Anyone who hasn't read them should have a look at Paul Graham's collection of essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html They're not all winners, but there's a lot of good stuff there, especially where he talks about things he knows intimately: startups and "hackers" (in the sense of programmers). I'm not sure if he actually ever comes out and says that startups are the way to go for enterprising hackers (he may not, infact), but his enthusiasm for that route is infectious. It's a route that was fantastically successful for him, and so it's natural that he thinks highly of it. However, the "opportunity costs" are also important to consider. In other words, what else could you do with that time, as a young and bright coder? I think the world, and possibly Linus Torvalds himself, would have been worse off had he dedicated himself to creating a company. He's a bright guy, and might not have done too badly with a startup, but Linux is really one of a kind in the success that it's had. Same thing goes for other bright people who have dedicated themselves to technology in some way (Guido van Rossum, Ruby's 'Matz', Andrew Tridgell come to mind), in the process creating something very cool that has come back to reward them, in the end. On the other hand, while the idea of Arc is interesting, my guess is that the world is better off with Y Combinator, and Mr. Graham certainly seems to have done well by himself with the company he founded and sold to Yahoo. The question is: what kind of person should do what? Some of the personality traits are doubtless similar between the two categories. Or perhaps there isn't much difference at all, and it's motivation that counts. Perhaps the most important thing is the people you know. Apple's two founding Steves might not have did what they did without one another, whereas Linus was able to capitalize on the internet to leverage his own creation, without having to work closely with a business partner. I don't have the answers, nor do I think they are clear or easy, although I'm sure that motivation does count for a lot in terms of overcoming what people don't expect you to be able to do.

There's a TV Show about Bolzano adopting Free Software with English subtitles in-vision. It's quite good, emphasising the double win of more freedom and fairer costs. Tip to Graham and you might want ytplay

Paul Graham makes some interesting observations about taking risks to achieve career benefits. One thing he doesn’t mention is that the risks have to match your life situation. If you are 21, living with your parents, and single (typical for a CS graduate) then you should take the riskiest options in terms of your career (apart from working in Iraq of course). If you don’t have much money then you don’t have much to lose. If you live with your parents then you still have accommodation and food even if you have no money. If you have no dependents (SO or children) then there’s nothing compelling you to earn a certain income. When you get older you may get a mortgage, a SO, and/or children. Also you won’t live with your parents forever. Most career risks that you might want to take aren’t possible if you leave them too late. Finally if you do something risky such as starting your own company and it doesn’t work out then it’s still going to look good on your CV. If you already have a lot of experience in the industry then the CV improvement may not be worth the time and effort invested in an unsuccessful company. When I was 22 I (along with two business partners) started an Internet cafe. It went reasonably well (by the standards of small businesses), it lasted for a few years before cheap net access at home killed most of the business. At the time the cafe had to close the ISP side of the business was doing reasonably well and one of my partners bought the operating ISP business. This buy-out caused me to approximately break even out of the entire business which is a lot better than most small businesses do. When I was 26 I moved to London (I have dual nationality, UK and Australian). The experience I had gained from running my own business allowed me to immediately get contract work for large ISPs in Europe. Most of the risks in my career were ones that I took while living with my parents. At the time I didn’t think through the issues of mortgages etc, my thinking was mostly along the lines of “it could work, I’m bored, so why not?”. ;) Update: While in the process of writing this blog post I forwarded the URL of a dating service for scientists (sciconnect.com) to some friends. The main page has pictures of single people wearing lab coats and using laptops which I found amusing. I have no idea whether it’s a good service or not, but the pictures on the main page made it worth a look. It seems that I accidentally pasted the wrong URL into my blog post so people who were looking for the Paul Graham article ended up at the dating service instead. But I guess if you are the type of person who reads my blog and who is interested in a link to Paul Graham’s blog and you happen to be single then a dating service for scientists might be of some interest. Thanks to MJ Ray for pointing out my error.

In one of his many well written and thought provoking essays (Ideas for Startups), Paul Graham has this to say:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

While I agree with his main point that execution counts, his affermation bugs me a little bit because it clashes with my understanding of economics. To wit, that ideas are "Non-excludable goods". As the linked page says,

Non-excludable goods are defined in economics as goods or service whereby it is impossible to prevent an individual who does not pay for that thing from enjoying the benefits of it. Market allocation of such goods is not feasible.

How would a market for ideas work, in any case? How could you prevent someone from listening to a bunch of ideas and just walking away with the ones they like? Perhaps with lots of lawyering and monitoring schemes, something could be kludged together, but at that point, since the ideas alone most likely aren't worth that much compared to well executed ideas, putting together that market would probably be more trouble than it's worth. So Paul Graham is right, for practical purposes, but his economics don't seem correct to me.

Aside from Paul Graham's list of reasons not to do a startup on your own (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html), there's another very simple one: pronouns. It's much, much nicer to be able to write "we" on a corporate web site. "We" could be anything from 2 to IBM's zillions, but it implies a real organization, whereas "I" implies some guy off working on his own. Of course, you could lie and write "we", but that will probably catch up with you at an inopportune moment.

I found this to be very interesting: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/09/demo-day-y-combinators-spring-chicks/ Specifically:

Tsumobi Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It's often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

That sounds very familiar... Hecl, maybe? On one hand, I'm sort of jealous that someone is getting paid to do something I did for free (and hang out with Paul Graham, to boot). On the other, it certainly validates the idea doesn't it?

Yep, time to stock up on some new books. I'm interested in:

• Business (startups and the like)
• Economics
• Marketing
• Technology. Classics, though, books about the latest this or that are less appealing these days, because the net simply has so much information available.

That's certainly a broad range, but the reason I'm writing here, is that I'm looking for books other people like me considered a good read, and not just an idea I can glean from the wikipedia summary of the book. Yoav seems to share some of my tastes, for instance. Some of the books I'm considering:

• Founders at Work, by one of Paul Graham's collaborators. Looks interesting, but I'm a little bit dubious about the 'lots of anecdotes' format. Do you learn anything repeatable from it, or just motivational tales of yore?
• Something from Guy Kawasaki - Rules for Revolutionaries?
• Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

What I've already read, and would recommend to others: http://www.dedasys.com/freesoftware/ (under 'Recommended reading')

I am ansiouxly waiting for the Second Season of The IT Crowd. The first episode was supposed to have been aired on January 5th, but so far, no news. In this case, no news is not good news (at least for me).

In the meantime, feel free to explore pics from the IT Crowd set, and peek at the shelves, and see what treasures you recognize or find there. Here is a short, but to the point interview with Graham Linehan, its creator, which I want to partly quote:

Is the show an attack on 'geeks'? No way, no how. I know that's how some will take it but in the end it's very much a celebration of geekdom, geekery, whatever. I consider myself a geek and I'm proud of it.

They even want to know what your IT Crowd looks like. So send your pics to Aunt Irma!

In his article about the SPI decision to transfer domains to OSI, Bruce Byfield originally mis-attributed a quote typed by David Graham to me. I am pleased to report that he has now fixed the attributions. Thanks, Bruce!

For various reasons, Software in the Public Interest (SPI) owned the domains opensource.org and opensource.net, which have been managed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for most of their life. This supported various SPI goals and also gave a possibility of community control of opensource.org/net just in case it was ever needed. OSI does not offer much opportunity for community control, as it is a self-appointing board. (Regular readers may remember that the principles of democratic member control, autonomy and concern for community are important to me.) I was watching as the SPI board voted in favour of giving away the opensource domains, proposal 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 on the agenda. The vote happened without any discussion in the meeting. From memory (I guess logs will appear on the SPI site eventually):- David Graham ("SPI must also be involved in the promotion of and education about open source") proposed and voted for this action that stops SPI being involved in this promotion and education about open source; Michael Schultheiss ("I look forward to SPI's future expansion") (amended and?) voted for this action that reduces SPI; Neil McGovern ("achieve a greater degree of involvement [...] from the community in general") voted for this action that lessens SPI's involvement; Jimmy Kaplowitz ("It is important that it continue holding in trust the money and other legal assets belonging to its member projects [...] fulfill some more of its stated corporate purposes, involving education of the general public about free software and about computers in general") voted for this action that drops these assets and reduces involvement in education of the general public; Bdale Garbee ("would like to close this issue one way or another, once and for all") seemed willing to vote for anything which prevented further discussion - of course, only surrendering the domains could close it once and for all, as this is a one-way trapdoor topic - but had apologised for absence from the meeting; Martin "Joey" Schulze had apologised for absence from the meeting; Josh Berkus (nothing obviously relevant in his platform) abstained - consistent but disappointing; I think Branden Robinson was missing. Ian Jackson ("SPI's role is to provide a stable legal entity which can hold assets") voted against this action so that SPI would keep holding these assets. Bravo! Sources: The quotes above are the board's own promises in their election platforms, as listed on the SPI site in 2003 2006 apart from Bdale Garbee's platform which wasn't at the link given in 2004 so that quote is from the minutes of the previous meeting If some board members are willing to give away assets for no good reason, that strikes at one of SPI's core methods: holding assets for the community. What can we trust about this board? Their platforms are full of fine sentiments, but how do their actions reflect their platforms? This may be a mostly-dormant issue until the next election. If you want any of SPI's assets, just ask. If your request is rejected (as SPI rejected the opensource domain give-away before), just keep asking new sets of voters until they agree.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

It's official, a friend and I have submitted our application to Y Combinator for the winter submission deadline. Hopefully within the next week we'll be lucky enough to make it at least to the interview process in MA. Unfortunately, my ANSI Common Lisp book is back in Ohio at the moment so I won't have a chance to bring it along and proclaim my inner fanboy when we meet with Paul Graham and Co. It will be interesting to leave work at my current internship early on a Friday to fly to MA for this opportunity though. I'm lucky I'm finished here in Washington by December.

Alas, I may never graduate at this rate. But at least the ride has been thrilling and informative. If anyone has participated in the Y Combinator program and has any advice / wisdom to impart I would be grateful if you passed it along to chris[at]nullcode.org.

As I'm finalising the call for participation for XTech 2007 (15-18 May 2007, Paris, France), I've taken a look back at the some of the best received presentations from the 2006 conference. I thought them well worth sharing again here. To be sure of hearing about the call for participation and other XTech 2007 news, sign up for the newsletter or keep an eye on this blog. Native to a Web of Data: Designing a part of the Aggregate Web
Tom Coates (Yahoo!)

What are the architectural elements of the emerging web of data; how do you build services to thrive in this environment? What needs to change and what needs to return to fundamental principles? How do we bring it all together to make something awesome?

• Read Suw Charman's report of this talk

An open (data) can of worms
Paul Hammond (Yahoo!, ex-BBC)

Open data is not a panacea, and presents as many questions as answers. Technology can only solve some of these issues, this presentation outlines some of the other, more fundamental, problems.

• Read Suw Charman's report of this talk

Etna, a WYSIWYG XML RELAX NG and Gecko-based editor
Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations) A presentation of the new WYSIWYG XML editor based on Gecko, and its underlying implementation of RELAX NG.

• Read the full paper

How American are startups?
Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

Startups are largely an American phenomenon. Why? What is it about America that makes startups work there? Could Silicon Valley be replicated in another country?

Written up as two essays:

• How to be Silicon Valley
• Why Startups Condense in America

The power of declarative thinking
Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI)

This talk discussed the requirements for Web Applications, and the underpinnings necessary to make Web Applications follow in the same spirit that engendered the Web in the first place.

• Read Pemberton's slides

RDF/A: The Easy Way to Publish Your Metadata
Mark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd.)

RDF/A is a new, and simpler, way of adding metadata to documents, in such a way that the document contains its own metadata--making it easy to turn a home page into a FoaF file or RSS feed.

• Read full paper

Well, it's finally arrived and here I am in the middle of it all.
Rails fun

The week kicked off with Matt and I teaching our tutorial on Ruby on Rails. It was the first time we've taught on that topic, so we were interested to hear the opinions of the attendees. We embarked on a fast-paced day-long tour of Rails features, with a large amount of live coding on screen.The aim was to give attendees an understanding of Rails as an environment for developing web applications, to let them see how fun it was to code (especially tests) and provide a bucket full of jumping off points for them to pursue their own investigations. With six or seven deployed Rails applications between us, we're in a good position to talk as real-world developers.
I think we pretty much succeeded. During the day we saw many places to improve the material and the flow, but the concept was sound. Teaching together meant we gave each other energy, humour and support. From the feedback, everybody was kept entertained and engaged as well as educated. Folks went away with the slides and the source code for the application we developed over the day. We thought about making our own course notes, but really there's nothing better than the Pragmatic Rails book, so there didn't seem much point in duplicating that effort.
We'd certainly like to do it again, and we're interested in visiting companies interested in Rails to bring their developer teams up to speed: we've already heard from one company attending the conference about that. So do get in touch if that interests you.KeynotesPaul Graham kicked off the conference with a provocative keynote comparing the conditions in the EU and US, and their suitability for stimulating startup companies. This has already sparked off a lot of discussion on the web, which is great to see. I'm really grateful to Paul for travelling a long distance to speak to us.We also heard from Jeffrey McManus of Yahoo! (I can never write "Yahoo!'s Jeffrey McManus" because the consequent train-wreck of punctuation upsets me). He shared the remarkable number of APIs and places where Yahoo! lets developers hook into their data and services. There's so much in there, I resolved to put some serious time aside to investigate what I could make use of.
CoverageThe site I set up for last year's conference, Planet XTech, is doing a great job aggregating blog coverage of XTech again this year. It's a great way for people here, and those following from a distance, to keep up with what's going on. Some folks are blogging really detailed notes, which is fantastic for the talks I've not been able to get to.Next yearIn a couple of weeks' time, I'll start thinking about next year's conference. I'll try to pull together what we've learned this year to make XTech even better. One thing we know already is that this year is our last in Amsterdam. We've been here three years and had a lot of fun. Next year, we're heading to Paris, which will be wonderful.Please do write to me with any comments and suggestions about XTech. One idea I'm playing with is the idea of a smaller related event later in the year, focused on educating people about web technologies.

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job. Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

The flight to Mexico last Saturday went pretty much all ok, except that the plane had to start through at MEX because of some unexpected wind and the generally low air pressure at high altitudes. While this delayed the landing for about 20 minutes, I had the opportunity for a second look at this incredibly large city. After getting through customs, we (with Herman, Tore, and Annabelle) met Neil McGovern in the airport lounge, and after Marcella and Luciano had arrived, we had a rather bumpy ride to Oaxtepec, amounting to a 20h journey for me. The site here is really beautiful, with lots of green, palms, other plants, and of the swimming pool. However, so far Debcamp has been rather unproductive, we haven't had net access until Monday evening, and even yesterday round trip times and packet loss were so high that neither ssh (IRC!) nor scp/ftp/http were really usable. Using irssi's proxy module allowed me to get rid of the lag locally for IRC, but the connection was still unstable. I wrote some patches which I have yet to submit and replied to most of my NM mail, but the next projects will all require access to the BTS and debian.org machines to be worked on. At the moment, network is down again because the antenna connecting us from the village fell down. The main activity for me so far has ben to play Mao with Jesus, Adeodato, Marga, Graham, Gerfried, and others :-) Todo: get some real work done; upload pictures; go to the pool. Ah... network just went up again, yet still slow... mail queue flushed... network down again...

It's now just one week until XTech 2006.This is the point that the whole of the last year has been leading up to for me. It's now I can let myself stop being stressed and start to let the excitement in.You know how sometimes you look back at stuff you've done, and go "wow!" -- that's pretty much where I am right now. I've run out of superlatives to apply to the speaker lineup. I've thrilled that we'll be joined by just about the entire Mozilla project, Paul Graham, Jeff Barr, Jeffrey McManus, huge chunks of the BBC brains trust, the smartest people in XML and the semantic web, Ajax pioneers and thinkers, top-class instructors and so much more.Last-minute XTech happenings of interest include:

• Google join the schedule line-up, talking about GData.
• We've put an advert for XTech on Ryan Carson's new magazine for web developers, Vitamin. I've been enjoying Ryan's straightforward approach to web business recently, so I hope this works out well.
• For your inner techie, web caching expert Mark Nottingham joins the XTech program, talking about what's needed to support fast delivery of today's more dynamic web applications.
• We've added a Developers' Corner to the exhibition, where anybody with a project and a laptop can set up to show off their stuff. With the calibre of people floating round, this is a great chance to find collaborators and maybe more.
• A downloadable iCal schedule so there's no excuse for missing anything.
  

Finally, just a note that it's never too late to come along. If you've not registered, just turn up on the day and pay on the door. It's an easy flight to Amsterdam, a short train ride to Centraal and a short walk to the hotel.See you there! 

As previously mentioned, I had built local packages of Michael Lawrence's RGtk2 port of the Gtk v2 widgets / toolkit to the R language and environment. This package, along with the related cairoDevice package, is now in Debian's main archive. RGtk2 extends and replaces the older r-omegahat-rgtk package. For an two interesting applications using RGtk2, look at Graham William's rattle, a glade-based data-mining user-interface to several R functions, and at John Verzani's PMG (aka Poor Man's GUI) generic GUI for R.