In a boring day with some spare hours and influenced by Amaya's post, i've decided to brick^W install ipodlinux on my ipod mini 4gb after i've found that both Apple's UI and podzilla (ipodlinux UI) can coexist.

I'm impressed with the games, menus and podzilla usability but the audio player sucks. They did one thing right adding the album information and not only the artist / music that is playing. The problem is that the Song X of XXX is on the same block and you end up with the album information below the progress bar, really buggy.

podzilla came with a file browser and some friends were impressed when reading /proc/version and /proc/cpuinfo output. The funny dialog of the day was:
Co-worker: "Is your ipod running java?"
Me: "No, it runs Linux and a user interface called podzilla without overwriting the Apple's UI. The Linux flavoured one contains more games and is modular. I'm gonna check if i can run iboy, a game boy emulator over that"
Co-worker: "Are you serious? Linux is cool!"

oh, the humanity (and the game industry)...

In the last three days I made 15 NMUs, fixing 11 RC- and 4 l10n-bugs. I noticed that some maintainers were not aware that one of their packages had an open RC bug from the mails I received afterwards. So please double check your QA package for open RC bugs and fix them if you can. If you have some spare time please go to the unofficial RC-bugs page and check the bugs which are older than 7 days and affect etch and sid. We’re currently in a permanent BSP till etch is out, so 0-day NMUs are allowed. If you are an NM or no maintainer at all, you still can help by providing patches, submitting them to the BTS and tagging the bug with “patch”. Someone will upload ASAP and might even thank you in the corresponding changelog entry.

It is weird when spam arrives in your folder with a free speech self-justification: Name: nude girls E-mail: jenna@haze.com URI: http://nudefreexxx.com/ IP: 195.175.37.6 “Spam e-mails should be, should not be outlawed - Or: can, can not be outlawed, are examples of persuasive speech topic variants.”

The growth of new Open Content projects continues to amaze me. I really admire how the wiki technique makes it possible to combine the microcontributions of thousands or millions of people across the Internet and make high-quality, usable reference works for everyone to share and enjoy equally. What we'd normally think of as staggeringly audacious becomes manageable and realizable using wikis. I'm mostly waxing poetic here about a new project for creating a Free event calendar for the entire planet. Wikevent is built using the ubiquitous and reliable MediaWiki software, but with a ton of add-ons and features to make organizing an events calendar reasonable. There's a good mix of calendar-oriented interface, geographical interface, and a nice dose of Microformats thrown in for good measure. Wikevent is still in its early stages, but it doesn't take much imagining to envision a great future for it. Managing event calendars -- everything from the Beck concert in your city to the meeting of the local Interlingua club -- is a daunting task for local media. As its API and data feeds mature, it's reasonable -- nay, probable -- that Wikevent feeds could power the events calendars for local weekly newspapers, radio stations, TV, and community Web sites. I think it will make a good data source for community-oriented sites like Upcoming.org or Eventful. Wikevent plans to use a lot of metadata to allow slicing its database in different ways for different kinds of people. The entire database is available under the extremely liberal BSD-like Creative Commons Attribution license. Because it's such a nice complement to a travel guide, we've started adding Wikevent links to Wikitravel guide articles on our English version (and, soon, other versions too). There's more crossover, of course: the site's founder, Mark Jaroski, and community powerhouse Andrew Haggard, are both longtime Wikitravellers. I'm looking forward to seeing how this new Open Content project continues to develop. tags: wiki wikevent mediawiki mark jaroski andrew haggard cc event calendar

Jyte Speaking of cool new sites, I was glad to see in Scott Kveton's blog news of the new Jyte project. Jyte is a fascinating social network that uses the OpenID authentication system for the identity infrastructure. I think this is really interesting -- using OpenID for social networks is really a good idea, and opens up the process a lot. Another interesting point is that Jyte lets you make arbitrary assertions about yourself or, really, anything that has an URI. Other users can approve or disapprove the assertion, giving it more validity. For example, I've made an assertion that I'm the founder of Wikitravel: http://jyte.com/cl/evan.prodromou.name-is-the-founder-of-wikitravel That assertion has been backed up by 3 other people (so far), giving it a little bit more authority. Or, as Chris Dawson put it, http://jyte.com/cl/jyte-is-hot-or-not-for-nerds I think that the claims system is pretty intelligent -- a great way to make statements about yourself or others. It works like ClaimID, but with more latitude in what you can make claims about. tags: jyte openid claims assertions kveton janrain

Well, I did it. My Sansa e280 is now once again the property of the Bellevue Circuit City. The gadget had pretty sweet hardware (holding my entire music collection in the palm of my hand was a cool thing), but I have no real need for it -- certainly nothing that would be worth putting up with Sandisk's attitude regarding non-Windows computers.

I'm currently trying to decide whether to remain portable-less for now (on the theory that portable media players are likely to advance ridiculously in the next few months), to buy a simple 4GB or 2GB Flash player, or to give up on Flash for the time being and get a hard disk-based player. I'm leaning towards waiting until the 4GB model of the Cowon D2 becomes available in the U.S., and then ordering it -- its feature set is pretty amazing, and hopefully 4GB will be enough storage capacity (especially considering that you can insert an SD flash card to get more storage space). In the meantime, I can cover most of what I was using the player for with a combination of podcasts, .oggs of my music, and borrowing Kate's portable FM radio. Less convenient, but entirely workable.

I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up:

• Debian Quality Assurance, Free Software World Conference 3.0, 7-9 February 2007, Badajoz, Spain. I will briefly give a summary of QA activities in Debian and of the work accomplished at the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura in December 2006.
• Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices, FOSDEM, 24-25 February 2007, Brussels, Belgium. I will mainly talk about installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100, both very interesting devices.
• Compiler testing using Debian as a real-world testcase, Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo, 15-18 April 2007, San Jose, California. I will talk about the work I did testing GCC 4.2 and Osprey by compiling the entire Debian archive on Itanium (and other architectures).
• Release management in free software, Google, 19 April 2007, Mountain View, California. I will present some results from my research. I'll probably present good and bad practices found in large free software projects.
• I'll probably tour Norway in May to talk about my research on release management but details have not been finalized yet.

I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

Is there no better way to OR procmail rules than these horrid kludges?

For now I'm going with the DeMorgan Rule method, because it's more efficient and to the point that the alternative kludges. I still feel a little dirty writing things this:

      :0
      * ! condition1
      * ! condition2
                      # official procmail no-op. MUST LEAVE SPACE
      :0 E
      action_on_condition1_or_condition2    

It would be nice to have a recipe flag that means "OR the conditions below"

(Almost all links in this text lead to German sources. Sorry, but this is a local topic and there aren't any English sources.) Unfortunately, Hildesheim is home to some rather prominent figures of the German neo-nazi scene. One of them has now registered for a protest march through Hildesheim on the 24 February 2007. The reason for this is, that an other neo-nazi event, that had been disguised as a "birthday party", but was in fact a propaganda event featuring talks by "contemporary witnesses" and "an evening of ballads" and was arranged by "National Forces of Hildesheim and the Association of German Women" had been prevented by the Hildesheim police. As a reaction to this, the aforementioned gentleman has now registered for a demonstration with the Hildesheim city council. (In Germany you need to register demonstrations.) Official head of the whole thing is this other gentleman, who has a history of trying to organise nazi demonstrations. He occasionally does so in Leipzig, where he tries to organise such demonstrations about twice a year. Their attendance is dropping though and they are usually met with about ten times as many counter demonstrators and thus have to be ended prematurely, exposing them as the unwanted and ridiculous farces they really are. However, the fact that people still try to register demonstrations such as this one is worrying. And the fact that this one is meant to be in the town I live in makes me pretty angry. Fortunately the demonstration is met with broad opposition. An alliance has been formed, consisting of the German adult education centre of Hildesheim (VHS), the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), Verdi, our public services union, Attac, the Antifa, the refugee council of Lower Saxony and the political parties with the Hildesheim Greens as the most active part at the moment. It is good to see, that such neo-nazi endeavours are met with such a broad opposition, and that this opposition does not only originate from the "usual suspects", but from the centre of society. (The VHS for example is usually a non-political organisation, and seeing them engage in such an alliance and even hosting its meetings is pretty cool!) It's not sure yet, whether the demonstration will be approved. It probably will, but with a bunch of extra conditions. If it is approved, it is even more important to meet it with the resistance it deserves! So, if you are living near Hildesheim, watch this space for announcements of the planned counter measures.

Heh, I have been mentioned on Debian Weekly News for my very first time :-) . Still, I must make a correction and admit I didn't do a full install due to #407702.

In spite of that, installs over PPPoE have been confirmed and are working properly (with ppp-udeb 2.4.4rel-5) by appending modules=ppp-udeb to the D-I boot command.

Installation guide text proposal is tracked by bug #408340.

MJ, in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. When some of the basic needs for humans to live are easily covered and people do not have to worry about, suchs as daily eating, it’s way more easy to develop a country and have people concerning about unimportant stuff. Even free software is a luxury matter on some countries! You know, human beings have an stupid custom acquired since they were born, most of them, and that’s the need for eating, how weaks! I think you get my point. Yours, an international traveller flying between the UK.

All being well I now have a blog working using Typo, instead of Wordpress 2 - and no broken links! We'll see. Now to make sure that my server load doesn't rise through the roof this time. For future reference importing entries from Wordpress2 -> Typo will almost certainly give you this error: This can be fixed by changing: To this:

idproxy.net is a spanking-new service that lets people use their Yahoo! identity as an OpenID. Yahoo! released the API for their BBAuth service last fall, but it doesn't support any of the existing identity standards. So idproxy.net uses BBAuth to allow users to authenticate, and then use that identity to create OpenID URLs in the idproxy.net domain. I think this is a great idea -- I'm bitterly jealous that I didn't think of it. I've been experimenting with BBAuth since it came out, and I've wanted to make a plugin for MediaWiki that would use BBAuth to allow Yahoo! users to log into Wikitravel, but at this point I don't think I'll bother. Simon Willison has more info on his motivations for starting idproxy. Good luck to him. tags: idproxy openid simon willison yahoo bbauth

Thanks to numerous of helpful replies from Planet readers, I have come across quite a few decent bags. My favourites so far are these;
#1
Classic Messenger
Upsides; Roomy, casual, good quality
Downsides; No seperate space for laptop, you’d need a laptop sleeve, from the picture there doesen’t seem to be that many extra pockets #2
Laptop Courier
Upsides; Roomy, casual, seperate space for laptop, pockets
Downsides; Could do with another big protective pocket for my video camera, but now I’m being picky #3
Choroka K2
Upsides; Casual, very roomy with space for video camera, seperate place for laptop
Downsides; Looks a bit big, then again so do the others #4
Cargo
Upsides; Many pockets, a pocket very suitable for video camera, seperate place for laptop
Downsides; A bit big, looks kinda laptop’ishy. madduck has provided me with a new favourite band. Kino! I’ve gotten addicted to their album ‘Picture’. Thanks madduck.

Your results:
You are The Joker

The Joker 65% Venom 53% Mr. Freeze 49% Riddler 49% Dark Phoenix 49% Dr. Doom 45% Magneto 42% Lex Luthor 40% Green Goblin 38% Apocalypse 38% Two-Face 38% Juggernaut 34% Mystique 30% Kingpin 29% Catwoman 26% Poison Ivy 15%

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.20.2 is out. Brown paper bag release, whoops!

• Fix window_workspace (Andrew Yates)

Downloads are in the usual place.

Disjointed: Busy weekend: A brief trip to Glasgow, a lot of rat-lovin’ and a few minutes to hack on CFEngine package automation. I discovered insane performance problems with running Ruby on Rails applications under libapache2-mod-fastcgi so I switched to Apache2, mod_proxy & mongrel. The process wasn’t as painless as I’d expected – so I might write it up shortly. In other rails-news: I can’t get typo running on Etch. Migration from wordpress 2 fails in strange ways. Help?! In other news xmms on my AMD64 machine, reading /home/mp3 over an NFS share locks up every couple of days. Not sure if this is an AMD64 bit problem, or if the NFS usage is responsible. I should investigate. (The GUI is visible and responsible; but hitting “next”, “play”, etc, result in no action. I usually have to “kill” it – then restart.)

I got some email from Dan Brickley on Friday asking for some help getting the MediaWiki OpenID extension working. It looks like the FOAF wiki now allows you to login with OpenID. Cool beans on that! tags: wiki foaf mediawiki openid

Wikicalc Speaking of people whose names match the production "Dan Brick*", Dan Bricklin just releases WikiCalc 1.0. WikiCalc is an awesome piece of software that provides shared spreadsheets with a Wiki flavor. I'm interested in using it for some new projects, so I'm really glad Dan's worked so hard on it. Congratulations to him and to sponsor SocialText for such good work. tags: wiki wikicalc socialtext dan bricklin

Lucinda I'm excited to see that one of my favorite people in Montreal has set up a blog. Lucinda Catchlove is a Montreal writer, and also a good friend with a clear voice and an honest opinion. I'm looking forward to seeing what her blog will have to offer. tags: friends montreal lucinda catchlove

Google in Montreal It's probably not an overstatement to say that Montreal's digerati are a-twitter with gossip that Google will be opening a small office in Montreal (note: link in French). It's only space for a dozen or so people in downtown, but more tantalizing is the prospect that they're shopping for commercial real estate capable of handling 200-300 employees. The blogosph re (or is it the blogod me...? I get those confused all the time) here is pretty excited about the news, but a post by star podcaster Julien Smith has been more controversial. In Montreal... Needs... Brains... he says that he thinks the Montreal tech scene isn't as dynamic and interdependent as in other cities. He thinks the city needs a Google office as a shot-in-the-arm for developing our technology culture. I don't believe that this is the case. Montreal has a vibrant tech scene with a lot of cross-pollination. There are a lot of formal and informal venues for discussion in Montreal. We have the monthly Yulblog and Wiki Wednesday, last year's BarCampMontreal and the upcoming BarCampMontreal2, as well as RoCoCo. There's also the quarterly Montreal Creative Commons Salon. On the informal side, Seb Paquet's had a few group lunches with some of the most interesting people in town, and le Sans Fil gives us great hotspots like La ka and L'Utopik for serendipitous or on-purpose path-crossings. I guess my main point is that Montreal's got a great Scene, and I don't think it needs a big infusion of Googloids to make it better. Is there more that could be done? Sure. I think we need to get a Web Montag going to pull together the various sub-cultures forming. And we should probably be using SAT more -- it's a great space. But I think we're doing pretty good overall. Side notes: Hugh MacGuire has a quick list of Montreals doing stuff, and Robin Millette has some ideas about Montreal Action. tags: montreal technology scene google