Almost one year ago I got a great present from a great man, a Linksys Wireless router with a serial port that he had soldered on it himself, running OpenWrt (White Russian). Sexy!

This toy has made me happy ever since, even though this great man insisted on me using WPA, which basically means most of my friends can t use wireless at my place (blame crappy firmware), and I still, from time to time, have some wire mess around my living room, but that is also fun, specially for the cats, so no complaints here :)

I recently upgraded to White Russian RC6, and this great man pointed me to a wonderful web interface to manage the system with: X-Wrt.
This web interface is very helpful for me, even though I can ssh into the router, I am used to my aliases, longer history, my way of working on the command line, which makes my ssh sessions there a bit frustrating, as I am getting old and a bit reluctant to changes. The web interface also has nice graphs and stats, a beautiful CSS layout, and it makes my life 100% easy. This stuff just works^Wrocks!

The installation system was so easy I was amazed. Just fill in a form with your Linksys IP address, click on install and you are done!

I miss https for the config interface, and I would love to find a Linksys model that supports OpenWrt and does DSL at the same time, so I could get rid of the crappy 3com doing the ATM part in bridge mode. Less devices, less power wasted, less points of failure, happier me.

The amount of packages available for OpenWrt is just amazing, and it has a package manager that slightly reminds me of apt-get. It can even do asterisk!

So if you own any of the supported devices, I encourage you to get rid of the crappy firmware they usually ship with, and have some White Russian fun with it, which also happens to be one of my favourite drinks :)

Enjoy!

To say it with the words of Andreas Barth (one of the Debian release managers):

Etch is now frozen! Wheeeeeee!!!

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

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

On our recent stay in London we passed through Neal's Yard: a nice and tranquil enclosure in the busy Seven Dials neighbourhood (Covent Garden). Here you'll find a number of establishments that cater specifically to those that can appreciate a vegetarian or organic lifestyle. Right around the corner is Neal's Yard Diary, an excellent cheese shop, selling only cheeses from the UK, including of couse very good Stilton and Cheddar. The neighbourhood around Seven Dials sports a number of nice specialty shops. Well worth a visit. We had dinner at the Souk Medina restaurant. Surprisingly large when compared to its modest entrance, it serves a large Moroccan menu with plenty of vegetarian choice. The entourage may remind one of Efteling's Fata Morgana, without being over the top. Seated at knee-level tables on comfortable pillows, we enjoyed a range of Moroccan specialties, a bottle of wine and a pot of mint tea. The price was very modest. Highly recommended!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news, I hate fruitflies.

checkmodule -m -o local.mod local.te
semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod
semodule -u local.pp

Save the following policy as local.te and then run the above commands to make semodule work correctly and to also allow restorecon to access the console on boot.

module local 1.0;

require  
        class chr_file   read write  ;
        class fd use;
        type restorecon_t;
        type tmpfs_t;
        type initrc_t;
        type semanage_t;
        role system_r;
 ;

allow restorecon_t tmpfs_t:chr_file   read write  ;
allow semanage_t initrc_t:fd use;

Following from my 5 minute OSDC talk yesterday on 5 security improvements needed in Linux distributions I gave a 5 minute talk on installing SE Linux on Debian etch. To display the notes I formatted them such that they were in 24 line pages and used less at a virtual console to display them. The ultra-light laptop I was using has only 64M of RAM which isn't enough for a modern X environment and I couldn't be bothered getting something like Familiar going on it.

After base install you install the policy and the selinux-basics package:

# apt-get install selinux-basics selinux-policy-refpolicy-targeted
The following extra packages will be installed:
checkpolicy libsemanage1 mime-support policycoreutils python python-minimal
python-selinux python-semanage python-support python2.4 python2.4-minimal
selinux-utils
Suggested packages:
python-doc python-tk python-profiler python2.4-doc logcheck syslog-summary
The following NEW packages will be installed:
checkpolicy libsemanage1 mime-support policycoreutils python python-minimal
python-selinux python-semanage python-support python2.4 python2.4-minimal
selinux-basics selinux-policy-refpolicy-targeted selinux-utils
0 upgraded, 14 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 6362kB of archives.
After unpacking 41.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

The package install process also configures the policy for the machine. The next step is to label the filesystems, this took 26 seconds on my Celeron 500MHz laptop with 20,000 files on an old IDE disk. The time is in proportion to number of files, often bottlenecked on CPU. A more common install might have 5* as many files with a 5* faster CPU so 30 seconds is probably common for labelling. See the following:

# fixfiles relabel

Files in the /tmp directory may be labeled incorrectly, this command
can remove all files in /tmp.  If you choose to remove files from /tmp,
a reboot will be required after completion.

Do you wish to clean out the /tmp directory [N]? y
Cleaning out /tmp
/sbin/setfiles:  labeling files under /
matchpathcon_filespec_eval:  hash table stats: 14599 elements, 14245/65536 buckets used, longest chain length 2
/sbin/setfiles:  labeling files under /boot
matchpathcon_filespec_eval:  hash table stats: 19 elements, 19/65536 buckets used, longest chain length 1
/sbin/setfiles:  Done.

The next step is to edit /boot/grub/menu.list to enable SE Linux, auditing, and put it in enforcing mode:

title   Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.17-2-686
root    (hd0,1)
kernel  /vmlinuz-2.6.17-2-686 root=/dev/x selinux=1 audit=1 ro enforcing=1
initrd  /initrd.img-2.6.17-2-686

Then reboot.

After rebooting view the context of your shell, note that the login shell will have a domain of unconfined_t when the targeted policy is used:

# id -Z
system_u:system_r:unconfined_t

Now let's view all processes that are confined:

# ps axZ  grep -v unconfined_t grep -v kernel_t grep -v initrc_t
LABEL                             PID TTY   STAT   TIME COMMAND
system_u:system_r:init_t            1 ?     Ss     0:02 init [2]
system_u:system_r:udev_t         1999 ?     S.s    0:01 udevd --daemon
system_u:system_r:syslogd_t      3306 ?     Ss     0:00 /sbin/syslogd
system_u:system_r:klogd_t        3312 ?     Ss     0:00 /sbin/klogd -x
system_u:system_r:apmd_t         3372 ?     Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/acpid -c /etc
system_u:system_r:gpm_t          3376 ?     Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/i
system_u:system_r:crond_t        3402 ?     Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
system_u:system_r:local_login_t  3423 tty1  Ss     0:00 /bin/login --
system_u:system_r:local_login_t  3424 tty2  Ss     0:00 /bin/login --
system_u:system_r:getty_t        3425 tty3  Ss+    0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty3
system_u:system_r:getty_t        3426 tty4  Ss+    0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty4
system_u:system_r:getty_t        3429 tty5  Ss+    0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty5
system_u:system_r:getty_t        3430 tty6  Ss+    0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty6
system_u:system_r:dhcpc_t        3672 ?     S.s    0:00 dhclient3 -pf /var/run/

The initial install of policy inserts modules to match installed software, if you install new software then you need to add new modules with the semodule command:

# semodule -i /usr/share/selinux/refpolicy-targeted/apache.pp
security:  3 users, 7 roles, 824 types, 67 bools
security:  58 classes, 11813 rules
audit(1165532434.664:21): policy loaded auid=4294967295
# semodule -i /usr/share/selinux/refpolicy-targeted/bind.pp
security:  3 users, 7 roles, 836 types, 68 bools
security:  58 classes, 12240 rules
audit(1165532467.874:22): policy loaded auid=4294967295

Note that the security and audit messages come from the kernel via printk, it is displayed on console login but you need to view the system log if logged in via ssh or running an xterm. Now you have to relabel the files that are related to the new policy:

# restorecon -R -v /etc /usr/sbin /var/run /var/log
restorecon reset /etc/bind context system_u:object_r:etc_t->system_u:object_r:named_zone_t
restorecon reset /etc/bind/named.conf context system_u:object_r:etc_t->system_u:object_r:named_conf_t
[...]
restorecon reset /etc/apache2 context system_u:object_r:etc_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_config_t
restorecon reset /etc/apache2/httpd.conf context system_u:object_r:etc_runtime_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_config_t
[...]
restorecon reset /usr/sbin/named context system_u:object_r:sbin_t->system_u:object_r:named_exec_t
restorecon reset /usr/sbin/apache2 context system_u:object_r:sbin_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_exec_t
restorecon reset /usr/sbin/rndc context system_u:object_r:sbin_t->system_u:object_r:ndc_exec_t
restorecon reset /usr/sbin/named-checkconf context system_u:object_r:sbin_t->system_u:object_r:named_checkconf_exec_t
[...]
restorecon reset /var/run/bind context system_u:object_r:var_run_t->system_u:object_r:named_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/bind/run context system_u:object_r:var_run_t->system_u:object_r:named_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/bind/run/named.pid context system_u:object_r:initrc_var_run_t->system_u:object_r:named_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/motd context system_u:object_r:initrc_var_run_t->system_u:object_r:var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/apache2 context system_u:object_r:var_run_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/apache2/cgisock.3558 context system_u:object_r:var_run_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/run/apache2.pid context system_u:object_r:initrc_var_run_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_var_run_t
restorecon reset /var/log/apache2 context system_u:object_r:var_log_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_log_t
restorecon reset /var/log/apache2/error.log context system_u:object_r:var_log_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_log_t
restorecon reset /var/log/apache2/access.log context system_u:object_r:var_log_t->system_u:object_r:httpd_log_t

The -v option to restorecon causes it to give verbose output concerning it's operations. Often you won't do it in real use, but it's good to illustrate the use.

Now you have to restart the daemons:

# killall -9 apache2
# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
Starting web server (apache2)....
# /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
Stopping domain name service...: bind.
Starting domain name service...: bind.

Apache and BIND now run in confined domains, see the following ps output:

system_u:system_r:httpd_t   3833 ?     Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
system_u:system_r:httpd_t   3834 ?     S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
system_u:system_r:httpd_t   3839 ?     Sl     0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
system_u:system_r:httpd_t   3841 ?     Sl     0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
system_u:system_r:named_t   3917 ?     Ssl    0:00 /usr/sbin/named -u bind

It's not particularly difficult. I covered the actual install of SE Linux in about 1.5 minutes. I had considered just ending my talk there on a note of "it's so easy I don't need 5 minutes to talk about it" but decided that it was best to cover something that you need to do once it's installed.

If you want to know more about SE Linux then ask on the mailing list (see http://www.nsa.gov/selinux for subscription details), or ask on #selinux on freenode.

I've managed to go out dancing all night long (until 7am) two days in a row. There are some good parties in Seoul. Sleep is definitely not for this week.

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

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

One problem with keeping your journal in the French Revolutionary Calendar is that you have to keep looking up what the date is. It is nice to know that there are functions for converting Julian dates to French Revolutionary dates in PHP. Also a nice link on that page to the strange and mellow http://bottoms-dream.de/ , which isn't anywhere near as pornographic as it sounds. tags: french revolutionary calendar php bottoms

Blinky Redux I had Blinky Hockey again tonight -- the first time in a month that I've gone. (Blinky is the pickup hockey team my friends Meg and Patti started. It's for people who don't play hockey so good but want to learn. Like me.) Last time we had it, I flew out to California at 6AM the next day for 2 weeks, so I missed two practices in between. And then last time I had everyone over for Thanksgiving dinner, and I fell asleep putting the baby down. Doh. So it was good to go out this time around. I've been going to our local hockey rink, Ar na Mont-Royal, for free skating from 4-5PM a couple of times per week since we got home, and I think I'm getting a little steadier on the ice. I still haven't got the whole stop-on-a-dime thing or skate-forwards-backwards-forwards thing, but I'm able to get around without going face down. Which is good. Tonight we did some more sophisticated drills and had a good scrimmage at the end of practice. I didn't score but I had an awesome shot. It would have been cool if it were a score. Anyways, I think I'm going to have to keep practicing on my own. Going to the Ar na is great, but maybe I should fill our parking lot out back with water, like this R ves de Glace site suggests. That'd be cool. tags: hockey blinky skating montreal

Calendar wishlist So, I'm always trying to learn to use my calendar application, whatever's easiest and most available. I have a Treo 650 and Evolution, and they work OK, but they don't work great. I have a lot of things that I wish calendar programs had.

• Project management integration. This is probably the biggest one for me. I can't believe that we have two different kinds of programs for planning the exact same information: what you're going to do with your time. On top of that it's remarkable that so few of project planner programs talk to calendars (or vice versa).
• Hierarchical TODO lists. I'd like to break up tasks into sub-tasks that depend on each other.
• Effort estimates. I'd like to be able to make notes about how long I think a task is going to take, and when I'll get it done.
• Repeating TODOs. Probably the most egregiously un-ergonomic thing about modern calendaring programs. Almost everything I have to do in my life I have to do on a repeating schedule. I have to take out the recycling once a week before Wednesday morning. I have to pay rent before the 1st. I understand it's a tricky problem, but that doesn't mean I don't want a program to do it.
• Open invitations. I'd like to be able to send open event invitations to mailing lists and have people RSVP automatically (if they want). All the systems I've used require that I know the email address of each invitee ahead of time. And they rarely work across calendaring systems.
• Skipped TODOs. Sometimes I give myself a task todo and I just don't get around to doing it. I'd like to be able to mark a task as not done, but no longer important. I don't want to forget it forever, just remember that it never got done.
• Logging. It'd be nice if there were more and nicer interfaces to say what I did with my day after it's done. When did I finish that module? When was the last time Niko came over for dinner? It would be nice if my calendar helped me remember the past as well as plan the future.
• Sharing by default. I want to set up calendar sharing once, have my local and remote calendar synched transparently, and never worry about it again. CalDAV seems neat, but I have got no idea how to get it working.
• More shared calendars. I like using shared calendars; I wish more organizations published them. I'd like it if Bell Canada published a calendar that told me when to pay my phone bill, and I'd like it if MSLUG published a calendar of their meetings. I'd like it if I could mark my phone bill as paid, and RSVP for an MSLUG meeting, through my calendar interface.
• ACLs. Different people need to see different parts of my calendar. It'd be nice to have finer-grained control than "public" and "private".

tags: calendar wishlist

A member of the free software community recently sent me their CV and asked for assistance in getting a job. Some of my suggestions are globally applicable so I'm blogging them.

Firstly I recommend that a job seeker doesn't publish their CV on the net in an obvious place. Often you want to give different versions to different people, and you don't necessarily want everyone to know about the work you do. I can't imagine any situation in which a potential employer might view a CV on the net if it's available but not ask for one if it isn't there. If you are intensively looking for work (IE you are currently between jobs) then I recommend having a copy of your CV in a hidden URL on your site. This means that if you happen to meet a potential employer you can give them a URL so that they can get your CV quickly, but the general public can't view it. A final problem with publishing your CV is that it may cause disputes with former colleagues (EG if you describe yourself as the most skilled programmer in the team then a former colleague who believes themself to be more skillful might disagree).

Next don't put your picture on your CV. In some jurisdictions it's apparently illegal for a hiring officer to consider your appearance. If there are many CVs put forward for the position then it may be easier to just discard yours because of this. There is absolutely no benefit to having the picture, unless of course you are applying for a job as an actor. Incidentally I've considered applying for work as an movie extra. The amount of effort involved is often minimal (EG pretend to drink beer in the back of a bar scene) and the pay is reasonable. It seems like a good thing to do when between computer contracts.

I write my CV in HTML and refuse to convert it. If a recruiting agent can't manage to use IE to print my CV then they are not competent enough to represent me. If a hiring manager can't manage to view my CV with IE then I don't want to report to them. However I recommend against using HTML features that make a document act in any way unlike a word-processor file. There should be no frames or CSS files so there is only one file to email, and the text should be all on one page so the PGDN and PGUP keys can scroll through all the content. Tables, bold, and italic are good, fonts are a minor risk. Colors are bad.

Recruiting agents will often demand that your CV be targeted for the position that you are applying for. I often had complaints such as "I see only sys-admin skills not programming". To solve this I wrote my CV in M4 and used a Makefile to generate multiple versions at the same time. If a recruiter wants a version of my CV emphasising C programming and using Linux then I've already got one ready!

These are just a few thoughts on the topic based on a CV that I just saw. I may write more articles about getting jobs in the computer industry if there is interest.