By incredible coincidence, Dick Cheney, Dr. Who, and Devin Townsend were in L.A. that very day.
By now hopefully you got a chance to see my Jeopardy! episode so it won't be much of a spoiler to mention that I didn't win.
It went like this. I flew into LA on the night of October 31st. The taping was to take place on the next two days. Jeopardy! tapes two weeks of shows, two days a week for a total of 10 episodes. Contestants are randomly chosen for one of those 10 episodes but you don't find out which one you will be on until the last minute. Randomness and secrecy have become become a big part of the production process in games since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. (Interesting fact: it is a Federal felony to tamper with a TV game show.)
There were a group of just under 20 0f us altogether waiting to go on. All very nice people. Here in the New York area one tends to equate very intelligent people with "Type A" personalities but we got on well together.
Interspersed between the tapings, we had short practice sessions to familiarize ourselves with the studio setup and this is where I first started getting a little apprehensive. Jeopardy! is not just about general knowledge, there is a physical element too in that you have to buzz in by pressing a button on a stick which is wired up to some producers console. You can't buzz in before Alex has finished reading the question and obviously you can't buzz in if someone is already answering the question. If you buzz at the wrong time, your buzzer locks for 0.75 seconds so just jamming your finger on the button. I didn't even get that far as on the entire first day I failed to buzz in at all despite changing hands, changing grip different ways and other strategies. I was pretty despondent by the second day but then miraculously I managed to get the hang of it. So when I was finally selected (for the 3rd game of that day.) I was back to my usual cool self. I was up against Dave Leach and Nicholas Campiz who were returning after having tied in the previous game.
And the game did start well enough. Oh one thing you may notice is that Alex mispronounces my name Jaldhal. I knew he did that once or twice and even mentioned it to a producer but it was only viewing the episode right now that I see he does it consistently. I assumed such things would be fixed up in post-editting but I guess not. Oh well, after living in this country for so many years I've learned to be happy whenever two consonants are more or less in the right place. This particular mispronunciation is actually fairly common, even Indian people have been known to make it. The alternative theory is that Alex couldn't read my horrible handwriting which is also plausible.
Anyway, I digress. I started off fairly well. My first mistake was in a category about alcoholic drinks. I answered vermouth when the correct response was gin. In my defense I'm a strict teetoler so none of these words mean anything to me. I also earned the disapproval of my superhero fan son by mistaking Dr. Strange for Dr. Doom. I did get the one about Spiderman villain Dr. Octopus so that mollified him somewhat.
The highlight of my evening was strangely enough in a category about books of the Bible. I got a Daily Double. It was a risky move but I have always wanted to make a "true" daily double so I threw caution to the winds and wagered everything I had. To my surprise as much as anyones, got the answer right doubling my score.
I was in a pretty good position for the Double Jeopardy but thats when Dave started dominating. If you haven't been watching previous games, Dave Leach is arguably the best player this season. Not only is he smart but he is almost supernaturally fast on the buzzer. You can't see because I kept my hands behind the podium but I again and again I would desperately try to ring in on a question I knew the answer to only to be beaten to the punch by Dave. This caused me to start getting a bit reckless and answering questions where I was less than certain which cost me dearly. One particularly dumb mistake was in a category where all the answers were supposed to start with the letter g. I said compass when I should said gyrocompass but actually I should have left that category alone entirely.
By the time Final Jeopardy came around winning was no longer an option as Dave was too far in the lead. I was slightly ahead of Nicholas in 2nd place. This is where I again made a strategic error. My original plan to bet nothing in Final Jeopardy but the category was "1930s Novels" and I liked my chances. The clue was read out and it involved an anti-war novel whose author was blacklisted. I was elated. It had to be "All Quiet on the Western Front" right? The blacklist bit gave me pause as the author Erich Maria Remarque was German and this was obviously a reference to the anti-Communist blacklist in the 1950s USA. But somehow I remembered that he had spent the end of his life in Hollywood or maybe I just convinced myself that it was plausible. Evidently my thought process wasn't too crazy because all three of us came up with the same answer. All three of us were wrong. The correct answer was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Daltan Trumbo. In hindsight I knew this but it illustrates the strange ways the mind works. I knew because the video for Metallicas song "One" from "...And Justice for All" is based on the film adaptation of this book. However in a previous orientation session the lady who is the contestant coordinator for Jeopardy! had mentioned AQOTHWF as anexample of something and this got stuck in my brain crowding out the previously known fact.
So when all was said and done I ended up in 3rd place. (I bet big whereas Nicholas was more conservative.) Oh well. Despite not winning I had a blast. I fulfilled my dream of appearing on Jeopardy! I met Alex Trebek. (And I should be receiving an autographed picture of us together soon.) My witty banter was sufficiently witty. I made enough money to cover my travel expenses and still have a nice amount left. And I got to meet lots of interesting and wonderful people. So I'm satisfied.
<video controls="controls" poster="http://www.braincells.com/debian/images/jaldhar_jeopardy_howdy.jpg"> ![[India at night]](http://www.braincells.com/debian/images/india-at-night.jpg)
Wishing the entire Debian community worldwide a happy and prosperous Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2068 called Shobhan.)
The picture above, is one that's been making the rounds of the Indian blogosphere. It purports to be a NASA satellite image of India on Diwali (which was last night.) Actually it is a composite of several night shots taken over a period of a few years. Also the red dots are people who have been injured by fireworks and the green dots those immobilized by the ingestion of too much baraphi and halwa. But I could be wrong about that.
I've had some terrific news these past few days but alas I'm not at liberty to divulge it just yet...
As many people reading this may know, my wife Jyoti was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. When the first plane hit, she joined some colleagues at her employers offices on the 78th floor of the South Tower to see what was going on. A few minutes later she went downstairs to her desk on the 77th floor to call me and tell me about it. That's when the second plane hit. Everyone on the 78th floor was instantly killed as she would have been if she had decided to stay. She and some friends, covered in debris and soaked in jet fuel, blinded by thick black smoke made their way down 77 flights of stairs (the elevators were out of action) and even though she was seven months pregnant with our daughter at the time she went all the way down without stopping to rest. An NYPD officer Ramon Suarez helped her out and to an ambulance. He went back to rescue others and died half an hour later when the North Tower collapsed.
I was at home. After getting ready and saying my morning prayers, I was leisurly preparing breakfast before starting the day. I started getting phone calls asking "Is Jyoti ok?" Of course she was. Why wouldn't she be? I somehow don't remember who said it first but I was told to turn on the TV because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I spent the rest of the morning glued to the screen in horror as information on what exactly had happened. Absolutely the lowest moment of my life was when I saw, in real time, the twin towers fall. It was several more hours before I actually got to talk to Jyoti on the phone, confirmation that she was still alive. I didn't get to actually see her and hold her until the next day owing to the curfew around Manhattan.
So that's what happened that day. We have repeatedly been told "Never forget" but truth be told some of the details are already fading from my memory. For my wife too, while she occasionally had panic attacks at first, every day life is foremost now and it is only on days like this that her ordeal comes to mind. Our daughter Shailaja is now 10 years old and an honor roll student who just started 4th grade. She knows the story but is not affected by it. These are good things in my opinion. What the jihadists want most of all is apocalypse. They wanted the world to change course but ten years later America remains as generous, bull-headed, lively, spiritual, garish and crude as ever. That's the sweetest revenge lovers of life can have. Don't give up your rights and your daily routines to fear but make the bastards give up theirs. Or as the cliche goes, the terrorists will win.
Members of the public are advised not to panic at this time.
Wondering what is going on with the port of Debian to the Minix 3 microkernal? Here's an update.
dpkg Ported
Well, the big news as I mentioned in my last post is that dpkg has been successfully ported. I haven't sent the patches to the maintainers just yet as they need review and clean up but I will do that ASAP. The architecture name is defined as minix_i386. (There is no k because I am using the Minix libc as well as the kernel.) I am currently targetting squeeze.
A Maze of Twisty Dependencies All Different
Armed with my new dpkg, I have begun building packages which has been an interesting experience. The Debian packaging systems greatest asset dependencies is also its most frustrating during initial bootstrapping. Take debhelper for instance; nowadays most packages depend on it and I personally wouldn't think of creating a .deb without it but it build-depends e.g. po4a which build-depends on...debhelper. Also some programs which are assumed to be present on linux such as ldconfig are simply not available on Minix. So currently theres a lot of dpkg --force-depends and even --force-all going on. Of course this is only a temporary problem until I get a full set of base packages built. The equivs package is coming in handy too. In lieu of working .debs, I have been using Minix native packages to fill in the gaps. They use NetBSD pkgsrc which is a new experience for me. I can't say I'm that impressed but they work and, being uptodate, are a good source of patches.
Works in Progress
The two big packages I need to work on next are perl 5.10.1 and gcc 4.4.5. I haven't touched the latter yet. Perl is failing in its second-stage bootstrap for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of just yet. I suspect it has more to do with deficiencies in my build environment than a problem in perl itself.
libc Deficiencies
As I mentioned last time, the situation has improved tremendously since Minix switched over to using the NetBSD libc but I am still running into problems with unimplemented APIs. Take getpwent(3) and getpwuid(3) for instance. Being able to map between user ids and names is kind of important you know? Even worse instead of being completely absent some of these exist as stubs. So they compile and link without warning but always return ENOFILE and so on. I was surprised to find that there is no standardized API for getting information on mounted filesystems. (Which e.g. df(1) needs.) Linux uses getmnt(3) similar but incompatible with System V. The BSDs use getmntinfo so probably this is what Minix will implement. GNU programs are good about portability but a lot of Free software is unfortunately Linux-centric. Hopefully the Debian FreeBSD port already has patches for these cases. There are several annoyances like this but I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. I am using an unreleased version of Minix which is under heavy development and I must say the upstream developers have been good about responding to my concerns.
Looking forward: fakeroot, grub2, ext2
fakeroot is a very handy development tool that frees a developer from having to create .debs as root. Alas it won't work under Minix as it depends on LD_PRELOAD and Minix doesn't even support shared libraries. fakeroot-ng sounds a bit more promising as it uses the ptrace(2) system call which is implemented in the Minix kernel though I don't know how well.
Minix is now multiboot compliant so it is possible to use grub2 instead of the Minix boot loader. Definitely something I'm going to look at soon.
Minix now supports ext2 (though not ext3 or ext4) in addition to its native file system. For compatability this should become the default in the Debian port. While the kernel support is part of the standard Minix system, the userland support (e2fsprogs) is not for some reason. So I'll have to see about porting that.
Can I Help the Porting Effort?
Sorry not yet. Though if you are determined I'll try and help you get set up. Hopefully in a month or less I will be able to distribute a pre-alpha version so I suggest waiting for that. I am definitely going to be looking for outside help.
NEW YORK, Jul 29, 2011
The crowd of thousands gathered here to attend PreventaConf 2011 were abuzz over the unveiling of the culmination of 3 years of aimless arsing about^ww^w concentrated development which has led to the porting of dpkg to the MINIX 3 operating system.
Women fainted, men wept openly, medical personnel were kept busy dealing with the many instances of heart seizure, multisensory hallucination and spontaneous combustion which accompanied this momentous event.
Much remains to be done.
Somehow, even though I'd know about it for the longest time, I had never get around to reading George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series until I heard about the Game of Thrones HBO series. Then I thought I had better hurry up and read the books as TV adaptations tend to be inferior. (I must say HBO did a pretty good job though.) I was instantly hooked and finished all four books in a week. Today the long-awaited fifth installment called A Dance with Dragons
and I immediately got myself a copy. (Nowadays I mostly do my recreational reading with the Kindle app on my Android smartphone.)
As before, I'm spellbound. I'm already about 25% through it and loving it. What I love about Martin is that he really gets how traditional, "pagan", "feudal" societies work. Take religion for instance. A lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors if they deal with the subject at all usually give a cartoon version of polytheism that owes more to Christian canards and Dungeons & Dragons than any existing human religion. But in Westeros, one can be simultaneously devout, amoral, superstitious, and cynical in a way that makes a lot of sense to me as a Hindu. Or class. Being a peasant in Martins' world is horrible. Your life is completely at the mercy of Lords and Ladies and can end in an instant. But the upper class despite its wealth and power is trapped in its own way too. They must constantly protect their status from jealous competitors and a reversal of political or military fortune can destroy an ancient noble family just as suddenly as a bad harvest can destroy a family of farmers.
Like the other books in the series, this one has a huge cast of characters whose stories weave in and out with each chapter told mainly from one characters viewpoint. This is a tactic which I for one found helpful to keep my attention from flagging but it means you can't really enjoy it unless you've read the previous volumes in order first. I definitely think it's worth the effort though.
Barring a miracle, it looks like I won't be going to Debconf 11 this year which is a shame as that is a part of the world I have yet to visit. Anyway it got me thinking, I've neglected a lot of my Open Source activities this past year or so what with struggling to stay in good financial shape. As Chaturmasa started today in which we take up additional religious duties, I thought it might be a good time to recommit to getting all my projects up to speed again.
So during the next four months I aim to (in no particular order)
Right around the time I immigrated to the US Alex Trebek began a revival of
a TV game show originally hosted by Art Fleming called Jeopardy. In fact I believe
I saw the first episode or one of the first ones anyway. And ever since I
began watching, people have said to me I ought to be a contestant. I've tried
to get on every now and again with little success until this year. In
February I took the online entrance test not expecting any results as usual.
Indeed nothing happened at first then suddenly, a few weeks ago, I was
surprised to receive an email inviting me to an audition.
So today (or yesterday depending on when you read this. June 27th.) I went
to a conference room in the New York Sheraton Towers hotel to show off my
telegenic looks, rapier wit and mastery of general knowledge to the Jeopardy
producers. I had to bring in a list of five fun facts about myself for the
between-round amusing banter. You'll have to wait until I actually appear on
the show (if in fact I do. See below.) but let me assure you my banter is
very amusing. My spirit flagged a bit when they took a photo of me for their
files. I managed to do a convincing impression of Tow Mater from Cars 2 which
is not quite the showbiz look I was going for. My morale rose again after the
next portion of the audition in which you had to answer 50 trivia questions in
about 8 minutes. They don't tell you your score but based on my conversations
with fellow auditionees (there were about 20 of us) I think I only got 1
wrong. The next part of the audition was a mock game with a real board and
buzzers etc. I was in the first group of three to play which further leads me
to believe I got a good score in the questions. Unfortunately I had a bit of
bad luck in the categories half of which were not in my strong subjects but I
did ok. More importantly I demonstrated a good speaking voice (a lot of
people mumble or speak too softly), good buzzer technique and as I may have
previously mentioned, amusing banter.
Does this mean I am actually going to be on TV? I don't know. Every year
they select approximately 2,000 people for auditions and of those, around 400
are selected for the contestant pool. So I have a 1 in 5 chance of making it.
The consensus in the group was I had done pretty well for a first timer (Some
were making their second or third attempt.) so I am optimistic. All I know is
that sometime in the next 18 months I might receive the call to fly to Los
Angeles and fulfill my destiny.
Btw, in case you were wondering about the title.
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
Donald Trump you magnificent bastard, you did it. You actually did it. What you did is irrelevant and counterproductive but still gold star and a tick for perseverence.
In possibly related news, SETI is closing down their radio telescope array. I don't think I'd want to show this planet off to the neighbors either.
...and me. I turned 40 today and on such a momentous occasion I should pause I'm going to need the high performance spandex pitambar today.
I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month for several years now but this is the first time I've actually managed to complete writing 50,000 words in one month. My Science Fiction novel "The Anaclepses of Darwin Fenderman" is set in a future where the last individualist must fight for free will against, robots, telepathic dogs, and Phillip K. Dick.
It came out fairly well I think considering the haste in which it was written. Of course here's a hell of a lot of clean up that needs to be done before I can dare to show anyone else but in the coming months I want to see if I can get it into a fit state for publishing. Meanwhile, here's a teaser:
"Where is it then?"
"Out there somewhere.", he said gesturing vaguely at the window.
"Beyond the Hudson? But there's nothing but wasteland out there."
Next.
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