Tomorrow will be a challenging day, herding the kids through the airports to get to Hobart for a holiday in Tasmania before linux.conf.au 2009 in a couple more weeks. Sadly I didn't get the DAViCal release out over Christmas that I'd hoped for, and realistically I should face up to the fact that I won't have much chance to push it out until I get back... Still, it might happen, so don't lose hope! And if you're desperate the current Git head is pretty safe too - so long as you use the head for AWL as well. I'll only have sporadic net access (until LCA anyway), and my cellphone won't reach me at all, so I guess the world will have to get along without me for a few weeks :-) Have a Happy New Year - we won't be partying tonight, with a 4:00am start in the morning!

Today someone asked me to take a look at an Evolution enhancement that's just begging to get into trunk. Since this is a Gnome program in a subversion repository I've commenced the process of cloning the repository so I can look at the issue against the current head. At the current rate I should have a copy of the repository by early tomorrow morning, in order to be able to start looking at it. Of course today is when I actually do have some time to spare, and I hope to be fast asleep at the time when I expect this to finish. Presumably subversion isn't this slow for everyone, but since my latency to their repository is 300mS I'm probably on the worst end the pain, with each commit seemingly taking around a second. It sure would be nice if subversion provided some kind of chunked compression of these five-year-old commits, so I could be bandwidth limited, rather than latency challenged. The addition of a day to the checkout of a software project must be a significant barrier to entry for anyone considering contributing. It makes it much less likely to be opportunistic. So far I'm up to r3600 in 75 minutes. That's 75 minutes that I could have spent actually looking at the code, but now it's time for me to go and vote for me...

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now. The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that. Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage. Updated After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now. The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that. Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage. Updated After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.

When Heather designed a logo for me for Morphoss she did it with a bitmap editor, naturally enough because that's the tool she's most familiar with using. I'd rather not use a bitmap as the source format for the logo though, because it will degrade when it gets resized, so I redrew it as a vector graphic. One of the best free, open-source tools around for vector graphics seems to be Inkscape and I've mucked around with it for many years, so I naturally used that. Once you have a logo though, you naturally want to use it in documents, and the importing of SVG graphics into OpenOffice.org documents is a long-outstanding bug (let alone embedding SVG graphics) so I needed to convert them to another format. It's actually the most requested feature in OOo, appearing twice in the top 10, and even spawning an external SVG importer project. Since both programs support encapsulated postscript I was able to save the logo from Inkscape as .eps and use it directly in OpenOffice.org. While this initially seemed satisfactory, after a few weeks of using documents with the .eps logo embedded in them I started to get annoyed with the strange pauses when my CPU was maxed out while paging up and down. I was sure that that had not happened in the past when I was using a logo in WMF format, which OOo inevitably has to support well for compatibility with other Office Suites. After some searching around for more complicated ways to convert SVG or EPS to WMF, I discovered that what I could do was simply to open the EPS in OpenOffice.org draw, and save it from there as a WMF. This seems to work well, for my purposes anyway, so now when I use my logo in my OpenOffice.org documents I don't see any annoying slowdown paging up and down within the document, and I didn't have to download the SVG importer for OpenOffice.org either. Well alright, I did download the SVG importer as well, but my logo didn't look nearly so good without it's text, and with everything displaced up and to the right at various offsets!

Here are some pre-release DAViCal 0.9.5.90 (i.e. nearly 0.9.6) packages now. Since there is a lot of refactoring that has gone on under the covers here, I'll publish these packages so that people can tell me about all my embarassing mistakes, and I can correct them, before I upload them to places where they might get installed more or less automatically. In particular if you do find problems with these, and can catch me on the #davical on irc.oftc.net during the coming week I should be able to include a fix into the real 0.9.6 release next week. If you can't get on IRC then an e-mail will also be fine. The full release notes are here but the short version is that this fixes a number of bugs, notably one to do with importing calendars containing repeating events with exceptions. The big change is that this adds the initial support for the draft scheduling extensions to CalDAV, in particular the lookup of free/busy information.

I've been helping Amos Jeffries with a little testing in the last week to help nail some IPv6 bugginess preparatory to the upcoming 3.1 release of squid. In the process of that I've built some Squid3 packages with IPv6 support enabled from current HEAD. Get 'em while they're hot. Note that these are in a 'works for me' state. They have been built on Lenny, and I have them running on both Lenny and Sid. I haven't put them somewhere you could apt-get them from because you should be paying attention if you're going to use them! PS. If you can't click through to Amos' site it's because you're using IPv6 and the EveryDNS servers are continuing to serve up old data for his domain. Sigh.

After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer. In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least! Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet... I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware. After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this. Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website. I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function. The user-interface situation gets worse later, when I am taken through five successive screens to upload and classify some new media. It seems that in order to bore people who are foolishly trying to upload their home movies over "poorband" they attempt to display a progress bar. A better approach would be to ask me all of the questions about the media I am uploading on one single page and let me get on with something useful. This might be news, but it seems that such an interface could be done in plain HTML, and wouldn't actually require me to enable javascript for a site which is riddled with cross-site scripting flaws. Since it's the school holidays at the moment we took advantage of Te Papa's excellent institution of "Late Night Thursday" last week and visited the other end of the website in person. My disappointment in the website was then entirely eclipsed by my disappointment in the real-life part of the exhibit. The "walk on the map and see photos of the area" component was decidedly clunky, with no clear feedback between stepping on a tile and media appearing on the wall In fact it seems most tiles don't actually do anything, and there are only a few small screens in the walls to display the images. The "postcards blowing in the wind" gimmick amused the kids for about 20 seconds, tops. The 'wall' was quite a lot more successful, amusing me and the kids for nearly half an hour, though we're unlikely to go back next time we're there. There were plenty of annoyances also, in particular that it doesn't appear to use the full resolution of uploaded photos, the interface is slow and it is difficult to see what you are doing at times. It's good that they've started practising their apologies, firstly targeting the small (but geeky :-) segment of New Zealanders who are Linux users trying to help them out by providing them with free content. Now I am looking forward to their further apologies to larger groups of justifiably annoyed people, culminating with the ultimate one, where they apologise to all of the taxpayers of New Zealand who funded this incredible waste of money. I can imagine that something interesting could be done with a lot of media of New Zealand and now that Te Papa has started to amass a collection in this way, perhaps they will.

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website. I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function. The user-interface situation gets worse later, when I am taken through five successive screens to upload and classify some new media. It seems that in order to bore people who are foolishly trying to upload their home movies over "poorband" they attempt to display a progress bar. A better approach would be to ask me all of the questions about the media I am uploading on one single page and let me get on with something useful. This might be news, but it seems that such an interface could be done in plain HTML, and wouldn't actually require me to enable javascript for a site which is riddled with cross-site scripting flaws. Since it's the school holidays at the moment we took advantage of Te Papa's excellent institution of "Late Night Thursday" last week and visited the other end of the website in person. My disappointment in the website was then entirely eclipsed by my disappointment in the real-life part of the exhibit. The "walk on the map and see photos of the area" component was decidedly clunky, with no clear feedback between stepping on a tile and media appearing on the wall In fact it seems most tiles don't actually do anything, and there are only a few small screens in the walls to display the images. The "postcards blowing in the wind" gimmick amused the kids for about 20 seconds, tops. The 'wall' was quite a lot more successful, amusing me and the kids for nearly half an hour, though we're unlikely to go back next time we're there. There were plenty of annoyances also, in particular that it doesn't appear to use the full resolution of uploaded photos, the interface is slow and it is difficult to see what you are doing at times. It's good that they've started practising their apologies, firstly targeting the small (but geeky :-) segment of New Zealanders who are Linux users trying to help them out by providing them with free content. Now I am looking forward to their further apologies to larger groups of justifiably annoyed people, culminating with the ultimate one, where they apologise to all of the taxpayers of New Zealand who funded this incredible waste of money. I can imagine that something interesting could be done with a lot of media of New Zealand and now that Te Papa has started to amass a collection in this way, perhaps they will.

After 11 years 1 month and 28 days it's time for me to farewall Catalyst IT. While this is something that I've been working towards for the last couple of years, my reasons for leaving don't reflect any large dissatisfaction with Catalyst, but rather my own disinterest in fulfillling a role which is deemed appropriate to an executive director of the company it has become. As well, it is Catalyst's current and continuing success which provides me with the opportunity to fade out, like the cheshire cat, without the need to have strong plans. I do believe that the use and understanding of free and open-source software in New Zealand has matured to a point where there is the potential for an independent to make a few dollars reviewing or planning for open source projects in corporate and government areas. I hope I'll find out. And a great big thank you to every one of you staff, clients, suppliers and friends who has made Catalyst such a fantastic place to be a part of. It really will be a hard act to follow. :-)

Finally, I have released DAViCal 0.9.5. Hopefully this will resolve the series of installation- and upgrade- related problems which plagued the 0.9.4 release. Thanks for everyone being patient while this release was thoroughly tested through five pre-release versions, and especially thanks to those patient people who helped test those pre-releases. Now if I don't get too distracted by:

• processing my GPS tracks of the last two weeks around the South Island
• Uploading my last six months worth of photos
• Making sure the kids have done their homework
• Describing the places near where I live.
• ...anything else that catches my interest

... then maybe I will be able to really concentrate on nailing the scheduling extensions work over the next couple of months... Wish me luck!

I think that all Debian developers (including the brand new ones) will be delighted to learn that we not only have 4 indian DD's now, but we have an Indian DPL, at least according to his own words after a few beers. The first two days at FOSS.in have been quite busy. Sam's first talk ("Giving back to the community, how does Debian perform") was really interesting with ideas about a possible place where various distributions' patches to software could be collected and made available to upstream authors. I then had two talks in a row, which I feared a little but went pretty well. The first one was a brand new for me ("Contributing to Debian for dummies"). I tried to enforce the idea that contributing to Debian might be fun and opened to everybody, not only deep hard-core hackers (I funnily took my friend Andrew McMillan as example for hard-core hackers....). To make the talk less boring, I did choose to illustrate the various ideas I was explaining with photos taken from the various Debian-related events I attended last years. So, many of my Debian friends will recognize themselves on my talk slides. I hope you people won't mind being taken as examples (I should maybe have asked your authorization before....in case some of you want to sue me for using your public image). The other talk I has was a quite standard i18n talk. As I don't like doing the same talk over and over, I changed that one slightly to make it more suitable for the local audience, putting focus on localization for languages of India (even doing some of the "famous" bubulle-style maps especially for India). In case you aren't bored with that one, here's the link to slides. The next day features some other projects days. I will put focus on talks from the Indlinux project day. Indlinux is indeed an amazingly active project and the small room was entrely packed with people attending quite technical talks about Indic computing, Text-to-Speech, Indic languages spellchecking and such really specific topics. I also attended a very promozing talk by Dimitri Glezios, in the Fedora project day room, talking about Transifex, a very promising localisation material collecting platform with the interesting ability to be able to push translations back to thei respective upstreams, avoiding one of the major drawbacks of tools such as Rosetta. I'll have to come back on that one. Now for the Main Confeence days....that will be busy, too, for sure ! And I didn't even mention the awful Mozilla party we had yesterday night. Some people will remember that one.

A curiously interesting thread has sprung up on the Xorg mailing list recently regarding the lack of bandwidth the developers might have for accepting patches. Bernardo Innocenti, who hacks on OLPC stuff amongst other things, wants to get some patches reviewed for acceptance, but there aren't enough people around with the time and inclination to review and accept his work. He did a quick and dirty analysis of Xorg LoC vs Linux LoC, to give a "X codebase is roughly 1/2 Linux codebase" (which surprised me, actually, I'd always thought it was larger) and then a similarly rough analysis that suggests that Xorg has roughly 1/20th of the developer base. To some extent Bernardo's metrics are arguable, but the basic facts are that Linux gets the lions share of the developers. Is this what we should expect? Is this a healthy way for the free and open source software community to support the development of what I personally would like to see as the future desktop base? Linux does a fantastic job as an OS, right now. It's been doing it for years, really, but we still need to get behind some of the differential further up the stack. And all credit to those stalwarts of X development who are shouldering more than their fair share of the burden. So if you were looking for an open source software project where you can be appreciated, don't overlook X.

Quite a few people seem impressed with the new release of Leopard, and are now looking for a CalDAV server to use with their shiny new iCal app. Unfortunately it seems that Apple wrote this primarily to work with their own (free, open-source) calendar server, which has the side effect that it doesn't work with DAViCal. Part of the "doesn't work" is due to DAViCal not implementing some areas of the CalDAV specification, which is fair enough. Part of it is due to DAViCal not implementing some draft extensions to the CalDAV specification, which I can also understand, since it allows them to provide some useful features that those extensions are designed to support. There also seem to be some parts of the "doesn't work" which are due to a dependence on extensions beyond either of these cases, which is a little more disappointing - and quite a bit harder to implement. So far I have made some fixes to the first point, and some additions towards parts of the second, but as of today it still does not work. This is complicated by my not having access to a Mac. Things are looking up, however, because Tom Robinson has kindly agreed to loan me a Mac running Leopard from next week. In order to "clear the slate" for that, I will be releasing a 0.9.2 over the weekend with the various minor enhancements and fixes that have been applied over the last week. So although this upcoming release will let you add your DAViCal account to iCal 3, it still won't actually work with it. I'm hoping that ready access to the application will enable me to correct that fairly quickly. Also waiting in the wings (and which unfortunately won't be in 0.9.2 either) Maxime Delorme has been working on SyncML support, and is nearly ready with a patch, so we can look forward to that addition fairly soon also.

I hate spam! Which probably puts me in the same camp as 99.99999% of the world. The other 1 in 10 million are, of course, the spammers, who seem to take the space invaders approach to sending e-mail: we'll keep sending you more until you die. A few years ago I used to only receive perhaps 1 every 100 seconds, which was pretty annoying, but Spamassassin was quite able to filter out 99% of those and let through about 1-2 each day, which I could deal with. My spam levels increased to maybe 1 every 20 seconds, and late in 2005 I implemented a second layer of spam filtering on my laptop using DSpam. This worked quite effectively, but DSpam is really not the tool for the job - it's much more appropriate as a company-wide antispam solution, and potentially as a replacement for Spamassassin. It drove me nuts on my laptop because it's resource usage slowed down the interactive response. When I got my new laptop at the beginning of the year I decided against continuing with my rather baroque mail setup and to leave the spam filtering on the server. What I didn't realise is that my spam rate had increased again to around 1 every 8 seconds, and it has been slowly driving me to distraction ever since. It seems to have cranked up another notch recently, to perhaps 1 every 3 seconds now, so that 1% making its way through Spamassassin was getting to a very annoying several hundred each day. The longer I took to resolve it, the more time I would be wasting dealing with it every day. What I chose to apply on this occasion was CRM114, which I had some vague idea might be able to help. I was fairly impressed by the relatively simple install, but what completely blew me away was the speed with which it was able to learn to be useful. Starting from scratch, it seems to be correctly classifying over 90% of my incoming mail after about 12 hours of training, on a total of only 75 'Unsure' messages. Even after only an hour it was getting over 50% (I'll describe my actual CRM114 installation process in a comment below). So far there have been no false positives. Now that CRM114 is installed I will be able to look into some of it's other mail classifying features too, and I'm really looking forward to that too.

Last week I installed Ubuntu Gutsy onto Heather's laptop. While Gutsy seems to be an easy task for most situations, installing it onto a Pentium 366 laptop with 200M of RAM and (particularly) an 800x600 screen was harder than it perhaps should have been. I'm sure that most installations these days aren't 800x600, but the graphical installer in Gutsy seems determined to make this painful. I had to move the toolbars to the sides of the screen, and then I could see the top half of the buttons on each page. It was like the page was sized for 600 vertical pixels, but the designer had forgotten about toolbars and title bars - not that I could see any screens in the process I followed that needed more than 5/6 of that screen anyway. Eventually I got it installed, and it even seemed to run OK once we booted into it. That's "OK for a 200M P366 with an 800x600 screen" though. Looking around at the price of a new laptop made putting up with that sort of performance a whole lot less palatable. The Acer Aspire 5310 (with free RAM upgrade) was $898 at Dick Smith, with a $99 cashback offer. A quick google shows that it's using the Broadcom 43xx wireless which isn't even close to being the best, but can be made to work with Linux. Everything else seemed likely to work, so we bought it. Installing Gutsy on it was nearly trivial, though I had to install bcm43xx-fwcutter on a different PC (my laptop, which is running Debian, in fact) to get the firmware for the WLAN before I could get the wireless working. I'm surprised that Broadcom still don't make that firmware publicly available somewhere, rather than forcing people to jump through the sort of hoops that would get them wanting an Intel chipset next time. Anyway, everything installed very easily, and the laptop is working quite nicely. Strangely neither sound, nor suspend to ram are working out of the box, but perhaps I'll get them going in due course. They're not so important in this case fortunately, but perhaps in due course I'll try and get them working and post some details about it. Much harder has been getting the fabled 'cashback' from Acer. I think I now know what I'm being paid $99 for. Firstly the only way to get your cashback is by registering through a webpage. Heather's first attempt to do this resulted in an error from our proxy about a malformed request, so I got called in. I tried registering using on my laptop, but couldn't even get to the cashback page. I then tried using IE6, with similar results. So perhaps it's my PC? I tried using a different PC, with the same result again! We tried ringing them up, but they were absolutely determined that (even after 20 minutes on the phone) they were not going to accept that information over the phone. So the only way to get the cashback from Acer was via their thoroughly broken website. Even their Contact Acer page is broken in firefox just showing a blank. Firefox users need not apply. Eventually, while spending some time in front of Heather's main computer (which had made it all the way through to submitting their on-line form before failing) I realised that the error she was getting was a proxy error from some in-form javascript submitting an invalid request, so I disabled the proxy, the form finally worked, and I managed to apply for the cashback. Now we just have to send the printed form in, along with some blood from our firstborn, the ashes of my grandmother, various barcodes, receipts and toenail clippings and we're sweet. They say they'll send us some money within 30 days. I think we should maybe frame it or something. I just know I'm going to feel really inclined to take advantage of cashback offers in future. In Other News: DVD Slideshow Meanwhile I've been playing with DVD Slideshow which seems to be just what my parents have been after for a while, so they don't have to keep their favourite photos on the camera to be able to show them off on someone's TV. It's great! At least it is great now after I changed all the calls to ffmpeg to add a 'k' after the bitrate parameter. But that's Open Source Software, I guess. I'll send a patch to them... :-)

I have not been able to put a lot of effort into DAViCal over the last couple of months, since my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in early September, and he died on 2nd October. So here it is, finally, including a lot of refactoring work around the handling of DAV/CalDAV REPORT requests and implementation of the DAV::principal-property-search report. This also requires an upgrade to the latest AWL library (0.20), which includes a complete rewrite to the class used for parsing and rendering iCalendar data. This release is recommended, since you will need some of this stuff to support the upcoming Mozilla Calendar 0.7 release properly. At this point I have only released the files to http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/ and I'll push it out to a wider audience if I don't here screams of anguish from people in the next few days :-) This release does not have any associated database changes, so it should be a simple matter to install the upgraded code.

This week has been a week of pictures for me. I was looking around on Wikipedia earlier in the week and decided that the articles around the Porirua area where I live was looking a little barren. So I've been out taking a few snaps to liven it up a little. The articles themselves don't look that great either so I'll see if I can't put some effort into improving them as well. As a result though, I've been playing with photographs and I'm finding that the graphics landscape on Linux has improved significantly since last time I was playing around with things. I've been using Hugin for making panoramas since someone pointed me to it at Debconf5 in Helsinki, but version 0.7beta4 with Panorama Tools 13 is an immense improvement. It seems that now if I take my photos the right way I can expect Hugin to create a panorama with only a couple of minutes of time, and no real effort to speak of. I built some Debian packages of Hugin 0.7beta4 and libpano13 which are here, if you're interested. Sadly, it seems that the current maintainer has not updated these packages for a long time. Something I've also been trying to do properly for some time is to produce decent HDR images. Although the tools have been around for a while they are somewhat inaccessible to people, taking a long time to gain any kind of intuitive understanding about how they work and what parameters a person should use. The answer, it turns out, is something like the Hugin one: provide a GUI front end. Well there now is one, and it's damn good. I've now started taking a few photos in triplicate so I can fiddle around with QtPfsGUI and learn to recognise the situations where HDR can make a better photo. It's not an addictive name, but it's great software and when I've managed to get my head around it I will create an HDR area on my gallery and put a few fun images in there. I've built some Debian packages of this also, but I've never had to deal with something using QMake before and it doesn't seem particularly friendly to packaging. Probably I'm just beating on it the wrong way. Anyway, here are some Debian QtPfsGui packages for anyone who is interested. Maybe if you know how better to drive qmake from a distribution point of view you could send me some tips. Something that I really like about both Hugin and QtPfsGui is the way that they are providing a GUI framework for some pre-existing command-line tools. The separation of UI from function is a classic application of the Unix model that will be familiar to anyone who has ever piped find into xargs, and it really does allow for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. What is interesting about the two above, seems to be that by providing the UI they have managed to breathe some new life into the underlying functions as well. The next thing that I'm really looking forward to is the upcoming 0.46 release of Inkscape SVG editor. This totally awesome program just gets better and better and a bunch of the upcoming enhancements come from the Google Summer of Code. Actually all of these programs are quite a bit better recently because of the sponsorship they have received from the GSoC. There have been a few Catalyst people mentoring some GSoC projects - mostly around Moodle, Lisp and Git - so a couple of the Catalyst folks will be off to the big meetup / review in a couple of weeks. I hope those lucky stiffs pass on my thanks to everyone involved.

After much wading through possible names, none of which really excited me, I have finally chosen "DAViCal" as the new name for my CalDAV server that was previously called RSCDS, or the "Really Simple CalDAV Store". In the end, I chose DAViCal because it:

• seems easy to pronounce.
• combines the 'Cal' and 'DAV'.
• returns < 1000 results on google.
• doesn't make me cringe.
• didn't have a domain name registered.

That was about the hardest part of preparing for the 0.8.1 release, and now that I've done that I should manage to make the changes to the packaging, though I have no doubt that the old name will appear in all sorts of places for a while yet. Choosing names is an important business, and I should know that from the length of time we spent agonising over names for our children, discarding all sorts of things because they had silly abbreviation collisions (like the "Royal Scottish Country Dance Society" :-) Even then, I think we got the kids names wrong, and the big one should be called "Thumper" with the little one called "Sly", but perhaps that's just a temporary annoyance and in time the names that we registered for them will fit them better. I also recall Grant once saying that you should never use the word "Simple" in the name of your project, and he should know. DAViCal is no longer particularly simple, although I have attempted to hide the complexity from the user as far as that is possible, and will continue to do so. Once I get out version 0.8.1 of DAViCal I will finally upload it to Debian, proper. This version has some important enhancements to its DAV spec compliance which are going to be needed by some future versions of Mozilla, and probably other things too, so it's important to push it out as soon as possible now.