I just received the latest Dell advert, they are offering a 22 inch monitor with 1680x1050 resolution for $499 including delivery! This is a great deal, I've got the same model of monitor at home (I paid $750 for it almost six months ago) and have been totally satisfied. The same monitor with a $499 price is amazing value.

In the past I blogged about the benefits of larger monitors for software development. Now these benefits are available to most computer users in first-world countries.

Now that 1680x1050 is commonly available I expect to see higher resolution monitors dropping in price, at the $800 and $1200 price-points there will need to be something better than that.

The next development will be new software to take advantage of this. One thing that I have heard of is a window manager that splits the display into two halves (in this case they would be 840x1050 resolution). The benefit of having this configuration (according to the people who use it) is that for maximising a window will make it take half the physical screen. This means that you could have a debugger in one half of the screen and your application in the other, to "maximise" the application would not occlude the debugger. Or you could have a web browser and a MUA each using half a screen.

Of course the same result could be achieved by getting two physical displays, but this requires a graphics card that supports "twin-head" operation, and the purchase price of two displays (which will add up to more than $500).

Splitting a screen into two virtual displays is not something that would suit my working patterns. For a lot of my work I just have a screen filled with as many Xterms as will fit. For the GUI stuff I am happy to manually resize things. Maybe a KDE addition that would allow one "Desktop" to be split while another isn't would work.

A final impediment to splitting the screen is that 840 pixels is not enough to correctly display all web sites (many of which are designed for 1024x768). Maybe if I had a split desktop with an icon on the title-bar of the window to unsplit it for one particular window then it would work.

Another use for a large display is virtualisation. I previously blogged about how to use Xephyr to run multiple X sessions on one display, as Xen is now supported in all Linux distributions and KVM and other
virtualisation technologies are also being developed there should be a lot of demand to have multiple virtual machine GUI displays on one desktop (although you could probably do this by manually sizing the windows).

These are just some wild ideas, I have no plans to write the code for any of them, so it'll be a matter of whatever is desired by the people who write the code or pay them. But one thing is certain, the low prices of such monitors will drive new research into how to use them effectively. New technology to effectively use large displays will then drive demand for even larger displays (as will the people who just want to get something better and more expansive than their neighbours). I wonder when we will get to the stage when people are satisfied. For basic office applications commodity PC hardware has far surpassed what is needed for people to do their work.

Totally unoriginal, but I thought it was amusing. I also get some strange search phrases: "My gas meter is making a clicking noise" - then stop using the computer and call your gas company! (In England, the contact number should be on a label on the meter, or in most phone books under "Gas".) "My computer is making loud ticking noise" - that's better. Open the case and listen to the fans and hard disks. One is probably broken. "How many cars are there on the roads today" - too damn many? "How to send an email so that everyone doesn t see the addresses" - put yourself in the To line and everyone else in the Bcc (blind carbon copy). See my email guide for other handy tips. "How do i say in an email that there is an attachment" - How about "There is an attachment"? "Samsung yp-u2 linux" - it works as long as you don't want to upgrade the firmware. More... "How to satellite aiming motor europa" - point it at the sky, not at europa. I'll add more instructions to my satellite page as I rebuild my system. "MJ bad" - at least there are 4 times as many "good" searches. "How do I get the software for the samsung ml-4500" and "Samsung ml-4500 xp drivers" - I have a Ghostscript driver patch. Does Ghostscript work as a printer driver on XP? "Cycle tracks near sandringham" - there's part of NCN1 alongside the A149, but most of the other cycle routes near Sandringham are along quiet roads (which is fine). "What does wag stand for regarding football?" - Wives And Girlfriends. BTW it's a stupid TLA IMO. "Wretton planning", "Wretton parish council", "business properties for sale in Wretton" and "properties for sale in field lane Wretton" - I've not been to Wretton in some time, let alone mentioned its planning or set up an estate agent there! "How to grow grapevine in a conservatory?" - damned if I know. I would think the temperature change each time you open a door would hurt it too much. "Hanging washing out over night" - it's a bad idea if it's going to freeze. "Why some people take so long to reply to emails" - we're busy trying to thaw the washing out. "Satellite frequency for ulster tv for sky plus box" - 10906MHz Vertical polarisation 22Msym/s, but can you record "other channels" on Sky Plus or should you buy a real DVR? "Where can i find a picture of st james swimming pool in kings lynn?" - try Norlink's Picture Norfolk section. "What happened to opensource.org?" - It was transferred from SPI to OSI. Strangely, the next search phrase listed was "simple example of unethical behaviour"... "What to do about death?" - be very still and start to rot? "bf uk cbhf" - I give up. Did 8 of you headbutt the keyboard? "I hate belkin" - Me too. "Interesting questions to ask someone" - no, not on this site. "Bar" - best idea yet. Cheers!

I agree with dlisited.Kermits rendition of NIN’s HURT is better than the original and definitely on par with Johnny Cash’s piercing version. Now I would like to see him do AC/DC’s thunderstruck. That would rock.

Ubuntu got AppArmor support. This is bad news. AppArmor is a weak design. IMHO it gives the users a false impression of security, while leaving too much open to bypass security. But the biggest problem IMHO is that noone at Ubuntu seems to be working on their SELinux support. All I've seen is Ubuntu users breaking their system to a point where they didn't know how to fix it in the attempt to install their SELinux packages. The packages are mostly a 1:1 copy of the Debian packages I guess, but for example their new 'upstart' init-replacement likely isn't capable of actually starting a SELinux enabled system. Oh, and Debian didn't include the relevant package in any 'stable' release, Ubuntu had it in 'universe' since 'warty'. Right now, feisty will include the package, though it reportedly can't be installed. In the example used in the blog, evince is maybe protected from exploits by bad PDF files, but if you do a cp /usr/bin/evince /tmp and run that copy, all the protection is gone. A symlink might already be sufficient! So AppArmor is heavily relying on the user playing nicely. You might want to read this Article at LWN about AppArmor and why it's having a hard time getting into Linux mainline and "Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control" in Joshua Brindle's "SecurityBlog" for a detailed article on the weaknesses in AppArmors approach. And their constant claim of being easier to use than SELinux isn't true either: the 'learning' mode itself will only generate you an incomplete policy. It's about as much as you can achieve in SELinux by transforming audit errors to allow rules using the "audit2allow" tool. Maybe even less; for example when an application accesses a font file, SELinux audit2allow will generate a rule that allows access to all font files (since they have the same type). This doesn't rely on any directory globbing magic, but because there is a type for font files. I expect that future versions of audit2allow will actually recommend which interfaces to add instead of just listing raw allow statements. AppArmors 'abstractions' seems to match what is called 'interfaces' in SELinux, except that interfaces in the SELinux reference policy are well documented and much more extensive. The 'abstractions' offered look like an early, incomplete version of the old NSA policy to me, before this was restructured to become the 'reference policy'. Interaction between processes also seems to be completely ignored by AppArmor. So it seems to me that "preventing evince from trashing your home directory when opening a malicious PDF file" is pretty much all you can do with AppArmor? But again, this isn't so much about bashing AppArmor or Ubuntu. I'm just disappointed that noone at Ubuntu seems to work on the more sound and solid SELinux. Most of SELinux is already in Ubuntu (inherited by their Debian roots), but it's lacking some integration work and such. Ubuntu is often said to be more agile than Debian and better at adopting new technologies, but in my experience, this often is limited to 'visual' stuff. If Debian were better at recruiting new people (for example in the SELinux section, we also seriously lack manpower), I'd probably be annoyed by Ubuntu 'trying to be first with all the pretty stuff' (yes, saying this would not be fair, that's why I'm putting it in quotes). Right now I'm mostly happy that they 'divert' many newbies off Debian and to their huge forums. Although it occasionally means I need to help an Ubuntu user to fix his system when he doesn't get any help there.

When looking through my Webalizer stats recently I noticed that *.search.live.com is transferring about four times as much data from my domain than *.google.com. This wouldn't concern me if I saw some people being referred to my site from live.com, however I see almost none, while google.com is responsible for referring about half the traffic to my site!

Then I looked through the aggregate stats for all web sites hosted on my ISP and noticed that live.com has three times the bandwidth use of google while not showing up in referrals.

I did a couple of test searches with live.com and it seems that one reason why I'm not getting hits is because the search engine just isn't much good. The search string "bonnie++" does not return any links to my program on the first page (maybe live.com can't handle a '+' character).

So I'm now wondering whether there is any reason to permit the live.com servers to use my bandwidth. It's costing my ISP money for no apparent good cause.

In the past there was a previous MS search engine that I had to block because it's attacks (which can not be described in any other way) were using half the web bandwidth of the entire ISP). This case is not so obviously an attack and I'm wondering whether I should permit it to continue for a while just in case they end up giving me some useful referrals.

Of course the other possibility is that if we all block their servers then the live.com results will become even more useless than they currently are and they'll give up on the idea.

I look forward to comments on this issue.

In response to my post about buying dinner for developers (as an alternative to "professional networking sessions") Kris notes that his company has been doing it for years. He goes a little further than I did in my post and advocates buying dinner for developers as a way of thanking them for their work.

I agree that buying dinner for people is a good way of thanking them for their work. I didn't suggest it in my post though because I didn't expect that there would be much interest in such things. I'm glad that Kris has proved me wrong. I'm not sure whether Kris was talking about personally buying dinner or getting his company to do so. In either case it's a really good thing, and I encourage others to do the same!

If you have an hour to spare, I suggest watching this talk by astrophysicist David Dearborn entitled "The Use Of Nuclear Explosives To Disrupt or Divert Asteroids". It starts with a general introduction to the problem of NEOs (Near Earth Objects) and how, as the efficiency of our observation methods increased, we've come to realize that the inner solar system is literally packed with them — and that among them, quite a few large ones are bound to cross Earth's orbit in the near or distant future.

It then goes on to explain that even if you can detect an asteroid early, and observe it for a sufficient period of time (say 10 years) to calculate its orbit, you may not actually have any assurance that the object won't be a threat, because of non-gravitational forces:

• light bouncing off an object in space changes its trajectory, because photons carry momentum and exert a non-negligible force (an effect known as solar radiation pressure)
• more importantly, since the object also radiates heat, the emission of thermal photons modifies the object's orbit in non-predictable ways depending on its shape and composition (the Yarkovsky effect)

All this combines to make computations difficult, and as a result the time frame to react to a potential threat is a lot shorter than we would like (since of course, the more time you have, the better).

The meat of the talk is a presentation of two computer simulations: one where a nuclear device is used to heat an asteroid enough to change its trajectory and prevent a collision ("nudging"), and a second scenario where a nuclear explosive is used to blow the object into smaller chunks which can then simply burn in the atmosphere, or in the worst case cause less damage than a single collision (if they remain on a collision trajectory at all).

Overall, it makes a good case in favor of nuclear explosives as tools and nuclear technology as the most efficient method of transporting energy, beyond the other uses (military or civil) we already have for it. I find this very interesting.

Oh, and if you're not into astrophysics you might be interested in this talk by Mike Pinkerton on open-source and the early days of Mozilla instead; it's very good too.

Had a great time at DemoCampMontreal2 tonight. There were a ton of people there, the demos were great, and the bar at the SAT was open for business, so it was possible to drink beer and watch demos. There were all very solid projects with lots of interesting stuff going on. My favorite aha! moment came from Hugh McGuire showing off Collectik, his new social-podcast-aggregation platform, when he demo'd how he uses the site, and I realized that that's how I want to organize my podcast listening, too. I also liked Kakiloc, a location-oriented social networking site. They let you tell your friends what you're doing and where you are, and the friends can see it on the Web, by SMS, or through IM. Sound familiar? Yeah. Kakiloc's advantage is that they have more geo-oriented interface, and some extremely powerful rules that trigger activity when you (say) get close to someone in your circle of friends. However, I think in a world of Worse Is Better Kakiloc is going to have a hard time making a sale. Twitter already has the mindshare in this market, and the network effect makes it more valuable for people to stay with the popular platform. I also really dug the films from OpenSourceCinema.org, although they skirted the "demo" concept pretty scarcely. One thing that was neat was that the OSC Web site was built by a real-life barn-raising: Sylvain Carle put out the call for some help, and people convened on his house to build the Web site. Cool idea. All in all I had a really good time. DemoCampMontreal2 worked out well. tags: DemoCampMontreal2 kakiloc collectik opensourcecinema

Bait and switch So, on the way out the door to DemoCamp, I grabbed a handful of loonies out of my bedside change basket for the parking meters downtown. When I got to SAT, though, I realized that the "loonies" I'd brought were in fact Sacagawea dollars. I'd gotten them as change from the ticket machines on the Las Vegas monorail. Doh! Fortunately, downtown Montreal parking meters take credit cards, so I was OK. tags: loonie sacagawea parking meter monorail

Feisty Upgraded to FeistyFawn on Wednesday. Worked fine, nice smooth upgrade (who expects that?). Nothing revolutionary, but the software works well. tags: feistyfawn ubuntu upgrade

If you admin a heavily loaded SpamAssassin server...

1. Use SQL for Bayes and AWL data. This allows your spamd processes to store their tokens simultaneously, instead of fighting over the lock for the Berkeley DB files. I use MySQL, postgres works too.
2. If you use network tests, install a local caching nameserver. Even if your nameserver is on the LAN right next to the mail server, it'll be worth it.
3. If you use OCR, make sure that the caching mechanism works. This is especially important in corporate environments where people use images as signatures. For extra points, store the image hashes in SQL too.

Also, the old prefork (--round-robin) algorithm works much better in my case than the new Apache-like scaling algorithm. YMMV.

That's the company's slogan, whose offices we are working at. And I must admit it seems quite true.

Today, we have visited one of the data centers we are evaluating for our company hosting. It was a Tier 1 company, that is networking, connections... nothing special there. The amazing thing is one of the people we meet there was visiting Australia a year ago, and he is also a photograph passionated. I feel him a bit like a twin soul of mine as we are planning to visit Australia on our marriage trip where I will take a lot of pictures, of course. We were talking and he gave me some interesting URLs about his blog, travel agency and the like. So again everything seems connected, as Google knows so frightening well.

Anyway, we went there by motorbike which was a plus not connected to anything else, but too much funny in any case.

I'm not really sure which I find more disappointing - this, this or this.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is something that's designed to ensure two things. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, that discussions don't end up bogged down in personal abuse with no useful conclusions being drawn. Secondly, and perhaps more subtly, to ensure that potential contributors aren't put off by an atmosphere of perceived hostility.

The second point has been most commonly raised with respect to women in computing (perhaps most notably by the FLOSSPOLS findings), but it's not limited to that. One of the reasons I'm not involved with Debian nowadays is the atmosphere on the mailing lists[1]. If you're about to make something that you expect to be a controversial point, realising that the likely result is going to be a certain number of responses implying that holding that opinion is stupid is a pretty strong incentive to avoid posting in the first place. Suppressing the expression of thoughts isn't beneficial, even if you're not doing so deliberately.

Now, the obvious response to this is to accuse the CoC of enforcing some sort of Tellytubby land where people are nice to each other and it's all a mutual love-in. Which isn't, in fact, the case. Disagreeing with people is fine, but disagreeing in a factual and precise manner is significantly more useful than disagreeing in a manner that gives the strong impression that it would have been more helpful if the original poster had died rather than sending the mail in the first place. You're not even obliged to behave in a friendly way towards people - just avoid behaving in a clearly unfriendly way. A good rule of thumb is probably that if you think it would potentially result in a complaint to your boss if you did it in a moderately large company, then doing it on an Ubuntu mailing list is a bad plan.

So, the original point. The joke itself implies that there's no way to know why women behave the way they do, even to the point where a (presumably) omniscient god has no idea. Unsurprisingly, telling a large body of potential contributors that their behaviour is irrational[2] isn't a great way making them feel like their contributions are welcomed. But, oh no! It's actually ok - we're supposed to replace "women" with "newbs", because suggesting that basically your entire pool of potential contributors that their behaviour is irrational is much less bad.

Cough.

We then get to Caroline's post, an expression of frustration about an aspect of life. It contains the word "Fuck", which doesn't seem unreasonable in context. There's then a complaint from someone claiming that it's offensive, which means we have to consider a few things. Firstly, is the author of the complaint actually offended, or just attempting to claim that there's hypocrisy involved? Given the context, I'd suspect the latter. Arguably this isn't really the point, though - the issue isn't whether a given person is offended, it's whether it'll offend someone who would otherwise potentially make a valuable member of the community. Right now, I'd suspect that we (as a community) don't really object to it strongly. Google suggests that swearing isn't unheard of on the lists. While swearing in the context of a personal attack is pretty clearly a violation of the CoC[3], people don't seem to be objecting to it in general.

So, is it unacceptable to swear within the Ubuntu community? Right now, I'd say that (in appropriate contexts) it's not a problem. If a moderate number of people claim that the current degree of swearing dissuades them from being involved, then it may become a problem. Accusing someone of hypocrisy for swearing (not clearly a CoC issue, especially in context) after they claimed that a sexist joke might be, well, offensive? Yeah, I'd say that that one's pretty clearly unacceptable. Telling people that it's pretty funny and that they're wrong to be offended? History suggests that it's not a good plan. If you think someone's wrong to be offended, then a good first step is trying to figure out why rather than just dismissing them.

Of course, there's also the entirely secondary issue of what the roles of planet sites in the community are. Personally, I like to think of them as opportunities to see what people are really like rather than being reflections of people's behaviours on project mailing lists[4]. From that point of view, I think that the bounds of acceptable behaviour should be a little more liberal. If people disagree, that's not a problem and things can change - but expecting people to change their behaviour before there's any sort of general opinion that it's unacceptable isn't ok.

Which leaves open the question of whether posting sexist jokes to mailing lists is on the acceptable side of the CoC[5] or not. I'd be surprised if the ubuntu-uk community genuinely thought so, but if they do then there are pretty clearly issues that we need to solve. As far as I'm concerned, justifying that sort of behaviour has no place in Ubuntu.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that there's a certain degree of irony there
[2] For the record, yes, I do believe that women often behave in irrational ways. So do men.
[3] I find it surprisingly hard not to write that as COCK. Too much Jerkcity
[4] Which is, to an extent, why this journal isn't on Planet Ubuntu - there'd be potential for things I said to be mistaken for some sort of official Ubuntu position, which would end up limiting what I could say, which would kind of ruin the point
[5] Must... resist... temptation...

TurboGears RemoteForm tip In case your RemoteForm misteriously behaves like a normal HTTP form, refreshing the page on submit, and the only hint that there's something wrong is this bit in the Iceweasel's error console:

Errore: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure
code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"
nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)"  location: "JS frame ::
javascript: eval(__firebugTemp__); :: anonymous :: line 1"  data: no]

the problem can just be a missing action= attribute to the form. I found out after:

1. reading the TurboGears remoteform wiki: "For some reason, the RemoteForm is acting like a regular html form, serving up a new page instead of performing the replacements we're looking for. I'll update this page as soon as I figure out why this is happening."
2. finding this page on Google and meditating for a while while staring at it. I don't speak German, but often enough I manage to solve problems after meditating over Google results in all sorts of languages unknown or unreadable to me. I will call this practice Webomancy.

The xend config looks like this:

playground:~# grep -v ^# /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp
(network-script ‘network-bridge netdev=dummy0′)
(vif-script vif-bridge)
(dom0-min-mem 196)
(dom0-cpus 0) Creating volume group for Xen domU (/dev/hdb2 was allready created with id 8e):

playground:~# pvcreate /dev/hdb2
Physical volume “/dev/hdb2″ successfully created
playground:~# vgcreate xen-vol /dev/hdb2
Volume group “xen-vol” successfully created
playground:~# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “xen-vol” using metadata type lvm2 Creating first domU:

playground:~# xen-create-image –ip 192.168.222.50 –hostname xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
General Infomation
——————–
Hostname : xetch.blubb.cyconet.org
Distribution : etch
Fileystem Type : ext3
Size Information
—————-
Image size : 4Gb
Swap size : 1024Mb
Image type : full
Memory size : 128Mb
Kernel path : /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Initrd path : /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-vserver-686
Networking Information
———————-
IP Address 1 : 192.168.222.50
Netmask : 255.255.255.0
Gateway : 192.168.222.1
Creating ext3 filesystem on /dev/xen-vol/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org-disk
Done
Installing your system with debootstrap mirror ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/
Done
Running hooks
Done
No role script specified. Skipping
Creating Xen configuration file
Done
Setting up root password
Enter new UNIX password:
etype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
All done
Logfile produced at:
/var/log/xen-tools/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.log Add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto dummy0
iface dummy0 inet static
address 192.168.222.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.222.0
broadcast 192.168.222.255 Bringing up network interface, restarting xen and starting the domU:

playground:~# ifup dummy0
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains stop
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xend restart
playground:~# /etc/init.d/xendomains start
playground:~# xm create xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg -c
Using config file “/etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg”.
… If you want to autostart your domUs, you have to symlink the configfile to /etc/xen/auto:

playground:~# mkdir /etc/xen/auto/
playground:~# ln -s /etc/xen/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg /etc/xen/auto/xetch.blubb.cyconet.org.cfg Debian, Linux, opensource, planet, xen

One of my dedicated servers was in bad need of major LVM surgery today. Since the rescue system delivered with the server by the housing provider suffers from lack of LVM support, I needed to pull a creative stunt with grub and grml to accomplish this. The dedicated server rented from strato is the Box I tested in a different article. Installing the LVM-based Debian system via the LVM-less rescue system involved first installing without LVM in the partition which was originally supposed to be swap, booting the just installed system and using this temporary system to finally bootstrap the target. I had originally planned to go this way again in case rescue should become necessary. Today, I checked first whether the provider supplied rescue system had improved in the mean time (which it hadn’t), and I didn’t feel like installing a new temporary system. Instead, I decided to go through a different route, using grml. grml is extremely versatile regarding boot. All you need is to get the grml kernel to boot and point it towards the grml initrd, and the initrd automatically searches the available drives for the compressed file system image, mounts it and continues the boot process. This was the point where I hooked myself into grml. I put an ext3fs on the swap partition and copied the contents of a grml CD to that partition. After thinking a while about how to get ISOLINUX to boot this grml, I remembered that the disk already has grub installed, and decided to use grub to boot grml. This was possible because the provider offers a serial console for the machine. If no serial console had been available, things would have been a lot harder since there would be no feedback and one would have to talk to grub via offline editing of menu.lst. Thanks to the serial console, things were a lot faster. Booting grml via grub is actually easy. After finding out which partition grml is on (find /linux26) and setting this partition as root, all you need is “kernel /linux26 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us BOOT_IMAGE=grml console=ttyS0,57600n8”, “initrd /minirt26.gz” and finally “boot”. The “57600” given on the kernel command line was actually the hardest part: Strato operates the serial console at unusual 57600 bps, and grml’s serial console feature starts mgetty with hard-coded 9600 bps. The rather frustrating symptom was that you can watch grml booting, with “Finished execution of main grml startup” as the last sign of life. Knowing that there is a login prompt waiting for you at the wrong baud rate. After talking to Mika from the grml team for some minutes, we decided to take two “roads” to solve the issue. Mika hacked grml’s startup process to parse the baud rate to be used for mgetty from the kernel command line. Since I couldn’t wait for Mika’s fix, I used a grml.sh script to put a fixed mgetty.config over the file contained in grml. After fixing some stupid mistakes on my part, I finally received my grml login prompt and could start with the LVM surgery. Grml is a perfect tool for such tasks since it is extremely flexible and not selective in which medium and partition types it can boot from. It has saved me a lot of grief today and has helped me in solving a difficult problem. Oh, btw, pvmove --alloc anywhere can move a logical volume inside a pysical volume without the need of a temporary physical volume, and it is thus possible to “manually” defragment a physical volume in order to allow more clean resizing of logical values. While it is debateable whether this does really make sense, it satisfies my sense of order to have an LVM setup unfragmented.

Passing values to turbogears widgets at display time In turbogears, I often need to pass data to widgets at display time. Sometimes it works automatically, but sometimes, in cases like passing option lists to CheckBoxLists or number of repetitions in a RepeatingFieldSet, it doesn't. All the examples use precomputed lists or pass simple code functions. In most of my cases, I want them computed by the controller every time. Passing a function hasn't worked, as I did not find any obvious way to have the function know about the controller. So I need to pass things the display() method of the widgets, but I could not work out how to pass the option list and default list for a CheckBoxList that is part of a WidgetsList in a TableForm. On IRC came the answer, thanks to Xentac:

you should be able to...
    tableform.display(options=dict(checkboxname=[optionlist]))

And yes, it works. I can pass the default value as one of the normal form values:

    tableform.display(values=dict(checkboxname=[values]), options=dict(checkboxname=[optionlist]))

Hard to believe it's already time for DemoCampMontreal2 tomorrow night (Thursday, March 29, at the SAT). I had a pretty good time at the first DemoCampMontreal back in February, despite my demo going belly-up a few times. It was a good space and a fun time to talk. I think the BarCamp page on DemoCampMontreal2 has some good info, too. Check out Fred Ngo's writeup of DemoCampMontreal2, including a fancy photo of yours truly demoing in February. It looks a little like BarCampHell, but in a good way. tags: barcamp democamp montreal DemoCampMontreal2 fred ngo me

Big day Today's our big day -- we're closing on the house at 4690 rue Pontiac tonight at 7. We just got in from Las Vegas last night, but we headed out to the bank this morning to get a cashier's check for our (very large) down payment and dot the t's and cross the i's for the mortgage. Lots more running around today, but we go to the notaire tonight, and we'll have some sort of paper certifying us as homeowners sometime tonight. Shom-pan-yah to follow. tags: house buying closing 4690ruepontiac

Open Web Design One really great Open Content (or is it Open Source...?) resource that I don't pay enough attention to is the Open Web Design repository. It's a collection of very nicely done Web designs, delivered in convenient packets of HTML and CSS. They make very nice templates for "skins" of blog engines, CMSes, or even wikis. It's a great complement to the tons of Free Web software available out there (most of which is quite skinnable, and most of which has execrable default themes). My favourite part is that all the designs are dedicated to the public domain or made available under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which makes them honest-to-goodness Free Culture per the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'm going to be using one of these Web designs to clean up my kinda bland home site. It could use a bit of editing. tags: web design design open content skins themes

Thanks Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka Thanks to Mark and family for the congratulations on our new house. We signed the papers tonight, and it went surprisingly smoothly. Our seller is a fascinating guy who started the animation lab at Ubisoft, so we enjoyed getting to talk to him in between onslaughts of legalese and flurries of signatures. In other good news, I guess the gang is coming out for RoCoCo. Wow! That'll be pretty fun. Good thing we'll have two houses then. tags: mark house rococo ubisoft

[Note: I wrote this more than three weeks ago, but due to me being lazy again (yeah right) I’m just publishing this now. Well, here goes:] Due to a project working on (in Perl,) I’m asking the great Lazyweb for their great insight into the problem of sending outgoing mails. It all started when I was trying to set up my own mail system on my laptop perlis. After months of doing most of my mails under GMail and finding it impressive, but not quite adequate for my needs, I decided to go back to my old desktop workflow of downloading all my mails using ESR’s fetchmail over IMAP, and using my preferred MUA (Gnus, in this case to write my replies/posts/spam and send them using an MTA. However, since the time I’ve been checking my mails on revan, the amount of mail that I have been receiving has gone up to less than manageable proportions for my old system, so I had to revise my way of getting my email fix. Ultimately, I went on to use John Goerzen’s offlineimap to synchronize my IMAP Maildirs locally and do my mail stuff from there. No problem at the receiving front. On the sending of emails, I ran to a slight problem. I used to use an MTA to relay my mails to a smarthost for delivery, but since things have changed a bit (new ISP that blocks port 25, for one I have to find some other means. Although I could probably configure my MTA to use (and authenticate to) a smarthost, I found that approach to be too heavy for comfort (even when using a special-purpose MTA such as masqmail.) Furthermore, I’d like to have more control on how I send my mails (like which mails using one of my email addresses should go to a particular smarthost.) So, here is my attempt to solve my problem: a small, user-configurable mail submission agent. It small because it is written in Perl, and makes the most out of it (being a Perl user means you gotta love CPAN It’s user-configurable, involving a small INI-style file in the user’s home directory (I would prefer, however, to do away with tinkering with config-files altogether and do all configuration via some friendly interface.) It’s not much, but it works. And it’s working for the past three weeks or so now. I call it kartero because its the Spanish-Filipino word for postman (and yes, that’s exactly what my program does. It’s not much, but you can pick it up and try it yourself. Complaints; violent reactions: you know where to send them.