doing to organize a Universal Wiki Edit Button. I decided to kick in on the machine-readable side and proposed a rel-edit microformat. So far the microformats-discuss mailing list has been pretty positive on the idea, but I'm going to wait a few days before posting a draft on the microformats wiki. tags: rel-edit microformats uweb mailinglist microformats-discuss

Salt I just finished reading Salt: A World History, a nice non-fiction book by researcher extraordinaire Mark Kurlansky. The book covers this important mineral, its importance to human life, and the many ways to extract it to make it available for us. The book covers mummification in ancient Egypt, salt taxes in China, fish sauce in Vietnam, and Mahatma Gandhi's great salt march in India. It's so comprehensive that it can really make your head spin; but it's also exciting to see world history refracted through these whitish crystals. I think it's a great book, and I'm looking forward to reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by the same author. But we just got Everything is Miscellaneous from Amazon this week, so I think I'll be digging through that before I get to Cod. tags: salt markkurlansky nonfiction nacl cod

reCAPTCHA I heard about recaptcha via Hugh's article about same. Brilliant idea; why didn't someone think of this before? (Update: it was about 5 minutes after I posted this that I realized, "Hey! That can't work!" So I went back and re-read the docs on reCAPTCHA again. Now I'm even more impressed.) tags: recaptcha ingenious ocr

I want to ride my I've been thinking of picking up a bicycle for a few weeks now, as the weather has cleared here in town. So today I went up to Garantie Bicycle on rue Marie-Anne and bought the cheapest damn bike they had that wasn't made specifically for pre-pubescent children. Woohoo! The last time I had I bike, I lived in San Francisco. It was a beautiful cherry-red Cannondale hybrid -- with that great fat Cannondale tube, but light enough that I could lift it with one finger. I rode it around SF a lot, and took it out for trail biking on weekends in Marin County and the Peninsula and even the Sierra Nevada. It was a tough bike to ride, but once you got used to it it was a dream to take up hills. But that bike was stolen at Burning Man 2001, during the actual Burn. It's a classic mistake: professional bike thieves go to Burning Man each year to snag bikes left unlocked by tired and idealistic Burners, especially at times when camps are left empty, like during the Burn. To be honest, it was kind of a relief: I'd already moved out of my apartment and was planning a trip around North America, and I didn't have room in my Citro n DS for a bike. Nor in my storage locker at the weird and wonderful Sunshine Storage in Oakland. But it was too nice a bike to throw away or give to one of my no-good friends, who were mostly too short for it anyways. So bicycle theft was the best solution. Sam Phillips had his bike stolen at the same time. The bike thieves left a lot of cheapo bikes around our camp. They liked mine and Sam's, though. Anyways, my new bike was quite inexpensive, and it weighs a metric ton. It's built like you're supposed to drive trains over it. I could never, ever carry it up a steep and muddy hill, and I wouldn't bother. Fortunately for me Montreal is really, really flat, so I don't really need to worry about riding this thing up hills. It will look pretty good with a baby seat on the back, though. tags: montreal garantiebicycle burningman bicycle theft samphillips sunshinestorage oakland cannondale

I did some work on my mobile phone shopping list ShopList today. Thanks to a bug report from Sven Mueller, I think I managed to correct an encoding issue. If you use ShopList and enter non-ascii text into the shoplist web application, let me know if things are working for you. I also did some work on the back end to enable statistics, but only for users who are logged in to their accounts. Not surprisingly, the most common things people buy at the store are:

• Milk
• Bread
• Butter
• Cheese
• Eggs

Which probably hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Sort of reassuring, I guess?

In the last two weeks, life has been jam packed, full of movement and travel and a bit of sensory overload. I went to San Francisco to visit friends from the past but also took a trip to NYC to help set things up for the future. Logistically, it certainly was not enjoyable to travel from Edmonton to SF to NYC and back to SF before heading back to Edmonton, which was only made worse by the fact that I was sick flying back from NYC to SF. But taken from an aesthetic point of view, there was something that made sense about going back and forth between cities that in reality connect my past with my future. For it was my time in SF when I did my research that more or less made possible my future life in NYC. I had not been back to SF since I had left in the summer of 2003. My mom’s illness kept me away from the west, pulled instead toward the east. In fact, right before I left SF was also the time when my mother’s condition took a turn for the worse and I started to travel only for work or to visit my mom PR (or Debconf, which is, well, somewhere in between work and play). Because of my relatively long absence and the many memories of the area, my return hit vividly. You may leave a place, but when you return you are reminded of how much a place always leaves some imprint in your body and soul, which resurface upon your return. Feelings and memories of the past flickered to consciousness when my eyes first absorbed the stunningly beautiful (but also vulnerable) geography of the Bay Area: the pale blue sky, the colorful bridges and houses, the ridiculously steep hills, the wispy and thick fog. San Francisco is a city, it seems to me, that has made a Faustian pact with nature. Nature and the geography have not been completely conquered. They seep right into the man-made environment, which is why it is so beautiful here. But it comes at a price measured in ways small and large. Daily battle with the hills is a small reminder and the larger reminders come in the form of terrifying earthquakes. It was really great to see many friends, many of whom I have stayed in constant touch with on IRC, but of course, from time to time, a little flesh and blood goes a lot further than the bits and bytes. While SF does not have a high retention rate (apparently 30% of the population changes every 2 years), many of my techie friends have faithfully remained and other techie friends have since made their way to Bay Area. As much as I find this city amazing, I was reminded of how much I find San Francisco’s weather completely objectionable, disliking it even more than the cold Canadian north (really).The damp cold and constant wind are impossible to escape, only made worse by lousy indoor heating like the cozy heater I already blogged about (and apparently, this is how you can fix it). I am staying in the outer Mission district, which is where I lived for a while, and I do love the slightly warmer temperatures, flatness of the streets, and very colorful murals. While Valencia street has moved up a few notches on the gentrification scale, it does not seem out of control. And of course, the city is brimming with a particular mixture of youth and tech. In the many coffee shops, youthful faces are illuminated by Shiny New Laptops and it seems like at least every third person you meet works in the technology industry. I had not planned on heading out to the east coast but since I was given the option of seeing a couple of apartments courtesy of NYU housing, I decided it was well worth my while to make the cross country trip, given that it may be my future home for many years. Spring in NYC is one of its more flattering incarnations for there is a slight touch of nature that drapes the city, a touch that is absent during the height of the summer when the hot concrete jungle overtakes the flowers and trees. Heading to NYC briefly also reminded me that moving to NYC feels like a really BIG move. And not because the distance between Edmonton and NYC is 3900 KM but because of what it represents. It sort of dawned on me recently that becoming an assistant professor is not unlike the grueling period real doctors go through once they graduate medical school: residency. Even though by the time you start your job, you have been bequeathed with the title of a doctor, and are prepared to teach, advise, etc., in reality you are only half-baked and there is more cooking for you to go under. You need to go through a few more years of somewhat intense training to seal the deal and that is what is awaiting me starting this fall.

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

Seen on librarian.net: "Hi, I'm looking for anal tourism research." - So silly, so realistic, so hard not to laugh if it happened to you.

At work, I have to build a large DLL that is compiled partially on Borland CBuilder and partially on Visual Studio. Besides being stinking huge since I have to link against two standard libraries and Borland's annoying tendency to still link against their standard library dynamically despite my explicit request for no external dependencies, this is actually working quite well. Obviously, since stuff would fail otherwise if I brought a DLL compiled with Borland into a process with Microsoft runtime (which people do commonly). In principle, this also works under Linux, with precisely the same constraints (do not free() memory another module allocated for you, etc.). The C library may not assume it is the only one using memory management primitives like brk and mmap anyway, so multiple libcs in the same process should just work. The only things causing trouble here are libraries reexporting interfaces and asymmetric allocators. The former can be caught by a static header check, the latter by valgrind (in theory).

Almost a year ago I wrote this:

I ve thought about blogging about the books I read, although I m not sure if I ll manage to do it.

Although blogging about a book requires far less time than actually reading the book, I haven’t managed to do it, not that I actually believed I would be able to do it in the first place. I had thought that I would at least write a raw list of the books I’ve read in these ten months as closure for the “blogging about books” thing. In no particular order, and probably missing some of them:

• The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
• To kill a mockingbird, Harper Lee
• The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• The Cleric Quintet, R.A. Salvatore
• Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
• Notes from a Big Country, Bill Bryson
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Bill Bryson
• What liberal media?, Eric Alterman
• The Music of Chance, Paul Auster
• True Tales of American Life, collected by Paul Auster
• Best New American Voices 2004, several authors

I'm currently quite busy and I don't have time to manage a vote for the DeFuBu contest. I am already 2 months late for this. I am hereby requesting some help to organise the vote. I have a list of people/bug number and you should only put this formatted and find people to vote for, and then calculate the ranking. I'll do the rest. So please contact me if you have some spare time.

A number of recent events reminded me of how much time has passed since I started using Linux. Among these, the retirement of several 32-bit CPU architectures from the list of supported platforms on Debian and Ubuntu. The first architecture to fall was m68k. Release Managers at Debian proposed to drop support for m68k after Sarge, which indeed happened: Etch was released earlier this month and, for the very first time in Debian history, without m68k support. Granted, a number of dedicated developers are working on porting the GNU toolchain to Coldfire (an embedded platform that supports about 80% of the m68k instruction set) and good chances are that they will succeed but, let's not fool ourselves: m68k is gone. Around the same time, Ubuntu dropped support for PowerPC, just before releasing Feisty. Granted, there is still some PPC64 hardware being manufactured, but this is on the server side and thus getting farther away from the desktop market that constitutes Ubuntu's core business. Of course, given the plethora of 32-bit PPC hardware in circulation, in the form of second-hand Power Macs, the platform still has some lifespan left but, again, let's not fool ourselves: PowerPC is gone too. And now, a message sent to Debian mailing lists suggested that, as of Linux kernel 2.6.21, support for 32-bit SPARC was broken and, due to an insufficient developer interest for maintaining the GNU toolchain, 32-bit SPARC was likely to be dropped for the Lenny release. Yup, we really cannot fool ourselves: support for 32-bit architectures really is gone. Not surprisingly, my own computer collection has followed a similar trend: this morning, my beloved PA-RISC host left for the home of a happy computer hobbyist who had won the online auction on it. My Atari TT030 is likely to follow a similar route fairly soon. Ditto for the exotic Atari Stacy sitting besides it ...and let's not mention the huge stack of Pentium II and K6 desktop hardware sitting in the corner. Looking back, I'm glad to have shared so many brilliant years with 32-bit hardware. The variety of CPU architectures and hardware designs was quite a learning experience. This being said, life goes on and my current needs are fully covered by my Linutop and by my aging ThinkPad. Thank you for all those years, 32-bit computers. Enjoy a well-deserved rest in bit heaven.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. Version 0.7 comes with following changes:

• Development switched to subversion.
• Added support for CSV export.
• Added support for vCalendar export.

I just finished reading Ben Yoskowitz's Top 10 reasons to join a startup, and I feel like I have to say something. As an experienced programmer, I think of a startup as an abusive relationship. Most technology startups I've been in have been run by charismatic sociopaths with no actual management or technology experience. They make wild, ignorant, unfounded promises to employees, investors and potential customers, then get increasingly anxious and unpleasant as their unsupportable predictions of schedule and market share don't come through. Employees end up working 80-hour weeks, typically for low or no pay and worthless stock options that never pay out. Guilty that living the "startup lifestyle" (work from home, come in late, have fun) has caused schedule or feature slips, they push themselves too hard at work, to the detriment of their health and home life. It doesn't help you much get another job later. Most startups don't succeed, which means that you end up with 1, 2 or 3 years of space on your r sum consumed by a made-up company name that no one has ever heard of and whose phone line has been disconnected. If people have heard of the name, they'll associate it with failure ("Oh, yeah, wasn't that the company that spent all that money and went nowhere?"). On top of all that, the tech experience of working in a startup is usually pretty bad. The engineers are typically unexperienced -- just out of school, or close to it -- and they waste a lot of time and effort trying to reinvent the wheel. The idea that you're changing the world encourages this kind of bad engineering. You end up cutting a lot of corners and developing a lot of bad habits that you have to unlearn later on. Schedule pressures make you drop important engineering steps like analysis, design, unit tests, documentation. That is, if you even knew you were supposed to do them in the first place. It takes a lot of experience in this kind of pressure-cooker environment to come out of a startup sane, healthy, and wealthy. The vast majority of people end up with broken relationships, poor mental and physical health, and not much in the way of money to show for their efforts. tags: startup benyoskovitz work

Wikiclock in the news So, Niko, Hugh, Mike and Leoben Richardson all blogged about the Wikiclock. As far as I know, no MSM coverage yet, but it should be coming down the pipe any day. I talked to Niko tonight, and he said that he saw Hugh at La ka, and Hugh was updating the wikiclock. They traded off updating all afternoon. Sigh. It's actually quite addictive. tags: wikiclock niko hughmacguire leonardrichardson mikelinksvayer

Transit strike We've got a transit strike on in Montreal (see the CBC for deetz). It's a pretty heinous problem -- the maintenance workers are asking for X% pay increases over Y years with blah blah blah pension and fie fo fum and... Whatever. The city is refusing to budge, which makes our mayor, G rald Tremblay, officially a hypocritical idiot. Tremblay has been wagging fingers at provincial, federal and international figures for years about sticking to the Kyoto protocol, but when the hard decisions had to be made, he was willing to shut down Montr al's transit system... in summer... after one of the warmest winters in history. You can blame both sides on this issue, but when it comes down to it the union's job is to get the best deal it can for its workers, and Tremblay's job is to keep the Montreal M tro running. Someone's not doing his job. The city spends millions trying to get commuters out of their cars and into the public transit system. And all that work's out the window, now. Despite the public call for more people to rollerblade to work (riiiiiiiight), traffic is way up and auto use is way up. That means air quality is going to go down, and our city can go from being an environmental leader to an environmental mistake. I'm glad to hear that the Quebec government is stepping in to break up the fight, but I hope it doesn't take too long. tags: montreal quebec metro strike

Calling graphic designers: Universal edit button One of the interesting movements to come out of RoCoCoCamp this weekend is the idea of a universal wiki edit button. This would be an icon similar to the RSS radio-wave icon that's become ubiquitous for indicating an RSS feed. The UWEB would symbolize that the current page can be edited. Folks at AboutUs.org have taken the lead on this effort, which could be really interesting. Getting a universally-understood sign for "edit this page" would greatly help with acceptance of the wiki way by the general public. I don't think it'd have to be limited to wikis; any page that could be edited (e.g., on a CMS) could also have the UWEB. I highly encourage skilled graphic designers who want to take a crack at designing the Next Big Icon to look at the UWEB effort and give it a try. tags: graphicdesign universalwikieditbutton wiki rocococamp aboutus.org icon

At my Institute, we get the El Financiero newspaper - I like it quite a bit. It's very well balanced, with opinions from all of the political and economical points of view. Of course, it has huge business and market sections which I don't usually even care on looking at, as I won't understand much anyway. Those sections usually include advertisements for potential courses and businesses.
Today, Nadezhda showed me an ad that's just beautiful - It shows off the level of commitment and seriousness a company has. It is so beautiful that it deserves me copying it in Spanish and translating it for your further enjoyment. Of course, if somebody stumbles upon this advertisement at my personal blog - I don't know them, they might just be serious but clueless :)

GRUPO DE ASESORES PROFESIONALES
CONVOCA
A acad micos, investigadores, intelectuales, economistas y expertos en reformas estructurales para el an lisis de las siguientes:

• Econom a y finanzas
• Educaci n y empleo
• Seguridad y desarrollo social
• Pol tica y Energ a
• Reforma del estado

Para integrarse a un equipo serio y propositivo de Profesionales en estas reas que brinde asesor a puntual sobre las antes descritas.
REQUISITOS: Titulados con Maestr a y/o Doctorado. Contar con publicaciones especializadas.
Interesados enviar CV al correo electr nico:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

And now, for your further amusement, in my hastily translated English, as faithfully as I can do it.

GROUP OF PROFESSIONAL ADVISORS
INVITES
Academics, researchers, intelectuals, economists and structural reform experts for the analysis of the following areas:

• Economics and finances
• Education and employment
• Social security and development
• Politics and Energy
• State reform

To join a serious and propositive team of Professionals in the above areas that gives punctual advice regarding the aforementioned.
REQUIREMENTS: Holders of a title, with M.Sc. or Ph.D. studies. Having specialized publications.
Interested people, send your CV by email to:
juan_zzz_at_starmedia_dot_com
juan_3zzz_at_yahoo_dot_com_dot_mx
Bosque de Ciruelos No. 140, piso 12, oficina 1202, col. Bosques de las Lomas

Yes, several of the redaction mistakes are in the original text (and several more were introduced due to my English translation, of course).
Anyway... Would you believe in the seriousness of a professional-looking group of economists, paying around US$2000 for 1/4 page in one of the leading Mexican newspapers? By the way, their offices are located at one of Mexico City's most exclusive, expensive areas. But... For $ deity 's sake... COME ON! Please tell juan_zzz to get a decent-looking mail and domain! Having their main contact addresses at two free mail providers, Starmedia and Yahoo, does no service at all to their professional image! How can people still not pay even a bit of attention to those basic details?

I spent most of this past weekend (a long weekend in Canada, thanks to our royal heritage) writing documentation for the DebTorrent code. The original BitTornado code was seriously lacking in this area, having only 670 lines of comments out of almost 20,000 total lines of code, which is 3.5% if you're counting. (In fairness, this may be due in part to it being based on the original bittorrent client.) Since Python is supposed to be known for it's well-documented code, I decided to tackle this shortcoming sooner rather than later. It's also a good opportunity for me to become familiar with all of the code. I'm only about halfway there, but the end result of my weekend's worth of work is this diffstat:

DebTorrent/BT1/Choker.py             99 ++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Connecter.py         313 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Downloader.py        448 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/BT1/Storage.py           418 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
DebTorrent/BT1/__init__.py            9
DebTorrent/BT1/btformats.py          47 ++++
DebTorrent/BTcrypto.py              147 ++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConfigDir.py             248 +++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConnChoice.py             12 -
DebTorrent/CurrentRateMeasure.py     69 +++++-
DebTorrent/__init__.py               14 +
DebTorrent/bencode.py               193 ++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/bitfield.py               89 +++++++
DebTorrent/clock.py                  53 ++++
DebTorrent/download_bt1.py          380 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/inifile.py                70 ++++--
btcompletedir.py                     25 ++
btcopyannounce.py                    20 +
btdownloadheadless.py               111 +++++++++
btlaunchmany.py                      56 ++++
btmakemetafile.py                    19 +
btreannounce.py                       6
btrename.py                          11
btsethttpseeds.py                     6
btshowmetainfo.py                     6
bttrack.py                            6
setup.py                             20 +
27 files changed, 2809 insertions(+), 86 deletions(-)

I've also started using the epydoc program to automatically generate some documentation web pages for easy browsing of the code. So far it's worked out great! So well that I decided to use some of the new features available in a recent beta release that was not yet in the debian archive. The packaging seemed simple enough, so I created my own package containing the new upstream version, which is now available in my repository.