Had a great day yesterday. It was 20C outside in Montreal, so Maj and I had a bunch of friends over for "Sunday brunch" (at 3PM). I call it "bruncher", as a twist on diner and souper, lunch and dinner in Quebecois French, respectively. Our friends Patti and Meg, Anne-Marie and Jeff, Tobias and Cato, Heather and Damien, John Usher, Niko, and Maj's sister Lori were all there. I fired up my grill and made shrimp skewers, tuna burgers and salmon burgers (courtesy of the president), and tofu sausages, as well as corn on the cob. I prepped up a big green salad and a pasta salad, plus cheese and bread and chips and fresh guacamole. Topped off with a lot of vinho verde and the tasty EXP from Toasted Head, and we had a pretty nice meal. Oh, and John brought a pineapple, and we had berries and ice cream and watermelon for dessert. Nice. tags: grilling montreal bruncher

Montessori This morning Maj and I went to visit a potential pre-school and day-care centre for Amita June. It's the Outremont Montessori school, which was pretty nice inside and had a friendly staff. My three brothers and I were all taught using the Montessori method, and my mother is a Montessori instructor, so I'm probably a little picky about Montessori schools. But the Outremont one is bilingual, and they have all the Montessori method equipment, and a real commitment to it. The main thing I'm concerned about is that the teachers aren't AMI trained, as far as I can tell. They do a two-month workshop in the method, whereas AMI-trained teachers have one- or two-year degrees. I think we're going to check out the program and enroll Amita June for the day care (which is less intensive than the pre-school) and see how we feel about it. That is, if we get in: they've got a full school right now, but they might be able to put us on the waiting list. tags: amitajune preschool montessori teachers

Plattsburgh International I'm pretty excited about the incipient opening of Plattsburgh International Airport, which calls itself "Montreal's U.S. Airport" (really!). Plattsburgh lies right across the New York (state) border, about 100km from Montreal and about a one to two hour drive depending on border crossing times. The clear market is for Montrealers seeking discount flights to (other) destinations in the USA. I think that's going to require significantly cheaper flights than are available at Trudeau Airport. Fortunately, that might not be that hard -- Trudeau is really lacking in cheap fares. But will the new airport's fares be cheap enough to justify driving an hour and crossing a land border? I'd be surprised. (via montreal city weblog, which is awesome.) ddf says: Sure, it's a bit of drive. But consider the fact that border customs is way less of a pain than airport customs. I think if you are traveling with a lot of bag and don't want to risk some extensive search before being able to board in Montreal, it might be worth the drive. tags: plattsburgh montreal airport

So, this is my last evening (and when I remember correctly the first one I’m at home) of my holidays. All began last Friday called “Karfreitag”, a national holiday. To be correct, the first party was already on Thursday and they continued daily till Monday evening. The best event in this time was Sunday afternoon, some minutes after I waked up Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 aka Etch was released, what a feeling. It was especially interesting because it’s the first stable release with some of my packages and it was a great experience to see how releasing and planning works. I often think back to the two bug squashing parties in Zurich, one in September and one in October iirc. Back to my holidays: First it was planned that I go with my sister to Zurich from Monday evening till Thursday evening, but then I got a appalling call from madduck who told me that he is in the hospital in Zurich with several broken bones. We planned to sleep in madducks flat and so we couldn’t get the key and went Tuesday morning. Walking through Zurich, getting some informational material from the University Zurich for my Sister (she maybe wants to study there) and the visiting madduck. After the visit we went again to the center of the city and walked without a real destination. In the evening we finally went to Oerlikon and went to “our” flat. After installing our sleep places (goddamn, I want to have a waterbed) we went to Migros to buy some food and drinks for the evening and the next day. The next day we really got up quite early and visited Zurich with a city guide, a lot of sightseeing and hanging in some bars. In the afternoon Daniel Baumann also was in Zurich and we went to have a drink together and also Tobias Ast came and staid with us till the next evening. We really had fun together and the main thing we did on Thursday was relaxing on the lake of Zurich and in the evening we went home. Then it was finally friday, I looked forward to this day for about one week, why? The release party in Zurich!! It was my first release party on the Irchel area in Zurich, we grilled, had some beer together and talked about god and the world. It also was the first time i met Adrian von Bidder and Mathias St rmer in person, especially with Adrian i had a longer interesting discussion about network devices from Cisco and their special prices. Saturday was already the next party day. When I was 13 we had a supply teacher for our sick teacher for 2 months, I was her horror pupil. Fine - some weeks ago I met her again in a Pub in the evening and we staid together the whole evening and became good friends in a way, so I was also invited (as the only of her pupils) to her flat share party. I met several “new” people and some of them (mostly IT students) recognized my Debian t-shirt and I had some interesting discussions about free software and had to explain the philosophy of Debian to some of them. So yes, now it’s sunday, I’m more tired than before my holidays but I’m really happy, my holidays were great because of some adventures. Regards to all to my friends… Tomorrow I will continue working and have several tasks open, especially upgrading some Debian servers from Sarge to Etch (Spamfilters, LDAP, Proxy servers…) and I hope I won’t have many troubles. In addition I have also some tasks open for Debian which I’d like to complete this week.

So, today, I finally stopped the l10n NMU campaign. It started on Sept. 25th with the "Intent to Work" on hesiod. The last package I worked on has been isync today. The goal of that campaign was closing as many longstanding l10n bug reports as possible. The main goals were decided during the i18n work meeting in Extremadura, back in September. We focused on po-debconf translations, mostly, which are an easy target for NMUs. Thomas Huriaux extracted the data from the BTS and ranked packages with regards to the number of pending l10n bugs and their age. Lucas Wall reactivated a coordination page which we already used back in early 2006 when a first version of such a campaign was run. During that campaign, I worked on 102 packages. 89 of them got all their pending l10n bugs closed, 5 of them got most of their l10n bugs closed (remaining "l10n" bugs were either not really related to localisation and strange things which I left aside), 8 packages were ignored either because their respective maintainers wanted to handle the bugs themselves or because they were tagged for removal. Meny packages have also been handled by their respective maintainers, either because the NMU announcements woke them up...or because of their natural release process. I have to point out that the level of collaboration of package maintainers has been great (except for those who are MIA, and there are quite a few) with only one very proeminent exception (just guess which one). Thijs Kinkhorst and Tobias Toedter also contributed to the campaign. Thanks to them as well. As a side effect, we also made many of these packages as lintian-clean as we could, trying to balance between too invasive NMUs and trivial fixes. IIRC, I only introduced 3 or 4 RC bugs doing so (which I fixed immediately of course). A few RC bugs were also fixed by the NMUs and even a security bug has been hunted down (for screen). Meny thanks to all package maintainers, translators and everybody who helped during that work. It has been a great time. Just look at the result. Now heading to the improvement of the next pet project of the i18n task force: the Debian i18n server.

The Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 came into effect on Friday 8 December. It is now legal to use CE-marked "micro" FM transmitters, which are intended for linking portable ogg players to nearby FM radios. Transmitters can have at most 50mW power (if I understand page 35 of Ofcom's Interface Requirements 2030), compared for the local 100W commercial station on top of the hill, 25W for a full Restricted Service Licensee, 1W for low-power FM (LPFM) and 300mW for stadium commentary stations. Update: Kimmo Jukarainen / OH3GNU commented:

"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."

Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old ps2ascii indeed confirms

v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.

Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:

"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."

Rob Hart commented:

"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."

Andy Parkins commented:

"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."

The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:

"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."

Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.

The move to better subpixel rendering in X windows continues. Tobias Wolf kindly pointed out to me these new patches from David Turner. Turner says "it's rather delicious" and I'm inclined to agree.
Applied to libXft and Cairo, they remove a lot of the ugly colour fringing from subpixel rendered fonts under Linux.David posts a screenshot, which looks great on my screen (if you have a CRT or different pixel ordering, it may look horrible for you -- the disadvantage of subpixel and screenshots!)Update: Tobias mentions another patch, which is needed to get best results.