I've decided I wanted to try running Debian on nc4000 (laptop PC by HP).I didn't want to erase what is already there, so I needed some external USB HDD to do that.Since I didn't feel like hunting around for a USB CD-ROM drive and creating bootable USB, or configuring PXE, I decided to install using qemu to install to the USB HDD and use that installation on the machine.It was surprisingly simple.I connected my USB-HDD to my desktop machine, which recognized the disk as /dev/sda, and I used qemu to install Debian on it. qemu -hda /dev/sda -cdrom XXXX -boot d.Note that you really need kqemu or kvm for speed.Then, I selected LVM, and installed.After initial reboot within qemu, I changed the kernel to a 686 kernel since a k7 kernel was installed, but that's the only package I changed.After reconnecting the USB HDD to nc4000, I managed to boot from the USB disk.Initially, it failed to boot since vgscan ran before USB disk was recognized, and could not find the root device.Looking at the source, I found initramfs will probably re-try after 3 minutes. But reading further, I found that the timing can be improved by specifying rootdelay= boot option to the kernel.I specified rootdelay=15 for the kernel option in grub,and voila, it found the root filesystem on LVM.The /boot filesystem was /dev/hda1 inside qemu, but it is now /dev/sda1 on the nc4000; and boot stopped at fsck on /dev/hda1.It was trivial to fix after dropping into the command-line.LVM is able to work around device name change, which is nice to know.For the graphics card, qemu and nc4000 have different cards, and I had to dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.Okay, so I have Debian running on my notebook via USB HDD, now what ?

A coupld of glitches appeared lately during my sarge->etch upgrade for my home server:

• Non optimal upgrade of amavisd-new: the upgrade process is quite painful and there is no automated way to switch the old "all in one file" settings to the new layout. Pretty painful to reanalyse settings I made 2 years ago and never touched since then.
• No longer working VPN with my company. I was using Openswan and it no longer accepted to connect to my company's VPN server (a FortiNet router). After many fiddling with the infamous /etc/ipsec.conf file, I finally decided to move to StrongSwan which appears to be the next generation of such software. Using my old ipsec.conf file bringed my VPN back. As this is a big part of my work method, I'm getting reliefed..:)

There are probably a few others things to tweak, still. But I had no problem with the samba server, the squid cache, the postfix settings, IMAP server, which means that the entire family can still use their computers without hassle, which was the major challenge in this migration.

As mentioned previously I was invited to talk about Debian at the Long Island Linux User Group. Much to my embarrassment I had forgotten I had actually spoken at this venue before way back in 2003. But the audience (which of course included many members who had joined since then) were receptive, and asked lots of questions which I like. I did my "Three Pillars of Debian" talk updated for Etch with snazzy new slides — feel free to use them in your own presentations if you like. I was supposed to speak for two hours and ended up speaking for three. So hopefully I managed to impart some useful information and maybe make some new recruits. I would like to publically thank John Teddy and all the people at LILUG for inviting me. Also, note for the future: I really ought to learn how to correctly pronounce Hocevar. Sam, you should put up an audio clip somewhere.

Gunnar Wolf commented on my recent series of init script posts. Thanks for the feedback.The thing is that I've been doing a lot of Debian stuff these days (such as our GSoC coordination, and lots of stuff you saw in this blog). But I shouldn't... instead I should be trying to finally get my diploma thesis done.I had my exams last july. If I had been focused, I could have been finished with my degree last christmas. Now it will likely by this fall. :-( All that is remaining is my final thesis. It should be written in 6 months, but I still havn't submitted my topic yet. So if you are wondering what took me 8 months already: I investigated two topics, but they didn't work out. Then I started researching for my 'current' topic, and I have a vision for it, but I still havn't managed to convince my professor (which of course is largely due to me not being able to convey this idea, and that the topic is in information management and representation, where it's probaly often hard to find a solid theoretical part. I have examples I'd like to do, and I hope they are actually convincing, but I have no idea how to 'prove' something here; it's too much about social aspects and human perception I guess, and I'm not really qualified or capable to do solid research in that field.)(And as you can probably imagine, I'm pretty fed up with studying now. A year ago, I'd have considered to go for a PhD afterwards, but now I just want to get out, and work on my projects.)Anyway, I got distracted. Back to the init topic.I already posted this link: Init Hackfest, as well as a pointer to the initscripts-ng mailing list. I'd really like to get this topic on it's way for lenny. So please, join this effort. While I'd like to push it, I shouldn't; on contrary, I should suspend my Debian efforts.As for your (Gunnar) suggestion on how to handle multiple inits: what's wrong with just including multiple init scripts in one package? They are not particularly large and compress well. A single init script package might already be bigger than all the init scripts.The problem is more on how to write these init scripts; by the time we're done with this project, we might actually have hit 1000 init scripts. Yes; I didn't just make up this number: packages.debian.org has 890 hits for /etc/init.d; the init-like scripts in /etc/dbus-1/event.d not included. So if just want to add support to 5 alternate init systems, this means we would need to write 5000 new init scripts. Ouch. So we maybe should convert them to 1000 meta-init-scripts instead, and generate the 6000 real init scripts from them.Please join the discussion, and lets get this project going, despite having to face such scaringly high numbers...

(Rapidly followed by 0.4.1) I’m very pleased to announce that Dates 0.4 has been released to the world, this release includes support for multiple local and remote calendars (including read-only access to Google Calendar.) It is available in three stunning flavours all guaranteed to be buzzing with energy but 100% fat free. N800 owners can use the Application Manager to install dates by using this install link. Packages for Debian/Ubuntu are being built now. Hopefully we should be able to get packages built for the Nokia 770 soon. Dates also has a cool new icon, courtesy of Andreas Nilsson. Andreas has also designed icons for the other components of, as well as the website for, the Pimlico Project which launches today. Pimlico is the umbrella project for all the OpenedHand PIM applications; Dates, Contacts, Tasks and Sync.
The funky new Dates icon.

Those who know me even moderately well (as well as every doctor I have ever seen), knows that my real first name as “Enid.” That is the mysterious E. that sometimes precedes the Gabriella. My mom’s intention was to call me Gabriella, the first name of some famous Italian Cabaret singer, Gabriella Ferranti. But when Enid, my aunt on my fathers side, passed away a few months before I was born, I was given the name Enid Gabriella. We have always used Biella or Gabriella but I like that I have Enid in there and have fancied from time to time to start using the name Enid. By all accounts, Enid was an amazing and energetic woman, who reared her four kids with passion, was very open to friends and family, and who, despite living a solidly upper middle class Jewish life, was also involved in interesting political work(like helping Americans doge the draft by escaping to Canada). My mom held a special fondness for her because, well, honestly I think she was one of the only members of my dad’s family who she deeply loved. And Enid always went out of her way to show her care and concern, as when she immediately went to Caracas after my mothers first child unexpectedly died of a high fever at the age of five months. Today as I was writing away, I received an email from my father that he sent to me and a bunch of cousins and other siblings where he attached a 9 page document of remembrances and memories of Enid. My dad, though in no way as bad off as my mother (health wise), is no spring chicken. And I think as he fast approaches 80 years old, he is committing a lot to writing and thus, keeping his memory alive for us. In fact, this reminded me of a really beautiful quote I recently came across on memory:

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” Luis Bu uel

But what was a little odd (but nonetheless very endearing) about most of the account is that it was not organized by stories, or date, but by car models. Yes, by technology. My dad organized the stories about Enid by virtue of the cars they had, which struck me a little strange because it is not like he was a car buff or anything (growing up we always had the most unsexy cars, like Ford Tauruses). The cars he covers are the following: The Model A Ford Convertible
The 1941 Oldsmobile
The 1948 Buick Convertible
A Chevy Convertible Once you read his little tribute, it becomes immediately clear that his choice of talking about cars is also way for him to talk about history which is my dad’s great love (he can talk to you straight for 5 hours about some odd event in WW II and why he should have become a historian) as it is about Enid. Case in point here:

This was the first General Motors car with automatic drive. It was called Hydromatic and even though this car had a powerful 8-cylinder engine, this first automatic drive was very sluggish. Forget about 0 to 60 miles an hour in 7 seconds. This was in minutes. It was the car that Abe used to teach both Enid and I to drive. We both had to have additional lessons with a stick shift car, because the driving test was only given on stick shift cars. I learned to drive in 1944, when I was 16. Enid took lessons from Abe and learned to drive in 1945 when she was fifteen. This was against the law, but the law in the name of Tom, the policeman that covered our neighborhood, liked Enid and looked the other way.

For those who care to read more (it may only be amusing to me and those few people that are into American car history), I have included all the cars and here are the main cast of characters. Ruth = My Grandmother
Abe = Grandfather
David = Dad
Enid = My Aunt, David’s sister (more…)

I have just read the Presentation Zen blog post about PowerPoint.

One of the interesting suggestions was that it's not effective to present the same information twice, so you don't have notes covering what you say. Having a diagram that gives the same information is effective though because it gives a different way of analyzing the data. I looked at a couple of sets of slides that I have written and noticed that the ratio of text slides to diagram slides was 6:1 and 3:1 in favor of text, and that wasn't counting the first and last slides that have the title of the talk and a set of URLs respectively.

So it seems that I need more and better diagrams. I'll include most of the diagrams I use in my current SE Linux talks in this post with some ideas on how to improve them. I would appreciate any suggestions that may be offered (either through blog comments or email).

The above diagram shows how the SE Linux identity limits the roles that may be selected, and how the role limits the domains that may be entered. Therefore the identity controls what the user may do and in this example the identity "root" means that the user has little access to the machine (a Play Machine configuration). I think that the above is reasonably effective and have been using it for a few years. I have considered a more complex diagram with the "staff_r" role included as well and possibly including the way that "newrole" can be used to change between roles. So I could have the above as slide #1 about identities and roles with a more detailed diagram following to replace a page of text about role transition.

The above diagram shows the domain transitions used in a typical system boot and login process. It includes the names of the types and a summary of the relevant policy rules used to implement the transitions. I also have another diagram that I have used which is the same but without the file types and policy. In the past I have never used both in the one talk - just used one of the two and had text to describe the information content of the other. To make greater use of diagrams I could start with the simple diagram and then have the following slide have all the detail.

The above diagram simply displays the MCS security model with ellipses representing processes and rectangles representing files.

The above diagram shows a simplified version of the MMCS policy. With MMCS each process has a range with the low level representing the minimum category set of files to which it is permitted to write and the high level representing the files that it may read and write. So to write to a file with the "HR" category the process must have a low level that's no higher than "HR" and a high level that is equal or greater than "HR". The full set of combinations of two categories with low and high levels means 10 different levels of access for processes which makes for a complex diagram. I need something other than plain text for this but the above diagram is overly complex and a full set is even more so. Maybe a table with process contexts on one axis, file contexts on another and access granted being one of "R", "RW" or nothing?

I also have a MLS diagram in the same manner, but I now think it's too awful to put on my blog. Any suggestions on how to effectively design a diagram for MLS? For those of you who don't know how MLS works the basic concept is that every process has an "Effective Clearance" (AKA low level) which determines what it can write, it can't write to anything below that because it might have read data from a file at it's own level and it can't read from a level higher than it's own level. MLS also uses a high level for ranged processes and filesystem objects (but that's when it gets really complex).

This last one is what I consider my most effective diagram. It shows the benefits of SE Linux in confining daemons in a clear and effective manner. Any suggestions for improvement (apart from fixing the varying text size which is due to a bug in Dia) would be appreciated.

The above diagrams are all on my SE Linux talks page, along with the Dia files that were used to create them. They may be used freely for non-commercial purposes.

If anyone has some SE Linux diagrams that they would like to share then please let me know, either through a blog comment, email, or a blog post syndicated on Planet SE Linux.

I've been a bit offline during the last two weeks due to being in the middle of a ISP switch at home, which took me offline for a longer time than expected. Additionally, when I finally got the connection up, it was Easter time, and I ended up going to Vall, after cancelling a cycling trip with some friends down the Via Verda Ojos Negros (but this time, not during the night and spending a few days to complete the route) in the last minute, due to the horrid weather forecast. It apparently was a good idea: the river that goes along Vall overflowed, and for some reason the mobile phone service went down for more than 3 days. On Monday night I came back to Val ncia, and I figured that the DPL election results would be out by the time. When I opened Debian's webpage, I found out some other big news: Debian 4.0 was released the day before! Soon after, I looked for the vote results, to find Sam, my candidate of choice, was the winner, very closely followed by uncle Steve. Congrats Sam, no nos falles! And congratulations to the rest of the Debian project for yet another successful, well done release. Reading comments on news sites gives a fuzzy warm feeling. Even though we were slightly delayed, people show how etch is going to make their lives easier, or how trustable Debian is at work and at home. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me and many Debian people going. I'm pondering improvising some Etch Release Party (as the release managers deprived me of a IRC party by secretly releasing while I wasn't looking) this weekend in Barcelona, where I will be visiting, after giving up on being able to be in A Coru a for DudesConf. Anyone up for it?

Ofcom publishes research on media literacy

Analysis of a research report: "Certainly a useful document to have on hand, if only to deconstruct."

Karen Bremner - The Apprentice Series 2

A new art form: go on a reality TV show, start blogging to raise profile, get hired by Old Media, then leave the site to bit-rot. How many of these "reality TV star headstones" sites are there now?

predicts problems and confusion for consumers

If anyone doubts how much big media gets bad PR from trying to use their big influence to direct the market (such as making their films only available in their format), check the first comment: "I'm waiting for the corporate idiots to decide"

xmltv, was: [Debian-uk] Getting wired in Manchester

Another thing on my "must try that when I get my DVR built" list.

theLargePrint.com The New Media Landscape and the BBC's Lost Horizon

Nice criticism of BBC's link-up with anti-competitors. I recently wrote about the BBC-Google link, which raises some similar problems.

BBC NEWS Business Fewer charges for website content

Figures from 2006 (I'll do media linkposts more often in future).

Time to read the papers?

I only get time to read one paper per week, unless I'm travelling.

Number 10: Tony Blair Interview with Stephen Fry

Fantasy TV shows number 10: A bit of Fry and Blairie.

BBC NEWS Technology Broadband switching set to ease

They say new rules came in on 14 February, but sites like moneySavingExpert.com are still full of tales of woe.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban tv competitions/quizzes which charge extortionate caller rates (eg The Mint).

Sign this to clear UK digital TV of all these scam quizzes. I see that after just a taste of humble pie, itv play is back on air overnight on itv1.

BOF stands for Birds Of a Feather, it's an informal session run at a conference usually without any formal approval by the people who run the conference.

Often conferences have a white-board, wiki, or other place where conference delegates can leave notes for any reason. It is used for many purposes including arranging BOFs. To arrange a BOF you will usually write the title for the BOF and the name of the convenor (usually yourself if it's your idea) and leave a space for interested people to sign their names. Even though there is usually no formal involvement of the conference organizers they will generally reserve some time for BOFs. Depending on the expected interest they will usually offer one or two slots of either 45 minutes or one hour. They will also often assist in allocating BOFs to rooms. But none of this is needed. All that you need to do is find a notice-board, state your intention to have a BOF at a time when not much else is happening and play it by ear!

My observation is that about half the ideas for BOFs actually happen, the rest don't get enough interest. This is OK, one of the reasons for a BOF is to have a discussion about an area of technology that has an unknown level of interest. If no-one is interested then you offer the same thing the next year. If only a few people are interested then you discuss it over dinner. But sometimes you get 30+ people, you never know what to expect as many people don't sign up - or have their first choice canceled and attend the next on the list!

To run a BOF you firstly need some level of expert knowledge in the field. I believe that the best plan is for a BOF to be a panel discussion where you have a significant portion of the people in the audience (between 5 and 15 people) speaking their opinions on the topic and the convener moderating the discussion. If things work in an ideal manner then the convener will merely be one member of the panel. However it's generally expected that the person running the BOF can give an improvised lecture on the topic in case things don't happen in an ideal manner. It's also expected that the convener will have an agenda for a discussion drawn up so that if the panel method occurs they can ask a series of questions for members of the BOF to answer. My experience is that 8 simple questions will cover most of an hour.

One requirement for convening a BOF is that you be confident in speaking to an audience of unknown size, knowledge, and temperament. Although I haven't seen it done it would be possible to have two people acting as joint conveners of a BOF. One person with the confidence to handle the audience and manage the agenda and another with the technical skills needed to speak authoritatively on the topic.

Some of the BOFs I have attended have had casual discussions, some have had heated arguments, and some ended up as lectures with the convener just talking about the topic. Each of these outcomes can work in terms of entertaining and educating the delegates.

But don't feel afraid, one of the advantages of a BOF is that it's a very casual affair, not only because of the nature of the event but also because it usually happens at the end of a long conference day. People will want to relax not have a high-intensity lecture. One problem that you can have when giving a formal lecture to an audience is nervous problems such as hyper-ventilating. This has happened to me before and it was really difficult to recover while continuing the lecture. If that happens during a BOF then you can just throw a question to the audience such as "could everyone in the room please give their opinion on X", that will give you time for your nerves to recover while also allowing the audience to get to know each other a bit - it's probably best to have at least one such question on your agenda in case it's needed.

Note that the above is my personal opinion based on my own experience. I'm sure that lots of other people will disagree with me and write blog posts saying so. ;)

The facts which I expect no-one to dispute are:

• BOFs are informal
• Anyone can run one
• You need an agenda
• You need some level of expert knowledge of the topic

Etch is out! Thanks to everyone involved in the best release ever, and special congratulations for making this happen in 13 months less than for Sarge despite all the, er, obstacles. I d personally love to see the trend continue for Lenny. If you live in Paris, you have two opportunities to meet, have a beer and rejoice: tomorrow (Wednesday the 11th) and in three days (Friday the 13th). Everyone is welcome and you do not have to book, the place has plenty of room during the holidays. And if you live somewhere else, there s probably a party near your place.

If you use grep-dctrl, sort-dctrl or tbl-dctrl, I’d like to see your use cases! I’m building a system test automaton for dctrl-tools, and I’d like to include as much real-world examples as possible so that any regressions get found before uploading. You can send example command lines (and preferably also a test file, unless it’s one of the standard Debian files like Packages) to me by email at <ajk@debian.org>, as a wishlist bug report against dctrl-tools or by a Darcs patch against the experimental repository (see instructions).

Wow, what a wonderful weekend was this for Debian. And, yet again, I managed to miss the live announcement and party on IRC.
So... We got a shiny, new, French DPL. Just after that, we got one last release for Sarge, and right away we got a stable Etch - Who says having a new DPL cannot speed up things? ;-) Anyway... I don't remember where I started the meme when Sarge was released (it was not on my blog, it seems)... But here it goes again:
What were you doing at...
Etch release? Having a nice time with Nadezhda, walking around this broken and dear city in my last day of vacations.
Sarge release? At my psychologist. Yes, Sarge drove us all nuts.
Woody release? Sitting at a lent workstation at Departamento de Seguridad en C mputo in my University. Of course, the announcement was broadcasted right away to everybody around me ;-) I was in NM by then, and was a bit disappointed because my work didn't appear in the release.
Potato release? Don't know... I was not yet involved with Debian by then.
[Update]: Thanks to Wouter, my old meme-starting message appeared - is he more patient than I am, or just more organized? :-) Anyway, boo for Jaws breaking old URLs (I upgraded 0.4->0.5->0.6->0.7 since then)

Following up on last year's report, this is what I managed 06/07:

	2005/06	2006/07
number of (partial) days	25	16
Damüls	10	10
Diedamskopf	15	3
Warth/Schröcken	0	3
total meters of altitude	124634	74096
highscore	10247m	8321m
# of runs	309	189

We simply had too little snow this year, the initial three visits (6th and 28th of January, 18th of February) did not feature a lot of natural snow but loads of people and were cut absurdely short (less than two hours of riding) due to the lack of fun. The real season started only in the middle of March and I have make the most of it. - The best thing is that I did not hurt myself this year. :-) Have a nice summer.

Today - as many of you have already noticed - is/was a big day for Debian:

• Sam Hocevar won the DPL election


• Debian (old)stable 3.1 released a new version


• Debian Etch 4.0 was released

Well, I could add another topic:

• Debian is no longer Debian for me because not all of my archs are supported anymore

In a more detailed view:
Sam Hocevar won the DPL election
Congrats to Sam! I can agree with most of the points he made in his DPL platform, e.g. a sexier website, sexier distribution, remaing the universal OS, etc.
sexier website: Really, the current design of Debians website is awful. It's really something back from the 90s. Bad look, bad design and stuff you're looking for is difficult to find, because it's badly structured and stuff is spread all over the place. I think, it would be good to have some decent CMS and some good designers/graphic artists - a good package maintainier doesn't make a good webdesigner.
sexier distribution: Many people are using Ubuntu because they're desktop users. The current release cycles are way too long and drive people away from Debian. It's a different matter, of course, for servers or managed systems like Terminal Servers or such. Those are fine with longer release cycles. Splitting up the release in some core and sub releases is a quite common proposal. Yes, this split is difficult, but I think it's the way to go.
remaing the universal OS: As of the release of Etch, Debian became the no-more-universal OS - just because m68k wasn't released for obscure reasons. I'm a great m68k user and now I'm left behind by Debian with the problem that my pet arch is not supported anymore. Running testing/unstable is not an option for m68k IMHO. Because the m68k porters didn't come up with an alternative release plan so far, I think it's the best to shutdown my 3 m68k machines - all of them are m68k buildds - within the next weeks or months. They're producing (well, some little) heat, some disturbing noise and consume a lot of power of course. Currently I accept those drawbacks in order to help the m68k port by donating CPU power running some buildds for about 7 years now. I've spent much more money on this purpose - not only for paying the electricity bills - for phone calls to get crashed remote machines rebooted, sending replacement parts for other buildds or even driving by car to bring machines or other parts to other persons (like crest.debian.org to Michael Schmitz or accel boards to the Netherlands for porting stuff. Anyway, I will happily reactivate the machines when it's up to make a new release for the m68k architecture again! :)

Some other point Sam mentioned in his platform is this:

There are very useful services around, such as http://www.buildd.net/, http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ or http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/. I cannot understand why they are not Debian services.

I already had a conversation with Sam about this in which I expressed my general intention to develop at least Buildd.Net beyond its current state - it's quite frustrating for me to see Buildd.Net being stuck in development just because I've no more time and skill to develop Buildd.Net further. Sadly, my call for help wasn't as successful as I wanted. Only two persons wanted to help: faw and joey - and both are quite busy with other stuff.
Apparently, Buildd.Net will most likely suffer from shutting down my m68ks due to the missing m68k Etch release as well, because it was always a frontend to my m68k buildds in my eyes. All other stuff on Buildd.Net is just a nice addition to that. And when I don't operate m68k buildds on a daily basis, it's obvious that I won't invest much more time into the development of Buildd.Net. This is already true for the past year where I haven't found the time to fix some serious problems in the backend scripts and database of Buildd.Net, which basically breaks store_packages2.py (source and therefor ptracker.cgi(example) as well. I even haven't found the time to setup trac and svn again after the move to the new server during last autumn.
Erm, anyway.. back to the topic: I wish Sam the best for his period - but I don't think that he can make a big change. I doubt in general that any DPL is able to push big changes in Debian. One reason for this is the short period of just one year. Another reason is that many DDs won't let big changes to be made.

Just uploaded to Debian experimental. New features: grep-dctrl -I, tbl-dctrl -H

Huzzah! etch is released! Congratulations to the release managers, Debian-Installer developers, and all the DDs that make Debian a great operating system. tags: etch debian release

Happy Easter We had a good Easter morning at our house today. I got up around 5AM and packed plastic Easter eggs with about half candy and half healthy fruit (grapes and kiwis) and hid them around the house. There's still snow on the ground outside, so I decided not to hide any out there. Amita noticed as soon as she got up ("EGGS!!"), and ran around the house picking up eggs, breaking them in half, and eating the grapes inside. She also got an improvised Easter "basket" -- they didn't have baskets at the store, so I got a little Easter gift-bag instead -- with apples, a chocolate bunny, and a stuffed duck. Pretty good haul. This afternoon we're going out to a cabane sucre -- a traditional "sugar shack", where maple syrup is made. We'll have a big dinner, go on a horse ride, and listen to some traditional Qu bec music. It's my first time going, and I'm pretty excited. tags: easter cabane sucre easter egg hunt maj amitajune chocolate bunny maple syrup

Grindhouse Nicolas Ritoux, his girlfriend Karine, and I went to see Grindhouse on Friday night. It was a pretty fun film -- a double-feature by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, more-or-less modeled after early-'70s C-movie gore-fests. Rodriguez's half, "Planet Terror", was really good -- a campy gross-out with nods to horror-film clich s and T&A jiggle goofiness. The monsters were gross, the characters were dark, and stars Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez put in great performances. Best of all were the computer-modified soundtrack and photography, which gave a great impression of cheap, skippety, second-run film stock. I wish I could say the same about Tarantino's half, "Death Proof". After a full-length "Planet Terror", it was too slow and boring -- I almost walked out. Tarantino has always done a great job with the patter between characters in their on-screen "down time": driving in cars, waiting in bars, making plans on the phone. But the first half of "Death Proof" was about watching people you don't like say stupid things to each other while waiting for other people you don't care about. The second half, on the other hand, was pretty great. But it was almost entirely an extended car chase in beefed-up 70s muscle cars, which, like, how could that not be awesome? A New Zealander beats up Kurt Russell with a 2-meter lead pipe, and Rosario Dawson does a pick-axe kick on his throat. Cool. All in all, worth the price of admission, but the first half of "Death Proof" dragged down what could have been an excellent film. tags: grindhouse robert rodriguez quentin tarantino planet terror death proof

St. Laurent Maj, AJ and I went furniture shopping yesterday afternoon. We need to find a new, big couch for our new house, as well as a few other minor pieces. We're ditching those pieces of cheap disposable Ikea furniture that we built up over the years and trying to put together a house that's built to last. Shopping for furniture in Montreal is made considerably easier by the fact that maybe 2 dozen furniture stores are crammed between Duluth and Mont Royal on av. St. Laurent. We visited around 10 stores, just walking up and down these few blocks. Amita June loved running around the stores, and we had to keep her from pulling down giant crystal ornaments on her head. We had lunch at Taqueria Mex (not bad, but not like home) then I went to meet Niko at La ka while Maj took the baby home for a nap. We hung out at La ka for most of the day, working and talking, and ended up sitting around with a hungover Boris and Michael for a while. It's La ka -- if you sit around long enough, everyone in Montreal's Internet scene is going to walk past at some point. tags: laika la ka stlaurent furniture taqueria mex boris niko michael

Duluth is on fire So, a friend asked if I meant Duluth, Minnesota in the above entry. And that made me wonder: are rue Duluth in Montreal and Duluth, MI named after the same guy? Per Wikipedia, the city is named after Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, a French explorer who died in Montreal. Surely it's the same fellow...? Does anyone know who Duluth street is named after? tags: duluth street minnesota montreal

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 has been released - congratulations to all those involved in the release process, you've all done a fantastic job (as always ;). Now I've just got to test the upgrade for the NFS root desktop machines at work (that's going to be *sooo* much fun!) and make sure that nothing obvious breaks - I'm not expecting many problems, it *should* go quite smoothly (probably!). Might also use the "official" non-free packages for the sun j2sdk rather than using java-package, haven't decided yet (and actually, as we also use sun-j2sdk1.4, I'm going to have to use java-package for that anyways!). Hmmm, I suppose I should update all of my various build chroots and set up all the scripts that I'm going to need also - feh - that can wait for a bit. Ahh - and I'm going to need to compile an etch version of ion3 from unstable, can't be having my workstation running one of those dodgy window managers that makes it almost impossible to get anything done without using the mouse, afterall! Right - anyways - I think I shall just go faint, that was *far* too quick between sarge and etch!