I am in the Zurich airport en route to South Africa. I was thrilled that I had the right plug-adaptor to use because I have a long lay over. But when I wanted to pop it out to leave and explore the city, I found a very stuck adaptor. Very. 2 British guys assisted but to no avail. It may stay here forever so fellow Americans, you will always have a perma-adaptor in the Zurich airport. It is in the “Pearl: Bar” across from Bur Erry.. Just look and you will find.

Hey, I'm sure you're wondering what DeDeBu is, aren't you? That's the Debian Dumbest Bug contest! This is a new monthly contest which consists to choose the more stupid, silly, obvious and fun bug. How to win? Simply drop me an email with the bug number. I will maintain a list of candidats. Then, a selected and feed jury will choose the best of them.
If the bug you reported win, you and the reporter will win something like your weight in Ubuntu CD or the right to write my new book, Debian for dummies. For example, I give you a bug reported by Florent Bayle, #355455, which the first candidate for July. (Please note that I do this for fun, not for raising personnal attacks ;-))

Unwanted cc:s on debian mailinglists clearly qualifies as "unsolicited bulk e-mail" for me, aka spam. So from now on I will send personal replies to those people asking them to stop (because very often people reply to those emails and keep the cc:s). Also I will keep them in a list of shame. Please, read your email before sending and include the headers in this reading. Thanks.

In completly unrelated news yesterday I finally (after nine month) fixed the layout of this blog, so you can sensibly read it with a webbrowser as

Simon Phipps: “Stewart is spot-on with Flickr’s policy and paradoxically will keep my business by allowing me to leave at any time.” Absolutely. This post nicely explains something I’ve noticed about my own actions recently, namely why I’ve remained a del.icio.us user even as I’ve become less than enthralled with its new owner: I can export my data at any time from del.icio.us and take it to a competing service. As Simon so eloquently explains, I remain a customer because it’s easy to stop being one. To compete, a rival service needs to not only provide a better product but also make it equally simple to take my business elsewhere, and most service providers don’t seem to be in any hurry to let me do that. Furthermore, the usual reasons for moving data elsewhere, better integration with other providers’ services or more compelling features in a competing service, are less important when the service I’m already using has an open, well-documented API that allows me to do whatever I want with my data without needing to export it.

In less than a month, I'll be flying for one year to Ghana, where I was offered a job as a teacher and network administrator at an International College in Tema. The school wants to get started using Free Software and so Ralph Amissah, a fellow Debian Developer, asked me if I'm interested. I was, so I got the job.I don't know yet my exact tasks there, and I don't know yet if I can make a difference, but if I can, I'll try to spread the word about Free Software. In my opinion, Free Software can play a role in giving a country like Ghana technological independence and allows for their own developments in this area. My favourite Linux distribution will be Debian, of course, and I'll keep you, especially on planet.debian.org, updated on my progress. I have orginially looked for a project in the developing world to work on after my Abitur (German Highschool Diploma), but I haven't found something in time, so I started my studies in mathematics and computer science. Last year at DebConf 5, I talked with a few people about things to do to fight the Digital Divide, including Kurt Gramlich, Mark Shuttleworth and Ralph, who contacted my in the winter. @Ralph: Thank you!Note that the non-technical reports are blogged in German and won't appear on the planet, so if you're interested, see my blog directly. Pictures will appear at the usual place.

So I've spent the last 8 days at Fantasia, neglecting friends, family, my health and Debian work. Probably a good time to look back at what I've seen so the memories don't melt away has they have other years.

• The Descent: A British horror flick, about 6 female spelunkers. I was sold right there. It had a very satisfying amount of suspense, and overall was a lot of fun. The monsters do lose some of their scariness once you start to see them unfortunately.
• Seven Swords: A fairly standard group of amazing warriors fight an evil army. It was pretty average, drags a bit. The villain "Fire Wind" was entertaining.
• Tokyo Zombie ( ): A Japanese zombie spoof starring Tadanobu Asano sporting an afro. It had some pretty good laughs, but the last half kind of drags.
• A Bittersweet Life: A Korean gangster revenge flick. Pretty standard sort of story but well executed. Very enjoyable.
• Death Trance: Stars Steven Seagal's son. Enough said. Avoid at all costs.
• My Scary Girl: A Korean romantic comedy about a 30 year old virgin getting together with a cute killer. Some good laughs, the ending is a bit disapointing.
• Citizen Dog: An excellent Thai film reminiscent of Am lie. They showed a reel of the director's Thai TV commercials before the film which were good fun as well.
• A Chinese Tall Story: An extremely random Chinese big budget movie. Not very entertaining and somewhat puzzling (Why did the Buddha have crystal earmuffs?).
• Funky Forest: the First Contact ( : the First Contact): This was a totally messed up movie, full of short vignettes, by a someone who clearly liked Naked Lunch. I enjoyed it, but that probably means I have severe mental problems.
• Lost In Wu Song: A very pleasant low budget Chinese movie about a starry-eyed dreamer trying to make a movie about Wu Song. Interesting blend of the difficulties of getting the movie made with reveries about Wu Song.
• Murder, Take One: A cop movie crossed with reality TV, Korean style. Couldn't really capture my interest.
• The Art of Fighting: Another Korean one, this time about a kid training to get back at school bullies, mostly by fighting dirty. It was fun, the old tough guy character being pretty cool.
• Ils (Them): A French horror movie about a couple in Romania and there house being invaded by a gang of... well I won't ruin it. Really had me on the edge of my seat, once it gets going the suspense doesn't let up. Apparently inspired by true events.
• Strange Circus ( ): This one was packed with people. The story is a little difficult to explain, but basically it's about a mother and daughter who suffer sexual and physical abuse, and both lose there minds over it. Very disturbing imagery and fairly graphic sex scenes. A bit hard to follow in the beginning and lots of twists and turns throughout but comes together nicely in the end I thought. Probably my favorite of the festival so far.
• God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand ( ): I actually missed this one because I didn't pay enough attention to what time it was playing. Although I did see the first ten minutes of it when I went to see Tokyo Zombie because of a tape screw up. I don't think I missed much.

So only 8 movies left to see. So far it's been pretty good.

TNTnet, just uploaded to Debian, looks interesting. Basically it offers JSP-/PHP-like embedding of C++ code into web pages (or the other way round). Well, if you want to be precise, the syntax is actually much closer to HTML::Mason, a perl-based web application framework I've used some years ago. You can bet that these pages, compiled into native code, are hard to beat speed-wise... Think of compiling your website into your webserver. It's obviously not suited for wide audiences - you can have your users upload PHP files, but you probably won't allow them to upload C++ code - but more for high-performance sites with specialized applications. I have, however, one major gripe with it: The syntax is not XML. I wish they would have picked true XML as data format, instead on basically using string processing. I hate how many people treat webpages as mere character strings with some special characters instead of structured data serialized in some way or another. I don't want to be stuck using a line-based editor for structured data forever. I'm still using vim, and I'll probably continue for a while, but for XML I'm actually just waiting for an editor with a true understanding of XML and the power and speed-of-use of vim... KID remains my favourite way of generating web pages. It's templating transparently embedded in a XHTML file using a separate XML namespace. And it's actually compiling the templates into python modules. P.S. if your ever need the Dummy 16 and Dummy17 functions, get them from microsoft (excel) now! No need to write them yourself anymore! (Dummy 1-15 are apparently discontinued.) P.P.S. I just wanted to point out, that I'm convinced that embedding much code into a layout file is a bad idea (one of the reasons why I despise PHP). Keep logics and layout separate. KID for example is quite good at that. In my DNSoupdate tool for example, all the template contains is loop constructs and simple case disinctions. This also brings me to my biggest gripe with KID: it depends on python. I don't see a way of using the same template with a different language. So maybe I'll actually go back to some TAL solution or so that is a bit more portable templating-wise (and still perfectly reuseable XML).

I keep my Google Alerts keyed for news about Wikipedia, so I just got a link this morning to an article in the Guardian about Larry Sanger. Sanger was the original editor of Wikipedia, when the project had some semblance of editorial organization. When he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, Sanger left the project, and has been a gadfly for the project ever since. His article on Kuro5hin, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, was a call for better quality on the project. I think Sanger is wp:Stuart Sutcliffe of Wikipedia -- the wp:Fifth Beatle who missed out on the project's success. I'd be a pretty bitter Herb myself if it was me in that position. I also think his criticisms are way off the mark. Not that Wikipedia doesn't have quality problems -- it does. Grievous ones. But the quality problems aren't with the factual accuracy, but with the poor level of writing, kitchen-sink compositional strategy, and sloppy logical development. Sanger makes the same mistake that many Wikipedians do -- overemphasizing the characteristics and needs of contributors. Wikipedians are great, and their generosity of time and energy has made one of the crowning achievements of the Internet. (Disclaimer: I've been a Wikipedian since 2002, and I'm an admin on the English Wikipedia, so I have some bias.) But their value comes from serving readers, not from serving themselves. Many of Wikipedia's quality problems come from a feeling of entitlement on the part of editors -- that the most important thing is to make sure every contributor gets their say. Too often, we use the wp:NPOV rule as a conflict-resolution mechanism rather than as a guideline to writing good articles. Sanger's solution -- putting "experts" back in the driver's seat -- will drive his new Digital Universe project. But I'm not sure he's focusing on the right part of the problem. Sure, scientists and historians know their subjects in-depth, but that typically means they don't have the perspective to create accessible articles for the general public. The hoi polloi probably do a better job writing their own summaries at their own level than the Ivory Tower can. Grand plans for saving Wikipedia are like favorite characters on the Simpsons -- everybody's got one. Still, I'll give mine (plan, not favorite): what Wikipedia needs isn't scientists and historians, but writers and editors (in the traditional sense -- r dacteurs, redactors). Engaging that community's time and energy is going to be crucial to the project's success. Oh, also: Manjula. tags: wikipedia wiki editor larry sanger npov redaction experts digital universe manjula nahasapeemapetilon

Today, the uninstallabilities went down even more. Istanbul has been updated from unstable, and is now installable again. So, this leaves us with:

• 0 uninstallable packages on powerpc, alpha and mips*!
• the only uninstallable package on i386, stars has been rebuilt, and should go into testing tomorrow or so - so we can expect 0 uninstallable packages on 5 arches by then.
• ia64 still has libevolution-cil uninstallable; a rebuild of evolution-sharp might solve it.
• Some of the remaining 16 packages on amd64 are connected via the uninstallability of rpm to the neon/perl-transition; the major issue there is that perl FTBFS on a couple of architectures right now. But everything looks rather smooth there, once we resolve the perl issues.
• For the other architectures, not so much progress has happened.

MX1000: I've been trying to get horizontal scrolling working on my logitech mx1000 mouse with the tilt wheel. So far no luck. I've used the various howtos to get all the other buttons going but the tilt wheel is still alluding me. If anybody has this working I'd like to know how. Xorg7 of course.


Multiple Monitors: So I've been running with multiple montors for 5 years now at work and at home and I've settled in on standard way of using them. Initially I used xinerama on a Matrox card at work on two 17" screens. I make heavy use of virtual desktops/workspaces (whatever you want to call them) so I didn't like switching both monitors at once too much. At home and my current job I use dual head on NVIDIA cards (not Twinview). I tend to leave the second monitor as things I monitor while switching between email, terminals, browsers and anything else on the first head. At work I also make use of x2x to send input to some server monitors wrapping around my desk. Little X tricks impress the designers.


RIP Syd Barrett.

It's rare that I find a letter to the editor of a newspaper profound enough to be worth tearing out and saving. Today was one of those days. I am pleased to discover that the full text is visible online, so I can share Ashley Frohwein's letter Insight on Fourth of July flag burning here. Sadly, I'm not always proud of my country... but some of the principles on which it was founded remain as noble and inspiring as ever!

Yesterday evening, I noticed that the 2.5 release of support software for the Belgian electronic ID card had come out earlier this week (on 2006-07-04, to be exact). I didn't know, nor notice. Sigh. I knew this release was forthcoming; I had been working with some Zetes developers on the code a few days last month, and they had implemented a number of my suggestions. Always nice to have a working relationship with your upstream. They hadn't implemented everything I had pointed them to (mainly due to lack of time because of a deadline they were running up against), but my suggestions had at least avoided some serious bugs that would otherwise have been in the release. Great improvement over the 2.4 release, which couldn't even be built due to a serious SNAFU in the code. But, now, this isn't happening anymore. The only thing is that Zetes isn't the one doing official releases of the Belpic code; that honour is left to FEDICT. And while Zetes happily talks to me, I can't seem to get anyone inside FEDICT to talk to me. I've sent them some emails in the past, asking them some questions, but I've never had any of them reply to me. Like I said: Sigh. Oh well. So yesterday, late at night, I found out that the new release was out, and I promptly updated my packages. Err, well, at least, I almost did so. I actually postponed it to today, since, well, it was late already. And it is again, now, with my packages almost being finished; I had to redo some bits since, somehow, I seem to have lost my work of last month. Grmbl. Anyway. The packages seem ready now. When I get home, I'll test them just one more time, and then they'll be ready for upload. Whoo!

Over the past two days I’ve started two community things:

• The Debian Administration website now allows users to submit adverts which will be intermixed with the Google Adsense ones.
• I’m looking at renting a dedicated host to share out as a semi-co-op with about six people.

The adverts are basically modelled after Kuro5hin.org’s community adverts - the difference is these are free. (Should remain free, but no promises.) The idea of sharing out a Xen host with a few people means I’d get some seperation and wouldn’t overload my existing host which is getting a little strained with the Debian-Admin site, mostly because of my own lazy coding, and popularity. Still work in progress. I’ve priced a couple of companies for the hardware and support and figure that it can be run just above cost with 6x ( 10 a month). Still waiting for a few people to get back to me about whether they’ll commit to a years worth of cash up front..

This weekend I’ve started getting militant about fighting spam. Every single spam mail I’ve recieved today and yesterday I have reported to the originators ISP. Most likely this won’t achieve much, but it made me feel slightly better. It also gave me a new appreciation for exactly how much spam I receive, and where from. My top three sources of spam are:

• security@debian.org
• skx@debian.org
• freshmeat@steve.org.uk - An address previously used only here

To combat this I’ve done two things:

• Removed the “freshmeat” email alias, and replaced the address with a link to a “contact me” page + email address in an image.
• Started adjusting my mailserver.

My mailserver will now refuse to accept mails from hosts without reverse DNS. I think that is a legal thing to do, but I’ve never done it before. That combined with greylisting has cut my spam counts by about 200 messages a day. The only other thing I’ve done this weekend which was at all computery was to start writing a test suite for the Apache module I’ve been working on - which is now included in Debian sid.

mondo-2.08-2-2 fixes three bugs, namely #369321, #222052 and #292782.

I am particularly happy with the two latter ones even though they were only minor and wishlist, respectively. But they were fairly longstanding, and it makes me feel good that I finally got around to fixing them.

I've also gone through all the remaining bugs again, nagged the submitters where appropriate and closed some (with submitter agreement), especially the ones about LVM and RAID because I feel they have been fully addressed now. The result is that mindi has currently no open bugs and mondo is down to nine. Certainly not as cool as what Steinar H. Gunderson is doing to the RC bug count, but still not bad. ;-) Hopefully, I'll be able to get the bug count down even further.

I've also worked on Ubuntu support with the result that things should function out of the box on Dapper now, i.e. the package should build and run fine.

mondo-2.08-2-2 was tested on:

• NFS on i386 sid with kernel 2.6.16-2-k7 (version 2.6.16-15) with command line parameters

• DVD on amd64 sid with kernel 2.6.16-2-amd64-k8 (version 2.6.16-15) in interactive mode

• DVD on i386 dapper with kernel 2.6.15-25-686 (version 2.6.15-25.43) in interactive mode

Enjoy. ;-)

For most of the past winter I've been trying my best to get back into a somewhat regular schedule of training. I have failed miserably. At most, I've managed to go swimming at 7AM once or twice a week with my teammate Rafa, but I've been quite irregular. I also tried getting some running done, which revealed my condition is the worse in the last 7 years, probably. The first days I went running I felt I couldn't go faster than 4.5 mins/km without having my legs warn me about what I was doing. It was horrible. And when I started to get into the habit, I had to stop. I started getting some pain in both knees whenever I ran more than 45/50 minutes, and I associated it to my weird knee crack I get after a while of cycling. So, in March or so, I decided to stop, frightened of the pain being a serious injury or something. I wanted to visit a physiotherapist as soon as possible, but that only happened a few months later. I visited my teammate Jordi Reig in Alcoi, and after exploration, he deducted my knee problems probably come from the massive contractures in both quadriceps. I was meant to start running again, adding minutes to the sessions progressively until reaching the problematic 50 minutes of pain. I've been so busy though, that I haven't been able to do anything in the last months, so I can't say how bad my quadriceps are now. Two weeks ago, during the WarmUp Weekend in Vilanova, I got a bad kick on my calf during the semifinals game, and the day after even walking was painful. I had already signed up for the B tera triathlon, so I thought I may not be able to finish it. I signed up as I did with other competitions last year, with the goal of finishing and nothing more. This time, all my cycling training was a 40km stage I did back in December. B tera is a sprint with swimming done in a 50m pool, 27kms of cycling in an irregular circuit and a bit more of 5kms of running around the town. It is organised by our team mate Jordi Jord , and this year was the second edition. I already attended last year. On Sunday, I had to wake up at 6:10AM after going to bed at 3 or so, had some chaotic breakfast and drove up to B tera. This year I haven't got a triathlon licence, so I was in the teamless and veteran people leg. The judges made us wait in the water for nearly half an hour, apparently because one team was missing and was about to arrive. They could have warned and I wouldn't have frozen in there. The people in my lane tried to organise the start of the race, in order of what people said they swam. As the older people claimed they swam in 14m or so, and I had no idea of how much I would do, I offered to go last. Ok, that was a fuckup. It seems the 4 guys immediately before me weren't exactly van den Hoogenband or Phelps. After the first 100 metres I got tired of swimming at half speed and decidedd to overcome a few of them. I managed to get rid of two on the 350, but when I tried with the third, he didn't seem too cooperate too much, so when there were just 200 metres left I decided to not waste more energy on that. My swimming time wasn't spectacular, but at least I got out without being tired at all. Cycling made me remember my biggest problem when there's some climbing in the circuit. I climb very well, but everything you climb you'll have to descend eventually. So the three laps were the same: I passed many people on the way up, but on our way down they would go past me again like rockets, due to my minimal body weight. That sucks. At this point, I thought I would have abandoned the race due to my calf injury, but as I was feeling more or less ok, I decided to give it a try. The first lap of two wasn't so good, I felt my legs weren't used to the transitions, but after they warmed up a bit I started running faster. Until, 1.5kms away from the end, the quadriceps started warning me; I had to slow down again until I crossed the finish line.

I would look more like an athlete if I shaved... The rest of the team did pretty well on their leg, specially Rub n who came in third after having raced on Friday night. A few hours and many children races later, we received the team award for the Komando's second place.

Everyone loves the Komando. Go Komando! It always feels good to do races like B tera. I plan doing a few more races this summer: Val ncia, Pinedo, maybe Antella, maybe Cuenca...

Long hot days in Montreal -- which means a lot of fun for me. Yesterday, I had lunch with Marc Laporte, a Montreal Open Source developer and project lead for Tiki CMS/Groupware. Marc sent me email a week or so ago -- he saw on GeoURL that we lived right across Parc La Fontaine from each other, and since we had such similar interests it made sense to meet up. Wednesdays are my Daddy Day with Amita June. I try to work 4 10-hour days a week, and take Wednesday off to spend with the baby (and let Maj get some work done). It doesn't always work out that way -- I tend to work late night and weekends anyways, and Wikitravel never sleeps -- but at least theoretically I take the baby on Wednesdays. So I had the baby, and we went and met Marc at Universel Caf on Cherrier and Parc L.F. It's a nice place -- not too pricey and the food is good. It's also got a terrasse so we could sit outside in the sun. Marc is a lot of fun -- Tiki's got such an active user and developer community, and such a unique development strategy (very liberal CVS access) that we had a lot of fun and things to talk about. Marc spent six months in wt:Buenos Aires developing software, which is just about my dream job. I've wanted to go there for a long time, and it's on our list of "next places to live". We also talked a lot about how active Wiki culture is becoming, and how great that is, and how many blechy parts there are too. As when most Wiki makers come together, we bemoaned the lack of a Wiki markup standard, but hopefully the development of a text/wiki RFC will spur its growth. At least I hope so! tags: marc laporte amitajune montreal universel geourl tiki buenos aires wiki wiki markup standard

Allez les bleus On the way back from lunch, Amita and I stopped in the great playground by the baby pools in Parc La Fontaine, when my friend Niko called and invited me over to watch the World Cup semi-finals between France and Portugal. Niko lives on Marie-Anne and DeBullion -- about half-way between the Portuguese neighborhood surrounding Iglesia Santa Cruz at rue Rachel and St Urbain, and the Barouf, a bar on St. Denis that has become the unofficial centroid of French World Cup fans in Montreal. Amita June fell asleep on the way there, so we didn't get to Niko's until the game was almost over. But that was OK -- it was kind of a boring game, as far as I can tell, and France won 1-0. What was fun was walking out to St. Denis afterwards. The police had blocked off the street for several blocks in both directions, so we were able to walk up and down the street, while people cheered allez les bleus and waved the tricolor and generally had a mad good time. We couldn't help ourselves -- we had to walk down rue Rachel and see how the other half was doing. Which was, in fact, not well -- there were an awful lot of glum Portuguese people hanging out at Rachel and St Laurent. The street wasn't blocked officially, but cars really couldn't get through the crowd of mopey, extremely well-costumed folks. It got a little ugly -- one drunk France fan came around waving a tricolor and nearly got his hat handed to him by 12 angry Portuguese, including one guy in a red, yellow and green wig with a big red clown nose. A car with a French flag driving up St. Laurent also got stopped. We figured it was time to get out, so I took the baby home and put her to sleep and hacked on my OpenID MediaWiki extension for a few hours. Things are going well -- I'm really close to a consumer and a server. The little UI niceties will have to come later -- right now I'm concentrating on the mainline functionality. tags: openid mediawiki world cup montreal amitajune france portugal allez les bleus

We were a bit cooler for most of the day, but the evening sun is starting to raise the temperature again. Updated part one with a link to a recent BBC report of the Energy Saving Trust predicting an upwards trend. An interesting comparison from Monday: two bottles of frozen water, one stood in the house (temperature controlled with these tips) and one in an office (not controlled like this): the office one was all water by noon and the house one still part-ice at 4pm. Finally, had a nice email from some friends that said they're enjoying this series and "we moved our freezer out of the (light and warm) kitchen into the (cool and dark) garage, where we hope it'll use less power (cooler environment) and it won't be churning out heat somewhere that's hot enough already." I remember the freezer at my childhood home being in the garage: are we just rediscovering old ways?