I was recently asked to help someone understand the OpenSource movement, and the effects it might have on companies such as Oracle or SAP. I talked a bit that these companies can benefit from being independant of big vendors like Microsoft, while still not having to do everything themselves. But also on how opensource alternatives to their products will threaten their business in the long run and force them to be more innovative and constantly improve their product. I then talked about the 'viral' aspects in OpenSource; not about that GPL licensing bullshit (just read the licenses of stuff you want to use, and don't use them if you don't like the license...; this virality is highly overrated due to Microsofts FUD), but a very different kind of virality: Let's say you are supposed to evaluate different CMS solutions. So you install one or another that sounds promising. Most likely you'll install an opensource database like MySQL or Postgresql. And when you've decided upon a solution, you are quite likely to go with this database, and say to yourself: "if MySQL doesn't scale up well enough for our needs, we can still but an Oracle license". This would be probably different if you had had installed Oracle in the first place. Say a demo or so. But the demo versions of the CMS you tried already made you comfortable in using MySQL; it's easy to install (most likely included with your system anyway), and it just works. But would you have tried a CMS in first place that actuall required you to setup Oracle? Anyway, this "social" virality brought me to another point: developers and administrators. When you see numbers on the market share of Microsoft, they're still huge. Some 95% of users are using Microsoft as their primary operation system (I'm discounting the fact that a huge share of DSL modems here is running Linux, so actually many people are Linux users, and I'm also discounting the use of www.google.com, which would make 99.9% of people Linux users...). But these are the average users. But they aren't on their own. The software choice of the "average user" is influenced by a couple of factors, including:

• if anything goes wrong, whom can I call for help?
• company (administrative, security) policies
• word of mouth and (software) recommendations

But if you look at the computer geeks around you, what are they using? A huge share of the people I know are using Linux. Not everyone is using Linux as their main desktop system, but many are. Others are using Linux just for their development stuff, some only on servers. It doesn't really matter, Linux is huge with the geeks. When I look at the sofware my mom has installed on her Windows system (which also dual-boots Linux, and interestingly is the primary choice for watching a movie - Windows doesn't playback sound with some videos...): half of it is opensource. There is OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, LyX, Mplayer and a couple others. He favourite game? PySol. My dad already has switched to Linux as his main operating system. So why did they switch to so much opensource software? Because it's what I recommended them, and where I can help them. My mom needed a software to record something for her blog (yes, she's "podcasting" now) - of course I recommended her an opensource application, audacity. My mom is giving private lessons in math and physics; she's very successful at that. When one of her students got herself a laptop, she of course was given all kinds of (opensource!) software. For her highschool thesis she needed a vector graphics program - she ended up with inkscape. Now if my parents have some problem with Windows, who are they going to ask? I didn't manage to solve the video playback issues, my mom by herself switched to Linux for watching movies. It didn't work with Windows, I couldn't help her - she switched to something where she knews she'd get more support (and where the problem by chance didn't occur). Now let's have a look at the university. Our computer pool for the students is all Linux. There are a few windows systems for legacy purposes, I never found out if they are accessible to regular students; I only know they're supposed to exist. When doing some assignment, you're very often required to use some opensource software. For a thesis, you'll very likely be building upon some opensource system. The mathematics institute is still on solaris, but recently Gnome was installed there. Physics and electrical engineering also have mostly Linux systems, I've heard. For software development, it's pretty much a "develop on Linux, run anywhere", whereas Windows-only developers usually need to port their applications (or trust on Wine being able to run them good enough on Linux). So more and more people start developing on Linux, and get to love it's great development environment (after all, Linux was pretty much completely done by software developers...). And that is how Microsoft might already have lost the desktop war: developers, technical students and administrators (who usually also love their Linux boxes). They're only a small share of the userbase, but they're influential. In fact, other users rely on them being able to eventually fix their systems for them. But since these are using Windows much less already, they will be less capable of assisting others with Windows. They'll be putting Linux systems everywhere, and keep on encouraging them to make the switch. Of course it will still take some years, but you can expect more and more companies (and cities) to switch over, like the city of Munich. Windows support staff on the other hand might even become more expensive. I don't know of any numbers on the MCSE programme (Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert) - does anyone have numbers on "graduates" for that?

Ok, i386 users which have downloaded my packages here, I know you can't use thunar volume manager (thunar-volman) nor (u)mount devices from thunar, as it says that exo isn't built with hal support.

Hal support is indeed not enabled in i386 build (it is for ppc builds) on debian.corsac.net. I won't rebuild Xfce 4.4 for i386 with exo hal support enabled, as I don't really have currently enough power to do that more than once in a while.

But ema has begun to upload Xfce 4.4 package to experimental, so exo (with hal support enabled) is available on Debian Experimental packages.

If you want to test it, add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list:



Then update and install exo:



You can also pick other libs from there, which are more recent than ones on debian.corsac.net.

As always, be aware that those packages are in experimental shape, so it may damage your system, kill your cat and make your SO go away. Be prepared!

Anyway if you encounter bugs, don't hesitate to tell us on irc (precising from where your packages come from).

Happy testing.

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours. I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here: As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery. So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her chubster ) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder. The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money. Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied. Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.

The follow up of my previous blog post: FLOSS in Brazil turns out to be a joke, was published today on Linux.com written by Bruce Byfield, with the name: Brazil's FOSS utopia image at risk.

Some of those who simple ignored my blog post are the ones calling and mailling me now. I don't like answer calls during the workhours, i prefer answer emails and i'm doing that a lot lately. I'm glad that Carlos Morimoto (Kurumin fame) mailed me open to discuss changes in their website and distribution to inform better their users what's free software into Kurumin distribution, where's the source code, what exacly isn't free software and the reasons. Let me inform you that Kurumin isn't maintained by a company as Bruce wrote, the only error in the article so far, IMHO.

What about the free software initiatives in your country? Do they really fit with what the gov't is spreading everywhere over the press? Do they really fit with what people write on their company website? Let the world know the truth, even if that hurts.

Update: I've just visited plurall.net website and some hours after the Linux.com article, that was translated and published in some Linux related brazilian websites. They managed to setup a svn repository and put the code there. The announce into their site states in Portuguese "Finally, after some technical problems we've published the Plurall source code at: http://svn.plurall.net/plurall_boot_server". Looking into the source now...

Linspire will launch in the 2nd quarter of the year a interesting service: Click and Run - their 'linux software ready to go' warehouse, into the web. The site code and related stuff are proprietary, the thing they call a plugin (it isn't a new package manager and not a browser plugin) to run into the users machine will (or already is?) be free software. The site will deliver software for Debian, Fedora, Freespire, Linspire, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu.

I had two ideas based on their service, considering that the plugin software is quite good and reliable (i've no idea yet):

- non-free.debian.net - What if we launch a web service listing the packages into non-free and let the users install it through a simplified Click and Run plugin (we don't need multiple package managers support) ? That's clear we need to consider individual package and system upgrades, but i bet Linspire did it already. With this in mind, the new service would avoid the user need to edit the sources.list, learn how a package manager works and stuff like that. Those with non geek friends using linux when asked "How do i install java?" could answer "Go to non-free.debian.net and install it from there". It drives me to a strange world...

- CNR's everywhere - Consider a world where Red Hat put Red Hat Network to work over Fedora packages with a sane API to publish package metadata information (eg.: yet another rss2 extension) and the packages itself (we still can use http and ftp), we tune packages.d.o to do the same and there we go for others distributions. With a stable enough Click and Run "plugin" from Linspire we could sit and watch people building their own Click and Run based services providing signed software right from the projects, non-free software from partners, software by subscription, games, making profit from ads and more. I think that the API standardization could be something interesting to Linux Foundation try to push, while Click and Run would give the community the "plugin"and benefit from being the first and jumping on this new thing first. Thoughts?

With or without CNR's everywhere, i would still give non-free.debian.net a try since we don't need the CNR plugin too, but we can wait until the 2nd quarter and organize the ideas better. Volunteers?

Recently someone asked me for advice on what they can do to improve their career without getting a degree.

I have performed a quick poll of some people I know and found that for experienced people there seems to be little need for a degree. People who have extensive experience but no degree report no problems in finding work, and employers don't report any reluctance to hire someone who has the skills but no degree.

One thing that a degree is very good for is making a career jump. This is most notable when you get your first professional job, school results and references from part-time work don't help and a degree is a massive benefit. But if you have proven your abilities in the field then most employers will be more interested in checking references and the interview process than in qualifications. If you are only interested in getting a job that is one level above where you are at the moment then lacking a degree should not be a problem.

Another possibility for someone who lacks a degree is certification such as the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) provides and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). One advantage of the RHCE certification is that it is based on fixing misconfigured Linux systems, no theoretical questions, just the type of work that real sys-admins do for their job - this means that people who do badly in traditional exams can be expected to do well, and it also means that the RHCE certification accurately depicts real skills in fixing problems (and it should therefore be more valuable to employers). The LPI exams can be taken by anyone, but to sit for an RHCE you have to be sponsored by an employer.

There are ways of getting career benefits without strictly going upwards. One way of doing this is to move to a region where the pay scales are different. Some years ago I moved from Melbourne, Australia to London to increase my salary. When in London I did work that was a lot less challenging and was paid considerably better for doing so. One thing I discovered is that in London Australians were widely admired for working really hard, I don't think that Australians work harder than British people on average, but people who will move to the other side of the world to advance their career are generally prepared to work hard!

If you spend some time working in another region and then decide to return home you will probably find that employers are more interested in hiring you for what you have learned in another region. Whether you actually learn things that are of value to potential employers when working in another country is debatable, it probably depends on the individual. But when applying for a job you want to make the most of every opportunity that is available - if someone wants to hire you for the special skills you learned in another country then that's OK. ;)

Another possibility is moving to a different industry sector. Some industries have career bottlenecks at different levels. If there is no possibility of moving upwards in the area where you work then getting a job with the same skill requirements in a different industry might open up more opportunities. An example of this is working as a sys-admin in a medium sized company that is not IT based. If you are the only sys-admin in the company then there is no possibility of promotion, moving from such a company to an ISP (or other IT based company) would then give the possibility of becoming a senior sys-admin, team leader, or even the manager of the ops team (if management is your thing).

A final option that few people consider is becoming a contractor. Contractors tend to earn significantly more than permanent employees when they do the same work (so becoming a contractor provides a significant immediate benefit) and as the duration of contracts is usually small there is less attention paid to degrees etc (what does it matter if the contractor will only be there for three months?). Of course most contracts last significantly longer than the initial term, some contractors end up working in the same position for 10 years or more!

There are some down-sides to being a contractor, one is that they get less interesting work (offering someone a choice of projects if they become a permanent employee or the project that is deemed to be least interesting if they insist on being a contractor is not uncommon). Another down-side to being a contractor is the way that contractors are used. The ideal way of running a company is to have mostly permanent employees and to use contractors for special skills, short-term projects, and for emergencies when they can't hire permanent employees. When a company has almost no permanent employees it usually means that something is going badly wrong. This means that if you select a random contract role there is a good chance that it will be one where things are going badly wrong. The money from contracting is good, but it can be depressing when projects fail.

Improving package managers I noticed two posts on improving package managers none of which mentions Debtags. Daniel Burrows mentions various issues:

• the current sections in Synaptic are useless
• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()
• we could use popularity contest data to sort results
• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

David Nusinov mentions that the ideal package manager should look like Google, where you search for things using just a simple one line text entry and pick from the results what you want to install. I should probably do a bit of recap of things that have been going on. I'll go through that list again:

• The current sections in Synaptic are useless

Agreed. This used to be a bug about this, which has been closed by Debtags more than one year ago. We now have much more useful category data for about 73% of the archive (including experimental), but what we lack is software using it. Here's a quick trick to try:

1. install debtags, and this gives you an easy to read text file in /var/lib/debtags/package-tags.
2. from that file, pick packages that have the tags role::program, scope::application and interface::x11.
3. display the results, and use the tags works-with::* and use::* to navigate the results.

There is a python-debian package in experimental that has a debtags module you could play with. Why is that that so far noone has written a simple package manager just for gamers, which uses only the game::* tags? Do you think Debtags gives you too many tags? Then check out:

• The Debtags smart search, and especially how it does not show you all the tags, but it is able to infer the tags you want from your google-like query (hi David!).
• The Debtags tag editor, and especially the search-as-you type feature on all the tags and the tag search (analogous to the Debtags smart search, but it only searches tags.
• The Debtags tag cloud, and if you don't like that one try to make your own: there are countless ways of generating tag clouds from Debtags data.

To summarise so far, we not only do have better categories, but also a number of cool algorithms to use them, and some interface prototypes as well. Just don't expect me to write a package manager as well: that's a job that so far I decided to leave to someone else. adept gave it a try, with positive results.

• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()

Indeed, Xapian for example. I use it as part of the backend of the Debtags smart search, and here's our Xapian-powered normal keyword based package search interface which does stemming, indexing and all you want to ask from a serious full text index. In that page you don't see all the nice features of Xapian, but only the ones that I needed for my Debtags evil plans. Have a look at the documentation and give it a try. Here is a way to see Xapian's similarity matching in action:

1. go to the Go tagging! page
2. click on a random untagged package
3. the system gives you a rather relevant selection of tags
4. look at it again: the package was untagged: how could the web engine possibly figure those tags out?

What is happening under the scenes is that:

1. I ask Xapian: "what packages are similar to this one?".
2. I aggregate the tags of the resulting packages.
3. I rank the tags by how many resulting packages have them.

While we are on this topic, why don't we decide that we maintain a Xapian index of our package descriptions in, for example, /var/lib/apt/fulltext/, so that various applications can share it?

• we could use popularity contest data to sort results

Indeed. Anyone would like to implement this little "popcon" tool? Having the data easily accessible locally can encourage people to use them. The Debtags Go tagging! page already uses popcon data to show the most common untagged packages at the top, with double reason: it shows packages that more people are likely to know (and therefore likely to categorise) and it pushes for the most common packages to be tagged more urgently.

• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

Indeed. Anyone volunteers to implement a prototype? The full unaggregated (but anonymised) popcon data are accessible to every Debian Developer on the host gluck.debian.org in the directory /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/all-popcon-results. Ideally one can do many interesting things with this concept: besides tag suggestions, one could identify the packages that are most representative of an installed system, and also offer negative suggestions like: "people who have packages like yours usually don't have this package: would you like to remove it?". There is more than all this that could be done. Recently, almost by accident, I had the idea of querying packages by example, like pointing to a file and find packages that can work with it. I've asked Jeroen to have Mole collect info on all files that could possibly get installed in /usr/lib/mime/packages/ (as suggested by Bernhard R. Link), to see if that prototype can be made more accurate. Query by similarity would be nice: I don't like this program, but what else do we have that does the same job? This is best implemented using Debtags data, since it directly maps to semantic properties. Note that you don't have to show a single tag to the user to implement this kind of interface. Do we have a way to point at the X window of an application and get the name of the package that installed it? Wouldn't it be about time to have it? Why don't we have a system updater utility that shows the Debian weather? Why aren't more people playing with semantic web? But more generally, the problem with package managers is that we seem to be irrationally compulsive in wanting to make the one and only big easy and complete interface for everyone. Other more reasonable people would tell you that if you have two very different kinds of users you may want to consider having two different user interfaces. Ubuntu for example installs by default 3 package manager interfaces: Synaptic; the thing that you access from the application menu to add applications to it; and the update manager. Does it sound like a waste? To me it makes lots of sense. We have lots of interesting, usable metadata; we have algorithms; we have prototypes; we have ideas for lots of cool, implementable features. The question is, are we able to write applications that just combines what is needed from all this treasure to provide the right interface(s) for our base(s) of users? Even if my English in 2004 wasn't easy to understand, a read here might still be useful. There is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach.

I was hoping to find a “green” dry cleaner in Edmonton and have had no luck finding one (so now it is just me and the bathtub and woolite). But I did happen upon this nifty five limes site that helps you locate those super-hippie-hot-spots in major cities in the US and Canada (Edmonton does not count as a major city). It is somewhat incomplete but there is a decent start there.

Last week I decried a senior Pentagon official’s attack on lawyers providing pro bono representation to Guantánamo detainees. I suggested that villifying the partners of some of the largest firms in the country was probably not the wisest political move, and was likely to backfire. As it turns out, it appears I was right. See the editorial in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly:

…Headlines in print and online were unanimous: “Why Cully Stimson Is Wrong.” “The rightwing assault on the legal system.” “Cully Stimson Should Pick Up His Medal of Freedom and Go Home.” “Law deans respond to unethical Bush lawyer.” And perhaps the most eloquent rebuke of all came from Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried. In an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal, Fried declared that “Stimson showed ignorance and malice in deploring the pro bono representation of Guantanamo detainees by lawyers in some of the nation’s leading law firms.” The former Supreme Judicial Court justice continued: “It is no surprise that firms … on Mr. Stimson’s hit list are among the most sought-after by law school graduates, and retain the loyalty and enthusiasm of their partners. They offer their lawyers the profession at its best, and help assure that the rule of law is not just a slogan but a satisfying way of life.” …What could have been a disaster for the bar turned into an all-out celebration of what lawyers do.

According to Wikipedia: “Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest (depersonalisation or cynicism), usually in the work context. Burnout is often construed as the result of a period of expending too much effort at work while having too little recovery, but it is sometimes argued that workers with particular personality traits (especially neuroticism) are more prone to experiencing burnout.” In this web page there’s a global overview of burnout that might be useful: Burnout is a chronic condition that happens when your body or mind can no longer cope with overwhelmingly high demands. You are trapped in a state of emotional exhaustion, and it is hard to get out of that state. You stop caring about what you do, even though you may feel guilty about that fact. Even if you still continue working, it seems to be hard to make progress. You hardly accomplish anything significant, just go through the motions. Certain categories of people and professions are particularly susceptible to job burnout. Most often these are people who are highly committed and motivated, who have high standards and idealistic dedication to their jobs. Common burnout causes include:

• An overwhelming workload. Could be due to insufficient time management skills, especially lack of planning, prioritizing, or delegation skills.
• Hard work with no clear goals. You work hard and hard, but no matter how long you keep at it, you cannot see any progress. But how could you see that you have got closer if you don’t know your destination?
• Powerlessness to change something important to you. Something that you are very much emotionally attached to, but that is at the same time beyond your control.
• Forcing yourself to make the impossible happen. For example, solving problems without having the necessary resources.
• A conflict between your personal values and the values of the company your working for. You don’t believe in or disagree with what your are doing, but you feel the circumstances force you to keep doing it anyway.
• Hitting the invisible ceiling. No matter how good or competent you become, there is hardly any chance of recognition or promotional opportunities.

For all of those burnout causes what is important is not as much the external factors that fall on you, but how you interpret them, what you say to yourself, and what actions you take in response. Finally, it is important to understand the risks of burnout in your personal or job situations. Once you are its victim, it may not be easy to get things back on track. That condition does not go away in a day. You may not be able to recover by yourself, and you may need to have drastic changes in your attitudes and life style. You are much better off preventing it now than putting your life back together later. Some links:

• How Can We Avoid Burnout?
• Volunteer Burnout

You're pretending people are mocking Mrs Segol ne Royal because she's a woman, well, I don't think it has any chances to be true. It's IMHO a reason for many people to be addicted to her without even thinking to listen to what she says. I've listened to many of her interviews, those are pathetically void and empty. She's not able to use correct and decent French, and when I listen to her, I'm often under the impression to talk to my butcher. If I imagine her in the middle of an internationnal summit, I'm just plain afraid. When I try to sum up her ideas, I come up with a big nothing. That's just air and wind. I can't say the UMP is very kind with her but hey, she's a candidate to the presidency, she should grow a skin, chose a real communication manager (Montebourg, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), etc Recently, presidency candidacy has begun to look like a show. She's making pirouettes over pirouettes. How can you blame other candidates to just push her a bit so that she fall on the nose ? That is indeed unfair, but:

• it has nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman, that's a very very very bad argument, to me it's even in her disfavour, because it looks like that: look it's only a woman, please be kind with here WTF? if she's going to be the French President she has to be a bit stronger than that, and beeing a woman or not is totally irrelevant ;
• I'm not sure she really needs to be pushed hard to fall, her campaign (atm) is a long succession of "rattrapage aux branches".

So I'm under the impression that you defend her because she's a woman, which is certainly a way for chosing your favourite candidate, but it's not in my criterion list (neither as a pro or a cons) for such an election. And I'm not that sure she won't attend to the second turn. The "She's a woman" criterion will weigh on the election in a way that we didn't met before, and that is very hard to estimate.

The server that this site is running on is a Debian sarge machine with some backports.org packages for things that I just have to have up-to-date. This has been a pretty successful strategy for me for running servers... except for one thing. If you're running any PHP code, you really need to have an opcode cache like eAccelerator running on your server, too. Otherwise, every single hit to a PHP app loads and compiles every single PHP page it uses before executing. For any kind of load, and any kind of non-trivial app, it's just not a question. But there's not an eaccelerator package in sarge or in backports.org, so I built my own, which I have to keep up-to-date with PHP packages coming down the line from backports. Today, I upgraded from PHP 5.1.x to PHP 5.2.x, and I rebuilt eaccelerator, and... blammo. Segfaults all over the place with MediaWiki, and Drupal decided it wasn't going to save sessions any more. Turning off eaccelerator was enough to solve the problems with MW, but I had to track down this Drupal-PHP-5.2 bug and apply the patch to make Drupal work again. Of course, performance is sucking because there's no opcode cache. I kind of hate that kind of day. tags: php drupal php 5.2 eaccelerator mediawiki

xcache Update to that: I tried out xcache, and it seems to be working fine. So, y'know, hopefully that project keeps working in the future. tags: php xcache

Pirates So, probably the most interesting thing about getafirstlife.com is that the image chosen to represent analog reality is a bunch of kids dressed like pirates. That is one of the selling points of First Life, I guess. tags: getafirstlife kids pirates

Goethe I had a really good class at the Montreal Goethe Institute yesterday. I'm continually impressed by the facilities there. My class did a little tour of the building, including the half-size movie theatre, the huge reading room (with the day's German newspapers), and the big library. They even have a TV going with the Deutsche Welle satellite feed coming in. It's a pretty cool thing to have this kind of resource in Montreal. tags: montreal goethe german

Mon pays Speaking of great resources in Montreal, Amita June and I went for a walk through Parc LaFontaine today. It was a balmy -8C (18 F) and the sun was shining on the snow. They've opened up the pond for skating, and there were about a dozen people lazily twirling around on the ice. Well... they looked lazy. They were probably working pretty hard. Our stated purpose for the walk was to get to the Biblioth que centrale-jeunes on the other side of the parc. The main Biblioth que Centrale shut down about a year ago when the new Grande Biblioth que opened down by UQAM. But they've kept the children's library open, and Amita June's just at the age where she can actually enjoy it. It was really a very nice library. There were a ton of books in good shape, lots of open tables, and a couple of billion toys, blocks, and games to play with. Amita and I both got library cards, which should be pretty fun to use, and we played around with the different books and such. They also have story-time hours at 10AM each weekday, so we'll be going back soon. Amita's favourite part of the library, though, was a big rock dove they had. It had a nice cage with water and toys and mirrors and stuff, but it seemed to like walking around on the shelves better. Amita followed it around making dove noises -- coo ca coo! Our trip back across the parc was pretty nice, too. The kids in the school there were out for recess, and they had built some epic-scale snow forts and were involved in an 18-sided snowball fight as we passed. There was also a passel of kids from a nearby garderie (daycare) who were making Inukshuks out of hardened snow. By the time we got home, we were pretty exhausted, but glad to have gotten some winter outdoor time. tags: winter montreal library parc lafontaine

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)

Last July, I started an experiment, called Project Ummikko, with a friend of mine to see how well Linux is suited for a new user who has used Windows for many years, but is not a techie. I installed Debian, with GNOME, for her, and she went cold turkey: she started using Linux only, unless there was something she had to do, but could not achieve under Linux. It has been half a year, and it's time to report on the results. Translating and abbreviating her own words:

The good part of using Linux is that I don't need to worry about viruses or defragmenting the hard disk and so on. I would be happy to remain a Linux users for things like that. In basic everyday use I'm happy. The things that make me want to return to Windows are gaming, flash and other multimedia, and a feeling of helplessness. I want to play Alpha Centauri and adventure games I can borrow from friends. Flash doesn't work, and installing software from Debian via Synaptic is difficult, I'm not comfortable with it. With Windows, I'm used to being able to go online to find a program to solve some problem I have, or some plugin I'm missing, or some toy program I want, and after a few mouse clicks, I have it installed. There's many things that just don't work with Linux, like Second Life, or when my ISP would give two free movie downloads this month and next, but it only works on Windows and Mac. I have a feeling of being left out. I could manage with Linux, with the assumption that I have someone like Lasu to do installation and tweaking. The best thing about this experience? It was interesting to be able to make the experiement, the meta level has been the best thing. The best thing about Linux is the kind of maintenance things like no viruses or defragging, Linux doesn't rot like Windows does.

After we had the above interview, I upgraded her Debian, and this fixed at least most of the problems related to flash. Synaptic remains uncomfortable, and there's not much that can be done about Windows-only software. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I had expected much worse problems, but I'm happy to report now that Linux really does seem ready for the average Windows user. The uncomfortability of Synaptic may be partly due to the fact that it is a different model from Windows: you get all your programs from one place, instead of anywhere on the Internet, partly due to just not using Synaptic much at all, and partly due to Synaptic not being perhaps as easy to understand as possible. I personally find Synaptic to be very nice, and use it regularly, but I am biased by having used Debian package managers for over a decade. Even if she had learned to use Synaptic, it would, of course, not have been enough: there's lots of Linux software that hasn't been included in Debian. My friend therefore feels that it would be nicer, more liberating, to be able to just download any old Linux software from a web page and install it easily. My conclusions: package management for Debian based systems could do with some work targetted towards neophytes. I am sure there are things that could be done to make package installation easier, less daunting, without dumbing down the system.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

I've been working a bit more on DBus inspector. Python is so much fun and PyGTK just rocks. I love you, guys. :-) Ok, not everything is working right yet. I tried making the app multithreaded, and putting the DBus handling into a second thread, but failed at that so far. Getting threading work right with Python and GTK and DBus is just too much, I guess. :-) Here's a screenshot: You can grab the code temporarily from this location. It's rather crude, undocumented (fortunately Python code is quite easy to read) and still lacks some interesting parts (e.g. icons to differentiate between services, interfaces, methods, signals, ... and of course actually displaying method signatures or even allowing you to invoke them...) - but it's a start. Note that DBus using applications support introspection at varying levels - NetworkManager doesn't have a useful introspection description, and gaim goes the other way by apparently exposing every single method during DBus, so you can do the craziest stuff (but it's hard to find the method you are actually looking for).

I've been working a bit more on DBus inspector. Python is so much fun and PyGTK just rocks. I love you, guys. :-) Ok, not everything is working right yet. I tried making the app multithreaded, and putting the DBus handling into a second thread, but failed at that so far. Getting threading work right with Python and GTK and DBus is just too much, I guess. :-) Here's a screenshot: You can grab the code temporarily from this location. It's rather crude, undocumented (fortunately Python code is quite easy to read) and still lacks some interesting parts (e.g. icons to differentiate between services, interfaces, methods, signals, ... and of course actually displaying method signatures or even allowing you to invoke them...) - but it's a start. Note that DBus using applications support introspection at varying levels - NetworkManager doesn't have a useful introspection description, and gaim goes the other way by apparently exposing every single method during DBus, so you can do the craziest stuff (but it's hard to find the method you are actually looking for).

It s over, since yesterday I am back in what Bush calls the old Europe, and I feel like I never really left. But in fact, I did, and was in working as a volunteer at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana. Things did not really work out there, so I wrote a work report for the principal, describing what exactly has happened (or not happened) from the first contact until the end of my work there and analyzing what went wrong. This text might also be interesting for anyone who plans on doing similar volunteer work.During my time there I have set up a Linux setup that is, in my opinion, quite neat: Integration into Active Directory, automatic installation, Nagios network monitoring, caching and filtering web proxy et cetera. For my possible successor, but also for anyone who is creating a similar setup, I documented the steps to create such a setup in the techical documentation. Both reports can be found in the content section of my website.

I managed to miss the Igloofest by Piknic lectronik this weekend, which was kind of a bummer since it seemed like it would be such an awesome event. But with a downturn in the temperature -- another -20C day yesterday, with wind chill bringing it down to -28C -- it was just too hard to justify bringing a 1-year-old to an outdoor event. We did manage to do some fun things this weekend, anyways. Saturday was our first day house-hunting. We're planning to buy an apartment or condo in the Plateau Mont-Royal this year, before July 1. July 1 is the traditional Moving Day in Quebec -- the day that every renter in the province either renews their year-long lease or moves to a new apartment. We're going to move out of Renterhood this year altogether, and get into the fun of home ownership. Wish us luck. Anyways, we saw a great place this Saturday, and we plan to do some more house hunting over the next few weeks. We're going to make a decision about whether to stay in our current apartment or not before March 1, when we begin our big road trip down to Austin for South by Southwest. tags: montreal quebec piknicelectronic igloofest cold house-hunting moving day

Bruncher This afternoon we had a great bruncher with friends at our (current) apartment. We invited over Jeremy and Lina and their two girls Syvlie and Clea, who arrived at our door like an advertisement for a skiing school. I love talking to the girls -- they're really smart and sweet people. We also had over Maj's friend Emmy and her husband Stef, as well as their daughter Isadora. Emmy is originally from Oaxaca (city), and Stef is German. They moved here a few months ago, and Maj and Amita June met Emmy and Isadora at their playgroup. This was the first time I met Stef; I got to use my German introduction lessons for this week on him. Guten Tag! Ich hei e Evan! Freut Mich! Isadora speaks Spanish with her mother and German with her father. She'll grow up bilingual, but unfortunately not speaking either of the languages of the bilingual city she's living in. My guess is that she'll probably be pretty expert at four languages by the time she's 10 or so. Maj cooked today, and made a really great smoked salmon gratin, white bean vegetable soup, and hors d'oeuvres. I put together a green salad to round it out. We opened up a couple of bottles of crispy vinho verde and had a very nice afternoon time. The kids got along great; Sylvie and Clea are several years older than Amita and Isadora (one day apart!), but they were really gentle and nice with the little ones. tags: bruncher lina jeremy emmy stef amitajune german isadora sylvie clea