Planet #flood.nl

Hoi!

Zoals velen van jullie wel zullen weten woon ik tot op dit moment
antikraak in een kantoorpand in Hengelo. Da’s allemaal leuk en aardig,
maar het is tijdelijk, en dan ook nog met een opzegtermijn van maar
twee weken.

Helaas is er op dit moment zeer binnenkort een eind gekomen aan mijn
contract hier, en moet ik er voor 19 maart uit zijn.

Vandaar dat ik heel hard op zoek ben naar mensen die mij kunnen en
willen helpen verhuizen op zaterdag 13 of zondag 14 maart. Heb jij op 1
van deze twee dagen wat tijd over om mij te helpen met sjouwen, dan zou
ik dat heel erg fijn vinden! Voor eten en drinken wordt vanzelfsprekend
gezorgd, reiskosten en/of slaapplekken zijn ook wel te regelen indien
noodzakelijk.

Samenvattend:

Wat?
– Floris helpen verhuizen

Wanneer?
– zaterdag 13, of zondag 14 maart, afhankelijk hoeveel mensen wanneer
kunnen

Waar?
– van Hengelo naar ???: heel misschien naar Deventer, anders wordt
het waarschijnlijk naar een garagebox ook in Hengelo..

Ik besef dat dit heel kort dag is, maar ik hoop toch dat ik een paar
mensen kan bereiken die mij kunnen helpen! Bij voorbaat alvast heel erg
bedankt!!

Groet,

Floris

Zo, zie hier het resultaat van nog twee rondjes wandelen.
De blauwe reiger kwam ik twee weken geleden tegen in Utrecht langs de Singel, de pimpelmees vanmorgen in Enschede in het Ledeboerpark.

While searching for something else I happened to come across one of my first posts to the ntdom list in November 2000.

My post is a simple question about a Samba crash that I myself no doubt had introduced. I'm sure I could have found a solution to it by using Google - excuse me, AltaVista - but I still received a friendly reply from Jerry explaining me to use GDB. I'm not too embarrassed, at least I used proper punctuation and wrote somewhat comprehensible English.

It's also strange to realize it's already been almost ten years since I started hacking on the Samba project.

Afgelopen zondag in alle vroegte samen met Sebastiaan naar de Holterberg geweest in de hoop op wat mooi ochtend-licht. Het was koud!

O ja, en nog een resultaat zie je bovenaan m’n weblog, het was tijd voor een nieuwe header!

Interesting links of this week:

How To Easily Share Your Wireless Connection in Ubuntu 9.10

Epic win

Getting over the barriers to wiki adoption

What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn't a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word "excuse" deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn't to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.

This column will change your life: Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do

Ever wondered why your friends seem so much more popular than you are? There's a reason for that.

Why is Everybody So Angry about Apple's iPad?

About sums it up. It will be great for quite a lot of people, and won't be "the thing" for users that want more control. I really only hope that it won't be the beginning of closing down *all* computers, as that will seriously hamper tinkerers. Tinkerers that are our future developers/hackers/programmers (think about how you started with IT).

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

I have a major pet peeve that I need to confess. I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.

Location: Server

So tomorrow I'll be off to my university again to follow a course. Interesting sensation. Nice to go to Amsterdam again though :) *puts laptop in bag*

Location: Work

I went to Jonathan Corbet's yearly update of the status of the Linux kernel. He talked about the various big changes that went into the kernel over the last year as well as the development processes. The Linux kernel is probably one of the largest open source projects, and very healthy - there are a lot of individuals and companies contributing to it. With this size
comes a few interesting challenges coping with the flow of changes into Linus' tree. Their current processes seem to deal with this quite well, and don't seem to need a lot of major changes at the moment.

His talk also included the obligatory list of features that landed in the last year. The only one that really matters to me is the Nouveau driver, which I'm looking forward to trying out.

The second talk I went to in the morning was Selena Deckelmann's overview of the Open Source database landscape. She mentioned there's new projects started daily, but it was still a bit disappointing not to see TDB up there.

After lunch Rob gave a talk about Subunit, introducing to the ideas behind the Subunit protocol as well as presenting an overview of the tools that are available for it and the projects that have Subunitized as of yet. It's exciting to see the Subunit universe slowly growing, I wasn't aware of some of the projects that are using it. The recently announced
testrepository also looks interesting, even though it is still very rudimentary at the moment.

In the evening Tridge, Rusty, Andrew, Jeremy,AJ and I participated in the hackoff as the "Samba Team".

The hackoff was a lot of fun, and consisted of 6 problems, each of which involved somehow decoding the data file for the problem and extracting a short token from it in one way or another, which was required to retrieve the next problem. We managed to solve 4 problems in the hour that the organizers had allocated, and ended first because we were a bit quicker in solving the 4th problem than the runner-ups. No doubt the fact that we were the largest team had something to do with this.

I hung out with some of the awesome Git and Github developers in the Malthouse in the evening, and talked about Dulwich, Bazaar and Launchpad ("No *really*, I am not aware of any plans to add Git support to Launchpad.").

On Tuesday we had the "Launchpad" mini-conf, which featured talks from various Launchpad developers about different parts of Launchpad as well as from community members about their use of Launchpad. It wasn't necessarily about hosting projects on Launchpad, but rather about how various projects could benefit from Launchpad.

I popped out of Launchpad track for a bit to attend Andrews talk about the current status of Samba 4. He did a nice job of summarizing the events in the last year, the most of import one of course being the support for DC synchronization. I'm proud we've finally managed to pull this off - and hopefully we'll actually have a beta out next year. We have been saying "maybe next year" for almost 4 years now when people asked us for estimates of a release date.

In the afternoon I gave the talk about Launchpad code imports and code reviews that I had prepared with Aaron earlier. We had planned to give the talk together, but I unexpectedly ended up giving it by myself because of some confusion about the schedule.

Linux.Conf.Au has a reputation for being one of the best FLOSS conferences in the world, and it more than met my (high) expectations. The last one I attended was also in New-Zealand, but further south - in Dunedin.

As usual there were miniconfs the first two days before the actual conference. On the first day I attended some of the talks in the Open Languages track.

mwhudson gave a talk about pypy - Python implemented in Python. He discussed the reasons for doing what they do and the progress they've made so far. Like so many of the custom Python implementations, one of the main thing that's holding them back is the lack of support for the extensions written in C for CPython.

Rusty gave a quick tutorial to talloc/ after lunch ("it's a shame K&R didn't think of this!") and explained why it's so great.

In the afternoon I caught some of the talks in the distro summit track. Both of the talks that I attended happened to be Ubuntu-related - first Dustin gave a quick introduction to the components of Launchpad, followed by a talk from Lucas about the
relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. There was a discussion afterwards about
interoperability between the various hosting sites and bug trackers. Several audience members questioned the relevance of Debian and suggested everything should just switch to Launchpad, but this seemed to be founded in ignorance. (none were actually Launchpad developers, contrary to the impression Martin seems to have).

Het sneeuwt nog steeds regelmatig, dus weer wat voornamelijk witte foto’s. Dit keer in Nijmegen, of liever gezegd, net aan de overkant van de Waal bij Lent.

So to unwind from wrapping up stuff for university, I put some time into restyling my main website, aquariusoft.org. It's a lot cleaner, has less links leading everywhere and is easier on the eye. I'll post some before/after pics tomorrow.

Location: Home

At the moment I am returning home after three very productive and awesome weeks in Wellington, Sydney and Strasbourg.

I spent the first week in the West Plaza in Wellington, working together with fellow Launchpad developers on getting the basics of building from branches working. We eventually managed to get something working at the end of Friday afternoon. We split the work up at the beginning of the week and then worked on it in pairs for a couple of days before integrating all work on Friday. At the end of the week William managed to get a basic source package build from recipe through the queue.

Pair-programming with Jono and Michael was very educational, I suspect I'll be a fair bit quicker when I get back to hacking on Launchpad by myself. It's scary to see how some people can make the changes that would take me a full day in a mere hour.

Tim picked up my initial work on support for Mercurial imports and completed and landed it during the sprint. Since the rollout on Wednesday it is possible to request Mercurial imports on Launchpad. Most imports (e.g. mutt, dovecot, hg) seem to work fine, with the main exception being the really large Mercurial repositories such as OpenOffice.org and OpenJDK. This is because of (known) scaling issues that will be fixed in one of the next releases of bzr-hg.

This was the first time I was back in Wellington since 2006, and the weather this year was exactly as I remembered it; showers and wind, with the occasional day of sunshine. For a capital the city centre is quite small, but it has its charm and the view from the various hills around the bay is
amazing.

On the weekend I met up with Andrew and Kirsty and we did some hiking around Wellington (where the weather allowed it).

While migrating my mailserver from Ubuntu Dapper to Debian Lenny, I noticed spamass-milter didn't want to start:

Could not parse "2001:770:017b::" as a network

After scratching my head on that for a while (it worked on the old box!) I remembered two years ago I spent some time adding IPv6 support to spamass-milter myself. Support as-in allowing IPv6 subnets to be whitelisted/auto-accepted. Very useful if you want mails from your local IPv6 machines to be accepted automatically without waiting for 10s while spamassasin is checking if you're not a spammer...

I never published the thing and now I could hardly find back the damn thing at all. :-)

http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/spamass-milter-ipv6.diff

Just to make sure I won't lose it again ... and maybe it'll be useful for someone else.

Also just de-Ubuntufied my laptop. Debian's doing great so far: Suspend and Resume actually work better out of the box, but fonts look a bit ugly (and sometimes really less readable I'm afraid) compared to Ubuntu...

Interesting links of this week:

A Day in America According to a (Baffled) Foreigner

And you know it's true...

​Modern browsers for modern applications

Hear hear. Go Google :)

Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?

Good piece on the iPad being a device to bring closed computer systems to the masses. Will this mean the beginning of the end of open systems where you are the master of your hardware?

What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.

Guitar Hero hits the Commodore 64

*wets pants*

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

I'm the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it's decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of hacker ingenuity versus multiple layers of suck.

Location: Server

So, 28. That's 9 years of pretending to be 18 and 10 years away from really being it. Oh well, at least I'm not 30 yet. Yet.

Thanks for another year. This one will be awesome.

Location: Home

Finally, the Internet-Draft I was working on with my team over the last months made it to the public.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/proposal-to-extend-dns-protocol.html
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-00.txt

This draft was the main purpose of my visit to IETF76 last year. I'll have to go to 77/78 this year then to hopefully get this idea accepted as a working group item.

It's interesting to see all the comments coming up claiming that this is evil and meant for tracking purposes just because it has the name Google on it... :-/

Interesting links of this week:

We Are Just a Tiny Station in the Milky Way Subway Map - Milky way transit authority

Good way of visualising our Milky Way galaxy and the tiny spot our little solar system is taking in.

[Dutch] Privacy Barometer - De actuele stand van de politiek over privacy

Site about our policians' stance on privacy etc.

Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

[Dutch] Lieve Majesteit

Great rebuttal to our Queen's rejection of modern communication media in her Christmas speech last year.

Location: Server

Interesting links of this week:

in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project

Awesome pieces of music; works really well when you combine some of the movies and let them jam together. Meshes together magically.

First-Person Tetris

Awesomeness

Talk Urbex - Exploring decaying abandoned architecture

Awesome pictures

Will You Go to Duct Tape Prom With Me?

Wow, elaborate

PHP Must Die

I like php for quickly putting a webapp together, but things/bugs like these don't help. Might need to spend more time developing with Django/Python

Russian Underground Submarine Base

Impressive

10 Awesome Uses of Augmented Reality Marketing

Very interesting

Zarro boogs

So that's where that bugzilla statement comes from

Location: Server

On my way back from work it started to snow tiny flakes. When I stopped at a traffic light, they turned out to be beautiful snow crystals, 3 to 4mm across. Made me smile.

Location: Home

Interesting links of this week:

250 animales que no existirían sin Photoshop

Nice collection of 250 animals that wouldn't exist without that notorious tool

60 Humorous Print Advertisements to Tickle Your Bones

Teehee (not all SFW)

Lost: The Last Supper

The ones from the other series are quite nice too

COLOURlovers: Color Trends and Palettes

Also, patterns. Great site for when you're trying to find inspiration for a design.

SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder

Handy web-based tool to generate the command line for converting movies to xvid

Enable Windows 7 god mode!

That's actually quite handy. If you use windows seven, that is.

Location: Server

Vandaag maar eens een stukje gewandeld (fietsen zou een behoorlijke uitdaging worden…) om wat mooie sneeuw-plaatjes te schieten. Zie hier het resultaat:

Interesting links of this week:

[YouTube] It Could Be Worse

It could be raining

Let's stop talking about "backups"

Are you going to be able to restore them?

American Apparel Ads: the 50 Hottest in Company History

That's what you call mature advertisement. I like it.

[YouTube] RF plane with on-board camera flies through fireworks

Fun stuff. Everybody wants to shoot at planes with fireworks ;)

[Silverlight] Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience

Too bad it's a silverlight video, but moonlight should do the job. Interesting presentation by Stephan Hoefnagels about how the user experience designers went on their way to make windows7 a better place. I think they even succeeded in their endeavour, which means that windows7 actually is a version that gets out your face like it should. Good stuff.

The Death Of The Blog Post

Let's face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?

Location: Server

2009 was a weird year; on the one hand it was quite bland, on the other we did some real cool things, like going on a mind-blowing trip through southern Africa, jumping on the wedding train (the actual fact will take place this new year) and buying a house, amongst others. The paradoxic part is that I both got less and more done than anticipated; just in different fields. All-in-all it was a quite OK year.

This new year will bear us the fruits of our hard labour this year, which will make it a quite fun year for me and my lovely ega. We are going to enjoy the ride and try to have as much fun as possible on the way!

So, a very good, interesting, healthy and just plain enjoyable 2010 to you all!

Location: Home

Bij deze wil ik iedereen die dit leest een heel gelukkig 2010 wensen!

Ik merk dat ik mijn blog het afgelopen jaar een beetje verwaarloosd heb: geen enkele post in heel 2009!! Daar ga ik maar eens wat aan doen, hopelijk kunnen jullie komend jaar meer van mij verwachten. Ik ben met name van plan vaker posts met mooie foto’s te gaan doen, beginnend bij vandaag!

Qua layout zal er waarschijnlijk binnenkort ook het een en ander gaan veranderen om het wat geschikter te maken foto’s weer te geven.

Goed, foto’s. Hier wat vuurwerk-foto’s. Dit zijn op dit moment allemaal onbewerkte foto’s, rechtstreeks de JPEG’s zoals ze uit m’n camera zijn gekomen. Ik ben nog wat met de RAW-conversie aan het stoeien, maar dat lukt nog niet echt…

Because Intel on-board video isn't quite good enough at 3D and my somewhat old laptop with built-in NVIDIA chip wasn't doing all that well at X-Plane either, I bought an NVIDIA GT240 card. Mostly because it seemed to be a good performer without doubling the power consumption of my PC. Stuff wasn't working all that well though and I got pretty frustrated:



was all X-Plane could tell me. Google Earth also didn't work and seemed more like Google Black hole to me. Both are 32-bit apps. A 64-bit binary of Flightgear did work. Sigh.

After some poking I noticed the nvidia-glx package replaces /usr/lib{64,}/libGL* with its own versions, but didn't touch /usr/lib32. A-ha!

The fix: Get a 32-bit version of nvidia-glx, extract it somewhere (dpkg -X) and copy all the files in its usr/lib to /usr/lib32, overwriting the libGL symlink that is currently there.

Or, hmm, as I just found out: apt-get install nvidia-glx-ia32. I'm glad someone thought of it already.

Now X-Plane works perfectly (with maybe even ten times the frame rate I had with Intel on-board) and Google Earth can show me my house again.

Just blogging this since so far a Google search for any part of the error above didn't give useful results.

Now, I just have to find out if I can get a TV signal out of this thing somehow, since my TV was made long before HDMI was invented. :-/

Interesting links of this week:

Mario's Closet

Awesome picture of Mario trying to choose an outfit

Papercraft Self Portrait

Awesomeness!

I made this as my costume for Halloween 2009. It was kind of inspired by big-head mode seen in videogames. I really wanted to get the faceted geosphere look with wireframe.

The Generation M Manifesto

Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.

How to store Scotch Whisky

Some good tips for keeping your fine whisky fine

Location: Server

I think I need to create something. It always gives me a lot of energy, something I've been lacking a bit lately.

Location: Home

My weblog is now old enough to start learning how to write itself! Back in 2003 I started a weblog because I was curious to the phenomenon, how it would work out for myself (writing in English, dumping my thoughts online) and just to vent my frustrations with the day-to-day life on.

This year was a tad quiet, with lots of weeks going by only having the generated blogmarks postings. The counter for this year is currently stuck on 212 blogmarks; interesting or just funny sites I wanted to share with you, my loyal reader. 86 rants were posted, of which 46 are those automagic postings. That means I even posted 40 times myself, which is more than I suspected. Still, not *that* active, as it was better in previous years.

It likely didn't help that I started using Twitter this year too, as a lot of minor thoughts and ideas ended up going there instead of being posted here. I might put up a twitter thingee in the sidebar, or just try to remind myself to post ideas here more often, like I should. Either way, you might want to check out my twitterfeed.

Today is Yule and also the shortest day of the year, marking it officially Winter. There's a lot of snow outside and more light than the average winter day, so I'll just revel a bit in the grey-white glow and try to be productive for another day. Or I'll go outside with my camera. Whatever is more fun.

Location: Home

Interesting links of this week:

Gigapixel-Dresden.de - Large Size Panoramas

26 gigapixels of panorama. Awesome!

Iraqi insurgents using $26 software to monitor Predator video feeds

Hm, I guess they couldn't be bothered encrypting that stream? Or it's a major fuck-up. Interesting.

Idea Killers

Well illustrated: killers of ideas

Think your SSL traffic is secure?

It needs some modifications, but works really well in corporate environments, for example. Scary, as it means that SSL-secured traffic isn't.

Location: Server

Interesting links of this week:

The Facts About Bottled Water

Same story goes for France and more and more countries; there's perfectly good (better!) water in your tap people!

If they had Facebook in Star Wars…

LOL (yesh, I'm a nerd I guess)

Location: Server

Roughly a week ago I joined Julian, Muharem and Michael, working on the Soyuz component of Launchpad. For now I've been working on easy Soyuz bugs, as a way of becoming more familiar with the internals. I'm working from home but I had the chance to hang out with some of the other Launchpad developers, including the full Soyuz team, at UDS Lucid in Dallas.

Launchpad is different from most other FOSS projects I have worked on so far. Some things I noticed during my first week:

The codebase is big and well tied together. I don't think I've ever used grep and ctags as often as I have in the last week. Fortunately, the directory structure makes it relatively easy to predict where to look for things.

Reviews are really quick - no long round-trips between author and reviewer trying to get a branch landed. This is a really *really* great thing.

It's easy to find somebody familiar with a particular piece of code and it doesn't take long to get an answer when you ask questions. I'm still getting used to this - I tend to ask questions sporadically because I have gotten used to having to wait a couple of days for an answer that's actually useful.

Setting up the development environment takes some time. Or perhaps I'm spoiled by Bazaar where "bzr branch lp:bzr bzr && ./bzr/bzr selftest" is all you need to start hacking. And it seems like karmic is the only platform on which things work - I tried with Debian Sid and Lucid as well, but things broke in strange and unusual ways.

The test suite is heavy and takes long to start up, something that makes proper TDD too hard. I also managed to run into some unexplainable problems where the librarian wouldn't shut down on one of my systems. Since there is only one instance of the database it is not really possible to run multiple instances of the testsuite at the same time unless you use chroots or something like that - this makes it hard to work on multiple branches at the same time, something which would especially be nice since the testsuite is slow (so you can run the testsuite in one branch, hack in another and alterate).

Doctests, while fast, a bit of a nuisance. Because of the setup/teardown overhead that is paid for every single test, doc tests are a lot faster than unit tests. On the other hand, pdb doesn't play well with doc tests - it doesn't show any context. Conceptually I also prefer small unit tests over doc tests, since they're quicker to read, easier to understand and there's less side-effects from previous instructions in the test that could affect the code that's being tested.

And for those that know me well; yes, getting used to somewhat regular working hours was indeed a challenge, but I seem to have managed.

Interesting links of this week:

50 Best Free Fonts From 2009

Some are loud display ones, but there are some really nice and chique ones in there

40 jQuery Plugins Improving Your Website Look and Feel

Some good stuff in there

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them - Fake user interfaces

Wow, didn't know a single man was behind most of them. Check out Mark Coleran's screen design portfolio.

Social Media Count

Fun little stats meter

11 Fascinating Fractals in Nature

Fractals never cease to be amazing

[VIDEO] Hans Aarsman on the mysterious ways of beauty in photography

Good stuff

The unspoken truth about managing geeks

Recently, though, I have come to realize that perfectly healthy groups with solid, well-adjusted IT pros can and will devolve, slowly and quietly, into the behaviors that give rise to the stereotypes, given the right set of conditions. It turns out that it is the conditions that are stereotypical, and the IT pros tend to react to those conditions in logical ways. To say it a different way, organizations actively elicit these stereotypical negative behaviors.

Interesting read.

Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?

Some tips to keep your postings interesting and engaging for readers

Location: Server

We got this parcel from our contractor by registered mail, which only I could fetch from the mail agency (as I needed to identify myself). Turns out they blew 8.15 EUR on shipping two chocolate characters. Well, thanks...

Turns out they didn't even have their administration straight, as they sent those because we apparently didn't show up at their party. This party. Whatever.

Location: Home

Today at work my first user facing product was released, Google Public DNS. I've worked a lot on it over the last months and it was actually the reason for my visit to NY this Summer. :-)

But now, finally after a long time, I can actually start calling the thing by its name instead of saying "my secret project at work", which makes me very happy.

Praise, complaints and comments about the service are welcome! :-)

Location: Work

Interesting links of this week:

50 Amazing Realistic CG Portraits

Some are uncanny valley, others are jaw-dropping. All have a `wow' effect; what a work. Amazing.

Location: Server

I'm back ... for almost two weeks already. Getting used again to bad weather (today's a very foggy and cold day in Dublin), working and all the other things of daily life. Japan was fantastic. I'll be careful to not sound like your average "everything's better in Japan" idiot, but admittedly, there were some things there I really liked.

One of the first things I noticed was that a rule about escalators I really like is actually enforced over there. Wherever I've been so far escalators are always full of people who don't understand how stairs work; they think the fact that the escalator goes up means they can just put their lazy feet on it and wait (forgetting that for lazy people we already invented elevators :-P). Many civilizations have tried introducing a "stand still on the left, walk on the right" rule, but Japan's the only place where I've seen people all obeying it.

Getting around there indeed turned out to be challenging at times. Even though people (at least from "my generation") learn English for about ten years at school, many people still don't or hardly speak it. This was never really a problem though. Menus in restaurants have pictures and pointing at things is the most successful international language ever invented. :-) One of the first days I had sushi in a place just a few steps away from my hotel in Tokyo. While eating my meal, the man behind the bar (probably also the owner of the place) came to me with a map, asking me to point at where I come from. Also, the little origami bird he folded for me from my chopsticks wrapper is still sitting on my desk here. :-D

The ramen place I went to for breakfast one of the first days was also amazing. Not so much because of the food (which was also good), but because of the size. Literally, it was a room of maybe just over 2m wide, about 10m deep, with a bar separating it into two small 10m × something areas. Two people working on one side, and ten seats on the other (all occupied, most of the time).

My camera claims I made over 700 pictures there. Obviously there are many duplicates and worthless pictures, and after soring there will probably only be around 100 left. I hope to put them online soon, and probably with some more stories. I wrote too much now already.

All I know is that I'm definitely going there again.

Interesting links of this week:

The Five Worst Inventions of 2009 - TIME

And the 50 best inventions of 2009.

Google Labs: Green robot icon

Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they're not really "online online" -- they just have chat open on their Android phones.

Your Looks and Your Inbox

Paradoxically, it seems it's women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the "average" member of the opposite sex.

Interesting piece of research

Location: Server

The blogmark updates are a clue about me not being dead, but this weblog has been awefully quiet lately. I have been rather busy and have been microblogging my blurps at my twitterfeed, but that isn't a good excuse to neglect dammIT so badly.

Minor part of the quietness of my online expressions was our trip through southern Africa, of which I put a photo summary online. Yes, we saw leopards too:

More pictures will appear soonish. Most likely too many for your taste, but damn it was a beautiful trip, full of experiences that are really without a price. In a nutshell: starting off in Cape Town, South Africa, we went north through Namibia, spent some days in Botswana and finished in Zambia, with the magnificent Victoria Falls and a lot of other impressive nature.

In other news: today we had an official moment regarding our to-be-built home. The first official moment even, one which everyone had been looking forward a bit for a while yet as there hadn't been any meetings been organised so far, so meeting your future neighbours was still that: something happening in the future.

Well, today we still didn't meet our neighbours, but at least we met some of the people living only a few houses away, which was a pleasant experience. Then we all went outside to witness the placement of the first piece of flooring. Also, I took the first picture of our future home:

Location: Home

Twitter seems like the right way to track this kind of stuff: https://twitter.com/BitlBee

Please look for status updates there from now on.

Interesting links of this week:

Mapping voter apathy by age

Interesting trends. Just go to vote if the time is there. Not voting is giving up your right to complain :)

Location: Server

Every few days it happens to me that I mistype a URL, and Firefox thinks it can fix it by adding www. and/or .com to it. This often brings me to some stupid webpage instead of the intranet page I was looking for, or just generates another broken URL that needs more work for me to fix because I have to undo what Firefox did and then still fix my typo.

I finally found out how to disable that stupid feature and am sure more people are wondering about that. Since it took me a while to find out how to do this, I guess I'll just write a (maybe easier to find) blog post about it.

In short: about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled.

Fixup. Yeah right.

For a similar feature that adds some other TLD to the URL if you accidentally have alt/ctrl or something pressed when you press Enter, there's a plugin called ClumsyFingers, I think. Fortunately my fingers aren't clumsy enough yet that I need that one.

I'm still in Japan, now in Hiroshima for the IETF meeting. Japan's fantastic. :-D

Interesting links of this week:

The calculus of Caffeine consumption

Great analysis

Location: Server

It's always morning somewhere, and right now it's still morning in Tokyo! (Although not for long anymore.)

I arrived here yesterday morning, found my hotel and some good food. I'll spend the next three or so days here and then take the Nozomi (very fast train) to Hiroshima for IETF76.

My current plan is to find some breakfast, then go to Ueno Park and Akihabara (which is supposed to be like Fry's but then good). And generally just see what the city is like. Planning to join the Tokyo Bicycle Tour on Saturday, also. Any suggestions for other things to do here are welcome, assuming they have nothing to do with anime. :-P

Interesting links of this week:

Apes are just like people, or are people just like apes?

What a lovely, emotional photo.

i feel it is incumbent upon me to draw attention to truly sublime works of art

Awesome videoclip from 1977

Dunbar's Number isn't just a number, it's the law

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily.

[Video] Microsoft's Many Multitouch Mice

Interesting. Not all of them are really practical, but there is potential there.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Tony Ross' "Distributed Extensibility Submission"

Ah, that's a lot better

Location: Server

These past few days in the US were a bit of a rollercoaster. Some random observations:

• The mentor summit was very nice and well organized (or rather: well disorganized). Lots of awesome people around from a wide variety of projects and nationalities.
• "Next Generation VCS" seems to be an alias for git these days in the minds of most people.
• I didn't write a single line of code in almost a week, something that is very rare.
• Driving an automatic gives you two spare limbs to use for other things. What those other things are, I have yet to figure out.
• Is the fact that your kid was student of the month or the fact that you own two cats and a dog really something that belongs on a bumper sticker?
• Gas is cheap (compared to Europe). I drove 300 miles on a $30 tank.
• The malls in the Bay Area are some of the biggest I've ever seen, but strangely enough they seem to lack both book- and cd-stores.
• Visiting Fry's continues to have a significant effect on the contents of my wallet.
• It is legal to turn right on a red traffic sign in California unless otherwise indicated. It took me a while to realize this until people repeatedly started honking behind me...
• The waiver I had to sign to be able to skydive in California was scary. I can cope with my operating system coming without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, but my parachute?
• I stopped pretending to have any regularity in my sleeping habits. 6 AM flights? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Hey, it's more than two months ago already, but it's just in time for my thoughts on HAR2009! I put pictures on-line a little while ago already, but nothing else so far.

It's a pretty neat event. It feels like a festival, but then completely stuffed with geeks. And talks instead of concerts. And also, fantastic decoration. Or maybe I should call it light pollution? Also, we had our own GSM network! Of course, we also had police on site, because you don't want to know what this hacker scum does in their spare time. From the stories I heard, the police had a pretty unexciting but pleasant time there though.

All in all it was fun, and I met a whole bunch of people, including some happy BitlBee users and contributors. Most interesting was perhaps that I met a roommate of a former Mountain View teammate of mine at the train station before the conference already. The geek world is pretty small, I guess.

I just released BitlBee 1.2.4. It's been more than a year since the last release and sadly not that much changed. But Yahoo! support is back, the program is more stable than ever (running in daemon mode on the testing server for more than a year already with little problems), and there are some other nice changes like a better UI for managing chatrooms and support for automatically joining rooms when you connect.

Get it while it's hot!

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice. As maemo5 makes it possible for home-screen widgets to be part of separate processes, I figured it might be possible to adapt plasmoidviewer to act as a simple program to put any type of plasma applet on the normal maemo desktop (actually, I think it was somebody else that suggested this, I just don't remember who it was). So after several hours of hacking (and a lot more hours of compiling Qt and various parts of kde (btw, the just released Qt 4.6 maemo5 technology preview is missing some essential bits like for example qdbuscpp2xml), I managed to figure out just exactly how to get the window to appear on the normal desktop as a widget. At first this didn't look to pretty as you can see in this screenshot:

But after several more hours of hacking and trying to figure out how transparency works in X11, I even managed to get nice translucent applets. Also I figured out how to hook up the normal maemo5 widget configuration system to display the correct configuration dialog when you click on the configure button on one of these plasmoids. So with in the end maybe 20 lines of code, I got a rather good working implementation that makes it basically possible to have any plasmoid you might have on your normal kde desktop, also on your maemo5 home screen. One (somewhat major) problem with the current implementation is that it is not possible to resize widgets, but as far as I can tell that is mostly a limitation of the maemo5 desktop widget system, so I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it from my side.

Interesting links of this week:

Video: Windows 7 launch party parody is bleeping genius

The original advertisement is downright creepy, the remix quite fun

Location: Server

Interesting links of this week:

I Just Made Love

IJML shows on the map of the world places where people just made love.

Okaaay...

The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences

Wow, just... wow

What is a Web Browser? No One Knows!

Sad but true

Four Web Browsers Go To The DriveThru...

So true...

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo

Software should know that after clicking "Okay" countless times in response to the question, we’ll probably click "Okay" this time too, even if we don't mean to. Software should know that we won’t have a chance to think before accidentally throwing our work away.

[Video on TED.com] Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

That's pretty impressive. Tad weird to have a projector on your belly, but it's a quite nifty idea and already worked out to something really interesting

Location: Server

... when you think you have forgotten to announce you are getting married, then find out you actually already did. I really should be here more :)

In other news: those getting-married-parties are damn expensive. Not going to get that spiffy new car for a long while I guess...

Location: Work

So, erm, seen my twitter feed lately? :)

Location: Work

Interesting links of this week:

The 21 Awesomest Superhero Mods for My Little Pony

Now that made me smile

Location: Server

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I'm looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn't want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit.

Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It's been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I've tried different build systems, I've tried different implementation languages, I've tried different configuration file formats, I've tried different support libraries, I've tried different version control systems, I've tried different documentation formats. So while it's definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven't really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on.

These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, such as BIP, so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks).

cp: Anathema - Shroud of False

Interesting links of this week:

78 Photography Rules for Complete Idiots

Awesome

Handset Detection

You can also use Handset Detection to detect phone capabilities for ringtones, wallpapers, java games and any mobile content. Or, just learn which mobile devices are accessing your website.

Detecting Mobile Devices Using PHP

Well-designed little module for detecting mobile web browsers, even given specifics if you want. aquariusoft.org now shows a decent 1-column layout if browsed with a capable mobile browser.

Google’s Monopoly: The Board Game, Not Antitrust

Hm, that's an intriguing concept: using the complete world (through Google Maps) as a massive multi-user Monopoly game where you can design buildings yourself

50 Inspiring Web Application and Service Web Site Designs : Speckyboy Design Magazine

There's some nifty or just handy stuff on there. I like how at least those sites don't scream at you like sites of the early 2000's did.

Women Are Sort Of More Tentative Than Men, Aren't They?

Women hedge, issue disclaimers and ask questions when they communicate, language features that can suggest uncertainty, lack of confidence and low status. But men do the same, according to new research from the University of California, Davis.

Location: Server

For this years (the fifth?) Summer of Code, I participated once again as a mentor for the Samba and OpenChange projects.

Samba was assigned four slots this year: one was a CIFSFS project mentored by Steve French and the other three were Python projects related to Samba 4, co-mentored by Andrew and me. Our students did very well this year, although we unfortunately had to drop one after the mid-term evaluations due to lack of effort. Nonetheless, we're very happy with the results of the other two projects:

Calin Crisan (France) converted the rest of the applications in SambaGtk to Python, and worked on a GTK+ user manager for Samba and Windows. With his improvements, it is now possible to edit registries, manage users, inspect the endpoint mapper, plan tasks and manage services on a remote Windows machine using a GTK+ application on a Linux workstation.

Ricardo Velhote (Portugal) designed and implemented a new version of SWAT - the Samba Web Administration Tool. Unlike the old SWAT, his implementation is more than just a simple web-based editor for smb.conf. As we were expecting at the start of the Summer of Code, not all of the functionality could be implemented properly in a couple of months, not while getting the design and infrastructure right. With a basic version working, we now hope the remaining subsystems can be contributed with help from the community.

I'm planning to merge Calin's improvements to Samba-Gtk into the mainline in the next month or so. SWAT is a standalone application and will continue to live as a separate project, while being a part of the Samba ecosystem. Congratulations to both Calin and Ricardo on their achievements!

Yet so much implications. She said 'Yes'.

I'm a happy man.

Location: Work

So after a few weeks of loving my HTC Hero Android phone, I decided to list the applications I had installed or thought that where just plain handy or nice to have. The result is this list of cool and handy Android applications. Yes, most I still have installed and in use. I will try to keep the list updated with new finds.

Suggestions for gems I'm missing?

For you wondering why some applications like a Twitter client are missing, I'm rather happy with the tools HTC put in Sense. They actually work decently!

Location: Work

Interesting links of this week:

Analysis of Rate of Human Problems

Good article on probability and how we handle it with regards to our problems

Shelfari: Neil Gaiman's Bookshelves

Neil Gaiman's gorgeous personal library. One day I want such a one of my own.

Bluetile - a modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve

Interesting project, as it integrates with a familiar desktop environment. Still doesn't look that slick though. I think Compiz should learn some tiling management tricks, that'd be great.

The Definitive Guide to About Me Pages

Some good tips. I'm not too sure about putting a picture of yourself on there too; I've had a few times that I was completely put off by one. But maybe that's a good filter too :)

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

Cool piece of tech; also really decent article, where everything is explained and listed. Good stuff.

High-Tech for the Kitchen: Scientists Develop Intelligent Coffee Mug

Good stuff. Interesting material btw, that phase change material (PCM)

Download More RAM!

Damn handy! Seems to have replaced my 8GB with 4GB though :(

Location: Server