Norbert, I'm not entirely confident you'd be able to reliably restore a database from such a backup, unless the database had a QUIESCE command that would be called before the snapshot is taken.

Once again there is a discussion whether uClibc based systems should get their own architecture, or whether it would be more like Ubuntu -- they, too, have a different C library (with stack-protector support; this simplifies the gcc bootstrap sequence a bit). Thinking further, why not have generic support for keeping different configurations for various derived distributions in a single source tree, so the same source package could be used on Debian, Ubuntu, emdebian and all the others which all build different binaries? The gcc package does this, to some extent, but it looks at the build system to find out which configuration to use -- a standard mechanism, for example a DEB_BUILD_VARIANT environment variable would be nice.

You cannot store a CComPtr inside an STL list. You can, however, wrap it in a struct, and store that in the list. Careful study of the error message led to the conclusion that apparently some STL implementations frown upon classes that provide an unary operator&.

Since I now have a business licence so I can actually charge people if they ask me questions about computers, I need to occasionally send a letter to the tax office. This means that I finally need a printer. Since I expect to be using it for about 50 pages a year, I don't really see the point in spending too much money on it, but I expect it to work those few times I actually need it. The ability to print documents that remain readable for ten years is important, so it's probably laser or thermal transfer; colour printing isn't important to me. I've had a pretty bad experience with a Lexmark Optra E (squeaky noise, crumpled envelopes, feed not working, collecting dust in the mechanics due to being top-fed). So, I'm interested in printer stories.

Recently, a lot of people have suggested that I cut my hair short in order to look like a human being. I'm not entirely convinced, and in fact think that my own taste should be what matters; I can somehow see that looking more "conservative" might help in certain things (on the other hand, I already have a job). This is a lot like the "self-censorship" thing I wrote about earlier -- the difference being that I'm already conservative about what I write (while others happily post all their party photos to social networking sites, and that doesn't do much harm to them either). I probably should post pictures.

I have not forgotten about the componentisation tutorial. I'm just trying to find an ObjectAdapter that sucks less. The mighty PortableObjectAdapter (POA) is just that: portable. Hence, it does not require the C++ compiler to support RTTI, so it cannot determine whether an object that is passed as a reference is a proxy or the implementation itself. That makes automatic "activation" of objects difficult, because without that information, you cannot create shortcuts in call chains if two objects that live on the same host have been introduced to each other by a third on another host. So I'm looking for an implementation that uses RTTI to that effect, in order to have a non-overwhelming first example.

The last weeks, I've had a particularly unhealthy sleep cycle, mostly because I've always felt that I could do more on this or that project, and when I decided that it was time to sleep I still kept on thinking about the problem before I dozed off. Now I'm keeping a semi-strict timetable (instead of exact times, there are ranges, but there are non-negotiable, as much as that other person that goes into the shower in the morning tries), and generally that has helped me feel a lot better. I still cannot "switch off" though.

I've written before that uClibc is currently not acceptable for the Debian archive maintainers because the licence notices in the source files are incomplete and there is no complete per-file breakdown of contributors and licences. No wonder, there are over 2,000 source files. Thus, I'm setting up a database that will allow me to map file content to people. I'm not sure there is existing software to do that, so it's going to take a while. Until then, uClibc for Debian can be downloaded from uclibc.debian.net (source, amd64 and m68k, the latter cross-compiled using the emdebian toolchain).

Since quite some time, I feel stressed most of the time, have trouble sleeping (and, consecutively, getting up). If you look at the timestamps of my blog posts, you may notice that several have been written at rather unorthodox times. When most of the stuff you do for a living is project work, that is a problem only in so far that it is difficult to talk to colleagues at 3 AM, and that it is massively unhealthy. The sheer amount of time I've spent working (what else are you going to do at 2 AM if you don't have a TV and weren't particularly interested in watching pr0n or talkshows even if you had) and the fact that programming for money is not that much different from programming for fun has made my Debian work suffer and myself unhappy. So things need to change. I already have a plan, and have procured the necessary domain names. Details will follow.

Via Anomaly Television: The video "This Fortean Island" is a seemingly random mixture of "cultism, death, UFOs, Bohemian Grove, Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Freemasonry, and necrophilia", with Discordianism being the connecting element. You can watch it on Google Video or get it as an AVI.

I just spent 5 hours downloading and installing updates to Windows CE Platform Builder. By clicking download links. On a web server that has 500kB/s per user and a maximum of two concurrent connections. I cannot count how many times I accepted that license now. The mighty APT still rocks.

The German train drivers are going on strike again on Friday, asking for 30% more money. So far, they've been offered 4% and two extra hours of work per week. At least DB had the decency not to sink millions of Euros into an advertising campaign denouncing the union's demands as unreasonable. Which they aren't.

My bug difficulty metric is "number of items I forgot while thinking about the problem". My not-entirely-obvious failure to tell COM that my objects are threadsafe ranks a measly 1 (umbrella). The only "3" so far (coat, mobile phone, rollerblades) involved template classes.

A lot of people treat their blog basically as an extension to their CV, and don't write anything that could be used against them in any way, and even if it is just to suggest that they are not invincible superhumans who work 36 hours every day. I often find myself thinking about what people could read into a posting while still writing it, thus censoring myself; I even do so now. Some of the commercial blog hosters offer "private" categories where friends have to log in to see some of the entries. What is your take on the situation? Do you feel limited in what you can write into your blog by what other people might think?

Dirk, actually it is suggested that there is a single space between the shebang and the path to the interpreter. It's not particularly important on Linux, but there are systems out there that use "#! /" as the magic value for scripts, thereby ensuring that the interpreter path is indeed absolute.

Well, still in the planning stages... The general idea is to get a largish house in Denmark for one or two weeks, share the cost among ten people, and live a life of debauchery for one or two weeks, probably in the first or second week of January.

The mighty Cyrus mail system can in theory deliver to subfolders of users' inboxes. In practise, it will only write to folders where the SASL user that the delivery process switches to has at least List and Post privilege -- with the exception of user mailboxes. Normally, this is the "unknown" user, i.e. the permissions need to be "anyone lp". Since that shows the existance of those mailboxes to all IMAP users and allows them to append mail, that's not a good idea. The approach I'm using on my systems is only slightly different. Cyrus "preauthenticates" local connections as the "postman" user, which means they can assume any identity they wish by using the AUTH parameter in the RCPT command. Most mailers don't do this, however, and the default is to fall back on "unknown". I've written a patch that does all deliveries as the authenticated user if nothing else was specified, which nicely reduces the problem to granting access to the "postman" user.

Progress on most fronts. Life is mostly good thus. Reading email only once a day also helps a lot in remaining sane. If it can be urgent, I have given you my phone number. It seems that Planet Debian has a new meme, namely unveilling replacements for the ion window manager. I'm late to the party as I'm using mine as the example code in the componentisation tutorial to introduce the concepts and language bindings one by one -- obviously I have to make that work with a few languages first. And at the same time, work for a living.

I have a separate VoIP account for "business" related things, and am now looking for a good (soft or hard) phone. Requirements are: it should work when I'm not logged in, and both my USB and Bluetooth hand/headsets should be supported, with switching between both in the middle of calls. Does that exist?

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 takes five hours to install. Most of that time is spent trying to figure out what actually needs to be installed; the actual deed is done in rather quick 45 minutes.