Upstream released 2.6.16 yesterday, and thanks to the non-me members of the kernel team/ftp-master teams, packages are making their way into sid. I tried to get ia64 working before the upload, but got sidetracked debugging an issue that turned out to just be out-dated firmware on my box and didn't get the new configs tested in time. Anyway, I cleaned up the ia64 configs today, and took care of hppa while I was at it, so maybe we can try a 2.6.16-2 tomorrow.

I switched to evolution from mutt a little over a year ago. I found that I really need a side-panel list of folders and some better calendar integration. Since then, I'd discovered muttng and other ways of dealing w/ calendar stuff at work, but I just couldn't make myself go through the MUA switch again. Today I have a couple new . (No offence intended to the gnome/evo guys - they've been responding quickly, and ia64 doesn't have a huge desktop userbase - its something I've wanted to do for a while anyway). I spent a couple hours splitting out configs so that I can share all of my common settings across machines, and have customizations where necessary for specific locations/situations. I used the 'source file ' syntax to call a shell script that uses heuristics to guess at my environment & generate relevant pieces of muttrc. I'm already (re-)impressed by how much quicker I can process mail, and of course, the fact that I can customize every little property of the MUA. And I can use my $EDITOR again :) Now I guess I should take another look at calendaring tools to go with it - I hear sunbird has pretty good support for read/writing calendar info via WebDAV...

I'm currently sitting in Denver International awaiting a flight to Houston where I'll meet up with Taggart for the flight into Mexico. There we'll meet up with some other folks (Ryan Murray, Troy Heber & Junichi Uekawa at least) and take a cab down to Oaxtepec. We've had *tremendous* trouble booking our hotel room (and by we, I mean Troy). In fact, last we heard they were cancelling our reservation. I strongly suspect this is an attempt at bribe soliciation, or maybe they actually just don't want to do business with us? Not quite sure - my employer is sponsoring my travel here, and I haven't noticed a "bribe" category on the expense report.. maybe I can list it under tip? :) Oh well, I suspect the worst case is that we can find asylum for a night on someone's floor until our accomodations get worked out. I'm very much looking forward to arriving at DebConf & seeing everyone, not to mention trying the local cuisine :)

The next kernel update for sarge is being prepared; testing is welcome - please note your status on the wiki. Also, for those job seeking types, HP has some jobs open in the Open Source and Linux Organization. You can search for them here.

HP ProLiant servers have a device called the iLO that lets you do things like get remote console, power cycle, etc. There's a java interface for getting a graphics console, but I've always been more than happy to ssh into the device and use the "remcons" command, which lets me view the VGA console remotely. It only deals with text, but why do I need framebuffer/X on a remote server anyway? Anyway, I just received a new "G5" system, which has an updated controller called "iLO 2". So I ssh in to install it and, surprise, the remcons command is gone. So, I spent a few days playing with this machine, trying to avoid installing a Java plugin or actually walking into the machine room with a monitor/keyboard. What I did discover is that the ssh interface has a "Virtual Serial Port" option, and I can configure the BIOS to redirect its output through the serial port. Turns out, this is actually better than remcons - remcons somehow captured the text being displayed via VGA, probably by snooping the framebuffer. This resulted in a oft difficult to read display due to random artifacts. But, good ol' serial doesn't have this problem - pump it up to 115200, and its quite interactive and easy to read. So, to all of the people for whom I've suggested the remcons command in the past, try vsp instead - its a lot nicer.

I'm always on the lookout for a better way to maintain and share my calendar. I currently have a hybrid solution - evolution/webcalendar. I use evolution to store all of my HP appointments, because it can easily import ical appointments. It also has a pop-up reminder mechanism, which is certainly a must. But what sucks is that I want to see/be reminded of the same appointments whether I'm on my laptop at home, or in the office on my workstation. evolution doesn't share its calendar with other clients. Outside of work, I use webcalendar - which is actually pretty feature rich. It can send e-mail reminders and even has a .ics interface that evolution can poll. That way I can overlay my (read-only) webcalendar appointments on top of my evolution calendar, so I only have to maintain those appointments in a single place, and can still get pop-up reminders. Unfortunately, this hasn't been working with recent evolutions - and when it did, it was flaky - random crashes, etc. A problem with webcalendar is that everyone I invite to an event needs to have an account. I want to be able to invite anyone in the world, with just their e-mail address. When I'd first read about hula, I let my mind go wild with how it might work. Wouldn't it be cool if this was just a simple to install/configure/use client that people could just install and run locally? And then what if all these clients could somehow be organized into useful groups? Like I could tell my client that I'm an HP employee, and it could talk to some hp hula server to see my coworker's schedules? And I could also see my buddy's calendar that lists all the concerts he's going to this month, by communicating with his client directly, in an rss fashion? No required central server, just a client that knows how to collect/post information in standard formats and present it in a useful way. Well, that's not what hula's all about, it seems. It looks very centralized, and isn't something many of my friends could configure themselves. I installed sid's hula today; which is admittedly about 6 months out of date. I was initially impressed with the ease of install & the pretty web page, but quickly became disappointed by the admin architecture. Adding a user is terribly, terribly non-intuitive. And the whole thing looks overly complex, like its inherited a lot of design cruft. But, once you log in as a user, things look fine. hula's calendar looks nice, and I'd seen a flash video that makes newer versions look really spiffy. So, I wanted to see if I could easily import an e-mailed invitation into it. This means I'd need to give hula access to my e-mail. You can have hula pull mail from a remote server - I was hoping to connect it to my imap server as a read-only client for this test. However, it seems that hula will only pull mail every N hours, where N is configurable globally. I really just want to have an active imap session, using hula as a front-end, but that feature doesn't look like its there. I also couldn't find anyway to import an existing calendar/.ics file. Anyway, I've seen enough to know that hula isn't going to work for me yet. It doesn't appear to offer me anything that I don't already have, or simplify anything I do already have.

I travelled quite a bit over the break. First leg was home to New Mexico for Christmas. The night I arrived, YD's band Absolute Uncertainties played a short birthday party set. The rest of the week was spent mostly hanging out with my nieces & nephews. They're pretty fun to hang out with, now that most of them can carry on conversations. Then it was off to Las Vegas. But I didn't stop at that one & instead ventured on to the one in Nevada. I drove to Albuquerque, had lunch with Skye & Casey, then met up with YD to fly to Vegas. After nearly missing the flight to fix a flat on the rental, we were on our way. This was YD's first time on an airplane, and he didn't even throw up on me. That's a true friend. A bunch of us stayed at a friend's house. We spent a lot of time in the hot tub, drank a lot of Coors Light, and ate a lot of Del Taco.

A while back, we started tracking security issues across the various security-supported packages in svn. We're slowly refining the format, but it seems to be working pretty well. In my at-the-parents-for-the-holidays-boredom, I wrote a script to create a summary page. It still needs some smarts about dealing with the linux-2.6 package, and needs a post-commit hook to auto-regenerate. Hopefully I'll have it active by next week.

I've started a wiki to track the status of woody security updates. I think the only problem here is gonna be testing. But, if there's noone around with a woody system to test on, then there's probably not much of a userbase for the updates anyway.

I need to start a line of clothing called "Hipster-Wear". Clothing featuring phrases such as

• I'm just here to see the opening band
• Hipster-brand razors: for that "just-shaved-two-days-ago" look
• I was there when the 80s came back the *first* time

I hadn't heard of Immaculate Machine before, so I downloaded the mp3s they had posted online. They sounded pretty awesome, so I made sure to show up early. Not since the last New Pornographers show have I gotten such good parking at the Gothic (the marquee in the back). Not only that, but some guy with an extra ticket sold it to me for $15 ($17 at the door). The night was starting out right. Just as I walked in and ordered a Gin & Tonic, Immaculate Machines started their set. They were pretty upbeat & rockin; I picked up their new CD. Destroyer played next. I'd listened to a number of tracks available from their site as well. A few of them were pretty good; I really liked the tracks with the horns - but they didn't bring them to the show. I like Dan Bejar's vocals on the New Pornographers albums, but I'm not much of a Destroyer fan. The New Pornographer's set was excellent. They started off with Twin Cinema & Use It - their first two singles off the new album. I always think its cool when bands get their singles out of the way; but that might just be me remembering a Rolling Stone article about the Breeders, and how cool the author thought it was that they started the set with Cannonball. The vocalist/keyboardist (and also Carl Newman's niece, it seems) played the entire set with them, as did the bassist from Destroyer. Dan Bejar came out for a few songs and seemed to be getting a bit a little tipsy near the end. A lot more people showed up than last time I saw the New Pornographers. But that's probably because they were competing with a Flaming Lips/Modest Mouse show the same night.

Somebody may have noticed, we've sent out kernel updates for sarge yesterday. It's been a lot of work that eventually lead to this update. Thanks to everybody involved, you've helped Debian a lot. Thanks for being patient when things weren't looking so well. The new 2.4 kernel fixes 13 and the new 2.6 kernel fixes 28 identified vulnerabilities. Both kernels are compiled for all affected architectures. It has been quite some work to identify and document all problems, test all packages and kernels, correct those with bugs and get them uploaded. The woody kernel still needs an update, even for older issues. I've already had prepared an update for one of the six 2.4 woody kernels and asked for help porting it a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, the person who offered help took two months to tell me and got pissed in the meantime. Currently, Dann Frazier is working on this, and he's done a lot of work for the recent sarge kernel update as well.