Hello, I have updated geoip in wheezy-backports today from version 1.5.0-3~bpo70+1 to 1.6.2-4~bpo70+1, which includes also the new generators for the City and ASN database. This is also a prerequisite for the upcoming geoip-database updates! For the otrs users: Now you can also install otrs 3.3.9-3~bpo70+1 in Wheezy, instead of the realy old version 3.2.11-1~bpo70+1.

Hi, until the end of last week I were my first time in Egypt at Hurghada. Interesting country and culture but I have to think about it if I would travel again to Egypt :D I also travelled to Luxor to visit the city itself, to drive on the Nil river and to visit some attractions like the Luxor-Temple and the Totentempel of Hatschepsut .

Hola, and finaly I have packaged, tested and uploaded otrs 4.0.5-1 to Debian experimental. :-)
Much fun with it!

Hello, I have just backported the php-redis (php5-redis) 2.2.5-1~bpo70+1 package for Debian Wheezy. Thanks to the ftp-masters for their quick ACCEPT :)
Now you can install and use the redis PHP extension from the offical repositories, see: Instructions: http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/
Package: https://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/php5-redis

Hi, geoip version 1.6.2-2 and geoip-database version 20141027-1 are now available in Debian unstable/sid, with some news of more free databases available :) geoip changes:

   * Add patch for geoip-csv-to-dat to add support for building GeoIP city DB.
     Many thanks to Andrew Moise for contributing!
   * Add and install geoip-generator-asn, which is able to build the ASN DB. It
     is a modified version from the original geoip-generator. Much thanks for
     contributing also to Aaron Gibson!
   * Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.6 (no changes required).

geoip-database changes:

   * New upstream release.
   * Add new databases GeoLite city and GeoLite ASN to the new package
     geoip-database-extra. Also bump build depends on geoip to 1.6.2-2.
   * Switch to xz compression for the orig tarball.

So much thanks to both contributors!

Hello, I have decided to create fixed bash packages for Debian Lenny. I have applied the upstream patchsets from from 052 until 057, so some other issues are also addressed in it. :-)
And here they are: Source .dsc: http://misc.linux-dev.org/bash_shellshock/bash_3.2-4.1.dsc
amd64 package: http://misc.linux-dev.org/bash_shellshock/bash_3.2-4.1_amd64.deb
i386 package: http://misc.linux-dev.org/bash_shellshock/bash_3.2-4.1_i386.deb Much fun with it!

Sarah dropped Zoe around this morning at about 8:30am. She was still a bit feverish, but otherwise in good spirits, so I decided to stick with my plan for today, which was a tour of the Port of Brisbane. Originally the plan had been to do it with Megan and her Dad, Jason, but Jason had some stuff to work on on his house, so I offered to take Megan with us to allow him more time to work on the house uninterrupted. I was casting around for something to do to pass the time until Jason dropped Megan off at 10:30am, and I thought we could do some foot painting. We searched high and low for something I could use as a foot washing bucket, other than the mop bucket, which I didn't want to use because of potential chemical residue. I gave up because I couldn't anything suitable, and we watched a bit of TV instead. Jason dropped Megan around, and we immediately jumped in the car and headed out to the Port. I missed the on ramp for the M4 from Lytton Road, and so we took the slightly longer Lytton Road route, which was fine, because we had plenty of time to kill. The plan was to get there for about 11:30am, have lunch in the observation cafe on the top floor of the visitor's centre building, and then get on the tour bus at 12:30pm. We ended up arriving much earlier than 11:30am, so we looked around the foyer of the visitor's centre for a bit. It was quite a nice building. The foyer area had some displays, but the most interesting thing (for the girls) was an interactive webcam of the shore bird roost across the street. There was a tablet where you could control the camera and zoom in and out on the birds roosting on a man-made island. That passed the time nicely. One of the staff also gave the girls Easter eggs as we arrived. We went up to the cafe for lunch next. The view was quite good from the 7th floor. On one side you could look out over the bay, notably Saint Helena Island, and on the other side you got quite a good view of the port operations and the container park. Lunch didn't take all that long, and the girls were getting a bit rowdy, running around the cafe, so we headed back downstairs to kill some more time looking at the shore birds with the webcam, and then we boarded the bus. It was just the three of us and three other adults, which was good. The girls were pretty fidgety, and I don't think they got that much out of it. The tour didn't really go anywhere that you couldn't go yourself in your own car, but you did get running commentary from the driver, which made all the difference. The girls spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out where his voice was coming from (he was wired up with a microphone). The thing I found most interesting about the port operations was the amount of automation. There were three container terminals, and the two operated by DP World and Hutchinson Ports employed fully automated overhead cranes for moving containers around. Completely unmanned, they'd go pick a container from the stack and place it on a waiting truck below. What I found even more fascinating was the Patrick terminal, which used fully automated straddle carriers, which would, completely autonomously move about the container park, pick up a container, and then move over to a waiting truck in the loading area and place it on the truck. There were 27 of these things moving around the container park at a fairly decent clip. Of course the girls didn't really appreciate any of this, and half way through the tour Megan was busting to go to the toilet, despite going before we started the tour. I was worried about her having an accident before we got back, she didn't, so it was all good. I'd say in terms of a successful excursion, I'd score it about a 4 out of 10, because the girls didn't really enjoy the bus tour all that much. I was hoping we'd see more ships, but there weren't many (if any) in port today. They did enjoy the overall outing. Megan spontaneously thanked me as we were leaving, which was sweet. We picked up the blank cake I'd ordered from Woolworths on the way through on the way home, and then dropped Megan off. Zoe wanted to play, so we hung around for a little while before returning home. Zoe watched a bit more TV while we waited for Sarah to pick her up. Her fever picked up a bit more in the afternoon, but she was still very perky.

Today was another wet day. Sarah dropped Zoe around in the morning, and she watched a little bit of TV before we drove to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class. My cycling fitness is going to go completely to hell. Zoe's really taken to her teacher, Patrick. The classes have pretty much been just Zoe and I on Friday's, with the occasional other kids, and so she's formed a pretty close relationship with her teacher. The last few weeks, Zoe's really liked to help Patrick set up and tidy up the space before and after the classes. She loves to tell Patrick about what's been going on in her life. It's really sweet to watch. Today there was another 3 year old boy, but he was much less focused than Zoe. I will miss the classes, because I've seen real self-defense value in what they've been teaching. For proper comparison, I should see tae kwon do clases as well, but currently I'd be pretty happy with what I've seen taught in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can see the practical application of it. We're going to go watch Patrick compete in May, and I'm looking forward to seeing some adult-level stuff. Megan's Dad was looking for something to do with his kids, so I suggested we meet at Lollipops Playland & Cafe in Cannon Hill after BJJ class. We were a bit late in getting there, mostly because Zoe wanted to hang around after class for a bit, but we got there eventually, and Zoe and Megan had a great time. We stayed for lunch and the girls played a bit more. It's the first time I've used a play cafe since coming back to Australia, and I found it almost overwhelmingly loud and busy. These places must love it when it rains. It was nice that Zoe's at an age now where she can go off and play on her own. Having Megan there was a great help in that regard, but the girls did keep losing each other, although that wasn't a big problem for either of them. While we were at the play cafe, I received an email saying that the Kindergarten working bee for tomorrow had been canceled on account of the wet weather, so that's opened up our Saturday significantly. After that, we headed down to Bunkers to place the order for the bunk bed I want to get Zoe for her birthday. I'd expected with all the morning's activities, for her to pass out in the car immediately, but surprisingly she lasted the distance, and had a great time sampling all the different bunk beds at the store. Even on the way back home, it took her a little while to fall asleep, so I extended the car ride by driving around the Port of Brisbane to see how much there was to see that might be interesting for Zoe when she's awake. After that, we went to the car wash to get the car cleaned, because it's been a while. Zoe had a babyccino and we sorted through the DreamWorks cards we'd traded with Megan that morning. It was time for dinner after the car wash, so we headed home, and Zoe watched some TV while I prepared dinner. At bath time, I realised that we hadn't had time to do anything for Science Friday. Yesterday at Bunnings I bought a roll of clear tubing for the heck of it, so we made a siphon in the bath. Zoe thought the tube was great fun, and had a good time blowing bubbles in the bath with it. Tomorrow we'll have to use some bubble bath for added entertainment. Bedtime went smoothly enough.

I thought it would have been smooth, though it wasn t. OpenRC shipped /sbin/rc, which conflicted with the rc shell (an implementation of the AT&T Plan 9 shell), and /sbin/runscript was conflicting with minicom. With the help of upstream authors, /sbin/rc was renamed /sbin/openrc, and /sbin/runscript was renamed /sbin/openrc-run. However, the main goal is reached: after last summer Google Summer of Code project, and a bit of rework for the ruff edges, OpenRC made it to Debian. So, if you wish to try OpenRC, which is a direct replacement for sysv-rc, just add the Debian Experimental repository to your sources.list, and do apt-get install openrc . The only issue will be the first reboot, though that should be fine if one manually shuts down every running daemon, and then type what the postinst suggests as command echoed on the screen. Suggestions on how to improve this is welcome. I warmly also welcome more general feedback. I d like to publicly thank Patrick Lauer, Benda ( ), WIlliam Hubbs, Alexander Vershilov (who are all OpenRC upstreams), Bill Wang who was the GSoC studdent working on OpenRC, Roger Leigh who is the current sysv-init/sysv-rc maintainer, for their help and support when porting OpenRC to Debian. Without them, it wouldn t have been possible.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 8
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

The editorial this issue is about the Dell Magazines Award, so newsy without a lot of content (particularly since we don't get to read the winners). Silverberg's column is much more interesting, focusing on the complex rules of the honor code of the Albanian highlands and pointing out that there's more complexity and strangeness in things we can find on Earth than in a lot of science fiction. Even within the rules of real human cultures. James Patrick Kelly's column this issue is an interesting summary of what graduates of the Clarion writing workshop learned, in their own words. It's a nice barrage of quick writing tips, and an interesting view of what people take away from a writing workshop. The book review column this issue is Peter Heck's normal workman-like job. "The End of the Line" by Robert Silverberg: Someday, I really should read Lord Valentine's Castle. As you might guess from this comment, this is another Majipoor story. This one follows an official who is part of an advance party for the Coronal Lord, the ruler (of sorts). He's decided, as part of those duties, to take the opportunity to learn more about the aboriginal people of Majipoor: the somewhat mysterious metamorphs, or Piurivar. I'm not that familiar with the history of Majipoor, since all I've read is this story and one other, none of the novels. Apparently, knowing that the official in question is named Stiamot will place this story for more familiar readers. For the unfamiliar, such as myself, there's a lot of politics here and what's clearly background for a major event in the world, but as a standalone story it's a bit unsatisfying (and grim). It's not that clear why things had to turn out the way they did, and the characters seem largely without agency. It's well-written, but mostly a story for fans of the series, I think. (6) "Corn Teeth" by Melanie Tem: This is a tight third-person story about a human child raised by alien foster parents, and it's deeply disturbing. Not because of the fostering, which appears wonderful and loving, but because it's a train wreck sort of story: the reader can see the horrible coming and can't do anything about it (and it turns out even worse than one might expect). It's also a story built around failure of communication and failure of empathy, and has a monumentally depressing ending, the kind that leaves scars. I'm sure all of this is entirely intentional; it seems very well-written. But I really didn't want this much horrible misunderstanding and depressing hopelessness in my reading. (2) "Watch Bees" by Philip Brewer: I rather liked this story even if the protagonist is an awful person. The story is set in a future of bioengineered insects and hard economic times, and it features a man who is supposedly working his way from farm to farm to get back home. What he's actually after is more complicated and is closely related to the defense systems that keep intruders off of farms. You might guess some of the rest from the title. It's a story about understanding layered defense systems, and about economic warfare. I didn't care much for any of the characters, but the story is well-plotted and kept me interested in seeing what would happen next. (6) "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stones of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again" by Michael Swanwick: By Swanwick, so it's a little odd, but I found this story surprisingly moving and ambiguous. It's about an American of Irish descent, a trip to Ireland, and a love affair with a fierce Irish nationalist, all set against an SF background of an Earth conquered by benevolent aliens. It's angry, uncertain, fanatical, and realistic by turns, and left me with profound mixed feelings. I think it does a good job capturing in a brief story the emotional complexities of what it means to give onself to a cause. (7) "We Were Wonder Scouts" by Will Ludwigsen: This is a short and odd story about a variant of the Boy Scouts founded by a man who is a little too obsessed with the paranormal, and an outing in the woods that turns rather creepy. It's a type of story that I'm not very fond of: one that twists the delight of discovery into something dark and mundane. I suppose you could call it horror; it's more horror than fantasy, at least. Anyway, not my thing. (3) "Pairs" by Zachary Jernigan: This story, on the other hand, isn't as dark as it seems like it should be from the setup. Humans have been conquered and enslaved by more powerful alien races, and now human souls are a profitable business. The protagonist is a person who has been embodied in a spaceship, and who works with (and monitors) another largely insane embodied person as they work as couriers, carrying souls to their buyers. But neither of them are as fully under control as they might appear, which is the point of the story. There is no grand tale of redemption, and the price is high, but I found the psychological portrayal oddly satisfying and faintly hopeful, and I was intrigued by the world background. (7) "Paradise is a Walled Garden" by Lisa Goldstein: The cover story, this is by far the best story of the issue. It's steampunk, set in a world where Muslim civilization was not pressed back by Christianity and continues to thrive into the reign of Queen Elizabeth as, among other things, makers of automata. A girl has managed to get herself a job in a British factory by posing as a boy and is the first to sound the alarm when the automata that do most of the work go strangely (and violently) haywire. That leads to her being assigned to the subsequent delegation to Al-Andulus (Muslim Spain, if you're not familiar with that name from history). The protagonist is the best part of this story. She's thoughtful, resourceful, and delights in learning things, something that she's rarely had the opportunity to do. She's also utterly unintimidated. In Al-Andulus, she thrives, despite the contempt of the leader of the expedition and some dangerous intrigues around the source of the anomalous behavior. I won't spoil the ending, but it's a delight, leaving the reader with a lot of hope for her future. I also liked the portrayal of the Muslim world, which is engrossed in its own business and has its own advantages and disadvantages, but is at least open to and focused on learning and technological development. The contrast with the superstitious British delegation is both pointed and historically grounded in Muslim relations with Europe around the point of divergence of Goldstein's world. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

Hi, I have created a backport of the otrs package for Wheezy backports and it has been just accepted. So much fun with otrs2/3.2.11-1~bpo70+1 and have a look here for backport installation instructions!

I don't envy conference organizers these days - most of what's being said can be read the next day, for free, on line, at your own pace, from the comfort of your own home, and without spending a bundle of time and money to sleep in a far away hotel. Competing with that is not easy, but the guys at MicroConf managed to. I would sum up the weekend by saying that it was a "very high bandwidth experience". Every day, from breakfast until I turned in, I was chatting with people or listening to speakers during the conference itself. That's aproximately 16 hours of being "on", and by the time I got home to Padova, I was exhausted! But at the end of the day, I felt like it was worth it being there in person, because of all the interaction with other people. The speakers' talks all ended up on line, more or less, but all the chatting and discussion and getting to know everyone is the human element that is tough to replicate on line, and one of the most important reasons to attend a conference in person. Prague is also a beautiful city - I wish I had had more time there to check it out. Here are some highlights and notes, in no particular order:

• Rob Walling talked about actual, concrete numbers when discussing his current project's revenues. There's a ton of handwavy stuff out there on the internet, but real numbers are tough to beat. What makes it especially nice is that they also felt "real": they're good numbers, no doubt about it, but not stratospheric, science fiction numbers that leave you feeling like "ok, whatever, but that's not the planet I live on". They're numbers that make you think "maybe, if things go well, I could do that too".
• The number of "I'm from X, but live in Y" people at the conference was high. Irish but live in Spain, American but live in Japan. Or maybe just noticeable because I'm in that category myself. There were people attending from the US, Europe, Japan, South Africa, and even Australia. Impressive!
• Almost all of the speakers had very specific, concrete advice that I can and will apply to LiberWriter, time permitting. I read, and have read, a lot of business books. Most of them are kind of fluffy, truth be told, in that they've got one decent idea, and a lot of filler to turn what could have been a tight, ten-page article into a book. This was quite different in that there were a whole lot of tips and tricks being thrown out.
• Rob's wife Sherry gave a talk about life with an entrepreneur. Having two kids and a wonderful wife myself, it's a point of view that I was very interested in hearing about. Judging from the people I chatted with, this was not your typical "startup" conference with a bunch of 20-somethings with no family and no ties - a lot of the other people attending had kids to think about as they launch their ventures. A question I asked of Rob was how much of a leap he took from consulting to working on his own products, with the answer being that he's actually pretty risk adverse. No Silicon Valley story about betting the house and everything else on the company - apparently, revenues from the web sites and products were good enough that there wasn't even really a leap to make when he quit consulting.
• The size of the conference was just right: enough people that I didn't quite manage to meet everyone, but not so many that it was overwhelming. In downtime between talks, and during dinners, breakfasts, lunch and so on, the speakers were very available to chat with.
• Patrick McKenzie seems to have stumbled into his life's calling as someone working at the border of software and marketing. The amount of advice, anecdotes, and data that he was continually spinning off was incredible. He comes across as being a down-to-earth, approachable, friendly person.
• Part of the balancing act the organizers have to work with is where people are at: some people had an idea but no concrete business. Some of us (me) make some money but not too much. Others have viable businesses that they make enough to live off of, and then there are those who seem pretty much 'set'. It's difficult to find people to speak to each audience without losing some of the others.
• The thing I liked the most about a lot of what was discussed was that it seems realistic. Few people at the conference were from Silicon Valley, and yet... they're successful! I like hearing about success stories that work out really well for the people involved, but still feel like something attainable. People should be looking to emulate the successful guys here, not looking at extreme outliers like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
• I'm used to tech conferences, where it's all about the technology. There was very little actual tech talk at MicroConf - it seems like everyone knows their stuff and was interested in learning about marketing, sales, and so on.

However, since it was a business conference, I also have to put on my cold, hard accountant hat. Will the conference pay for itself? Only time will tell. I learned a variety of interesting and useful things, many of which I think I can put into practice. The problem is finding the time between consulting work and family, but that was a bottleneck before, too - I had, and have, more things to do than time. Also, to be very direct about it, how much of what I learned could not have been learned by carefully reading accounts of the conference, slides, and other material published on the internet? A lot of it. I'm not sure I would have paid attention to all of it though, so the conference was definitely nice in that it exposed me to some talks and ideas that otherwise I might have brushed off before giving them a chance. In terms of dollars and cents, I won't be able to say for a while whether it was a sensible investment or not. Would I go again? I'd like to - it was a lot of fun and the people were great. Like I said, it's tough doing conferences because your competition is the internet!

Matt Palmer wrote an insightful post about the use of the word professional [1]. It s one factor that makes me less inclined to be a member of professional societies. The TED blog has an interesting article about Wikihouse which is a project to create a set of free designs for houses to be cut out of plywood with a CNC milling machine [2]. The article also links to a TED talk by Alastair Parvin of the Wikihouse project which covers many interesting things other than designing houses. An XKCD comic has one of the best explanations of bullying I ve ever seen [3]. If you aren t familiar with XKCD then make sure you hover your mouse over it to read the hidden text. The Fair Phone is a project to develop a smart phone starting with conflict-free resources and with fully free software (not like a typical Android build) [4]. It s an interesting project and the price and specs seem within the normal range so you re not paying a huge premium for a conflict-free phone. Unfortunately they only have one model with a 4.3 display, if they had a competitor for the Galaxy Note then I d be interested. Patrick Stokes wrote an insightful article about why I m entitled to my opinion is a bogus argument [5]. Jim Daly wrote an interesting TED blog post interviewing Rishi Manchanda about Upstream Doctors who look for the root causes of medical problems rather than just treating the symptoms [6]. Brian Krebs wrote an insightful article about the value of a hacked email account [7]. If you are trying to convince your users to use better passwords then this should help. Ron Garrett wrote an insightful series or articles on morality hooked on the premise of whether it s wrong to torture kittens [8]. Part of his conclusion is that people who believe it s wrong to do such things tend to be more capable of working in large groups and forming a productive and efficient society. The TED blog has an interesting post by Karen Eng summarising Andreas Raptopoulos talk about using autonomous drones to deliver parcels in parts of the world that don t have usable roads [9]. Delivering parcels (which would start with medical supplies but would presumably move on to commercial transport) by drone is apparently really cheap. Being cheaper than building roads isn t going to be difficult but it seems that they are going to make it cheaper than paying people to deliver parcels even if the roads were built. The main web site about this project is www.matternet.us, they are hiring electrical engineers. Here is the link for Andreas TED talk [10]. The TOR blog has an interesting article by Emily Asher-Perrin comparing the different houses of Hogwarts [11]. It s an insightful article about personality attributes and gives more information than is available in the movies (I d read the books if I had time).

• [1] http://hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2013/05/14/a-modest-vocabulary-proposal.html
• [2] http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/23/how-to-print-out-your-own-house/
• [3] http://xkcd.com/1216/
• [4] http://www.fairphone.com/
• [5] http://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/n2rvo94
• [7] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/the-value-of-a-hacked-email-account/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/nczyspd
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/kxu8dxp
• [10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqcX3AM5oh8
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/o4sbt3l

Hola, now, where I will travel again for 15 days to Fuerteventura/Corralejo from the 21.06.2013 until 07.07.2013, I remember myself, that I forget to post some images from my last vacation in Turkey/Belek. Since my little realy cheap cam was damaged after a few days, I will post some photos of my buddy Robyn.

One of the replies to the post about Debian's last groupware meeting was from Patrick Ohly of syncevolution fame pointing out that syncevolution already implements calendar autodetection for CalDAV calendars as described in draft-daboo-srv-caldav-10. While looking at the code I noticed that there's a backend for the N900s calendar by Ove K ven as well. When I tried Ove's latest package on my N900 it lead to an immediate crash when doing a:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

According to Patrick the bug was supposed to be fixed in recent versions so I set up scratchbox and built a newer git snapshot for maemo (sources). This wouldn't crash but didn't show up any items either. It turned out to be a minor bug in calypso returning no content type for REPORT queries which resulted in libneon discarding the whole reply (now already fixed in calypso upstream). With this out of the way setting up synchronisation is quiet simple:

# Configuration
CALDAV_SERVER=192.168.0.10
syncevolution --configure username=<username> password=<password> \
              calendar/backend=caldav calendar/database=https://$ CALDAV_SERVER :5233/private/my_calendar \
              target-config@webdav calendar
syncevolution --configure --template SyncEvolution_Client sync=none syncURL=local://@webdav username= password= webdav
syncevolution --configure sync=two-way backend=calendar webdav calendar

You should then be able to print the items on the local (N900) and from the remote (CalDAV server) end:

# This lists the current calendar items on the server
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
# This lists the current calendar items on the N900
syncevolution --print-items @default calendar

And from there on sync away:

# initial slow sync
syncevolution --sync slow webdav
# from there on
syncevolution webdav

The syncevolution source code has great documentation about debugging problems (e.g. src/backends/webdav/README). So check that in case you run into problems. The tl;dr version is

SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG=1 src/syncevolution loglevel=10 --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

to debug CalDAV related problems. In case you need to run syncevoluton from source be sure to set these beforehand:

export SYNCEVOLUTION_TEMPLATE_DIR=$PWD/src/templates/
export SYNCEVOLUTION_XML_CONFIG_DIR=$PWD/src/syncevo/configs/

On the CalDAV side I used current Calypso git which (with some additional minor fixes) now also interoperates nicely with Iceowl/Icowl-Extension aka Sunbird/Lightning on the desktop side. There's also an ITP for it. So it'll hopefully end up in Debian soon.

I've been slow lately in writing these up (and, for that matter, in doing most other things related to reading; things have been rather busy lately). This is a bunch of here-and-there purchases over the last few months, including Powell's Indiespensible shipments. Sandra Barret Face of the Enemy (sff)
Anne Bishop Written in Red (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (sff)
Cary Caffrey The Girls from Alcyone (sff)
Jenni Fagan The Panopticon (mainstream)
Niels Ferguson, et al. Cryptography Engineering (non-fiction)
Jen Kirchner The Fourth Channel (sff)
Anothony Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (mainstream)
Steve McConnell Code Complete (non-fiction)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Junior Super-Patriots (sff)
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, et al. (ed.) Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 (sff anthology)
Lisa O'Donnell The Death of Bees (mainstream)
Susan Palwich Flying in Place (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson 2312 (sff)
John Scalzi Redshirts (sff)
Ian Tregillis Bitter Seeds (sff)
Leon Trotsky The History of the Russian Revolution (non-fiction)
Simon Van Booy The Illusion of Separateness (mainstream)
Chris Anne Wolfe Shadows of Aggar (sff)
Barbara Ann Wright The Pyramid Waltz (sff) That's a lot of stuff. It includes a couple of non-fiction O'Reilly books from sales, a few months of Powell's Indiespensible subscriptions, a variety of books I picked up after a discussion of good lesbian fiction on Tor.com (romance without the obnoxious gender tropes, or at least as many of them), and the rest of the Hugo nominees for the year. I got a ton of reading done earlier this month. I wish I could say the same thing about reviews, but I only wrote a few. That's something that I want to try to catch up on soon, so there will probably be a flurry of those posted soon. I've already read Blackout and Redshirts of this year's nominees (a review of the latter is coming), so at least I'm not too far behind on the reading. Throne of the Crescent Moon is in progress now.

I've recently started staging upgrades from Squeeze to Wheezy. One unpleasant surprise was that the mutt-patched package available to Debian doesn't contain the "sidebar-new-only" patch. This means I need to maintain it myself again, which I'd rather avoid. Over time I've been slowly moving to standard Debian systems, trying to not carry too many local perversions around. Unfortunately if you've kept all your mail since 1994 you have many mailboxes. having mutt-patched available at all, with the sidebar patch, is a great timesaver. But I don't want to see mailboxes I'm never going to touch; just mailboxes with new mail in them. Also I find the idea of having to explicitly define mailboxes a pain. Just run inotify on ~/Maildir and discover the damn things yourself. Please computer, compute! If you divide up "mail client" into distinct steps it doesn't seem so hard:

• Show a list of folders: all, new-mail-containing only.
• Viewing a list of mail-messages: all in folder, or folders.
• Compose a new mail.
• Reply to a mail.

Obviously there is more to it than that. Sending mail? exec( sendmail ). Filtering mail? procmail/sieve/etc. Editing mail? exec(vim). I'm sure if I were to start a core of a program, suitable for myself, would be simple enough. Maybe with lua, maybe with javascript, but with a real language at the core. Anyway I've thought this before, and working with quilt and some ropy patches has always seemed like the way to go. Maybe it still is, but I can dream. (PS. Sup + Notmuch both crash on my archives. I do not wish to examine them further. Still some interesting ideas. It should be possible to say "maildirs are tags; view "~/Maildir/.livejournal.2003" and ~/Maildir/.livejournal.2007 at the same time. Why just a single directory in the "index-view? So 1994.) Disjointed posts R Us. Obquote: "How hard could it be?" -- Patrick.

Step one: building OpenRC, and force it with a big hammer to replace sysv-rc. A few minutes later, with even more hacks, we have a more decent boot process which uses Gentoo boot scripts (amazingly, most of them do work out of the box!): Notice the udev script, which is hacked from the Debian sysv-rc, still has the color scheme of Debian, while the other scripts are just drop-ins from Gentoo. Of course, this is only a big hack to have the above. There is only so much you can do in a 4 hours hacking session. It will need more serious work to make it a viable solution (like finding a way to upgrade smoothly and allow the first reboot to shutdown processes which aren t running using cgroup, converting existing init scripts automatically, hooking into update-rc.d, etc.). Though the proof of concept is there: the rc-status command works, we have cgroups working, and so on. Thanks to Patrick Lauer for spending with me this fun afternoon, hacking OpenRC in SID.