I've had the same mouse for probably 5 years, and I'm very happy with the result. Unfortunately, the batteries don't make good contact with the pins anymore and sometimes it takes ten minutes of delicate work to get it going again. So today, I went to buy a mouse, and surprise, surprise, I had forgotten how much it sucks to be a left-handed when purchasing certain objects. At the computer store, there were about 25 different mouse models, most of them featuring extra buttons, ergononic shape and other cool stuff. I was ready to buy something for even more than 20 if it was worth it, but due to the non-simmetrical shape of most of them, again I could only go for the cheapest models. I took a Creative optical mouse, and downgraded from a cordless mouse with 5 buttons + a wheel to a plain simple 3-button + wheel. At least it's USB... all the low end mice are still PS2. When I was looking for a laptop, one of the requirements was that the touchpad wasn't slightly displaced to the left. So right-handed-ish... I know there are shops with stuff for left-handed. Once, my mother bought me a pair of nail scissors designed for left-handed people. All that kind of stuff is generally very expensive and anecdotic, though. I wonder if we'll ever see laws that will force manufacturers to provide inverted items on demand. I want one of those cool mice.

Oh yes. This currently rocks my world. (YMMV, of course.) Place the following in a shell script:

xclip -o xclip -i -selection secondary
echo -n "http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~hmw26/" xclip
xsendkeys Shift_L+Insert
xclip -o -selection secondary xclip -i

and run tpb -t “/bin/sh $PATH_TO_SCRIPT”. My “Access IBM” key now pastes http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~hmw26/ into the window currently in focus. No more typing my URL into IRC, email etc. everytime I upload something. Kick ass.

Via Luis, I really like this article. Debian has become way too corporate in a lot of ways it seems, and many of us are forgetting what it's like to try and do something daring. It's one of the reasons I find aj's DPL platform compelling, even though he hasn't said how he's actually going to encourage a faster tempo. People got really excited when I simply updated Debian's X packages to the latest upstream version. Granted, this is cool, but it's far from the exciting stuff I'm looking to do once we're finally caught up with upstream for real (almost there!) It doesn't have to be revolutionary or anything, but I want the XSF to be a center for exciting things to happen. Unfortunately, the most exciting X stuff is happening everywhere but Debian right now, despite my best efforts to open it up further.

And while I share helix's hate for the term "stop energy", the vast and deep flamefests that periodically consume the project really do seem to slow down our development noticeably when I just look at daily changelogs in sid. Julien may call me a teletubby for this (a metaphor I loathe for its utter stupidity) but debian-x has been almost 100% free of flamewars for the past year or so since I came on, and we've gotten a remarkable amount done. Contrast that with the previous era in which the fighting seemed to sap the will of the most productive and capable members of the team, all of whom seemed to focus much of their energy elsewhere as a result. While I think a mailing list code of conduct will be an important step in achieving this effect project-wide, I think a more fundamental solution is for individuals to attempt to build momentum themselves. Momentum like what I've tried to build with X seems to stop these energy-sucking flamewars dead in their tracks, and makes the project seem like a lot more fun place to be. I know that with all the flames going on with ndiswrapper and such I've been able to retreat in to XSF-land and find my happy place and be productive.

Several weeks ago, Wolfgang asked after a rename command for Hecl. Pretty simple to do in terms of the Hashtable that maps strings to commands, so I added it. However, there was a problem: in order to save space, I'd been grouping commands together in one class, and dispatching on "argv[0]". A nearly empty class in Java compiles to something like 500 bytes, so mapping one command to one class is not an acceptable practice when you are working, in some cases, with an upper limit of 64K. Dispatching on argv[0] meant treating it as a string, and doing a compare against the command name, which meant hard coding the command names into the classes implementing commands. Try renaming one of those commands and...oops! I struggled for a bit trying to find an answer I was happy with, and after talking it over on the mailing list, arrived at doing things like this: A big class that implements a number of commands, with a dispatch method:

static void dispatch(int cmd, Interp interp, Thing[] argv) throws HeclException  

That method then does a plain old 'switch' on the cmd int to go to the correct block of code. The code that calls this is simple, and it has to be, because one gets instantiated for every command, and so it's imperitive that it doesn't take up much memory:

class MathCmdFacade implements Command  
    private int cmdtype;
    public MathCmdFacade(int cmd)  
        cmdtype = cmd;
     
    public void cmdCode(Interp interp, Thing[] argv) throws HeclException  
        MathCmds.dispatch(cmdtype, interp, argv);
     
 

So far, I'm pretty happy with the results. By making the 'facade' (I'm not sure it's really the facade pattern, but... oh well, the name works for me) small, I don't waste memory. Plopping all the code in the switch statements is probably loathsome to purists, but it makes the code smaller, something that's never far from mind when working on Hecl. Things are also a bit faster, because we don't do the string comparisons to dispatch commands either. All things considered, the code isn't illegible by any means, either. Furthermore, because the new 'facade' commands still just implement the regular old Command interface, which means that Proc still works, and that you can still associate a class implementing Command with a string, so that it remains very easy to implement new Hecl commands in Java, and the interface hasn't changed. Faster, smaller, backwards compatible, and 'rename' works too... life is good!

I dropped my cell phone a few months ago, and it ended up with a large crack across the LCD, which to me became the perfect excuse to finally get that Blackberry I’ve always wanted. However, given the uncertainty about the outcome of NTP v. RIM, I decided to hold off on my purchase till after the hearing last week, which was widely expected to provide some closure one way or the other as to whether RIM would be allowed to continue its service in the U.S. Unfortunately, there was no such closure to be found. So, I have a quick question to those more in the know than I: When the media talks of a “Blackberry shutdown”, I assume they’re just talking about a shutdown of the push email service, not a shutdown of all access to the Blackberry network? In other words, if Blackberry is shutdown, I presume I’d still be able to access the web etc.? Or would my brand new Blackberry become little more than an expensive paperweight?

So, I just wrote some code that had a subtle bug in it: if you hit ^C at the wrong time, it would run kill(-1, SIGTERM), which kills every process you're running. I discovered this, recovered the damage, and started my session anew. Once I'd done this, I checked my email, where there was a new email awaiting me, entitled 'Competence Development News'. HR are taunting me.

English (Queen's English) is the only real language.

After this required short announcement by our main sponsor, Daniel Stone, lets go ahead and explain something of interest to the many Catalan X.Org users out there. Ivan and I have been looking at the issues that block a GNU/Linux user from using the compound geminate L, , instead of the more usual L L spelling. The and characters are unfortunately not included in ISO-8859-1, so fonts were the first big problem we faced. When modern X desktops started using True Type fonts by default, the de-facto free font in most distributions became Bitstream Vera as soon as they were licensed under a Free Software license back in 2003. Bitstream did not include the Unicode glyphs U+013F and U+0140, but some time after, chatting with daf, I learned he was working on Olwen, a Vera extension which would add proper Welsh coverage. He promptly added the Catalan glyphs, but Olwen never got widely exposed in distributions. Luckily, things are changing lately. Due to the lack of bugfixes or new releases of Vera, the list of Vera derivatives like Olwen started growing. The DejaVu project is building a font family, based on Vera, which merged many of these smaller purpose Vera derivatives, including Olwen. DejaVu, is, as far as I know, slowly replacing Bitstream Vera as the standard free, high quality true type font in free desktops. With the font blocker easily solvable now, the next problem was making the input easy. Some terminals, such as GNOME's or rxvt, allow you to insert Unicode typing a Unicode code point. The Spanish layouts don't provide a shortcut for it though, and if you try to do Level3-Shift+l, you'll get a Polish character, , that is of no use in neither Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque or other languages in the Spanish state. We wanted to replace that with , but when we had a look at it last Saturday night during our stay in Bruxelles, we couldn't find what the name for Unicode's U+0140/U+013F was in XKB-speak. So, as I said, on Sunday I went looking for Daniel and Keith to see if we would be clued up. The solution is easy: there is no name mapping, but you can use Unicode in 0x100XXXX notation directly in your X config file to make it work. He tried in his laptop, and why not, generated a patch for X.Org 7.0's xkeyboard-config. Daniel can't be that good, so he forced me to spread lies about the English language in this blog entry if we wanted the patch committed. :) Support for X.Org 6.8 and 6.9 isn't planned, unless you bribe your X maintainer to add a tiny patch. This has been implemented as an "es" keyboard extension (named cat ) because other systems don't have that feature in the Spanish layout, and X.Org wants to remain compatible with the rest. We'll have to add a

        Option          "XkbVariant"     "cat"

option to our keyboard section in xorg.conf. If you're not using X.Org 7.0, you might want to try:

xmodmap -e "keycode 46 = l L U140 U13f U140 U13f"

but I don't know if that'll work in all systems. To test in your keyboard, that'll probably be AltGr+l or AltGR+L . What we need to do now is to add support for the character in more fonts, alternative spellings for words using the ela geminada (ie, col labora and co labora ) in dictionaries, wordlists..., and of course, teach users about the avalability of this, and promote its usage.

I'm so glad I finally decided to attend FOSDEM this year, as last weekend in Bruxelles was so cool it reminded me of the unforgettable week in Helsinki for DebConf 5 last summer. I travelled early on Friday with Ivan Vilata, the dude who dragged me into the Catalan translations world, and about 12:30 we were finding our way through Bruxelles airport. We had barely no problems getting to Ra l's place in Boulevard Louis Schmidt, thanks to the detailed HOWTO he provided a few days before. We dropped our bags in his appartment and went out with him and Virginia after a well deserved mini-nap. On our way to the Grand' Place, where we'd hook up with the Softcatal crowd and the rest of FOSDEM people, we stopped in A la Morte Subite, where we Ivan and I started our personal training on Belgian beers. The Roy d'Espagne is an excellent name for a place where to meet our friends from Catalunya. I didn't know that was a formal meeting point that kickstarts FOSDEM, so I was really impressed when I got to the second floor and found the place was packed with Free Software people, many of them I already knew in person. Reaching Softcatala's table near the window took about 15 minutes, and after saying hi to most people, we decided we could use a quieter place to have dinner, and then go back.

The Grand' Place was bombed by seb128 in 1695 Ra l and Virginia, our official guides during the weekend, chose a Vietnamese restaurant in the Stock Exchange area they frequent, and for little money we got an enormous meal. Back at the Roy d'Espagne, I tried to say hello to most Debian people I saw around, while at the same time I tried to be with my hosts and the Catalan people. A while after, I spotted tbm and azeem downstairs, who I finally met. I talked to Michael for a long while, and at some point we left as we didn't want to miss the last tram. Ivan, luckily, only snores rarely, so we slept for a while, and then took the tram to the Universit Libre du Bruxelles. The main room was already packed for RMS's keynote, which was pretty good. After that, we went to several talks here and there, while I kept meeting some people around the place. Ivan and I left when the show ended and we met with Virginia and Ra l at the centre. This time, we hooked up with Xevi and Jes s Corrius from Softcatal , as Toni Hermoso had abandoned us for a cheap dinner with the Mozilla.org people. We were taken to a packed bar/restaurant (don't remember the name right now), which had a few interesting features: they wouldn't sell any Coca-Cola, would not accept credit cards in protest for the high fees Visa charges on small businesses, and something I wouldn't expect to see in 2006, their chart of prices hadn't been rounded up when they switched to the Euro. So some plate would be 9.72, others 12.43, etc. After dinner we had a few beers at the Th atre de Toone, located in some tiny alley in the centre and being pretty tired, we went back home at 23:30 or so. Sunday was a busy days, due to the number of interesting Debian and GNOME talks going on. I'd highlight liw's talk on Piuparts, Enrico's on debtags and fjp's on Debian Installer in the Debian room, and kris' on the future of GTK+. There was also a cool demo of Novell's XGL. During a dead slot, I approached Little Daniel and keithp to see if he could point me at some mapping between UTF-8 and XKB symbol names. But Daniel was cool enough to solve a problem a lot simpler than expected. :) jdub's closing talk was just fantastic, and telling him "See you in Vilanova, we left the University, for our last dinner around Bruxelles.

jdub clues the audience about some basic acronyms We managed to rescue madduck from the Debian UK beer trap and went to an Italian for dinner, this time with Josep and Mia, from Softcatal , making a nice mix of German, Valencian/Catalan, and Swedish at our table.

Mia, Josep, Ra l, Ivan, Martin and Jordi after pizza Ra l took us around the city centre and told us about the underground river, the remaining city wall's tower, and the church that leaned against it. That night's beer lesson happened in the "2000 beer bar". We all had a 7 Trappist Westvleteren Bleu 8, apparently "the best beer of the world". It was pretty good, actually. Our weekend in Bruxelles was about to end. After not that much sleep, Ivan and I took a tram and a bus to the Airport, arriving in Val ncia around 10AM, and after seeing the best view of the Pyrenees ever, which were absolutely covered with snow, as well as many other places in the Pa s Valenci and Teruel due to massive snows during the two days we were out. FOSDEM is probably a "can't miss" yearly event now. Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work to make it happen. You rock.

Bleurgh... Looks like I brought a bug home from Brussels instead of the beer I was hoping to find. I'm missing a day at work, feeling awful. Hopefully I'll be up to answering some email later, but for now I'm heading back to bed.

I just managed around to learn the very basics of autotools, and as a first execrise, used them on my "SSDDiff" xmldiff application. So you can now build it with the usual "./configure && make" command (if you have C++ STL and libxml2, that is, but these have been really standard for years now) So there is a new tarball on the Alioth project page which should be a lot easier to install. Get it while it's hot. ;-) A few words about ssddiff: SSDDiff is an "diff" application for XML files, which can output into a "merged" format, "xupdate" diffs or "marked" versions of the source files. The algorithm used is very good at dealing with structural changes, but it uses rather much memory and is not the fastest. So it's a good choice when you have a difficult case (one could say it tries to do a "semantic diff"). If you have CVS files or database tables dumped to XML, use other tools.

The webserver I've been running for the past year or two, my own creation, had been acting strangely lately. It got stuck at times and refused to serve requests. I knew of the problem for some time, but due to time constraints, I haven't touched the code in a very long while. Therefore, the problem never got fixed - and as it stands, it never will be, as I've given up working on Thy (and pretty much everything else), until I finally finish my studies. Originally, thy was written because the machine that powered my domain was not strong enough to run apache. The hardware got replaced about two times since then, and the current one is adequate enough, and the switch was made: I'm now running Apache 2.0. A few rough edges still remain - like SSL is not configured yet at all, but other than that, I think everything else that used to work, still works.

Robert Collins: Actually no, we don't pay enough at the movies so that we don't have to be inundated with advertising. In fact, it's getting harder and harder for movie cinemas to make a buck, that's why the candy bar has such outrageous prices. It's the advertising that is their bread and butter, not the ticket sales.

A new release of Quantian is now available! Release 0.7.9.2, available as a iso file of 2.7 gb, contains almost 7.6 gb of quantitative, numerical or scientific software. This release is the second one based on Knoppix 4.0.2 and features:

• Kernel 2.6.12, KDE 3.5 / 3.4, OpenOffice 2.0, ... and more from Knoppix 4.0.2
• a backport of the openMosix-enabled 2.4.27 kernel and openMosix tools from the last clusterKnoppix release,
• very comprehensive support for GNU R with over 870 packages from CRAN and BioConductor, plus ESS, Ggobi, Rpad, RKward, RSPerl, JGR, ...
• addition of the Java 1.5.0 SDK enabling us to add ImageJ, Weka, JGR, Mondrian;
• plus a number of other new packages (inkscape, orsa, praat, wxmaxima, some more Debian documentation...)
• and still loads more of math, bio, engineering, LaTeX, ... software

Downloads are available via the Quantian site at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and at from Greg Warnes' machine at Yale. European mirrors should be in sync within a day or two, Bittorrent support via the Linux Mirror Project should also be available soon. Note that http transfers seem to be problematic due to the file size of over 2gb; rsync and bittorrent are probably a better approach. More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.

It looks like I’ve earnt another ID: CVE-2005-4720 - Firefox 1.0.6 segfaults on this malformed .html page. Still no news about the security bounty though. I’m tempted to prod people .. but I haven’t managed to get round to it yet. On the one hand it’s bad to push for things like that. On the other hand there is no way I’d cash the cheque, and it would look lovely hanging on my wall…. Nothing much to say about the Debian Project Leader election yet. I think it is pretty clear to me that the idea of a “team DPL” was a failure. (At least I saw nothing happen any different.) I hoped the current/previous DPL would do great things, but to be honest didn’t see much evidence of it. (I know that personal issues came up, which is understandable, but it was disappointing to see the lack of promised status reports.) I also utterly refuse to vote for anybody who mentions in their platforms “we’re all social disfunctional”. I’m not. I’m good with people, animals, and myself. I don’t need somebody reinforcing geek stereotypes in even the smallest way. I did have the vague hope we’d have a female DPL, but alas that doesn’t look like it will happen for a while longer. Something to think about for the next year perhaps? Ummm .. I’m not sure how valid people would consider my opinions given that I’ve been mostly driven away from Debian mailing lists, and have never been a big IRC users .. so I will stop commenting now!