There are only a few days left until the close of the XTech 2007 call for participation. XTech 2007 will be held 15-18 May 2007 in Paris, France.
As I wrote last month, the theme for this year's conference is "The Ubiquitous Web", reflecting the many ways, places and devices through which we now interact with and are affected by the web. XTech 2007 will be comprised of four thematic tracks:

• Applications: web applications, vocabularies, publishing, content management, case studies
• Browser Technologies: browsers, mobile, user interface, related issues and standards.
• Core Technology: the heart of web technology, markup, protocols, semantics and more.
• Open Data: technology, experiences and policy behind open access to data.

All these topic suggestions are of course just that; don't feel you are limited to topics mentioned explicitly in the call.XTech is always topical, so to take that angle, we'll be expecting to hear about things such as Second Life, mobile and geolocative services, progress in open standards, Ajax toolkits, OpenDocument vs Microsoft Open XML, copyright, identity, best design practices and more.Just a few more tips based on submissions so far:

• Don't worry if you can't decide which track your submission falls into: just say so in the notes, and the programme committee can place it appropriately.
• If you have something super-secret you can't talk about yet, but can do by May 2007, write to me personally and we'll try to come to a suitable arrangement.
• If you have a great excuse why you need just a few more days to respond to the call, also let me know.

Otherwise, propose away!

I have been walking to and from work lately and have become increasingly restless over not having anything to listen to, so I bought a small media player, a Samsung Z5F. First impression is it's tiny. Really tiny and I used a little while to get used to touch-buttons. Upgrading the firmware is trivial, both from Linux and Windows: the firmware download is a zip file, inside there's .dat file which you place in the root directory. When you disconnect, the player says "new firmware detected. Upgrade?", I answered yes (who wouldn't? It gives me 30% better battery life and gapless MP3 playback), it rebooted, upgraded itself and rebooted again. After a long (probably 15-20 seconds) wait where it just displayed the Samsung logo, during which I was a bit scared it was bricked, it booted up fine. It works well, it plays music and podcasts, but I have run into one strange problem with it. I was about 1/3 through the latest episode of Lugradio when I wanted to go ten seconds back to catch something somebody said, but it entirely failed to seek backwards. It seems like it either doesn't support seeking in big .ogg files or doesn't support seeking in big files or doesn't support seeking in .ogg files. Anyway, annoying bug. I'm going to download the MP3 instead to see if it has the same problem or not. Apart from that, it's a lovely, tiny little player with 44 hours of battery life and 4GB storage. Nice little toy.

My face is covered in egg. Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho found a security problem in EoC, both the 1.0.3 and the 1.2.3 versions. The problem is that EoC did not quote shell arguments properly. I have fixed the problem in 1.2.4, which contains no other changes relative to 1.2.3. This problem has the code CVE-2006-5875. You can find the 1.2.4 version from the EoC website: http://liw.iki.fi/liw/eoc/ and I have also uploaded it to Debian's unstable. Debian's stable contains 1.0.3, and I have prepared a patch for that. It is actually essentially the same patch as was used to create 1.2.4. The Debian security team has uploaded a fixed version of the 1.0.3 package to security.debian.org. I've attached it to this message in case anyone not running Debian wants to stay with 1.0.3, but I won't be releasing a 1.0.4 unless someone really needs it (if you do, please tell me immediately). For risk assessment: I was unable to come up with an exploit. Doing so would require getting a certain kind of construct through the SMTP level to EoC, and I wasn't able to make that happen, but I would not rely on it being impossible. Therefore, please upgrade immediately. I apologize for this problem. It was amateurish to let the problematic code into a released version of the program, I knew better than do that.

Today I have effectively started with my Master Project! I have been been at it for a few days already in the past weeks though, but now I’m sitting on my own spot working on some proofs. So, what am I actually doing? Well that’s still hard to put in words yet and it also requires some process algebra and general math prior knowledge, but I’ll try. My graduation supervisor is Bas Luttik and in July he co-published a paper on defining a finite equational base (a set of equations from which all others can be derived) for a specific process algebra called CCS. This paper used a specific subset of CCS, namely without restriction (hiding) and relabelling. Restriction is an operator of the process algebra to block certain actions of happening, relabelling is an operator to replace actions by other actions. Take 1 of my project is to try to consider this algebra with restriction and finding a new equational base and proof that either it works or it can not be done. This is a risky assignment because it can lead to: we have tried but haven’t gotten either results. The short period to come will entail considering CCS with restriction but without concurrency to drastically reduce the cases to be considered. If we succeed, we’ll continue with CCS with restriction and concurrency. If we do not succeed it’s quite possible we’ll change my project assignment. More to come!

(Translated from my same post in Spanish) A few days ago, McDonald published a cartoon on the end of the dictator Pinochet. Yesterday, fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet died in the Military Hospital in Santiago, after heart and lung diseases, being 91 years old. Now, current president Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, in case Pinochet is given State memorials, could be attending the ceremony (in a predominantly conservative country as Chile), even after she was tortured and persecuted under the dictatorship and his father was murdered under the regimen, after serving Salvador Allende‘ government. Shitty life, huh? Viva Chile!, just as the ironman stated.

I work at the Ministerio de Administraciones P blicas, the MAP. My main task there is to administer an email cluster for something between 8.000 and 10.000 users, based on free software (LDAP, Postfix, Amavis...) which has been pretty fulfilling so far.

The problem they have is a lot of consultants from external companies that come for big or small projects and they know of no easy way of being able to grant enough permissions to achieve certain tasks without giving away the root password and having to change it every other day. I am one of these external consultants, only I am there for a long term project. I have been there for more than a year and a half now, and our contract was just renovated for two more years. This basically means I am doing my job pretty well.

But a couple of months ago, the company I work for, Alanta, agreed with the MAP on me giving a 12h a training session on sudo. After spending 100 hours in preparing my slides on a sudo workshop (spanish only, sorry), starting from file permissions to ssh public-private key pairs, and ending with sudo, a high amount of stress, as I had to work full time as I prepared this in paralel, I bitterly complained to my boss. (That s when the cleaning started, BTW).

So we had a nice lunch in which I was given a 200 EUR 2GB 2nd Generation Silver Ipod Nano. Which is nice, but taking into account that when I worked for IBM as a certified trainer I made something between 24-60 EUR per hour, depending on the subject, and all the material (slides, exercises, TOC and Trainer material) was already done for me, so I just had to prepare and give my lessons, I felt patronized and a bit insulted, even if I did not expect any compensation for this extra effort that really damaged my (mental) health. Getting presents in exchange for hard work doesn t make sense for me, specially when I can hardly make it to the end of the month, constantly being in (small, to be honest) debt.

But you could be making more money, couldn t you? Yes, sure. But at what price? I like the relaxed work environment and the lack of sexism in my current project. I have plenty of spare time, and my life quality is overall great, I can walk home from work, I am not juiced and then disposed of, despite the punctual stressful periods everyone gets every once in a while (which are rare here, at MAP).

And this thing will never run IpodLinux or Rockbox. I feel like I want to throw it out the window. It lacks support for my favourite music file formats, UTF-8 and hangs up more than MS Windows 95.

There were more shocking news for me when I got back home yesterday. Via Toni Hermoso, I learned that Toni Cucarella, a Valencian writer I recently discovered, just announced that he has abandoned his writing activities, just a little bit after announcing he wouldn't further update his blog. I learned about Toni Cucarella's literature aproximately one year ago, when I heard about a new novel, Quina lenta agonia, la dels ametlers perduts, on the radio, which sounded interesting. The book fascinated me as soon as I started reading. Describing the life of a group of children in the outskirts of X tiva, a small city south of Val ncia, in the late 1960s, Cucarella managed to transmit some feelings about my childhood during the summers of the early 80s around my town in the inner province of Castell . It wasn't anything in particular what did this, but the way the book was written, which managed to describe how these kids lived happily and in freedom around their houses, regardless their economic status and the difficulties their families went through. All of this reminded me of my sister, cousins and friends running around the streets and fields, away from our parents or any adults, in a time when nobody thought this was dangerous or irresponsible. The only two sins were to play on the road or to get back home a lot after the sunset. Toni Cucarella has been very vocal against the Language Authorities in Val ncia regarding the unity of the Catalan language, and specifically against the Acad mia Valenciana de la Llengua, a recently created institution which now has competence over the "Valencian language", something that was previously in the hands of a scientific institution like the Universitat de Val ncia. He has finally burned out, not only due to the bad situation Catalan literature is in the Valencian Country, but also because leaving aside two very prominent exceptions, Valencian authors are basically ignored in Catalunya, making their subsistence quite difficult. I hope Toni can build some new motivations after some time and the public can enjoy new novels written by him in the future, as well as more of those very interesting blog entries we had got used to reading every few days. In the meanwhile, thanks for your writings, Toni, and good luck with your new activities!

The Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 came into effect on Friday 8 December. It is now legal to use CE-marked "micro" FM transmitters, which are intended for linking portable ogg players to nearby FM radios. Transmitters can have at most 50mW power (if I understand page 35 of Ofcom's Interface Requirements 2030), compared for the local 100W commercial station on top of the hill, 25W for a full Restricted Service Licensee, 1W for low-power FM (LPFM) and 300mW for stadium commentary stations. Update: Kimmo Jukarainen / OH3GNU commented:

"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."

Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old ps2ascii indeed confirms

v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.

Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:

"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."

Rob Hart commented:

"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."

Andy Parkins commented:

"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."

The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:

"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."

Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.

The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use.Before you read on, don't forget that the XTech 2007 call for participation ends this week. The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed.Both of these services support XML output, but only with the semantics crammed awkwardly into RSS or Atom. Neither have plain XML for public consumption (some is available behind a registration protected API), but do support serialization via other formats. We don't really have "XML on the Web". We have RSS on the web, plus a bunch of mostly JSON and YAML for those who didn't care for pointy brackets.Did we as supporters of XML get it wrong somehow? I think we did. The success of the XML project and the W3C as a unifying forum was seductive, and we felt more bound to the edicts of the W3C than we thought. Our justified love of open standards inadvertently promoted a straitjacketed approach to using XML. XML was felt to need a schema language.What we missed was that settling on schemas for data serialization represented much more of an up-front commitment than most developers could really make. The rise of agile programming techniques further emphasizes the hazards of prematurely freezing a design.Schemas never really came with great evolution or migration strategies.
And of course it didn't help that both DTDs and W3C XML Schema are pretty darn obscure. Somehow we never got the word out, despite the "standalone" XML declaration, that it's OK to spread schema-less XML around.We had of course the Simple XML movement, but it came to little. Other voices pointed the way forward. Walter Perry notably promoted an agenda that required little a priori agreement between communicators, but it gained little ground in common thought. Ironically it took James Clark to push the agenda of developer convenience, with the RELAX NG compact syntax giving us all permission not to think in angle brackets.Meanwhile, busy developers with work to do on the web have created non-XML syntaxes such as JSON and YAML. Though I deliberately closeted myself in XML for a long time, I have come to appreciate the utility of these syntaxes.One of the more intriguing developments is that the Semantic Web crowd, while still very much W3C oriented, have really proved themselves more flexible in their attitude than the XML world at large. RDF/XML is hardly the only acceptable way to approach the throne of Tim, and the man himself threw out XML syntax pretty early on with the development of the N3 scribble format. More recently, the work on GRDDL to scrape semantics from HTML has shown the semweb folks' amenability to outside initiatives such as microformats.Maybe it's not such a bad world, as making an XML mapping of YAML, JSON and friends isn't really very hard. I'd just like to get the message out to web application developers that Plain Old XML is fine by me. I live in hope yet that the rise of REST will hit this home.So while markup has most definitely won on the web, it's a shame XML hasn't yet achieved as much as it could. It's not too late for an injection of pragmatism and a little less constraint.

Saw this on Baen’s Bar

Loser- INTP 46% Extraversion, 53% Intuition, 66% Thinking, 33% Judging

Talked to another human being lately? I’m serious. You value knowledge above ALL else. You love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. The fact that nobody else cares still hasn’t become apparent to you… Nerd’s a great word to describe you, and I seriously couldn’t care less about the different definitions of the word and why you’re actually more of a geek than a nerd. Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking that. You want every single miniscule fact and theory to be presented correctly. Critical? Sarcastic? Cynical? Pessimistic? Just a few words to describe you when you’re at your very best…*cough* Sorry, I mean worst. Picking up the dudes or dudettes isn’t something you find easy, but don’t worry too much about it. You can blame it on your personality type now. On top of all this, you’re shy. Nice one, wench. No wonder you’re on OKCupid! Now, quickly go and delete everything about “theoretical questions” from your profile page. As long as nobody tries to start a conversation with you, just MAYBE you’ll now have a chance of picking up a date. But don’t get your hopes up. I am interested though. If a tree fell over in a forest, would it really make a sound? ***************** If you want to learn more about your personality type in a slightly less negative way, check out this. ***************** The other personality types are as follows… Loner - Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving Pushover - Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging Criminal - Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Borefest - Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging Almost Perfect - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Freak - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging Crackpot - Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging Clown - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving Sap - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging Commander - Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Do Gooder - Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging Scumbag - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Busybody - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging Prick - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving Dictator - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 53% on Extraversion You scored higher than 25% on Intuition You scored higher than 52% on Thinking You scored higher than 15% on Judging

Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

On thursday, I bought me a digital camera; a Nikon D50. That's the cheapest DSLR camera they had at the shop where I bought it—they had models for prices going up to just under 7000. The latter obviously is "slightly" out of budget for me, but this one isn't bad, at all. I took some pictures with it on friday, and yesterday I went to "De Oude Landen", a local (and rather unique) piece of nature, to try out my new camera. Most of the pictures I took then were crap due to bad lighting; I guess I need to read the manual a bit more. We'll see. In any case, it's a fun piece of machinery, and it seems my long-lost photography sk1llz are coming back now (I did a photography course when I was a 13-14yo). Love it. Roland Mas pointed out that f-spot is a great application to manage pictures, and I have to agree with him. Apart from the fact that it is a bit pedantically gnome-esque in its settings dialog ("settings, what's that? Oh, right, that's where you enable the screensaver"), it has a whole bunch of nice and interesting features, such as the ability to tag pictures, export them to CD or web-based applications, and more interesting stuff. A bit too much clickety-clickety, but then I guess it's impossible to design a good command-line based interface to manage graphical subject matters. Setting up gallery on sarge is not even half as hard as I'd feared, either. Long live the Debian apache team. So, yes, the above means I have a gallery online. Take a look if you care; I personally very much like this one.

Last Friday I was tinkering with apcupsd and rrdtool and decided to join both: I’d monitor the mains voltage during a period of 24 hours, to see if it varied during the day. Well, apparently, it does. To my untrained eye it looks like it varies with the load in the electric network: the voltage is at its highest during nighttime, and hits its lowest point at 13:30 (solar mid-day in Galicia); then rises again while people is having lunch then dips until after 18:00. The discontinuity at about 20:15 was due to my briefly stopping apcupsd to change a configuration in my UPS. Now, I don’t know if the mains voltage really varies so much during the day or if it is because my UPS’s voltmeter is a piece of shit (which it, apparently, is) and is affected by the presence of non-resistive loads or whatnot, but the graph is interesting anyhow. Detailed explanations by people who know more about electricity than yours truly will be appreciated. On an unrelated subject, I’m teaching myself how to juggle a reverse cascade. To do it properly, it requires better timing and more homogeneous throws than I’m currently able to do. So, to master it, I first need to suck less at juggling. We’re working on it.

There's a story going around the neo-con blogs titled "The Squirrel and the Grasshopper". It was forwarded to me by a business associate with the claim that it's "right on the money". It's strange that someone could be considered to be "right on the money" for Australia when essentially the same text is posted in the UK, New Zealand, and Sweden (from a 30 second google search - I'm sure that the neo-cons in other countries have posted it too).

The following are the neo-con ideas promoted by the story in question:

1. To mis-represent a local main-stream political party that is known for representing workers (the ALP in the case of Australia) as being extremist and associated with Greenpeace (an organization that is out of favor at the moment and disliked by many people who vote for main-stream parties).
2. To spread the "liberal press" lie that wing-nuts like to believe. Any analysis of the press will show that most multi-national media organizations are quite biased towards the right-wing groups.
3. Making false claims about the legal system to drive support for recent fascistic legal changes. In the case of Australia this means allowing employers to lay off employees and immediately re-hire them at a lower rate, allowing employees to be laid off if factory equipment breaks down, and for almost any reason you can imagine. Driving the idea that the judges are incompetent and therefore imposing legislation to remove judicial discretion is an important step in removing civil rights.
4. Claims that the government is communist and takes the property from the middle-classes and gives it to unworthy people. In fact the opposite is true (for Australia at least). Large companies and wealthy individuals are routinely given community property. The toll roads are the best example of this, the government closes public roads that can be used as an alternative to a toll road, and then politicians get paid off after they leave office. Far from taking money from people who work (as the neo-con propaganda claims) the government allows big corporations to do so with impunity. The Australian government (as many governments in first-world countries) has been becoming increasingly fascistic recently.
5. The claim that asylum seekers are terrorists. If the government wanted to stop terrorism then they would cease involvement with those parts of the world. However only plebians (people like us) are likely to be hurt by terrorism so the government has little motivation to stop it - it's good for winning elections! By joining the invasion of Iraq the Australian government helped al Quaeda establish new training bases while also giving al Quaeda (and related organizations) a reason to target Australia. Also whenever a war is started people will be forced to leave their homes and seek asylum else-where. If you don't want asylum seekers seeking entry to your country then you don't want to mess up other countries and force people to flee.
6. Support for the "war on drugs". That war has been at best a stale-mate and generally a loss for a century now. The approach that is being adopted experimentally of legal supply of hard drugs to addicts seems to have more promise. Incidentally the breaches in border security that are established for the purpose of drug smuggling are available for any illegal purpose that pays enough - if al Quaeda wanted to smuggle weapons into a first-world country they would probably get drug dealers to do it for them. I'll blog more on this topic in future.

There you have it, The Squirrel and the Grasshopper covered all of the neo-con propaganda bases apart from the pro-Christian angle.

For the benefit of anyone who is thinking of forwarding on a "parable" in future, the first thing you might want to do is a google search on it. Search for comments and also search for who is promoting it. If a message you are considering forwarding is being promoted by people who are obviously racist or who discriminate against people on the basis of religion then you might consider whether you want to associate yourself with them by forwarding the message.

Fun day today. Maj, Amita and I went up to the Christmas tree lot at Parc Lahaie on St. Joseph and St. Laurent. It was packed with people there for No l dans le Parc, a month-long Christmas festival held in two parks in Montreal. Of course, we had no idea it was going on before we got there. Christmas tree lots in Quebec are a lot more festive than the businesslike lots in, say, California. There is often a pen full of farm animals -- like the Christmas manger, eh? -- that kids can look at and pet. Since it's often ass-cold, there's also usually a fireplace or a barrel fire. For some weird reason, all the lots in our neighborhood are in public parks, but that might have to do with a dearth of big parking lots in the Plateau. But No l dans le Parc was even bigger than all that. When we arrived, there were two blues players in separate giant plastic globes hovering in the trees above the campfire. In two other (terrestrial) booths, a Quebec traditional music band was playing silently behind a glass window while a radio crew in the other booth broadcast them live. There was a concession stand serving bi re and vin chaud (of which we ordered two), and an open-air museum with fun stuff for kids. We ended up hanging out for more than an hour. Amita June developed an intense fascination with the sheep in the petting zoo, and even after Papa had bought an 8' tree and tied it to the roof, she insisted on going back to the pen and saying goodbye one more time. The tree looks great in our living room -- it's almost scraping the ceiling, but it fills up its corner nicely. tags: christmas tree montreal noel dans le parc quebec christmas amitajune

Lina and Jeremy's Xmas party Even better tonight was our friends Lina and Jeremy's Christmas Party, at their house. Maj whipped up some steamed artichokes to take over, and I put together mixins for hot buttered rums, and we headed over to their great place in Little Italy. We got there early and Lina had made mulled wine -- a big pot of it, based on the recipe from Clarence the Angel. Amita June headed off with Clea and Sylvie, two girls much older than her, and although she couldn't really communicate with them she followed along with what they were doing just fine. The under-10 crowd eventually settled around the TV, which was originally on Hockey Night in Canada but eventually switched over to a tape of Zoboomafoo. So her Mama and I got to hang out with grownups for a change, which I at least was ill-equipped to do, but made a game attempt. Lots of nice people, including L and J's upstairs neighbor Annabelle, whose band The Wailin Jennys is doing pretty darn good lately. They're up for a couple slots in the Canadian Folk Music Awards tomorrow. Good for them. I made a big batch of HBRs and they were quite a hit. It's such an easy recipe, I'll share it right here:

• 1 oz dark rum
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp butter
• 8 oz boiling water

Mix it all together in a coffee mug and serve when the butter's melted. Keeps you warm when you need it. We came home early, of course -- the baby's getting independent, but not that independent -- and now we're rresting from a long day. tags: lina jeremy xmas party annabelle the wailin jennys

Wikitravel RSS So, I know this sounds crazy, but we've never really had much of an RSS presence for Wikitravel. We've got an RSS feed for Recent Changes, of course, as does every MediaWiki site, but never anything else. But I was talking to Jack Herrick of wikiHow recently, and he was telling me that their Daily Howto RSS feed is one of their biggest vectors of people coming into the site. Wikitravellers make updated news and information on our Main Page all the time, so I figure it'd be useful to make an RSS feed of new stuff from Wikitravel, too. So I've started scraping the frequently-updated parts of the site to make them available through a Wikitravel News feed. It includes the strange-travel trivia from Wikitravel:Discover and the Travel news info, too. There's been a lot of work in it -- making feeds out of wiki pages requires some assumptions and creative markup. But I'm getting closer, and I think the lessons I'm learning with our English version will help making RSS feeds for the other language versions easier. I'll be adding in more features for English, too, as I learn how to scrape them better. tags: wikitravel rss wikihow travel news trivia daily howto

Wow! What a week. (Click here for all of this week's photos) On Sunday afternoon, we walked into the house and saw this:



Yes, over the weekend, the cabinet makers had installed the cabinets earlier than expected! I never expected that I would get excited about kitchen cabinets, but I sure was. They look great.

My grandma's china cabinet is back up in the dining room. They've removed the tile from the dining room, exposing the wood floor underneath. The floor restoration people have spent some time doing some patching already.

Doors and doorjams are starting to go in. Trim is arriving. And the wood in the wall alongside one of the staircases has been seamlessly extended.

It's exciting. (photos here)

And check this out:



That hunk of ice is the exhaust from our furnace. No joke! The furnace is so efficient that, when its running, it's a moist and slightly warm breeze blowing out of that exhaust pipe. In winter, it condenses and drips down below, forming an ice hunk.

The last couple of days have resulted in a number of fun things.

• An OLPC turned up. They're ridiculously neat devices , and it's impossible to describe just how amazing the transflective screen is in black and white mode. Even for an early prototype, the device feels remarkably solid - giving it to people rather larger than the intended market still didn't result in it being turned into a thin paste. We've already been able to get video and sound off it and broadcast to another machine thanks to the wonders of gstreamer's pipeline magic - even with a fairly puny processor, it's easily able to manage bidirectional conversation at QCIF resolutions.
  
• Canola has been released in beta form. No source yet, which is a shame, since it's probably the most useful application for the 770 since Maemo Mapper. A bit of poking revealed that fuppes currently seems to be more stable than gmediastreamer, and it's now possible to wander around the house streaming music, pictures and video off another machine. It's alarmingly like the future has arrived, especially since it'll happily do the same thing off the Internet. When experimenting with it we were a bit disturbed to find that it had found a share called "Rob's Music" before we tried setting anything up, but the presence of Croft No. 5 made it pretty clear that it had picked up Rob's Rhythmbox setup via DAAP. It also interacts fairly well with:
  
• The patching I've done to gnome-obex-server. The patch is here. Pretty straightforward - it looks at the file extension of incoming files and then saves them to different locations depending on the filetype. It'll also then execute a default command on each of the files. After adding a bluetooth adapter to my TV machine, I can now send pictures to it from my phone and have them displayed on the TV automatically. I've also got it hacked up so it pokes fuppes into refreshing the database, which means I can then also view them on the 770 using Canola. Mad convergence action. There's no sort of configuration UI for this yet, so you need to set the image_savedir, video_savedir and music_savedir gconf fields under /apps/gnome-obex-sever/. Default actions use image_action, video_action and music_action.
  

In other news, I hate fruitflies.

I can't really guess at how many social networking sites I've signed up to over the years. I was thinking about this a bit as I noticed some more LinkedIn mail. It's a site that seemed interesting, until I realised that I don't need to pay another company for the privilege of asking friends to introduce me to their friends. But I was thinking through the bits of electronic interaction that I have, and thinking back to my days at Hollinger where we actively spent time thinking about what content we could provide that would keep the user moving from one of our sites to another of our sites, always looking at our ads.

With this lens on, I was thinking about where I would take Google next if I were in a similar position there. I think that Google's future probably relies primarily on their crappiest product: Orkut. What places like MySpace do well is provide what I think of as the old CompuServe experience. You go, and in one spot you have different forums, chat, and downloads.

But what if Google were to make Orkut not suck? They've already started integrating Talk into it (although it still doesn't work with Apps for Your Domain), and I can only imagine that we'll soon see your account only a short while from where your Orkut page shows your public blog entries, as well as allows you to post to your own blog, or a community one. The relationships there are rich enough with Friends Groups and a gradient of friendship that the community FOAF bits could be represented easily. Picassa and their page builder things would allow people to setup myspace-like places for themselves without ever leaving the familiar framework of Orkut. Business could use all of these tools for internal corporate things, marking certain items as publish while the integrated checkout functionality let them to business quickly and efficiently.

But what other interactions then? Could we book a doctor's appointment by looking at their Calendar through their corporate page? Easily book venues for the band with the same? Use the presence notification in Talk figure out if there's someone I can deal with right now to finalise the plans for the upcoming gig?

And the cool part is that from what Google's done so far, they'll cheerfully let you integrate your own product into theirs through some sort of open standard.

I prefer the study of the law over being personally embroiled with the law in the real world, but if indeed Blue Cross Blue Shield does not pony up the money to cover my recent mole surgeries, I think I am going to take them to small claims court, which I know nothing of, except that it is a cheap way to try to get something done when you are getting screwed by a large faceless organization or some facefull twit. So the basic story is that since I had a lapse in my insurance (thanks to good Old Rutgers University!!), when I decided that I should buy my own just in case, I fell into a “pre-existing” clause, which means basically the insurance company can make your life a living bureaucratic hell because they have to review and approve every single procedure or doctor visit for over a year. Super. So of course when I got my mole diagnosis (dysplastic) and then the surgeries (the total cost being almost 3500) they went for review, but of course Blue Cross is taking their sweet time… The derm office has called for me to get involved so I spent the morning talking to a Ms. Flood from Blue Cross/Blue Shield and she explained to me that all the documentation from the doctor’s office was only received November 1st and then they will take 60-90 days to review the case before making the decision. Now, the insurance coordinator at the dermatology office told me that Blue Cross told her that Blue Cross can take up to FIVE years (not months, Years) to make a decision which seems, well just like they type of thing they would do, but somewhat illegal, maybe, no???!!! Anyway, my plan is to wait those 90 days and then if they deny my coverage or keep flip flopping around saying they need more info, I think I am going to proceed to the small claims court option. Honestly I don’t know if this is a realistic option (though I hope my lawyer friends write back soon) and it is a pain in the neck but I refuse refuse refuse to let this go…. because well, my mole condition was not pre-existing! Sure I had them, but they were happy healthy moles… And I even had seen another dermatologist with my Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance about 6 months earlier and all was good!! Yes I am upset Anyone else ever fought the insurance industrial complex along these lines? Or have used small claims courts? This makes me want to stay in Canada… forever.. but actually I am due back in NYC by August for a permanent job but more on that later.

Just in case you haven't heard of this yet: GnuPG = 1.4.5 contains a remotely exploitable security issue which has been fixed in 1.4.6. You should really upgrade ASAP, as this problem can (theoretically) occur when GnuPG decrypts/checks encrypted email messages/signatures (for example). If you're running Debian unstable: apt-get install gnupg

UK media regulator Ofcom released Ofcom sets Digital Switchover related licence conditions about the terrestial broadcast network, including a consultation on self-help relays. Essentially, the public service station multiplexes (BBC Royal Charter, Digital 3 & 4 and Freeview, labelled 1, 2 and B on this list ) will be available from all current public analogue transmitters, but the commercial multiplexes (SDN/itv and National Grid Wireless, which are A, C and D on the list) only need to continue the current coverage. So, free-to-air satellite reception will still be better for radio, music and films in most current poor-DTT areas.