Craige, it might be the first time that the exhibition has run under the Linux World Expo banner, but I recall an earlier one after the last linux.conf.au in Sydney. Indeed, a bit of Yahoo!ing reveals this from the Internet Archive, linuxexpo.com.au and the front page. It looks like I might have been there too at the Debian stand. Ah, memories.

I spent 45 minutes searching around for this, so this is mainly just so I don't have to spend a lot of time searching for it again. You can add/update entries in debian.net by doing

echo "<host> in a <ip>"   gpg --clearsign   mail changes@db.debian.org

All the commands are documented on db.debian.org, look for 'DNZ Zone entry'.

Horms, why not use gworldclock? Martin, I think you are after tra. Andrew, you do realise that you could do that with yum – which has been in Debian for a while now. You'd have probably heard about it earlier if Mako could be bothered to get Atom 1.0 support working on Planet Debian. Rodney, Nokia phones generally use Netfront as their default. If you want to use Opera you have to specify it. I'd be highly skepticle of KHTML being used anywhere memory footprint mattered. It looks like it might be WebCore (dervied from KHTML) instead. But that is only on very recent phones (first half of 2006). Oh, and that is likely to be Yahoo merchant crawler. Yahoo probably thinks you are a corporate whore or something ;-). Finally is it just me or does it strike anyone else as odd that the Mozilla Corporation, with all of its' money, is not able to get a crack group of hackers together so that Firefox 2.0 can render ACID2? At least two of the competitors can already so, what's the go, Joe? (or in this case Mitchell).

I have decided to add myself to the Uploaders field of amaya, after its maintainer, Anand Kumria, offered me to do so during the Xlibs-dev Transition.
The changelog is quite impressive, due to the excellent work of Regis Boudin, who provided patches for almost any bug on earth.

The Xlibs-dev Transition NMUs are going to be revisited during this weekend, to ensure that after a month, maintainers acknowledged the NMUs and that no new bugs were introduced.

<p> Just a few days ago, <a href="http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/">yum</a> entered <a title="Yum for Debian" href="http://packages.debian.org/yum">Debian</a>. Why is this interesting? </p> <p> Well, if you happen to be using <a title="virtual machine monitor" href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/">Xen</a> on Debian then you can easily create yourself a <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com/">Fedora</a> installation. </p> <p> You only need to perform <a title="Install a Fedora system in a Xen instance" href="http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstart#head-e41e7bbdd3c94366a44cf4ba609172f87b94d6d2">Step 5</a> on the procedures listed here after doing an <code>apt-get install yum</code>. Note, you'll want to make sure that rpm is setup correctly (<code>mkdir /var/lib/rpm; rpm --initdb</code>) before you begin. </p> <p> It is always interesting checking out the competition. Soon you be singing along to <i> <a title="Yummy yummy yummy" href="http://lyrics.rare-lyrics.com/O/Ohio-Express/Yummy.html">I've got love in my tummy</a></i> </p>

<p> Zeeshan Ali <a href="http://www.advogato.org/person/zeenix/diary.html?start=77">writes about Finnish women</a>. Onella is actually one of the better bars in Helsinki, hopefully you discovered the two "secret" bars after the inital heavy-metal one. The first is your typical dance-floor, the other is a uniquely Finnish experience. </p> <p> Basically it consists of drunk Finns, mainly drunk Finnish women, getting up on the table &mdash; dancing as best they can &mdash; and singing along to all the recent songs. <strong>Except it is all in Finnish!</strong>. Every song you know, and some you wish you didn't, will be sung, the audio will sound familiar but the words are Finnish. Distinctly odd. </p> <p> Yes, Zeeshan, Finns are very weird. I can not imagine anything like <a title="No secrets in Finland" href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2005-11-02T150542Z_01_EIC254324_RTRUKOC_0_US-FINLAND-WAGES1.xml">this</a> happening anywhere else. Even the BBC's <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4384992.stm">Night out in Helsinki</a> is fairly tame to my experience at Debconf5 </p> <p> Over the course of many nights, I saw </p> <ul> <li>Drunk women falling off tables (many times &ndash; and cute ones too!)</li> <li>People punching fists into windows</li> <li>Large brawls</li> <li>Pepper spray indiscriminately bandied about</li> <li>Bottles being thrown &ndash; by the bar staff at customers</li> </ul> <p>It makes for lots of fun adventures &mdash; If you ever meet <a title="Horms" href="http://www.vergenet.net/~horms">Simon Horman</a>, he can fill you in far better than I can</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.stillhq.com/">Michael Still</a> <a title="trackback pings" href="http://www.stillhq.com/blosxom/000007.html">writes</a> about <a href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/">Trackback pings</a>. </p> <p> I'm still not used to blosxom and how everything fits together but I thought I'd enumerate the plugins I've installed. </p> <dl> <dt><a href="http://www.insanum.com/downloads/BlosxomV2/categorytree.gz">categorytree</a><dt> <dd>I've actually got this named as 01categorytree, so it runs first, but it gives me the listing of topics I've posted too</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.hecker.org/blosxom/extensionless">extrensionless</a></dt> <dd>I'm a big fan of <a href="http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI">Cool URIs</a>, this helps me almost get there. Bonus points to those who can work out where I don't quite make the magic happen seemlessly. Oh, named 02extensionless.</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/atomfeed">atomfeed</a></dt> <dd>As every good blogger knows, syndication is the name of the game. While you got use the deprecated RSS, <a href="http://atomenabled.org/">Atom</a> is where is it at. I've actually disabled RSS feeds in preference to atom</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/breadcrumbs">breadcrumbs</a></dt> <dd>On permalink posts, you'll see a click-trail. All professional websites have them, so I figured I should too.</dd> <dt><a href="http://molelog.molehill.org/blox/Computers/Internet/Web/Blosxom/Calendar/">calendar</a></dt> <dd>Presents a calendar with all the posts you've done on various days highlighted, so you can quickly determine when someone has been sleeping or has been an insomniac</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/config">config</a></dt> <dd>Comes with the Debian blosxom package, and originates with the author. Allows you to customise configuration dependant on where the post is in your heirarchy and other magic.</dd> <dt><a href="http://my-security.net/bloxsom/directorybrowse.txt">directorybrowse</a></dt> <dd>If you have deep category hierarchies this makes all the elements of the paths clickable. It's cool, you want it.</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.hecker.org/blosxom/plugins/feedback">feedback</a></dt> <dd>Part of the blogging scene is to allow other people to comment upon what you've written. This gives them comments and trackbacks. I've modified this somewhat and still need to fixup how comments are previewed but otherwise this plugin is gold</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/flavourdir">flavourdir</a></dt> <dd>Also part of the <a href="http://packages.debian.org/blosxom">blosxom</a> package, this means you do not have to have your blog entries intermingled with the page templates (known as flavours) used to display them</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.blosxom.com/downloads/plugins/interpolate_fancy">interpolate_fancy</a></dt> <dd>For large plugins, like feedback, you might end with some text on your template that you only want displayed some of the time. This enhances blosxom so your template (flavour) can have conditionals, comparisons and whatnot.</dd> <dt><a href="http://noone.org/blosxom/multcat">multcat</a></dt> <dd>Not everything can be easily catagorised into one thing. This lets you put a post into multiple places. It'd be nice if all the categories a post was under was displayed as part of the category path</dd> <dt><a href="http://www.insanum.com/downloads/BlosxomV2/rendertime.gz">rendertime</a></dt> <dd>Calculates the amount of time the page took to render</dd> <p> On my todo list is to convert from a table based layout to a fluid CSS one. It'll probably be a 3-columned look with fixed-width sidebars since negative margins looks are harder to get right.</p>

<p> Or '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblog">mobloging</a>' for short. Basically it is using your mobile phone to add content to your blog. All very interesting, except when you get to the details. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/">Stewart Smith</a> gave it a whirl ([<a title="first attempt" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=503">1</a>], [<a title="take two" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=504">2</a>]) with fairly predictable results. This is because the message you might receive is dependent on the phone manufacturer <em>and</em> the <aabr title="Multimedia Messaging Centre">MMC</abbr> does to your message. And that is before it might be mangled along the way via email. </p> <p> Basically most phones (or MMCs) will convert the content to either <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32">Base32</a> or, more commonly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64">Base64</a>. Generally the MMS is composed of only two parts, and then sent to an email address. From there you'll have to write something that takes the email and converts it into a blog entry. </p> <p> A while ago a friend of mine wanted to do the same, so I wrote some perl to do it for him. It seemed to work for him (with some tweaks) and it might be enough for you too. You can grab it <a title="Code to help with mobile blogging" href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/moblog--devo--1.0/">here</a> However you might find it simpler to use <a href="">GNU Arch</a> and register <code>http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/</code> and then browse in <code>wildfire@progsoc.org--projects/moblog</code>. </p>

<p> <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2005/11/02/0">James Henstridge</a> notes that <a href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/zeroconf/">zeroconf</a> can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/317655" title="bug 317655: Zeroconf crucifies the network">bug</a> was filed and then fixed within 2 days. </p> <p> This was because I was at <a href="http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/">DebConf</a> and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an <abbr title="Address Resoultion Protocol">ARP</abbr> packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them. </p> <strong>Update: 18:20 AEST</strong> <p> <a href="http://www.davyd.id.au/">Davyd</a> asks why would you use zeroconf over <a href="http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/">NetworkManager</a>. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong. </p> <p> I do believe there should be an <em>overall</em> co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding. </p> <p> Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates <abbr title="Internet Protocol v4 Link-Local">IPv4LL</abbr> addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3927.txt" title="Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses">RFC3927</a>. </p>

# metadata <p> I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking. </p> <p> Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. <em>Again</em>. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts. </p> <p> I started off at <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Cruise.aspx">Cruise Bar</a>, which has a great view of the Opera House [<a title="Sydney Opera House in the afternoon" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-in-afternoon.jpg">1</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at dusk" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-dusk.jpg">2</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at night" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-night.jpg">3</a>] and (somehow) staggered my way to the <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Ship_Inn.aspx">Ship Inn</a>. Unable to flag down a cab in this area &ndash; lots of people going home around 23:00 &ndash; I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are. </p> <p> For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge. </p> <p> By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. <q>Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here</q>. <q>Mate, are you fucking deaf?</q>. (on radio, to pals)<q>Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?</q> </p> <p> Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything. </p> <p> In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely. </p> <p> These laws &ndash; part of the War on Freedom &ndash; would make the rest of this entry illegal. </p> <p> I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard. </p> <p> In Australia, things like <a href="http://smh.com.au/news/national/braindamaged-man-told-to-pay-up-after-bashing/2005/11/01/1130823210703.html" title="victim of security guards">this</a> are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist. </p> <p> Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there. </p> <p> How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style. </p> <p> Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area &ndash; probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums). </p> <p> Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things. </p>

<p> First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene. </p> <p> I looked around at various pieces of software and only <a href="http://www.blosxom.com/">blosxom</a> and <a href="http://pyblosxom.sf.net/">pyblosxom</a> fitted my criteria. </p> <p> My criteria was pretty simple: <ul> <li>Plenty of features (comments, calendar, categories)</li> <li>No database (even though I prefer <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/">Postgresql</a>, I didn't want to have to learn a schema if I decided to migrate or it all went cactus</li> <li>Vibrant community</li> </ul> Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have &mdash; it'll get better in time. </p>