1st of May is in most civilized countries a bank holiday (term that means “if you work for a bank, you dont have to go to work” and is closely similar to a standard holiday). Ireland prides itself for moving the holidays to the morning after, so you can enjoy a long weekend, and did we: rented a car, took off and visited the country side. Well, right after we exchanged seats, since apparently one cannot drive here on the left side of the car. The country is in much better state than the 10 years old Lonely Planet describes: good condition signaled roads and a B&B on every other corner. From Dublin we jumped to Kilkenny were we had a beer (guess which one) and enjoyed a concert on a pub, since they had some festival going on. It also meant we had to stay a bit far from the center. Moving south from Kilkenny we visited Waterford and from there we moved all the way to Cork, for a small visit. Lara lives there, and we had a great chocolate and some food after paying a visit to the cathedral. After deciding not to spend the night in the city we headed towards Old Head. That was a great plan. The view from the cliffs in there is impresive. Pity they have a golf course which will not allow you to reach the tip. One night over in Timoleague, after a beer in the local pub and we headed back to Dublin. A nice relaxing weekend away from the city. The best: sunny countryside, getting away for a while, B&Bs (mostly the second B). The weird: driving on the left, requires loads of concentration not to make mistakes and shifting gears with the left hand is not great. The worst: having to jump from B&B to another one looking for a bed. Also it made it interesting, since we never knew where we were going to end.

It has been a long time since i posted an entry. Many things have happened. Many things have changed. Let’s summarize them. I no longer live in Finland. I moved out on January the 29th, almost exactly by the day 8 and half years after I moved there. Right now I am in Dublin, Ireland, but you never know for how long. In any case I am enjoying quite much. Not as dark as Finland in winter, not as rainy as people think it is. Yeah, it rains, but it was rainy in Finland too. And here in not as cold. I no longer work for Nokia. My employer has changed and I am enjoying every single bit of it. I have not resigned from Debian, although I have not been active for the last months. If you add the new job (hiring process), moving and settling down, you could understand the lack of time. At least I can. Now things are getting stable (I got my ADSL connected only last weekend, and my server at home with all the mail redirected only yesterday) so I am ready to restart with my commitments. Also my employer will allow me to do some Debian work, so I only need my GPG key to be reinstated in the keyring (there is a ticket for it, so I just have to wait). And finally, if you want to follow where I have been spending some of my time, follow my flickr photostream.

In a bit more than 2 weeks i have learned to love my Lomo LC-A / Olympus XA and XPro:

Not so long ago i posted a plea for people to donate their old hardware. Following my own advice, i donated one laptop which ended up in good hands, i believe ;) Unfortunately i got some people putting comments in my blog asking for a donation to be sent to places like India and Pakistan. And i say unfortunately because i cannot do that: i dont have any more laptops to donate, and even if i had, probably the cost of sending them would be similar to the price one would pay to purchase the same hardware in the country of destination. So No Can Do. I received a proposal to coordinate some donations, but so far i had not had the time to think about it. Too occupied with other things.

Not so long time ago i used to be a hardcore photography taker. I would carry a camera everywhere i went, and took hundreds of pictures. I even had a darkroom where to develop my b&w films. But digital came, and it was easier to shoot, check, re-shoot, erase,… you know, all the “benefits” you get with a digital: you care less what you are shooting because it is inexpensive to erase what went not-so-good. It all started again getting into shape last month, before our trip to Spain and France, when i gave my girlfriend my Polaroid camera. She was amazed and bought some film for it. In Barcelona we found a lomography shop, where i purchased a fisheye2 camera. And it finally happened 2 weeks ago when i revisited a flickr.com page of a guy who lives in NY and takes pictures daily. I was amazed, and following some links i ended up learning about Lomography.com and the Lomo LC-A’s. It was monday last week when i purchased a sealed, unused Lomo LC-A for 80e and few hours later i had my first film in several years in the shop for development. Now it is 2 weeks later (almost) and i have purchased few other items: a wide angle for my serviced old Pentax ME-1, few 120 rolls for my Yashica D, some more 35mm rolls for it (i will mod the case with some foam to insert 35mm rolls and take full 3.8×6 takes), an Olympus XA, a Minox 35ML and a couple of old FEDs. All together for less than 350e. My flicker page already reflects the activity i have been enjoying here and there. I admit it needs some cleanup, some pro upgrade and some descriptions added, but with time i will get there.

can be summaryzed in one word: Ohmygodineedholidays. You guys enjoy your DebConf in Scotland.

After i wrote this entry, I received few comments on my blog from people asking me to send laptops to different parts of the world. Unfortunately I cannot do that. I have one spare laptop which will be taken to Edinburgh for Debconf7 and will be given away to a fellow Debian developer (or prospective developer) in need of such piece of hardware, but it will not be sent by post. My initial call was for a similar action from people with spare hardware which can be given away. Maybe one day I could start my own NGO to send laptops around the world for the needy, but right now that is not the case.

Jesus Climent writes about donating laptops.


Free Thinkpad

I have a Thinkpad 385xd laptop to give away for free. It has a PentiumMMX-233 CPU, 96M of RAM, a 3.2G IDE disk, and a 800x600 display. As of my last tests it works well and is currently running an old version of Debian.

The power connector on the laptop is a little broken (it takes a bit of work to plug the cable in) and the cable is also broken (I think that some of the wires are broken and it gets hot when used for a while). Probably the best thing to do would be to solder the cable from the PSU onto the motherboard.

If anyone has a good use for such a machine that benefits a free software project and can arrange to collect it from Melbourne Australia then let me know.

Also I can bring it to any conference that I attend.

Note that I will delete this post once the laptop is taken. So if the Planet link doesn't resolve then someone else got in first.

During the last DebConfs I have advocated for people to donate their old laptops to developers that are not so fortunate with their economical situation. This year’s DebConf I will not be attending, but nevertheless, I would like you to think about it. If you have an spare laptop that you don’t use and you think you can give it up, bring it along with you and give it to someone who is in need of one.

From ThisIsLondon After [the so-called ‘uninterruptible autopilot system’] has been activated, the aircraft will be capable of remote digital control from the ground, enabling operators to fly it like a sophisticated model plane, manoeuvring it vertically and laterally. Once triggered, no one on board will be able to deactivate the system. Currently, all autopilots are manually switched on and off at the discretion of pilots. The latest move to combat airline terrorists follows The Mail on Sunday’s disclosure three weeks ago that scientists in Britain and Germany are developing a passenger-monitoring device. This will use tiny cameras linked to specialist computers to record every twitch, blink, facial expression or suspicious movement made on board flights in order to identify potential terrorists. So they want me to fly on a (possibly) remote controled plane with cameras controling every move i make. “Big Brother”, anyone? Seriously, how many people feel this is going too far? How many terrorist threats have we had on board in the last 6 years to justify this measures? Isn’t enough what we have to already go through every time we want to fly? No liquids, no shoes, no soul, no personal life… Pff…

Saturday, March the 24th. Underbar. Helsinki.

It sucks even more when you have lost it. I have no fricking idea where my iPod (with shiny, brand new Rockbox) is at the moment, and have had no idea for the last 10 days, so I guess I will start looking for a replacement. iPod is a good idea, so I will take a look at the 80GB masterpiece. I also need a new phone, since mine dropped two times while doing some work at home and now it sometimes goes off or reboots without noticing. Let’s see what Nokia has to offer…

After an increased amount of errors showing up in my logs, I decided to substitute my 2 reused hard disks with 2 new ones. The old configuration was a setup of 1x 120GB and 1x 160GB Seagate drives, with the 1st 40GB of both in RAID1 and the rest on stripped LVM configuration for cache purposes (things I already have on DVD or my ripped CDs). Now the situation is similar, but with 2x 250GB disks, so I can put my full music collection on that logical drive. Also, the old 4x 160GB SATA disks on RAID5 are still there, with all my non-backed up music and pictures, which I should consider doing at some point. Everything should be there up and running, including this blog, but something might be missing. Time will tell ;) The installation of Debian on that configuration went flawlessly, except for the fact that on the old installation the 4xRAID5 was setup as md0 and it was confused with the newly created md0 for the root partition. Renaming the RAID5 to md1 under /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf solved the problem. Also, LVM logical drive was found by the installer, so no information was lost at all.

[…] Federal officials […] say they intend to sue the Los Angeles Times and Paramount Pictures Corp. over the April 28 placement in news racks of digital devices that played the familiar “Mission: Impossible” theme song when the racks’ doors were opened. Several newspaper buyers thought the music players were bombs and reported them to law enforcement. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s arson squad blew up one Times news rack near the intersection of Sand Canyon and Soledad Canyon roads in Santa Clarita as a precaution. For FUCKS sake. Forget your back sack (heh, or your iPod) on a bus and you will be sued for putting a bomb. We live in uncertain paranoid times.

I have not been blogging for some time now, due to several things:

• My server’s hda is dying: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 DriveReady SeekComplete Error . Yeah, I hate hardware.
• I spend more time IRL than on IRC. Some time ago I left some (most of the) channels I used to hang in, and decided to spend more time with beers arounds than in front of the computer.
• All kinds of things happening in my life have led to a situation that I want to dedicate more time to play music and DJ (i already got word of a real gig some time soon), meet friends and go out clubbing than writing blong entries and doing Debian packages (still, I manage to update most of my beloved ones, except abcde, that needs a last upload but I dont know if it will make it for etch, eventhough the package has been ready for months).

On unrelated news, if you can stand a bit of disgusting scenes and a bit of perversions of the original book, you HAVE to go see Perfume. WOW.

The date: Friday, 19th of Jan.
The time: starting at around 21.00
The place: Olivers 21 (in Annankatu 21)
The who: DJ Mooch Vs. resident DJ
The what: Electronic music, starting with chillhouse and grooving towards progressive and electro house.
The why: because i/you can. And because i/you want it. ;)

Yeah, I know. This is a rant. Yeah, I know. I could do better and create the icons myself and yadayada, but I am no designer. So, the problem is I restarted my desktop this morning (the sound had been locked by a runaway application) and I got the new iceLOVE icons: Which one would you say is the one for iceape (the applicacion previously known as mozilla), icedove (thunderbird) and iceweasel (firefox)? Exactly! Once I changed to something more visual, you can see the difference:

Since the word is out there, I might just point out that: (From Slashdot): Expecting to see a 1/4″ thick, smoked black rectangle fully occupied by a screen, Norway gives us yet another really boring game station clone. Nokia is from Finland.

• When you make a mistake, don t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power. (Hugh White)
• Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from. (Al Franken, Oh, the Things I Know , 2002)
• Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can’t accept your imperfections, that’s their fault. — Dr. David M. Burns

More here

So there WAS a problem with rc1: the directory for a multisite config file, previously located at /usr/share/trac/conf/trac.ini has been moved to a more policy compliant /etc/trac/trac.ini and the package did NOT inform about it. Now, if you use it, move it to /etc/trac and be happy. Otherwise, it was refered on the siteconfig.py as “etc/trac” without a leading “/”, which has also been solved. Enjoy it.