While watching the Vienna New Year s Concert today, reading about its perhaps somewhat problematic origins, I was struck by the observation that the Strauss family s polkas were seen as pop music during their lifetime, not as serious as proper classical composers, and so it took some time before the Vienna Philharmonic would actually play their work. (Perhaps the space-themed interval today and the ballet dancers pretending to be a steam train were a continuation of the true spirit of this? It felt very Eurovision.) I can t decide if it s remarkable that this year was the first time a female composer (Constanze Geiger) was represented at this concert, or if that is what you get when you set up a tradition of playing mainly Strauss?

I just noticed that I wrote this a decade ago, and then never got round to posting it, so thought I might kick it off now to mark my tentative return to blogging. At the recent 2015 Cambridge-UK Mini-DebConf (generously hosted by ARM), I gave an impromptu Lightning Talk about Sleep Apnoea (video here). Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA - the form I'm on about) is a sleep disorder where one repeatedly stops breathing while asleep, normally when snoring, but not necessarily. The consequence of this is that in order to resume breathing one must wake up momentarily. These events are not remembered, but they ruin the quality of your sleep. If you find that you're often quite tired, you should probably give the Epworth Sleepiness Scale a try -- if it suggests you have a problem: Get thee to a doctor for a check-up! The good news is that if you do turn out to have OSA it's fairly easy to treat (CPAP or more recently APAP being the favoured treatment), and that when treated you should be able to get good quality sleep that will result in you being much more awake, and much more cheerful. If you might be an Apnoeac (or a sufferer of some other sleep disorder, for that matter), get yourself treated, and you'll be able to use the extra hours of daily concentration working on Debian, thus making the world a better place

crowdsupply.com has a campaign to fund production of EOMA68 computer cards (and associated peripherals) which recently passed the $60,000 mark. If you were at DebConf13 in Switzerland, you may have seen me with some early prototypes that I had been lent to show people. The concept: build computers on a PCMCIA physical form-factor, thus confining most of the hardware and software complexity in a single replaceable item, decoupling the design of the outer device from the chips that drive it. There is a lot more information about this at crowdsupply, and at http://rhombus-tech.net/ -- I hope people find it interesting enough to sign up. BTW While I host Rhombus Tech's website as a favour to Luke Leighton, I have no financial links with them.

crowdsupply.com has a campaign to fund production of EOMA68 computer cards (and associated peripherals) which recently passed the $60,000 mark. If you were at DebConf13 in Switzerland, you may have seen me with some early prototypes that I had been lent to show people. The concept: build computers on a PCMCIA physical form-factor, thus confining most of the hardware and software complexity in a single replaceable item, decoupling the design of the outer device from the chips that drive it. There is a lot more information about this at crowdsupply, and at http://rhombus-tech.net/ -- I hope people find it interesting enough to sign up. BTW While I host Rhombus Tech's website as a favour to Luke Leighton, I have no financial links with them.

I am reminded by Gunnar's wonderful news that I have been very remiss in publishing my own. Mathilda Sophie Hands, our second daughter, was delivered on the 9th of January. Her arrival was a little more interesting than we'd have preferred (with Gunde being suddenly diagnosed with HELLP Syndrome), but all has turned out well, with Gunde bouncing back to health surprisingly quickly, and Mathilda going from very skinny to positively chubby in a few short weeks, so no harm done. Today Mathilda produced her first on-camera smile. It's lovely when they start smiling. It seems to signal that there's a proper little person beginning to take shape.

Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), is running a campaign for all medical trials to be published. It seems that best current evidence indicates that about half of the trials for treatments currently in use remain unpublished. That's pretty astounding when you think about it. Given that many of the trials that are published only compare new treatments against placebo, rather than against the best available existing treatment, and often barely show them as being more effective than homeopathy^Wsugar, one has to wonder how dire were the results that are not being published. If you prefer to have science done in the open, then I'd encourage you to visit www.alltrials.net and sign the petition and/or give them a donation. The fix is pretty straight-forward: Simply insist that clinical trials have to register before they start in order to be considered valid, and that all registered trials have to report their results. It need not be expensive to do -- a git repo. shared across the industry, containing a file for each trial in a standard format would do the trick probably. I imagine they'll come up with a more expensive solution, but in comparison to the cost of running a decent sized trial, it'll still be pocket change. (A note from the campaign, sent to existing petition signatories, is what prompted this blog post -- please read it and be inspired to help)

... a week ago, in the shape of Alexandra Daphne Scholz, my enchanting daughter. She seems to have inherited my hairstyle. Gundemarie Scholz (my wife) and she are both doing remarkably well, to the extent that they both keep surprising medical staff with their rapid progress. For those of you that care about such things: She was 2.9kg (6lb 6oz) at birth, and 49cm (1'7") tall ... or should that be "long", given that she's not doing so much standing up as yet? What she is doing is sleeping, breast feeding, and excreting ... rather a lot. Between times, it's mostly gurgling cheerfully, looking around at the world, and attempting to study her own hands -- I find her completely fascinating. That being the case, don't expect anything very sensible out of me for the foreseeable future (so no change there, eh? ) and because I cannot resist the urge, here are a few more snaps of her: As you can see, at only one day old, it seems that she'd already managed to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor, and was having a well earned nap

Having designed the 3D model for a Pinard Horn (Foetoscope) last night, I printed it out and went to bed. This morning I applied it to Gunde's bump, and listened to my unborn daughter's heartbeat. I'm almost jealous of her for the exciting times she's being born into.

... since we got married -- a great month and one month until Gunde's expected to give birth to our first daughter. So exciting times ahead.

Debian will be exhibiting at next month's Cloud Expo Europe on the 2nd & 3rd of Feb.
(well I will be if you fancy keeping me company please add yourself to this page)If you fancy visiting the show, you can register for free before midnight on the 1st of February (after that it costs 15.00 GBP)oh, and later the same week,

I had a constructive meeting with my Member of Parliament yesterday, in which he agreed to push this critique of the Digital Economy Act (the dire nonsense that Lord Mandelson forced through in the dying seconds of the previous UK parliamentary session, apparently at the behest of the copyright exploitation industry, who will presumably now owe him a few lucrative consultancies)If you're wanting to do something similar, feel free to use the content, or use it for inspiration, or just use the one-page PDF version if that's helpful to you in explaining the worthlessness of this law.Note, I know there are many other points that could be made, but I was restricting myself to one side of A4 (just) -- MPs cannot be expected to read more it seems.

The cloth is woven, so the tailors are busy collecting measurements. If you've ordered a kilt or whatever, and have not yet sent in your dimensions & money you need to do that within about 24 hours if you're hoping to get something in time for DebConf.We seem to have got about 20 yards more than we ordered (weaving's more of an art than a science) so if you've only just realised that you want a kilt, skirt, whatever, in glorious Debian Tartan, I suggest you get in touch promptly, as even if you don't want it in time for DebConf, I imagine the rest will get snapped up as soon as people see what they've been missing in New York.I'm getting some Ties made -- they'll cost about 25.00 GBP each. If you fancy one, tell me, and add yourself to this table on the wiki. There's more background on that page.

Thank you to everyone who came to see me sing in the Southampton Philharmonic Choir this evening, and to those supporting from afar. My favourite parts, naturally, were the phrases in Villa-Lobos's Choros 10 that include fortissimo low F notes. There's a low E at one point in Daphnis et Chloe, but it's pianissimo.

I've asked the weavers to start doing their job today, so with luck the tailors will still have time to make kilts ready to wear for DebConf10.If you've been wondering if you'd like some Debian Tartan, now's your chance. We've ordered a little over 16 yards more than we need, which will be enough to make about 2 extra kilts and a few ties (depending on exact details), so order early to avoid disappointment.Of course, kilts are not the only thing one can make out of tartan. The tailors make other things, but there's nothing stopping you from buying some cloth by the yard and being inventive (it costs about 25.00 GBP per yard). We'll also be making ties, so if you're interested in one of those, please add yourself to the relevant table on the wiki, and I'll get in touch with prices etc.Full details of this silliness are available on the wiki page -- send any questions to phil at hands dot comUpdate 16:00 UTC 27th: one 8-yard kilt snapped up already (numbers above updated)

It looks like we have just enough interest for a second run of Debian Tartan. If we get it ordered in the next couple of weeks there will be time for kilts to be made in time be worn at DebConf10.The only issue at present is that it would be rather cheaper if more people were involved. For short runs the cloth costs 26.00 GBP per yard, and one also needs to find 400.00 GBP for the loom setup. Once you get to an order of 80 yards, the weavers will swallow the setup cost, and only charge 24.00 GBP per yard.In other words, if we're making only 46 yards (which seems like the current level) it's going to cost 10 GBP extra per yard, which is frustrating, as that then means that buying the remaining 36 yards to make it up to 80 yards will only cost another 365.00 GBP or a tenner a yard.If I wanted to make a profit out of this, I suppose I could speculate on the spare cloth, and then knock it out for 150% profit, but I have no desire to make money from my fellow developers, so while I'm chivying, and talking to the weavers, I'm not going to be underwriting the order like I did last time.So if you're even slightly tempted to join this cheerful clan then mail me now! Every extra kilt, skirt, tie, or other item ordered not only results in you owning a beautifully crafted item, but it also does your fellows good by making their orders cheaper too.At an order of 60 yards, the prices cross over, at which point there is no point in not making the full 80 yards, which can then be sold to late-comers to recoup costs for the early-birds.Go on -- you know you want one.Update: not sure what happened to the spam unfriendly mail link - use this: phil at hands dot com

Having excitedly bought an Arduino from the nice folks at tuxbrain.com while they were at DebConf9, I was then a little deflated to discover (while attending the UKUUG's Arduino Workshop in August), that the IDE is written in Java. While I can see that the authors might perceive this as the easiest way to provide cross-platform pointy-clicky-ness, JREs have a half-life of about an hour on my systems.Anyway, I fought with Java to show willing, until I'd determined that the IDE didn't seem to be happy running under xmonad (rendering menus so that they were unclickable) and gave up -- spending the rest of the tutorial proving to myself that I could compile and upload C code for the little beastie, but failing to compile Arduino sketches on the command line.Ever since, I've been meaning to work out the required CLI incantations, and finally made time over the weekend. The incantations turn out to be rather simple, if not very obvious, so I thought the world could benefit from a package that encapsulates the required knowledge.I've pared the source tree down to the c++ code and some examples and tweaked the Makefile so that it'll do it's work out of tree, referring to the files that the package installs for you, which allows you to apt-get install aurduino-core and then cut&paste a few lines from the contained README.Debian in order to get an LED blinking for the first time.The resulting git repo is now on Alioth. The binary-indep package it produces I've called arduino-core -- hopefully I've left enough room for any fan of the Java IDE to shove that back into the upstream branch and add packages for the full IDE, and maybe throwing in another package for the GTK IDE that's out there.I'm very mildly concerned by the fact that Arduino is a trademark of the Arduino Team, but that trademark is for the circuits, not the software, so this is probably irrelevant. If you think I should care enough to rename the package to freeduino, say, please get in touch.Anyway, if you have an Arduino (or similar) please grab a copy and test it.

I managed to resist for a while, but after thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I've cracked and ordered a Pandora, which is a tiny palm-top cum gaming console, with an OMAP3530 (ARM Cortex A8) running at 600MHz, a smidgen larger than a Nintendo DS. I'm not really interested in the gaming side, but am thinking that now that DisplayLink seems to be somewhat supportable on Linux I'll be able to plug it into a decent monitor when I'm home, and that the 10 hour battery life and pocket size will be great when I'm not. Hopefully it'll be built and shipped in time for Xmas.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I was under the impression that one could only have a single HTTPS site per IP address, but it seems I was wrong. The procedure is described here on the CACert wiki. In short, you need multiple SubjectAltName fields on your server's certificate, such that all the VirtualHost names that you want to work are either directly mentioned, or will match via wildcards. The page above includes a link to a nice script that generates a key and CSR (Certificate Signing Request) ready to be pasted into CAcert's Server Certificate page. Note: the CN is pretty much ignored by some browsers, so you'll want to put the machine's main name as one of the SubjectAltNames as well. BTW if you get a warning like:

  [warn] _default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 443, the first has precedence

you probably need to add

  NameVirtualHost *:443

to your /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ssl before the <VirtualHost *:443> line. Of course, this glosses over the details of doing things like setting your name and address in the certificate, but since CAcert will strip all that out anyway, it only matters if you wanted to get it signed by someone else. Even so, this should get you started -- you can always edit those details into the csr script.

Alain Williams just sent me a link to the Atheist Bus Campaign which was started to raise £5,500.00 GBP in order to buy adverts on the sides of busses in London. As I write they have raised £111,832.43, so over 20 times what they needed for the London busses. I'm so impressed with this that I gave them £100.00 Update: I note the campaign's page, where among other things they link to a clip from the BBC's Have I got news for you which is rather amusing about this, particularly the last joke. Also, Justgiving's blog seems in awe about how this has taken off. As they mention, there's even a wikipedia page about this.

Today I helped a friend sign up with Virgin Media's broadband service. He was having trouble, as their front-page at http://activation.virginmedia.com/ does a brain-damaged test, and tells you that they only support Windows and MacOS X and that if you have anything else you'll need to phone them at a pound a minute so you can talk to some idiot until you lose the will to live (or some such). After a brief rummage, I noticed that if instead of doing what they tell you to do, you go to https://autoreg.autoregister.net/ you get prompted for whether you're signing up for Broadband or Dialup, and on clicking Broadband, you're lead through the sign-up procedure with no complaints about compatibility, and within 5 minutes he was online with his GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) system and Firefox browser. This makes me wonder why Virgin Media bother putting extra effort into turning users away when in fact the sign-up procedure would work perfectly if they hadn't bothered with the stupid browser test.