Can't Drive 55
I don't know when this started, but I like it.
Taken on I-10 East about 30 miles west of Junction Texas
TXOSS 2008
The Texas Open Source Symposium in San Angelo is a wrap. This was a small one day event in San Angelo organized by Jeremy Fluhmann (who did an excellent job by the way). I rather enjoyed it, and providing that it becomes an annual event (which I understand is the idea), I will certainly try and make it back next year.
I gave a talk on Mercurial during the 11:00am slot. I'm not convinced that I did a very good job, but most of the people seated in the audience seemed to be paying attention and several people asked questions both during and after, so maybe it was alright.
The talks I attended were of excellent quality, I especially enjoyed both of the talks given by Patrick Michaud on Parrot and Perl6 (even if they did pretty much convince me that my shift in focus to Python was a Good Idea :).
Accomodations in San Angelo
I'm giving a talk on Saturday at the Texas Open Source Symposium entitled An Introduction to Mercurial. I'll be driving there but hadn't considered making a room reservation until today. How hard could it be to book a hotel room in San Angelo Texas, right? Sheesh.
I started out with a Google maps search that included the zip code of the venue, and began working through the options ordered by proximity and user submitted reviews. So first up were places like Comfort Suites and Holiday Inn, about a mile from the venue with reviews like, "I've never had customer service so good!". It ended with obscure motor inns on the opposite side of town with reviews like, "WHATEVER YOU DO, NEVER STAY IN THIS DISGUSTING PLACE". I called 18 different places and they were all booked.
Apparently there is some kind of triathlon or something going on this weekend.
Fortunately for me, Tarus Balog is also speaking. Fortunately for me he is also a smooth talker because he was able to get his room upgraded to one with two beds, (after finding out that he had made his reservations for the wrong month and got them to give him a room anyway, I might add).
Update: It's been suggested that this is the reason all of the hotels are at capacity.
Album Cover
Just when I convinced myself that I was done with memes. Oh well, here is my CD cover:
To make yours:
- Use Wikipedia's random article page to find your band name.
- Go to the Random Quotations Page. The last four words of the very last quote is your album name.
- Visit Flickr's interesting photos page, the third image, no matter what, is your cover art.
NP: Hear Me, Soil
Hell Hath No Fury Like ...
Earlier this year Lisa Nowak, a US Naval officer and former astronaut became infamous after she allegedly tried to kidnap her cheating boyfriend's love interest. I pretty much ignored all of this back when it was considered news-worthy, but I just came across her Wikipedia page where it details the events of February 4-5:
She had packed latex gloves, a black wig, a BB pistol and ammunition, pepper spray, a hooded tan trench coat, a 2-pound drilling hammer, black gloves, rubber tubing, plastic garbage bags, about US$585 in cash, her computer, an eight-inch Gerber folding knife and several other items before driving the 900 miles (1,450 km) to Florida. Early police reports indicated that she used diapers during the trip but she later vehemently denied wearing them through her lawyer.
Yikes!
Die Disk, Die
There's been a lot of "Ubuntu kills laptop hard drives" buzz going around lately. The implication is that over aggressive power management is causing excessive load/unload cycles, exceeding a reasonable duty cycle, and drastically shortening the life of your drive. I run Debian unstable on my laptop but I looked into it anyway and sure enough it's something which is effecting me as well.
As Matthew Garrett points out, it doesn't have anything to do with Ubuntu, Debian, or Linux in general, the culprit is aggressive power management settings in the drive firmware, or settings applied by the BIOS.
If this is happening to you, it's possible that it can be rectified with a firmware upgrade or by updating settings in the BIOS. The solution I chose was to allow laptop-mode-tools to control power management, applying maximum power savings when on battery (hdparm -B 1 /dev/$device), and disabling it when on AC power (hdparm -B 254 /dev/$device).
If you have an otherwise default install of laptop-mode-tools on Debian you can accomplish this by setting CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT=1 in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf and issuing an /etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart.
Not Ready To Be A Grandparent
One of my daughter's electives this semester is Child Development. That's the course where you're issued an infant and graded on the condition of the child at the completion of the assignment. Return anything other than a healthy well-adjusted baby and your grade suffers.
When I was in high school your "baby" was a raw egg. You were encouraged to personalize your egg/baby and many people did (drawn-on faces, clothing, facial hair, tattoos, etc). As goofy as it sounds, lugging around something as fragile as an egg is difficult for a high schooler so it's not surprising that many of them came back cracked (or worse), Attempts at cheating were common and usually consisted of hard boiling the baby, or replacing it with a suitably similar one in the hopes that the teacher wouldn't notice (somehow they always did though).
My how times have changed.
Sara was issued a startlingly realistic doll, a carrier which doubles as a car seat, a diaper bag, a bottle, and several changes of clothing.
This doll not only looks like a real baby, it's weight and other physical characteristics are very close to that of a real infant. To the point of making it creepy. It's also jam-packed with electronics.
Sensors in the doll detect feedings and diaper changes and record them for later download by the teacher. Let its head fall back or subject it to any undue impact and that will be recorded as well. You'll know when it's hungry, or needs a burping or changing because it gets "fussy". If you fail to respond to your baby's needs properly, and in a timely fashion, it transitions from "fussy" to Screaming At The Top Of Its Lungs. For added effect, the eat-excrete cycle is also accurate which means waking in the middle of the night to care for it.
The program is convincing enough that when my daughter takes her homework someplace public (she can't leave it at home. that'd be bad parenting), she receives very authentic looks of disapproval.
High school child development courses are always pitched as a way of teaching how to properly care for a baby, but in reality it's always been about scaring the living shit out of teenagers. They may have finally succeeded, I for one am terrified.
I don't know if I should be impressed by the genius that is Baby Think It Over, or saddened by the fact that teenage pregnancy is enough of an issue to warrant such extremes.
Duplicity backport for Etch
I've been backing up all of my important machines to Amazon S3 using Duplicity for sometime now. It's worked out really well but required just enough hackery to prevent me from providing straight forward instructions for others.
I'm all about sharing the love so I submitted a new S3 backend to upstream using the excellent boto library from Mitch Garnaat, and I packaged boto for Debian. The new backend made it into the 0.4.3 release of Duplicity, which in turn migrated to testing a couple of weeks ago. Now there is an Etch backport of 0.4.3 on backports.org.
In addition to installing duplicity from backports.org you will also need to pin python-boto from Lenny.
Enjoy.
Free Software Driver for Radeon R5xx/R6xx
Wow. Less than two weeks ago AMD announced that they would be opening the specs for their graphics cards, a few days later they followed through, and yesterday a driver for R5xx/R6xx cards was released. How's that for fast?
Why I Don't Do Comments
From time to time I get asked why my blog isn't comment enabled. There are several reasons for this:
- It's my blog. It's here as way for me to share information, make comments, and express opinions. Incidentally, one of those opinions is that all of these objectives can be met by a site that doesn't support comments.
- Comment sections make for a horrible discussion medium, I'd really rather get an email. I realize this makes it more of a pain for folks to provide feedback, and it hasn't escaped my attention that this also serves to improve the quality of feedback. Drastically in fact.
- Let's be realistic. I do a piss-poor job of posting with any regularity, it's pretty much a given that I'm going to do an even worse job of tracking and responding to comments.
- Spam, (and this one is pretty much reason enough). Others deal with this through some combination of moderating, content filtering (which requires accepting some false positives and/or negatives), or forcing users to jump through a series of hoops. It's an arms race and a pain in the ass. No thanks.
In other words, I'm selfish, and lazy.
Whether you agree or disagree, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a comment below and tell me how you feel!
The Mad
Horror movies are always a stretch. Even the best horror movie requires that its viewers go out of their way to suspend disbelief. I think this is why there are so many bad horror movies, because the line between, "creepy", and "oh for crying out loud ..." is pretty damn thin. If you are making a horror movie and there is any chance that it's going to fall into the latter category, you'd be well advised not to take yourself too seriously. Better to have them laughing with you, than at you.
The Mad stars Billy Zane as Jason Hunt, a widower on a road trip with his rebellious teenage daughter, her moron boyfriend, and his bitchy, emasculating girlfriend. Jason and crew layover in a small town just as it becomes the site of a super-mutant-mad-cow's disease breakout. The infected become flesh eating zombies, who in turn infect anyone they bite.
With a premise this cliche, would I be guilty of spoilers if I said that the cast slowly succumbs to attrition as they try to locate the source of the outbreak and stop it from spreading? That's ok, with this movie it's more about the journey than the destination, and the journey is hilarious.
Clearly the makers of The Mad wanted you to laugh with them and not at them, so if you like campy horror movies then I recommend you check this one out.
"Has your beef been acting strangely?"
AMD to open up graphics specs
This is excellent news. I look forward to the day when I can be oblivious of my graphics adapter.
New Blog
I've been using pyblosxom for years. I chose it because it was dead simple and I wasn't interested in a long-term commitment with a bloated PHP app, (or any PHP app for that matter). Unfortunately it has always been just a bit too simple.
I went shopping for new blog software, but sadly things aren't much better these days than they were when I originally set up my blog. There are a few more choices than there used to be, but the list of options is still pretty short if you aren't willing to use PHP (again, I'm not).
Ultimately I succumbed to NIH and wrote my own. It has a simple CRUD interface for inputing markdown which is stored to a database and converted on-the-fly to html. Writing one from scratch was probably the worst thing I could have done, but hey, it's like a right of passage these days, isn't it?
All of the original postings have been migrated over and any bookmarked permalinks should still be valid (shoot me an email if you find any that aren't). The feed links have changed, but I put a redirect in place for the old rss 0.9 feed which points to the new rss 2.0 one, (hopefully that's transparent). There are also atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds as well.
If I created a mess out of your feed reader, I apologize.
In yur DVD, stealin yer DRM
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Too Good To Be True
Today I received an SMS from a number that I did not recognize.
babe... Do you think they watched us?
I haven't woke up any place strange with hours or days unaccounted for recently so I was pretty sure this was a wrong number. It also occurred to me that this might be someone I know, collaborating with someone I didn't to have a little fun at my expense. Either way, I had to see it through.
Me: watched us? Them: yes.. Us in the act... Are you embarrassed of what happened Me: Hell no Them: <insert kissing emoticon> Me: <insert smiley emoticon> Them: babe... So what did you want to do today Me: I think you know Them: no i really dont.. Please fill [me] in Me: sorry, this is fun, but I think it's time you double checked the number you're texting
Shortly after that last message she called me. She was embarrassed and apologetic, and a little dumbfounded that someone would actually play along like that, but altogether she was a good sport about the whole thing. :)
Etch Released On Time
Etch released yesterday. Awesome news. Now I rant.
There is no one-size-fits-all release cycle. Some people wait on pins and needles for the next release of their favorite distro, and six months is almost more than they can bear. Others milk their vendor's support for a full six years and are upset when it is EOL'd and they are forced to upgrade. Releasing every six months and supporting each release for six years is a costly endeavor because it means floating up to twelve releases at once. Someone once said that you can make some of the people happy some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. They must have been talking about distribution release cycles.
It's very difficult (some would say impossible) to obtain consensus among volunteers in a project the size of Debian. I don't speak for the Debian Project as a whole, but I do however perceive this as an area where consensus has been reached, and the time-line is: When It Is Ready. "Ready" as it is used here relates to the completion of certain goals outlined at the beginning of the cycle combined with the absence of release critical bugs. "When" is targeted at 18 to 24 months after the previous release, but only if it is "Ready".
Debian does not have a fixed release schedule. If that bothers you then you are free to jump in and try to change things (it is a community-based project). If it bothers you than perhaps you should consider a distribution that does have a fixed release cycle. You could also just try getting over it.
Etch released when it was Ready (22 months and 2 days after Sarge). Etch released on time.
Bad Form
After the draft version of GPLv3 came out, I intently followed all of the various discussions for about a month. It got pretty boring, pretty fast. Boring because it seems obvious to me that it isn't going to be earth shattering.
Interpretations of the text range from "riddled with unacceptable restrictions" and "<< 3 incompatible", to "not significantly different from past versions". Whatever. I'm confident that when v3 goes gold and the dust settles, we'll all still be here. Life will go on.
This guy over at Forbes disagrees. Of course, it's a little difficult for me to take him seriously with all of the vitriol aimed at RMS. See if you can count the number of personal insults.
Debconf6: Pictures
I'm back home now, but before settling into my normal routine I thought I'd take the time to get some pictures put up.
Debconf6: Crap
I just ate a bug. On purpose.
Debconf6: Day 6
Yesterday was a little disappointing. As the day wore on my upset stomach persisted despite the fact that I ate nothing but a handful of crackers. I seriously considered attending the formal dinner anyway, (and just passing on the food), but in the end decided against this based on the need for frequent and immediate access to a bathroom. I really should have went.
As reported on a number of blogs, it turned out to be quite an evening. My favorite though is Joey's.
Debconf6: Day 5
Yesterday was the day-trip to Xochicalco, the remains of a pre-hispanic city. Afterward, we had lunch at a restaurant nearby, and then it was on to Cuernavaca where we had about an hour to walk around the market and do some shopping.
Of note is that yesterday was the first day since I've been here that I did not eat at least one meal at the open market in the village. It is also the first day that I've felt sick. Go figure.
Debconf6: Day 2
I went to the marcado for breakfast this morning, quesedillas de papas y chorizo, and polo con queso. Damn fine. I was also able to score some melon agua, something I haven't had since I left El Paso. Deciphering the menu, placing my order, and paying was made awkward by the language barrier though.
On that note, I've alway been irritated watching folks attempt to communicate with a non-English speaking person by talking very slowly, and very loudly. Not to slag my own country, (there are plenty of others around to do that for me), but I thought this practice was uniquely American. I was wrong. Surprisingly, it was not irritating to be on the receiving end, it was kind of funny.