I've never had a dog of my own since I grew up, but there have always been dogs in my life.

Calypso and Percy

Calypso was dropped off at Wortroot soon after I moved in, and was my borrowed dog for years. And she remained out there, spending a good decade with run of the woods, fields and streams, a good doggy life. She got old and feeble, spent winters by the fireplace, and finally it was too much for her. I'll miss her, the best dog I've known. Recently I've caught glimpses of a dog lurking in the distance here at the Hollow. When I noticed it was sleeping on the roof of the battery box, I realized it was probably one of the dogs that used to live here but were given away last year. Exchanged email with the likely owners, now in Sudan, and they tell me her name is Domino, and she must have run away home. So I've been putting out food for Domino this week, and yesterday she came close enough to be petted. Medium sized and white, her name is for a black mask extending from eyes to ears. Although currently skittish, she seems basically a good, calm dog.

(This was going to be a comment on this blog post, but it s a Turdpress site that wants JS and cookies to comment. Bugger that for a game of skittles. Rimuhosting s recent extended outage due to power problems was apparently caused by a transfer switch failure at their colo provider. This has led people to wonder if putting UPSes in individual racks is a wise move. The theory is that in the event of a small outage, the UPS can keep things humming, and in an extended outage you can gracefully shut things down rather than having a hard thump. I happen to think this theory is bunkum. Your UPS is a newly instituted single point of failure. I d be willing to bet that the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining the UPSes, as well as the cost of the outages that inevitably result from their occasional failure, would be far greater than the cost of the occasional power outage you get in a well-managed facility. Good facilities don t have small outages. They don t have squirrels in the roof cavities, and they don t have people dropping spanners across busbars. The only outages they have are the big ones, when some piece of overengineered equipment turns out to be not so overengineered the multi-hour (or multi-day) ones where your UPS isn t going to stop you from going down. Your SLA credit and customer goodwill is already toast, so all you re saving is the incremental cost of a little bit more downtime while you get fscks run. If you want the best possible power reliability, get yourself into a really well engineered facility, and run dual-power on everything. Definitely run the numbers before you go down the UPS road; I ll bet you find they re not worth it.

If you ve ever needed to care about DNS and Python, you probably know about pydns (python-dns) and dnspython (python-dnspython). Both have been around a long time (dnspython hit 1.0 in 2003 and the origins of pydns are long enough ago that they are lost to the mists of time I think dnslib.py, from which it is derived was initially developed with Python 1.5). They each have their advantages.
Until recently, if you needed DNS functionality and you re interested in Python 3, you were out of luck. Last month I had some business travel with long airplane rides that I put to good use and I ported pydns to Python 3. Upstream took the changes and released it as py3dns, so now you have a Python 3 DNS option. Packages are available in Debian Wheezy/Unstable and in Ubuntu Natty as python3-dns. It passes all the tests (better than the existing pydns), but I know test coverage is incomplete, so take it for a spin and let me know if there are problems. The code isn t pretty (it s set of minimal changes to get to a working Python 3 port), but it seems to work OK.

Spend millions visiting space TWICE, take Amazon referal money from non profit... priceless!



From skitterman.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/business-oppor<wbr></wbr><wbr></wbr>tunity-in-ubuntu/#comment-364:
Thanks to a former friend for pointing me to these two people who could express this better than me.

Those of us who work in technical areas like to believe that because we are engaging in technical endeavors rather than social endeavors, our work is defined and predictable. This hints that we know the future. I think Scott Adams captured the thought well:
We should not be so cocky. While the technical world is more structured and predictable than other areas, it has its limits too. One can only see so far down into complexity before predictability is lost in the detail. That s where we get so called Heisenbugs . Looking out to the future we can only see so far as well. Recently I ve been reading The Black Swan. It is a useful reminder that the future isn t as linear and predictable as we d like to pretend it is. One idea that has stuck in my head is the idea that in order to take something into account that one will know in the future in one s predictions, one must already know it. There is an inherent limit to how far we can see. How is this relevant to distribution developers? Each time we set off to develop a new release, we make an assessment of how to best expend the available resources (our own, our company s, our group of people we can talk into doing stuff) to make things better . We do the best we can, but we must always be mindful of the fact that we press forward using our best engineering judgement, but as we look into the future, eventually this is all just liquor and guessing too.

I maintain a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record testing tool. If you happen to use it and it says your record isn t valid, your first action should not be to email me and ask if it s a bug in the tool. That is all.

This is the obligatory Hello world post. I m a developer both in Ubuntu and Debian. In Debian most of my work has been in the Python world where I co-maintain python-defaults and python3 defaults as well as several modules, extensions, and applications. I ve been contributing to Debian development for about 3 years now and recently became a DD.
Just so this post won t be completely free of technical content
Most of you will have heard that Python 2.6 is now the default in Sid. Once this transition is complete and migrated, the Python system that s planned for Squeeze will be in place (I know this is a topic that is very dear to some people, but I don t care to discuss the history of it in my blog and won t approve comments in that direction).
Of more technical interest, I think, is that the core system around Python 3 is starting to appear. The current version of Debian Python Policy begins to address Python 3 issues for the first time and we now have a supported and default Python 3. There is more work coming between now and freeze time to more completely define how the Debian Python 3 system should work. While many upstreams don t support Python 3 yet, we want to provide a solution that makes it easy for maintainers to provide Python 3 packages where they do.

There are some things you just wouldn't want to do without living in the country in Kansas.

A lot of rock on your driveway.

A good view of the sunset.

Neighbors with tractors.

Some way to get rid of trash and recycling.

Some friendly outdoor cats.

That last item is there because there are a few things you would really love to do without:

Mice.

Rats.

Pack rats.

Other assorted rodents.

Now, although we were adopted by a stray cat not too long ago, he is really the skittish, wondering hobo type of cat. Sometimes he's around, sometimes he's not. We'd really like more of a 24/7 rodent patrol. Plus we can't ever get close enough to Sneaky to play with him.

So on Labor Day, I brought home two cats from my parents place: Hudson and Nash. Both are yellow. Neither of them were really accustomed to a car carrier, and though the trip is less than 15 minutes, were quite scared by the end of it.

We normally pen up outside cats for the first few days so that they can identify with a new home, then let them roam free. So we decided to take them in to the grain elevator and let them roam in there for a little while. This is a big old wood structure about 80 years old. It has two stories, and a series of wooden grain bins built into the first floor.

We took the cats, in their carriers, into one of those bins, closed the door, and then let them out. Both were scared, but one of them calmed down quickly, and was soon happily playing with shoelaces, purring loudly, and generally wanting to be held.

The other made a run for it. He couldn't get out the door, but, well, he managed to climb up the wall. Up and out of the grain bin, and another jump or two and he was in the second story of the building -- no doubt finding a lovely cat-sized place to hide.

We eventually closed up the elevator as best we could, and left for the evening.

Tuesday morning, we saw only the smaller cat around. By the afternoon, Terah saw the older cat prowling around in the yard. That's one thing about 80-year-old farm buildings: they can't keep cats in or out. A cat will find a way in, or a way out, if it wants.

By now, they're playing outside and love it. They still like to go inside, and Hudson -- the older cat -- will let me get within about 5 feet of him. Nash tries to not let me get more than 5 feet away, and has climbed most of the way up my jeans using his claws by now.

When we're not outside, we can see them prowling about outside. Sometimes they'll see something -- maybe a cricket or a mouse -- and they'll crouch down, tail moving excitedly, ready to pounce. They don't really play with each other, but they stay close by.

All of this is great, but it comes with a price: I no longer have an excuse to avoid cleaning the rat droppings out of the elevator, because they won't just reappear within a month anymore.

Half a year ago yesterday, I stepped off a plane in the United States. It's been an eventful 6 months, as can be seen from reviewing my blog, and I thought I'd summarise the top 10 things I like and dislike about living in this country as opposed to Australia. Ten things I like about living in California:

1. Plenty of sunshine Love the sunshine. It was a bit wet in winter and early spring, but I'm told that it should be pretty much rain (and cloud) free for the rest of the year. Daylight saving also helps make enjoying the copious amounts of sunshine easier, it doesn't get dark until well after 8pm.
2. The public transport options, particularly in San Francisco are vast Particularly in San Francisco, your options for getting around the city are huge. You've got the BART, the Muni (which covers about three distinct forms of public transport in itself), and the VTA overhead electric and petrol powered buses. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, you've got the Caltrain, and VTA light rail and buses.
3. Petrol pumps You need never darken the door of a petrol station. Everywhere has pay at the pump (with plastic of course), and the pumps all have the automatic latch, so you don't even need to stand at the side of the car holding the handle while it fills up.
4. Free parking This was a big change, coming from Canberra, which has a love affair with pay and display parking. Even the multi-storey and underground carparks in the downtown areas are free.
5. Pedestrian crossings that countdown No excuse to get skittled because you thought you could make it in time. You known exactly how long you've got before you'll get mowed down before you step off the side of the road.
6. The postal system Saturday delivery. Every mailbox is an outgoing mailbox (just put the little flag up).
7. Right turns on red This is a real time saver. I can't see why Australia couldn't adopt this for left turns. The only downside is you can spend so much time looking to your left for a break in the traffic to dart out in, that you miss your green arrow (but that's what the guy behind you and his horn is for).
8. Corporately run rental apartment complexes Instead of having an apartment complex where individual landlords own each apartment, the entire complex (and they tend to be larger) is owned by a mega-corporation that employs half a dozen people to maintain it and run it as a business. The upside is they tend to have better facilities, an onsite office (great for receipting packages delivered during the week), onsite maintenance (some places even have a service-level agreement). This offers some economies of scale that you wouldn't otherwise have.
9. At least the perception of a low cost of living I haven't done the sums, and it's probably partially because the bills come monthly instead of quarterly, but all the utility bills seem fairly low and reasonable. Dollar for dollar, petrol is also cheaper, even though it's jumped a dollar a gallon in the time we've been here.

Of course, one must take a balanced look at these things... Ten things I don't like about living in the United States:

1. The currency Not a big fan of the notes. I miss the one and two dollar coins, and the distinctiveness between each denomination. I figure that vending machines over here must be so much more expensive because they have to have a note reader, and even then, the treasury decides to produce some new oddball note that half of the readers don't recognise... I blame tipping. If there were no tipping, the utility of one dollar bills would diminish enormously.
2. The government bureaucracy As my blog records, I haven't exactly had a smooth run with the system over here...
3. The banking system The banking system in general is woeful by comparison. The cheque (or check) still reigns supreme, whereas it's nearly obsolete in Australia. There's no such animal as BPay (and oh how I miss it). In fact, the equivalent system here often involves the bank cutting a cheque on your behalf and mailing it to the biller. How ridiculously antediluvian is that? Oh, and I miss vaguely decently authenticated electronic payments. I've been at cafes were I've paid by credit card, and haven't even had to provide a signature. Given that the credit card is actually a debit card, it's pretty disturbing how easily someone can clean out your bank account.
4. Ex-tax pricing I'm so glad that when they introduced the GST in Australia, they required by law that all prices include it. Most prices here don't, but the occasional food outlet does (like Subway for example), so it's sufficiently confusing that you can't budget for how much you're going to actually fork out.
5. ATM fees The ATM fees are more in your face. Instead of the bank charging you a fee at the end of the month for every transaction conducted at an ATM that isn't theirs, the ATM itself tacks on an extra amount to the withdrawal and effectively skims the money. I've seen fees as high as $5 a transaction, but $2 is fairly common. It's kind of weird seeing an ATM withdrawal of $42 on your bank statement... So having a bank account that doesn't charge you feeds for non-bank ATM withdrawals is all well and good, but it doesn't stop the ATM from charging you.
6. Inaudible pedestrian crossings Oh, the number of times I haven't been paying attention and missed the walk light at a pedestrian crossing... In some places, they do make noises like birds, or talk to you when you can walk, but they're definitely not the norm.
7. The road surface For the highways, they seem to have gone for quantity and not quality, or they're too busy to take offline to resurface. Either way, the road surface quality is pretty poor.
8. Sugar Everything is loaded with sugar. Absolutely everything.
9. Alcohol labelling Light beer is low calorie, not low alcohol. I miss Australia's concept of "standard drinks". Makes it very hard to drink and drive responsibly.