Debian

Blog moved!

2006-02-28T23:02:00.000+02:00

I have moved to www.aigarius.com. Please update your bookmarks and aggregators. The new feed is here.

The hockey fever has begun

2006-02-11T00:02:00.000+02:00

With the opening of Turin Olympic games, the sport fever is officially on. Especially it is the fact in Latvia - this year is the ultimate hockey year: our team is in the Olympics and we have the world championship in our capital Riga in a couple months.

Tomorrow we have a chance at medals in biathlon and luge. I had no idea our guys were actually in top 5 there. That will be fun to watch tomorrow.

And on Wednesday the heat will be on: hockey, Latvia vs USA. We would have beaten USA to pulp at last years world championships if the judge would not have illegally rejected two goals shot by our team and given a large number of unfair penalties to our players. Even the coach of the USA team made a point after the game of saying that the judging was inadequate. However the real point is - we will crush you this time.

PS. I just found out that the championship is planned at the same time as the Debconf 6 in Mexico. NOOOOOOO!!!! This is the worst news - I'll miss all the fun. Crap. Really. Crap. I hope there will be some kind of coverage in Mexico.

2006-02-09T13:54:00.000+02:00

Firefox backing up.
A bug is bugging me up, but it is unclear to me what is the cause, so no reporting or fixing is yet in sight - whenever I scroll up in Firefox using the mouse scroller there is ~10% chance that the "back" action will be executed. It has happened to me a lot of times now, and I haven't noticed similar symptoms in other programs.
Ubuntu Dapper, FF 1.5, USB mouse, HP nx6110 notebook. Any advise from the lazyweb?

2006-02-08T17:07:00.000+02:00

Superball/bowl.
So ... I tried to understand what this american football thing is all about. What got me interested in it was an anime from Japan called Eyeshield 21 where a boy that ran errants for bullies his whole school life goes into american football as a runner with his great speed and agility. That get me thinking about looking into that sport - it looked quite interesting in the anime.
Boy was I wrong.
So I watched the Superbowl XL - the biggest and most important event in the american football year. The first half was absolutely empty - nothing happened at all. The ads were much more interesting then the game. The halftime show was ok, not as good as ads.
And the second half just showed why this is the definitive american sport in the worst meaning of that - legalese. Steelers would have lost it the judges would have not interfered so much with the game. This sport has like hundreds of tiny rules that are very dependent on interpretation by the judges - that is what I call a sport for all the american lawyers to like. Cancelling several good Seahawks trows just because some guy was holding someone on the other part of the field, that must be givin an ecstasy for every law student. Not for me though.
And even without all that dilation with ridiculous rules (what's that stupidity with running clock and two minute warning ?!?) the game itself is kind of dumb - there are just too many people in the field for anything that a regular person can really understand. Strategies that almost never work out because of the other team interfering with their strategy. Too much chaos and still each person only does a one single thing. Even more - many of the players never will get any attention in the game just because they are on a supporting position, but the quarterback will always be the center of attention.
A very unbalanced game that is even more screwed by a ton of ads, a very heavy leaning on judging nitpicks and just 3-4 nice moments in the whole 1 hour game. I'll just stick back with hockey and anime :)

2006-02-07T02:20:00.000+02:00

Also at the school reunion I took a lot of photos - 217 to be exact. So, here are a couple of the best shots that (as I think) look quite nice even without knowing the people or the circumstances of the pictures.

Note to self: I seem to be getting good on candid portraits and architecture, but group photos, candid action photos and still life need a lot of work.

Note to my ex-classmates: dārgie klases biedri, visas manis uzņemtās fotogrāfijas jūs varat novilkt šeit, ja tas links nedarbojas, vai jums vajag kādu bildi augstākā kvalitātē - sazinieties ar mani pa epastu vai telefonu.

2006-02-06T20:15:00.000+02:00

On the weekend I was at the school reunion and among other matters I gave my school a present of 50 Ubuntu CDs to use in school and to give out to the pupils most interested in computers. After that I talked to my IT teacher who is now an IT adviser to the principal. It seems that all that we were taught in high school (Office software) is being move down to grade school and it is currently unclear, what will be taught to high school students. It could be programming, but it would take a large pile of time and money to prepare all the teachers for that.
It is quite a food for thought - find something challenging enough to teach at 11th and 12th grade to children that have learned all of word processing and presentation making while in their 5th grade and in the same time make it very easy to prepare 40+ year old teachers to teach that material.
In this context I find the project Little Wizard very interesting - if basics of programming can be taught so easily, maybe we still have a chance of getting it into the mandatory curriculum.

2006-02-06T01:17:00.000+02:00

On homosexuality

Listening to some recordings of the Howard Stern show got me thinking about homosexuality. I try not to have any prejudices, so I tried to view this phenomenon from a purely logical point of view with as little external data as possible, so help me if I'm wrong.

Close relationships between two persons are generally understood to contain four separate components: sex, legal matters, social matters and romantic matters.

First of all it is said that, while the percentage of homosexual people is low, many heterosexual people have had some kind of homosexual experience either as an experimentation or as an accidental exposure. It also is believed that if the person in question is not physiologically repulsed by the concept (i.e. homofobic) then they can experience sexual pleasure regardless of the gender of the partner, number of partners or even absence of such. In all we can basically conclude that while homofobia is a sexual disorder (it disorders sexual function), homosexuality is not about sex at all.

The legal perspective is very inconclusive - in some parts of the world even having homosexual relationships can be illegal, but in other parts of the world homosexual marriages are not uncommon. Also all the legal stuff is there to help people that can not help themselves, especially minorities. So the legal part should be all for the equalising homosexuality to heterosexuality unless that does direct and irreparable harm to the society (which it seemingly does not).

From social perspective homosexual couples look to be living the life very similar to the heterosexual couples - there are some that are going wild and there are some that honour strong and stable relationships for decades and love to go to theatre. It could even seem that homosexual people tend to have a higher percentage of creative people and intellectuals.

The only think left is love. Call it a quick romantic encounter or a the love of the lifetime, but that seems to be the major descriptive difference with homosexually oriented people - they just fall in love with types of people that tend to be of same gender as themselves. It could be related to behavioural predispositions or differences in hormonal perception, but ultimately we do not know enough about love to fully understand that difference.

So at this point I can only conclude that until we understand all the hormonal processes and that "love" thingy, we could just as well start counting homosexual males and homosexual females as two additional genders that can not be fully understood by other two genders, just like men can not fully understand women and the other way around. This difference is as real and as effective as the difference between male and female genders or (stretching the analogy a bit too far) like the difference between races and should be honoured just as much as these differences are honoured.

And now I coin the terms "omale" and "ofmale" as the new homosexual male and female gender descriptors and "oman", "omen", "owman" and "owmen" as terms for single homosexual male, multiple homosexual males, single homosexual female and multiple homosexual females respectively.

2006-02-05T22:02:00.000+02:00

Just watched the DVD version of the Aristocrats. It was one of the funniest jokes ever and each person telling it really changed the joke immensely. However if your sense of humour if even a bit under very good and if you can be easily disgusted by references to strange things, then forget that I wrote anything, or just watch it anyway to try to overcome that :)

Warning: do not in any circumstance allow a republican, anyone with a weak heart, or a child under 21 hear anything from that piece - you'd risk radical democratisation, a death stroke or a head filled with REALLY strange thoughts respectively.

Otherwise, just have fun and try not to die laughing :D

2006-02-02T13:54:00.000+02:00

Got my plane tickets to Debconf 6 yesterday. I ordered the tickets on-line, but when I came to the travel agency's office, they had lost my reservation some how. I did not complain, because the new price the offered was 10 bucks lower then the one I reserved on-line (and it was for the exact same flights). Strange.

Anyway - Mexico, here I come!

On another note, I and two of my high school classmates spent 6+ hours yesterday preparing a present for our high school homeroom teacher. We prepared a book with a page for each student with a photo and description of what each of us is doing 5 years after graduation. The Homecoming is this Saturday. Should be fun.

2006-01-22T23:23:00.000+02:00

It looks like the first Ice Age of the 2006 is retreating. For almost a full week we had to suffer temperatures in range of -25 to -30. I can remember that kind of cold setting in for a single day ... once in 5 years or so, but here we got almost a week of that horror. And they say that it is not over yet - there will be -25 again at the end of this week. After all this cold -9 tomorrow or -2 on Tuesday will be like a blessing.
The biggest problem that I have with this weather is that it is enough to get out of the house for 10 minutes to get to the nearby store and back and by sore throat is back for another day. Irritating.

2006-01-17T02:05:00.000+02:00

Ok, I read the first GPLv3 draft. I found multiple problems, some good, some quite bad:

Section 2 - The output from running it is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a work based on the Program.: does this mean that documents written in Abiword is covered by GPL? (Edit: I misread the sentence here, it really states just the oposite of what I thought :P)
Section 3 - Regardless of any other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users' privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.: does this mean that one can not make a locked down system where users can not write outside the homedir, make /home a separate partition and mount it with noexec parameter thus denying all simple users the right of running modified versions of these programs (at least on this system)?
Section 4. - You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright
notice;: does that mean that I have to write "Copyright by this and that and this and that and this and that" on every CD that I record in my home to give to my friends? It sounds as bad as the original BSD advertisement clause.
Section 5.b - You must license the entire modified work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.: I suggest adding "legally" before "comes", because otherwise, for example, if a company is making an internal modification of a GPL program with some secret information embedded into the code (some very internal communication routine, passwords, codes, ...) and some industrial thief steals this modified code for a blackhat hacker, he can claim that he "came into possession of a copy" and thus he has all the legal rights use it and that no trade secret laws can apply.
in some places "Corresponding Source" is used instead of "Complete Corresponding Source Code" (Edit: I was pointed to a place in the middle of the licence where "CS" is defined equal to "CCSC". Still, not the best style - either declare that upfront or use one style trough the document)
Section 9. - it is not clearly stated that using the covered work indicates acceptance of the Licence, but it is explicitly stated for modification and propagation.
Section 13. - I really do not like geographic limitations. Anyone can state "this program has a progress bar, which is patented in USA, so you can not use it in USA unless you have the patent" for basically any program thus very easily discriminating against quite a few people. If it is illegal by other means, leave it be illegal by those means - do not impose additional illegality on it via copyright. Law in some countries and patent situation can change more easily then the licence for old free software projects with many contributors.

I have not yet read any comments from either FSF or any other people and I am not a lawyer, but I hope that these problems will be fixed in next drafts.

Help needed for Simple Backup development.

2006-01-11T17:33:00.000+02:00

I have long understood that to make a good free software project, having multiple authors/contributors is essential. To that end, while I am fixing bugs and writing a few new features into the main SBackup codebase (see Changelog), I am inviting new people to contribute to SBackup development.
Many users have a need for an essential feature - backup to removable media. With current architecture of SBackup this goal is quite easy to achieve, but it would take a lot of time away from bugfixing and some other important features that I plan to do before 1.0. Also this feature is very independent of the rest of code, so I think it would be great way for somebody else to help the development of SBackup to become the ultimate simple backup system for desktops and servers alike. I have written a specification of how the new functionality (codenamed BackupBurner) should function and there is already a half-ready Glade interface in the source code.
So - volunteers, please step forward out of the cosy confines of the lazyweb :)

2006-01-09T00:16:00.000+02:00

Just finished recovering from a cold that I got on New Years eve while taking a bunch of pictures. Sadly, the one on the right is the best :(
Also just finished writing a summary of what I want to have completed/fixed before the 1.0 release of SBackup. ~20 entries. Of them at least 3 are marked as "hard" - i.e. non-trivial or in other words: several tens or even hundreds of lines of code added and changed all over the codebase. This will take a while :( Assistance would be very welcome :)

2006-01-01T18:09:00.000+02:00

Aggregation the G way.
I've been using the magic of RSS (and Atom) to keep up with Planet Debian, blogs of my friends, tech news and posts to an anime fan forum for the past several months, however one little problem bothered me - the forum has a lot of posts (sometimes more then 5 per minute) and an RSS feed of only last five items. That means that I had to have my RSS aggregator (Liferea) open at all times, so that I do not miss any posts. However keeping my laptop on and online at all times is quite bothersome, so I started looking for solutions.
I tried Google Reader however I didn't like it much - I like to see more of my feed. There is too much screen space wasted for all the wrong reasons, one can only see 5 items at the time (which is quite a hassle if you have 500+ of them), a lot of info I would like to see is not there (which blog did this come from???), some strange html conversions, ...
Now I have found my solution. It is a combination of rss2email and GMail. I have a computer that I always keep on and online (it could be a server, but in my case it is a simple workstation). I installed rss2email there, added all my feeds to the database there (hint: export feedlist from Liferea and do a bit of grep/sed magic), moded config so that all mails come from a single address, all have a custom identifiable header and all are HTML mails without any transformations. After that I configured cron to launch "r2e run" every half an hour and "r2e run 22" every minute (where '22' is the id of the feed of that anime forum). At Gmail side I simply filtered all mails from rss2email into a separate label and archived them (so that they do not clutter my inbox).
Now when I want to reed my feeds, I go to the last message of the RSS label in my Gmail, open it, read it, star it if I need to look at it later and then press "k" to get to the newer message. After I am done reading I usually go and remove RSS label from read messages, so that they do not appear in this labels "folder" and are only saved in Archive. If I start running out of space, I will simply search and delete old RSS items then.
Most of the screen space now is devoted to the message, I can see all the fields I want to see (source, author, topic, content, pictures, URLs) and I can manage messages by hundreds. Also being able to search both your mail and your rss feeds at the same time is neat.
Yesterday I did a little improvement to this scheme. The forum that I read has the title of every message made of "author: topic", so every message is a separate conversation in Gmail. I decided to try to use the conversation feature of Gmail and did a little modification to rss2email so that if the message is from this forum, then everything up to the first semicolon is cut from the title and inserted as a part of the name of the sender. In the end the subject of every message contains only the topic of the corresponding thread in the forum and thus all messages from one thread are neatly grouped together as a single conversation. At the same time every messages From: looks like "$forum_name $author " so that I can still see who wrote what in the forum.

2005-12-31T18:20:00.000+02:00

New Year's Eve. No party to go to. Lots of time to spend reading up on my mailbox and working towards 1.0 release of sbackup.

However I will stop for a moment for a meme from my friend, Yume

The idea is to put all of your music collection into a player, put it on shuffle, ask a question and press next. "Me" is myself, "PL" is the player with my interpretation of results on the next line.

Me: What do I think about myself?
PL: Aqualung - Strange and beautiful
I like that, nice start! :)

Me: What do my friends think about me?
PL: Rammstein - Moskau
Old, yet new. Known, yet strange. Open, yet with lots more to explore. Money uber ales.

Me: What does my family think of me?
PL: Weezer - Buddy Holly
"...I don't care what they say about us anyway..." :)

Me: How will the next year be for me?
PL: Gloria Estefan - Turn the beat around
dynamic and revolutionary?

Me: Hmm, nothing comes to mind ...
PL: Madonna - Secret
"...Happiness lies in your own hands..." or "..my baby's got a secret.." ?

Me: Will this year be more romantic then the last?
PL: Jackson Browne - Sky Blue and Black
??? strange love song about the edge between lovers and friends

Me: Do I have a bright future?
PL: Roxette - Dangerous
lol. "Hold on tight...", "...You pack your bag, you take control..." sounds nice even if "a little bit dangerous" :)

Me: Will I become a President (or at least a MEP)?
PL: Celine Dion - If you asked me to
so it is possible, if I want it to and ask for it

Me: Will I get my Master's degree?
PL: Shiro Sagisu - Destiny avaits (From "Bleach" OST)
Good, so that is my destiny :)

Me: When will I buy myself an apartment or a house?
PL: Dream Academy - Life in a Northern Town
Not positive - "all the work shut down" and mentions of the Salvation Army and "they sat on the stoney ground", but "everyone else came down". On the other hand, living outside Riga in some more northern towns is much cheaper, so that's an option.

Me: What about renting, I hear that is more reasonable now, ne?
PL: Anastacia - Pretty Little Dum Dum
"illusion and deceit" mostly about self illusion, sounds like you want to say that I myself will not be satisfied with a rented place.

Me: Ok, that brings another question - if I start a company, will it be successful enough for me to buy/build a house without taking a mortage?
PL: Diana King - Shy Guy
song says that shy guys are sexy, is that a potential marketing pitch :$
Me: I didn't quite get it, could you a bit more clear about that?
PL: Anastacia - Time
"one day at a time", "timing is everything". now that is better.

Me: Now, should I really publish this blog post?
PL: Avril Lavigne - Not the only one
If you do it, do it now.

So I will.

2005-12-24T09:21:00.000+02:00

It just came to me that if we accept the definition of "industry" (from the text of the software patent directive that EP had in first reading where it it was said) that industry basically is mass production of material goods, then there is no need for neither software industry not movie industry nor music industry - the production and distribution of copies is very efficiently achieved via the Internet. These industries are no longer needed by the society - they have no reason to exist.
Some might object - but where will the first copy come from? Well, that is not product of an industry, but a product of an artist. If originally said industries were created merely to copy and distribute works, now they are morphed into structures "supporting" artists. That is a clutch, that is not needed. There are other ways for artists to make a living off their art. Fanart and free software movement clearly shows that. Patents and copyright are just clutches for the falling industries. The clutches must go and giants must fall for progress towards knowledge society.
I would be glad if we could have professional musicians getting a minimal wage from the government. If your art has been downloaded by 10 000 people last year, you can get government pro-artist payroll. If you want more then minimal wage - do tours, sing in clubs, do advertisements, work in more then one art or get another job. I would be very glad to pay a tax for that if I could have free and unrestricted (copyright-free) access to all art of all artists. Call it art tax, device a maximum number of pro-artists the country can support via the tax, make qualification competitions, whatever. There is art without copyright. It is just not that expensive.
However, while the society will allow industries to suck their money, it will be very hard to change the situation as the very same money will be used to prove that said industries are worth supporting.
There are two ways: kick the crutches out (abolish patents and copyrights) or just move forward and ignore them and their crutches as we step through them towards freedom (develop free software, free media, free ... movements). Of course we can do the second until the first becomes viable.

In that context it is nice to see some funny lawmaking in France (a law project for "copy all you want for 5€/month") or WIPO saying that copyright is not really a right and it is quite a shame that word "right" is part of "copyright". Even reading about each new patent horror of USA court system becomes fun, because them worse it gets, the closer is the end. (Same with Bush :P)

2005-12-24T03:26:00.000+02:00

Learning TurboGears now. True MVC separation. Nice and powerful. Templates are valid XHTML documents (and not a mess of gibberish). Not much magic. I hate magic. Especially when it fails. I look forward to writing a task tracking system for a very special project in this framework. More about the project when it is launched. You're gonna love it ;)

Also I am going to visit my family - they still have no Internet, so I'll be mostly offline 'till the New Year (except for this and this). So I wish you all a Merry Christmas (note: there is absolutely nothing christian about Christmas - it existed like 2000 years before that character from Bible is born according to that book and in Latvian this day is called "Ziemassvētki" - "ziema" = winter, "svētki" = celebration) and a Happy New Year (if you are really an orthodox christian, why do you count years the new, non-christian way? you should be celebrating New Year on 13th of January like Christ did and the Orthodox church still does, because it uses Julian Calendar more then 420 years after it has been denounced)!

Oh, the fun of touting religious people ... of any religion ... :D Have fun everybody!

Footnote: in October I noted that there have been 11000 spam mails in my GMail spam box at that point (it stores only spam that has arrived in last 30 days). Today I am pleased to say that I can only see 4300 spam mails there today. It could be that GMail has implemented some procedures so that some spam does not even reach that folder, but I shall be very optimistic and say that amount of spam has declined! Maybe spammers are on holidays? If so, I wish they stay there :D

Ben from Eye

2005-12-22T20:00:00.000+02:00

Ben from Eye

It is misty today in Riga this reminded me of the second oldest photo that I've taken and that is still on my harddrive. A photo taken by a simple dispensable camera, but still so nice :)

2005-12-21T02:44:00.000+02:00

Christmas is coming and the longest nights of the year are here (in the Northern hemisphere that is). At this time of year I always want to remember about something nice and warm. This time it is the Jāņi/Līgo - Latvian national festivity dedicated to the shortest night of the year. Everyone is celebrating that - people lite fires before sunset and tries to keep the flame going until dawn thus bridging the two days together. Lots of beer, cheese and campfire grilled meat of all sorts is the order of the day. That's traditional. Also very traditional is the rain - there always is at least a bit of rain during the Līgo.
Anyway - these two photos of that midsummer night warmed up my midwinter night.

2005-12-20T03:24:00.000+02:00

Today I was doing the free vs. open presentation and comparison by Lawrence Lessig came up, that having computers governing your live in cyberspace without access to the rules along which you are being governed (essentially the source code) is like living in a society where some or most laws are secret any only know to the law enforcement agencies. Like it was sometimes the case in USSR. So photo for today's photoblog entry comes from last day of 2003 that I spent in the city of Liepaja. It was a semi-military port town in the USSR times, but today it is a city of peaceful engineers and tinkerers with nice beaches and a very distinct and proud stance for the future. A free future.

2005-12-19T00:18:00.000+02:00

I spent day preparing a presentation for tomorrow's "Open Christmas" celebration in Latvian University. One of my topics is "Free vs. Open: philosophy vs. presentation" about the various terms floating around the FLOSS movement: free, open, libre, shared, ... (and also their various translations to Latvian :P). This reminded me of the day I organised an event in Riga for the RMS's Baltic Anti Software Patent rally in 2004.

2005-12-14T03:40:00.000+02:00

Another idea came to me in shower - I've been reading up about MS Office 12 UI changes and I think there are some very nice ideas there, but we can do better.
The main principle of the Ribbon is that all functions are there, but some are smaller then others based on their priority.
It came to me that when you design an UI in, for example, Glade you are basically creating a dynamic structure that can scale up or down. The only two things missing to make it a Ribbonesque interface are: 1. unique priority for each widget to decide which widgets to reduce/increase in size, 2. multiple size versions for each widget - buttons from 128x128px to 16x16px, ...
For situations when 16x16px is not enough for the widget (editbox, for example) one could make a micro button that brings up the rest of the widget as a popover when pressed or simply not show the widget. Less important widgets would simply not be displayed at smaller screen/window sizes (hidden behind a generic "+" icon meaning more functions in a category).
This would allow an application to use those huge screens of the future for bigger and more detailed buttons/widgets and at the same time would increase usability of applications at small screen sizes. Or maybe I am just thinking too far.

2005-12-13T18:30:00.000+02:00

Here is a quick idea for you - Free Software tax.
Imagine a voluntary 1% tax that is collected by a non-profit US foundation from the people that signed up for the program. Imagine that amount exempt from the usual taxation. Imagine that money channelled to Eastern Europe or Russia or India or China or anywhere else where the cost of living is low and a lot of smart people live. Imagine then that students are hired for 4-10$/hour to work on free software tasks that are voted on by the "taxpayers".
So, anyone up to implement that? If you do, please contact me for coordination :)

Update: A USA foundation to get the money from USA, similar organisations in other countries would be needed to gather donations from that countries (in order for that money to be tax deducible). Of course students or other people from USA or Germany or UK or whatever would also be able to participate in getting the money, but the catch is - while 4$/hour in USA is half of the McDonalds pay, it is 4 times more then McDonalds pay their workers in Latvia. Quality control by feedback: after completion of a task - a mentor of the task leaves feedback in the profile of the worker.

2005-12-12T03:08:00.000+02:00

We all know how over time our input devices get contaminated by particles from objects that tend to reside in our hands in between acts of data input. Basically I am speaking about those bread crumbles in the keyboard and that slightly sticky stuff that covers the buttons of a mouse after a few months of everyday usage. Today it got too much for me and I gave my mouse a bath - disassembled it and washed all non-electronic components with liquid hand soap. After a couple of minutes and drying with a paper towel, all the parts looked dry enough for a reassembly. The patient lived on, giving a much more pleasant tactile feedback to its user (me).

P.S. It looks like I botched the clicking feel that a wheel of a mouse makes when scrolled. I've heard that it is actually better so, let's try to find out by trying.

2005-12-11T05:34:00.000+02:00

Catching up with unread blogs - Nat Friedmans blog has two very interesting entries: one huge entry about parties (with lots of photos) and another about parkour featuring a bunch of Latvian-Russian guys from the second larges city of Latvia - Daugavpils, which is ~50 kilometres away from the place of my birth. The video has several scenes from the very centre of the city. While on that topic I must say that I have also done some soft parkour when I was ~10 years old - not like it was popular in the day, I was just naturally good with climbing, jumping and balancing on strange places. :)

Also note: It is possible to watch Google Video videos without Flash plugin - view the source of the video page, copy the first parameter that is passed to the Flash plugin (the one that starts with "http"), decode that with something like Python's urllib.unquote() and then pass to wget or even directly to totem. I didn't get sound from the stream, but as I also can gen no sound from Flash, I am not complaining.

Free Christmas in Riga, Latvia.

2005-12-11T03:28:00.000+02:00

It looks like the Linux centre of the Latvian university in partnership with Latvian Open Source Association is going to throw a Free Code Christmas on 19th of December. Current idea is to make a mix of a social and technical event. The plan calls for two rooms - in one room a series of 15-20 minute presentations will be held and in the other room tea and cookies will be served and all the speakers will be available for interrogation. The plan is to start at 18.00 and go on until 21 or maybe a bit later. The official information will be coming next week, but remember - you heard it here first ;)

2005-12-08T03:01:00.000+02:00

A couple shots from Tokyo girls concert from the closing ceremony of the Animefest3. This ends my photostream from the event, now I'll have to shoot something new to show you. BTW: there are also some photos that I did upload to Flickr, but didn't link to the blog - you can go to my photostream to see all of them.

Last week a idea came to my mind - promoting open source is most rewarding if we do it to developers who then come to open source and help us move forward, the biggest identifiable bunch of developers in Latvia are the web developers (LAMPers, ASPers, J2EEers, ...) and these developers are quite interesed in that new "Web 2.0" buzzword. So I thought - why cann't Latvian Open Source Association organise a event dedicated to Web 2.0: what it is all about, what open source solutions empower you to develop Web 2.0 sites, how and why should you use them and also why and how do you contribute back to the community that created these tools. Nobody else stepped up for the task, so if I want this to happen - I will have to organise that. I have defined the master theme and format of the conference and now I am going around the potential sponsors asking for few hundred $ to fund the coffee breaks and a lunch. If I get that, then we can start thinking about specific topics, speakers, participant registration forms and all the rest of the stuff. If I don't get that 'till Christmas, then I will not be able to get the event going at the planed time in the last week of February. Well - a bunch of job to do.

BTW: this reminds me - what's up with USA and Christmas??? As you probably know, mine only source of information about world events is The Daily Show (along with the Colbert Report, and _sometimes_ BBC news) and now it seams that USA have gone to the extremes of ridiculousness (I guess, president sets the mark). Banning use of word Christmas? How about cancelling New Year? You do know that in some religions the year changes at a different day, don't you? And don't get me started about "Plan for success" two years after the "Mission Accomplished" by the man personally!

Folding@Stage

2005-12-06T23:45:00.000+02:00

Flashback to childhood

A contest at Animefest - we all are trying to remember how paper boats were made. Here I have a moment of "enlightenment" :)

In other news - today I was "performing" in an event at Latvian University - telling a bunch of people what is console, how and why can work and survive there. Was fun.

Also I got tired of instability of Ubuntu dapper and went for a radical move - downgrading a system back to breezy. It was no easy feat - after setting APT preferences (pinning breezy to 1500) I went trough a series of "apt-get dist-upgrade"s and "apt-get -f install"s. Some packages failed to downgrade because of file conflicts, then I had to manually fix file lists in /var/lib/dpkg/info/package.list so that there is no conflict. After the whole downgrade I could reinstall all my lost packages by means of "dpkg --set-selection" and "apt-get dselect-upgrade" and via aptitude remembering what software I installed manually trough it before the downgrade. All in all - a successful downgrade.

2005-12-05T04:29:00.000+02:00

Another bug has pissed me enough to start debugging. This time it is Totem-xine crashing on startup in Ubuntu dapper.

The first thing is that you cann't rebuild totem from sources multiple time after ubuntu patches - ubuntu uses dpatch to patch something in automake files and after the build has been run, the unpatch fails thus preventing a rebuild, doh! Worked around that by removing that patch. (Bug not reported yet)

After installing totem-gstreamer, my main suspect is the change to the statusbar, that look very recent. Could it be that Totem developers forgot a critical fix to the xine backend? Could it be that the treat xine backend as a ... second class citizen? To what? To that GStreamer? I tried to use GStreamer, I really did, but there are a few tiny issues: 1) it doesn't open even half the files that xine does, 2) within 5 minutes of a movie audio-video can easily get out of sync by 5 seconds. I have never seen A-V sync in xine. Ever. I love telling our Windows using frends that my movies "just work" with totem-xine, please do not take that away!

Anyway - back to the bug we go.

As we have a clean crash, I recompiled totem with debugging symbols ("DEB_BUILD_OPTS=nostrip,noopt debuild -us -uc") and run with gdb. When totem crashed, I got the code line, where it happened:

(totem:4608): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid cast from ` ' to `TotemTimeLabel'

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x08068659 in totem_time_label_set_time (label=0x8199a60, time=0, length=0) at totem-time-label.c:69
69              if (time / 1000 == label->priv->time / 1000

Now, that is interesting, lets see, what we have here - time is an int, so no segfaults from there, but label is a TotemTimeLabel. Hmm, that error now makes sense. And when we take a look at label->priv, it appears to be a pointer to TotemTimeLabelPrivate with an address of 0xffffffff. That's the problem, now we only need to backtrace trough the program and find the bug that is causing that.

Well all looks pretty nice - there is a "tick" event in the player that calls the time update. Not really clear, why there is such a discrepance between GtkLabel and TotemTimeLabel or why this structure is not inicialized in time. More strange is that gstreamer backend never calls this function. Wierd. Let's see what happens if I just return from it without doing anything. Does not help - now statusbar is crashing.

Let's try it from another angle - it worked before. Nothing much in totem changed since release of breezy. Installing the version from breezy, it works fine. Recompiling the version from breezy on dapper - crashes. Ouch! It looks like xine backend of totem has not been ported to that new crazy Gnome 2.12 thingie, like gstreamer backend was. Strange - that is a backend, it should not be dependent on the frontend, no? Anyway, it is not something I can do - I will have to install the breezy version, hack some dependencies to make it no conflict with one optional library and then file a critical bug on totem for breaking the xine backend.

But even that will have to wait 'till tomorrow, sleep is of the essence, anywere.

2005-12-03T04:08:00.000+02:00

After reading the Final Debconf5 report I suddenly saw how this report shows all of us how much blood, sweat, tears and ruined stomachs has really been put into organising the best Debconf ever (so far at least). A lot of Debian Developers were present at Debconf5, even more Debian developers, Debian users and other free software users gained something from this event - a better Debian.
I feel that we should give all organisers of Debconf5 the prise the deserve, but as we can't send them all to a two week vacation to Hawaii, we could at least express our gratitude on a web page.
So, if you feel that Debconf5 has given something good to your life - got to http://wiki.debian.org/Debconf5ThankTheOrganizers and express that in warm words towards the people that made that happen!

P.S. Today I configured my Palm to be a IR remote trigger for my Canon 350D, happy like hell about that.
P.P.S. Number of unique visitors to my photo gallery has reached 575, with one of the photos seen by 475 unique visitors, thanks! (Hint: more comments with constructive critique would be useful to improve quality ;))
P.P.P.S. For me "a1t" will always mean that girl nicknamed "alt" with the shotgun pointed my way, really.

2005-12-02T03:11:00.000+02:00

Here is my friend lastguru - the second most active photographer on the AnimeFest3. He is trying to get a shot of the audience, but while he is doing that, I got a shot of him :)

Yesterday I discovered a great surge in popularity of SBackup - just on SourceForge around 700 people downloaded it in a period of three days (compared to ~250 total downloads before that) and some new bugs were filled.Only then I remembered about the interview I gave over the email, looks that it was published on Monday. Fun. Now the plans for a good rewrite are even more prominent on my ToDo list and I am also thinking about trying to get all developers of similar tools to unite in the context of this rewrite. This will bring all their good features in (encryption, per-user subconfiguration, removable media support, config on server option) and ensure continued development of the project even if I get a bit lazy on it ;) A confederation for simple yet feature complete Linux backup solution?

Also today we have a very good milestone - translation of Debian Installer to Latvian language has just reached 100%. I thank greatly our new contributor - Orvils from Latvian University who did bulk of the work. I still had to spend around 6 hours reviewing and correcting his translations and then updating the translations that changed or were added during the time that Orvils was translating, but it was much faster then it would have been it the translation was only up to me :)

2005-11-30T22:47:00.000+02:00

First batch of 6 photos from Animefest.

Just a note - yes, my cosplay costume is crappy and the hair are curly and not straight, but at least my hair were white and not yellow (like the other guy that cosplayed Jiraiya had) and I was true to Jiraiya's pervert spirit :D

(P.S. No laws were broken during my perversionist activities, I simply provided an alternative, very perverted look on common place events, persons, statues, actions and expressions. You just need to get people thinking and the autoperversion effects sets in :))

2005-11-29T10:37:00.000+02:00

Photography is dangerous

After a bit of sleep, a bit of rest and several hours of working trough all the 293 photographs taken during the 3 days of AnimeFest, I must finally write something about the last day.
The last day of the fest (Sunday) was easily the best. The morning was a bit disapointing as the planned special showing of Steamboy did not happen and the Korean Hammerboy was quite boring for anyone over the age of 7. Many had a good nap.
Everything went wild when the second part of Hellsing series was supposed to start. Previous day the showing stopped on 6th episode, so when after the intro we saw that the 10th episodes starts, all started shouting so loud that even mechanics understood that something was wrong. For about 5 minutes they seemed to wander aimlessly around the menu of the DVD. The mechanics were in a sealed room, so they couldn't hear us and we couldn't quite go to them either. I had a fun moment running up to the screen and showing with my hand which button should the mechanic press on the screen. I mimicked both pushing the button like it was a touchscreen and a also ran around trying to "drag" the cursor across the screen. It looked very fun to the audience. In the end it turned out that the DVD was doublesided and had to be turned around, but it took almost ten times of starting the 10th episode and around a half an hour of time. Thankfully the rest of days schedule could be pressed a bit to compensate.
Hellsing itself was just wonderfull, I hope they will decide to make a sequel soon and that they'll make it well.
Next up was Millennium Actress. I did not expect much realism from the creators of Prefect Blue, but I was so wrong. The movie is simply great - it is fun, has great story and ingenious way to tell that story. Simply a marvel.
The final ceremony of the festival started with a concert of a local group of two Latvian girls singing Japanese pop songs - "Tokio Dolls". Nice voices, very good choreography and reasonable lights - all in all a good show. In the conclusion there was Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. This is my second time trying to get it. I loved the first film. I liked the first season of series. But this film and the second season of series is just ... too smart? The first movie was a good combination of action, elegance, politics and wisdom. In the second part only distilled wisdom remains - typical scene is three people standing in a room for 20 minutes speaking loosely related citations of philosophers to each other. After a sleepless night of debugging gphoto, I slept well there.

All in all this festival was a wonderful event - lots of good friends came, lots of cosplays were seen, lots of anime was watched, a bit of go was played, a bit of buffed weapon fighting was done, a lot of good photos taken. I look forward to next animefest sometime next year. In the meanwhile I will try to sort out the few best pictures and post them to my flickr album during the week.

2005-11-27T08:11:00.000+02:00

Do you want to hear the most incredible "it's not a bug - it's a feature" story ever?

After shooting hundreds of megs of RAWs with my Canon 350D last couple of weeks, I noticed a very strange thing - importing this large amount of files from my camera into F-Spot took ages. F-Spot ate memory in tens and hundreds of megabytes and never returned it back to the system. Well I blamed it on Mono and went searching for a better way. Then I found out that command-line C program gphoto also take the same horrific amount of memory to import my photos. I saw that to download 900 Mb of photos (~250 photos) photo memory use went up to ~910 Mb (2 Mb were shared). Luckily Linux managed to swap out part of gphoto, so I could finish the download with my 512 Mb of real RAM and a 1 Gb swap file. I googled and founds tens of bug reports on this - first of them as early as December 2004. Ouch.

Well - let's see what the problem is, shall we? Some bugreports reference a bug in gphoto's SourceForge bug tracker where a users reports that downloading a 250 Mb video file takes 250 Mb of RAM and developers reply that unfortunately that is the limitation of current infrastructure and it is very hard to fix. Bumer.

But wait! He says that downloading ONE file takes a lot of RAM. This limit should not exist when downloading multiple files - we should be able to drop information about previous file as soon as we start downloading the next one, right?

Ok, lest see, what really is going on there. Downloading source of gphoto. Looking at it. Seeing a lot of mess. After around 10 minutes I start to understand that there is a table of option names and functions and the real job is doe by command line parser who calls a function as soon as he encounters a proper parameter on the command line. :P After 3 more minutes jumping around the code I finally get to a function that gets called to download a single file. Looks pretty easy:

take a CameraFile pointer

pass it to gp_file_new() for inicialization

pass it to gp_get_file() to get the actual data of file (download happens here)

pass it to gp_write_file_to_file() to dump the data to a file on disk

pass it to gp_file_unref() to free the data

Looks all fine and dandy so far. However I see the memory use that suggest that this last operation does not happen as it should, so I search for the gp_file_unref() function. I do not find it in gphoto source, but as I soon figure out - it is in libgphoto2. The function is pretty straight forward - the reference count of the structure is reduced by 1 and if it has reached 0, the structure is freed from memory via gp_file_free() function.

Hmm, I wonder what will happen if I replace gp_file_unref() with gp_file_free() in gphoto? After a quick compile and installation (I thank the Gods and all DD's for the wonders of "debuild -us -uc && sudo dpkg -i ../gphoto*.deb") I ran gphoto again. Wow, it now only consumes 8-16 Mb of RAM and not 900. The files downloaded fine, but in the end glibc made a lot of fuss about "double free". What does that mean? It means that someone managed to get a reference to our MemoryFile and didn't give it back. Naughty boy!

We only call three functions using that pointer, so it should not be hard to trace them trough the source to see what they do. The gp_file_new() function looks good, it sets reference count to 1 always. gp_get_file is more complex - I get to crawl through a lot of strange redirects to all levels of gphoto architecture. At one point I get a bit alarmed as I see a local variable called ref_count, but then I see that the code just stores reference count there for safekeeping while data is copied from another object and right after that copy reference count is put back safely. After all that I get to the end of the gp_get_file function, just a couple thing left - cache the result, clean up and return the file. Wait a minute ....

CACHE?!?!?!!

$(&@($^@#$(^@&^$(#&$@#(&$(@#$&!^&$^@*!(&$#(@& !!!!!

It appears that someone thought that it is a good idea to use a gig or so of my RAM for cache, just in case if I would like to download the same photos the second time around in the same program call. IT IS NOT!

Results: one line patch, one NMU building for upload, one *very* long bug in upstream bug tracker, one developer quite upset and not too convinced about the correctness of free software ways any more :P

Mad cosplay

2005-11-27T01:04:00.000+02:00

Mad cosplay

More coverage from Latvia's 3rd Animefest coming up.
Todays features were:
* Hellsing - a phenomenally great vampire story. This is actually not a movie, but an anime series of 13 episodes - first 6 were shown today and 7 more will be shown tomorrow. It is not too scary - the good guys are quite good at what they do, but the taste of fun is unmistakeable. Highly recommended! :)
* Armitage III: Double Matrix - if you like the original Armitage III, then you should also see this - very nice action, kawai daughter, just a bit of interplanetary politics.
* Future Police - policemen in future Tokio doing their work in Mecha suits. A very interesting piece of film. It looks like the creators wanted to shine a bit in the glory of "Ghost in the Shell" and the "Law and Order" with a bit of "Numb3rs" thrown in :) Nice music and atmosphere, a simple plot that get stopped at times by politics and red tape, nice fighting and a bit of humor to spice thing up a bit. A little to drawn out in the middle though - the classic sequence of two cops "walking the streets and talking to people" could be a little shorter.
Bunch of new cosplays and cosplayers around. In the evening there was another event in the same cinema and the people that came to that event (in suits and ties) were quite amazed at us waling around there :D
My updated costume got some praise that it damn well deserved! Pics will come up later - after I get a decent sleep :)

President and people

2005-11-26T01:24:00.000+02:00

President and people

No time to process new pictures, so one of the oldies is here - our president again, this time from a more interesting angle.
Today there was a bit IT conference here - it looks like Latvia finally has a strategy for country wide growth capitalising on knowledge. The plans look sound and as specific as such thing can be. Very promising and apolitical.
Also the first day of Animefest was here, I only managed to see the last movie "Grave of the fireflies" - a very sad movie about war and loss and children. Very recommended if you can stand a bit of war shock and death.
Spent couple of hours improving my costume - they mocked the beta, but tomorrow I will be back with release! :D

Cosplay warm-up

2005-11-24T17:31:00.000+02:00

Cosplay warm-up

The opening of AnimeFest went great - there were few cosplayers and a huge lot of general public. Anime is on the high.
The fest was opened by two cute girls - one of them was speaking in Latvian and the other in Russian. At first they were translating each others lines both then they diverged and even started a small dispute. You had to know both languages to "get" the joke, but I think most of the people in Latvia do know Russian enough for that.
The opening program consisted of "Howl's Moving Castle" - a truly wonderful anime movie from the same director as the "Spirited Away". A great fairy tail as expected from Studio Ghibly.
Also:

My blog is worth $5,645.40.
How much is your blog worth?

I have no idea why, but I would like to check out half of it, please :)

Otaku girls

2005-11-22T23:44:00.000+02:00

Otaku girls

Today I am preparing for tomorrows big event - opening of Latvia's third Anime Festival. A bunch of otaku girls is begging me to cosplay Jiraiya - the super pervert ninja from the very popular Naruto series. I already have most needed components - white hair (false) and a pervert mind (true). It is gonna be fun :)

2005-11-21T15:43:00.000+02:00

Cann't tell you more because of the NDA, but is suffices to tell that I no longer plan to move anywhere. A bit sad.

2005-11-21T01:09:00.000+02:00

Another tiny note - why is it so that all the Python wrappers for Gnome and Freedesktop related things (GnomeVFS and DBus in my experience) have absolutely no API documentation !!! PyGTK has a nice set of documentation for GTK work, but it doesn't extend beyond that, sadly. When I was writing SBackup, I had to resort to using Python build-in function dir() to show me what names the gnomevfs module exported and guestimate my way from there. That was ugly as hell, but worked. Now I am trying to find any information about that "new" DBus thing that everyone was so excited about approximately a year ago - I can only find a few blog posts about rewrites of said API and a few simple programs that do not even work with the rewritten API. I mean - I can understand not having documentation for internal functions of a desktop program, but not having a public API document for a critical library of freedesktop.org desktop infrastructure - that is just plain dumb.

Edit: It seams that there is some kind of dbus tutorial with Python API section. I do not know, why it didn't appear on first 10 pages of Google search for "dbus python" or "dbus python API", but I hope this linking will help that a bit. Also, we will see, how useful it actually is - the rest of the document itself is quite cryptic to me.

Edit2: I am impressed, the Python chapter is definitely written by someone different from those that wrote the rest of the dbus tutorial - this part actually makes sense, is very detailed and hand-holding when it is needed. i got almost all my questions answered. Thanks to whoever wrote that!

Sky burn

2005-11-20T22:12:00.000+02:00

Sky burn

One more day without taking a shot, but with a bit of productivity :) While on the topic of photography, I must say - if you work with photos in Linux, use UFRaw and that other thing. The other thing doesn't even have a preview when converting, but the UFRaw can autodetect a white balance in this photo in such way to turn those clouds white and blue - i.e. remove any color influence from the sunset.
Now to the geeky stuff - today I made the community web site for SBackup, you can find it here. After evaluating the options I went with Wikka Wiki as it is much simpler codewise then MediaWiki or Trac and at this point I mainly want simplicity there. Finally there is a bit of documentation for the SBackup project and a way for users to contribute to it.
About media players - I still use AmaroK, despite being a hardcore Gnome user. I like the command line control interface, automatic lyrics downloads and a dynamic mode of stream of "suggested" songs.

Low fireworks & sbackup

2005-11-20T05:26:00.000+02:00

Low fireworks

The photo is from yesterday, but it is still new for most of you so the photo-a-day is still going strong for me :)
Today was spend in a very productive fashion - bugfixing. I had a lot of feedback for SBackup over last couple of months - it was time to fix some of the bugs people were reporting. Therefore version 0.9 of SBackup will be hitting you nearest mirror as we speak (I mean, I am uploading it now :)).
This realease is mostly a hey-this-thing-is-still-alive-and-kicking-ouch release and it also includes a TODO file with my plans for its future. I expect more feedback both on features and bugfixes for the stable 1.0 branch and for the planned 2.0 rewrite.
Also I spent couple of hours reviewing Wiki engines with an idea to put one on SourceForge to provide documentation for SBackup - I found no good candidates. I wanted a simple wiki, preferably in python, with MySQL database (SourceForge mounts web directories read-only). Not good. Now I am considering making a page in Wikipedia and using that as a documentation page. Scream at me violently if have any other solutions :)

2005-11-19T02:53:00.000+02:00

Little tiny side note: F-Spot rules as a photo organiser: I can import my photos from the camera, tag them, print them, export them too photo albums, BUT there are two tiny issues:
* why cann't I start GIMP on a photo and automatically get a new Version of it when I save (preferable a separate version for each save operation)? or why can't I just say that photo 1 is a version of photo 2?
* why exactly does F-Spot consume over 250 Mb or real nonshared memory during photo import from camera and almost 150 Mb of memory at all other times?!?!?!!?!

grumble, grumble, grumble, must file bug reports, grumble, grumble...

Real fotoday

2005-11-19T00:46:00.000+02:00

Creepy windows

Today was the Independence day of Latvia. I spent most of it walking around the city of Riga with a camera and taking pictures. The weather was fantastic (except it was cold and icy) the colors that spread across the sky and people were truly amazing. I took lots and lots of pictures and managed to select 10 of them to upload to flickr for others to enjoy. Unfortunately none of 150 pictures I took during the fireworks are good enough for me to dare showing them around - the fireworks were kind of weak this year. Maybe next time.
So - I hope you'll enjoy looking at those pictures at least as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Mokso

2005-11-18T03:28:00.000+02:00

Mokso

The photo is from yesterday, but I have not taken a picture today and spent most of the day thinking - about life, about future, about past.
Looked back at SBackup. It seams that many people are using it. I should probably fix the bugs. Spent some time planing the bugfixes and the path ahead for the project - sbackup 2.0 will be more like a rewrite - users ask for many good features that the current architecture simply can not do.
Also a community web page must be made - sourceforge is just ... not too communicative?

New leaf

2005-11-17T14:24:00.000+02:00

New leaf

I called this shot - "new fallen leafs stand tall". Despite allmost filling my 1Gb card with street photos and aikido photos yesterday, I somehow found myself wandering back to this shot all the time.
A couple other good shots are back in my Flickr gallery.
If you want to see lots of misguided aikido photoaction you can also browse all the shots here.

Moon

2005-11-16T09:26:00.000+02:00

Moon

Just a full moon. How many of you can resist a full moon on an cloudless night just after you got you new camera and 300mm lens?
I couldn't.
Not much of artistic value, just plain nature.

My camera was spotted by my aikido sensey today, so he asked me to come to a special demo session tomorrow to take some pictures. Expect a good flying shot tomorrow :)

Note: I am not sure if such daily photo content would be appropriate for Debian Planet. Maybe I should post it on my non-syndicated blog?

Vantu bridge

2005-11-15T17:40:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I received my new Canon 350D and of course most of the evening was spent trying it out on different subjects, with different lenses, in different settings. The results look quite awful - the camera exposes any your mistake :). But I will still try to stand by my idea of trying to do a photoblog of one picture per day, so here goes yesterdays best picture.

Vanšu tilts

2005-11-10T02:38:00.000+02:00

Now that I have had time to consider my reactions, I will write down, what was my experience in Dublin, when I went for a on-site interview for a job in Google. First of all, I had to sign an NDA before entering the office, so I can not tell you about anything that I learnt there. Still this is a huge post, to save my first impression, so that I can look back on it in the future (like tomorrow morning) and see how naive I was. :)

The first thing I noticed after arrival to Dublin was that the highway from the airport to the city was under repair. I was lucky though as I arrive at night and there was almost no traffic. The highway looked strange compared to highways in Belgium, Germany or UK - it had all those strange twists and turns and splits and merges - it looked like the highway was build adapting it into the space between other roads and buildings, like it was some kind of a country road. Oh and that driving on the left side - freaks me out every time.

After I arrived to the hotel and checked in, I discovered that executive suites of 3 star hotel look much like regular suites of five star hotels I've been accommodated earlier in my life. One more fun fact found me soon - the power plugs are all wrong :) When I was in UK some time ago, all homes that I went to used usual EU type plugs, so this was the first time I saw a UK plug in action. Needing power (a computer geek always needs power) I searched for a solution. I thought that I found one, when in the bathroom I found three round holes marked "for shavers only". I responded - "but this is an emergency" and tried to plug my notebook in anyway. Unfortunately they have thought about that - shaver plugs are thinner and just a tiny bit closer, so the regular power plug does not fit in shaver socket. Damn! Oh well, then I'll have to sleep.

Next morning I walked around the area of Google EU Headquarters scouting the surroundings. I found that the building, where the headquarters are, is still under construction - I am sure Google advised the builders on some minor adjustments ;). Just across the street there is a large block of residential houses. Small residential houses. I've seen apartments bigger then some of those houses. I also found several nice apartment houses: from the common "windows that Cappuletti will not climb trough" to modern housing with large windows and modern decor. I also saw the first backyard street in my life - a street less then half a meter wide between two lines of backyards. Diverse life. And that was only one neighbourhood - less then 5 minutes from Google office.

After the interviews were over, I planned to go to see the city center. Unfortunately looking on the map of the city did not provide any clue to discovering any such place. No central building, no central square, no central monument or park. Nothing - just a maze of streets. Well, I hit the maze. What I saw was a flood of people, just like in Riga on Friday night (it was Friday). The difference was that because of the lack of clear centre, the mass of people floated in a larger area. I noticed lots of very special shops that would have not survived in Riga (belt buckle shop?) and a general lack of big supermarkets that we are used to here. Also the people seam to be much more ignorant to traffic rules - it is easy to see people streaming across a street despite a red streetlight.

I can also touch a bit on food, as I tried the food in hotel and in a local fast-food place. Well, the situation in Ireland is much more positive towards fast-food. In Latvia the regular food is both much better and a bit cheaper then fast-food. In Ireland the quality level of regular food seams similar to the fast-food while the price of fast-food is lower. I rated the quality by the taste of meat, where perfect meat is from a wild animal shot in a forest and prepared straight without any additives, and worst meat is slice of fast-food hamburger meat with all the salt and additives they put there. Of course I couldn't get a clear sample within my short stay, but I tried to be as objective as I could.

The conclusion? In my mind, moving from Riga to Dublin will be a downgrade in life quality. Google's offer must be good enough to compensate this, if they want me in. We'll see soon enough. I should have the answer before next week.

P.S. The level of spam in my mail has reached 11 000 per month. Yay! :P

2005-11-09T23:10:00.000+02:00

Now I am getting a bit photoestatique - my Canon EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM lens has already arrived and my Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D) with the kit lens and a 1 Gb Compact Flash card has shipped from USA today. When it arrives, I will go to a local shop and buy myself a Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. With that my new photographic kit will be complete. Finally!
Now, I must reserve next weekend to image hunting activities...

2005-11-03T20:37:00.000+02:00

Going out of the house to fly to Dublin for the final Google interview. Ganbattene! Banzai! :D

2005-10-29T23:56:00.000+03:00

A small gotcha witha too smart printer.
I have a PostScript capable printer (Lexmark C510) connected to one computer and I ofter print to there from my notebook trough CUPS. I noted that sometimes the printer would blink "busy" lamp and then go back to "ready" without printing anything. Usually I just printed to a PS file, converted it to PDF with ps2pdf and then it worked. (I had no time to investigate then)
Now, I found, what the problem was - some apps on the notebook were generating Letter size Postscript and the printer only had A4 paper, so it simply ignored the data after parsing it. Doh!

2005-10-27T01:24:00.000+03:00

Also today I got a call from Google office in Dublin - I am flying there next Thursday, stay at a hotel overnight and then there will be an on-site interview on Friday afternoon and on Saturday I will be on my way back home.
Looking forward to that challenge.

2005-10-27T00:30:00.000+03:00

Planning to buy a Canon Digital Rebel XT as my first SLR and can't decide on the lenses. What I know is that my current camera (Sony F717) has a fixed lens that is equivalent to 24-125mm and I would like to have a lens set that is wider at both ends.
I am already decided to take a Canon 50mm f/1.8 II prime lens - for portraits and for low light situations (in-house sports, ...). All experts say that this is a must have lens - it is very fast and gives wonderfully crisp pictures for a price of 75-80$.
Now I can't decide whether to buy the kit lens (Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6) or go and buy something better right in the beginning. After reading a comprehensive review of the best Canon lenses from Bob Atkins I am more confused then before.
One of the best compromise "walking" lenses is actually narrower then Sony's range - Canon EF 28-105/3.5-4.5 USM. Buying this lens would mean that after some time I will probably buy the kit lens or a 500-600$ lens for that wide end and a Canon EF 75-300/4-5.6 for the telephoto end. That is a total of 4 lenses - what a waste!
Now, if I would relax myself a bit on the money, I would take a Canon EF-S 17-85/3.5-5.6 USM and then extend to the telephoto end with Canon EF 75-300/4-5.6 or (new, much better, more expensive) Canon EF 70-300/4-5.6 IS USM.
Lets see what the numbers say:
Option 1 - kit lens + Canon EF 28-105/3.5-4.5 USM + Canon EF 75-300/4-5.6 = 100$ + 200$ + 150$ (or 450$ with IS and USM) = 450$
Option 2 - Canon EF-S 17-85/3.5-5.6 USM + Canon EF 75-300/4-5.6 = 520$ + 150$ (or 650$ for the great new Canon EF 70-300/4-5.6 IS USM) = 670$
My start-up lens choices vary from the recommended 350$ (kit + Canon EF 75-300/4-5.6 + 50mm prime) or 270$ (Canon EF 28-105/3.5-4.5 USM + 50mm prime) to 1250$ (Canon EF-S 17-85/3.5-5.6 USM, Canon EF 70-300/4-5.6 IS USM, 50 mm prime). We must also remember that I will also have to buy the camera itself (500-600$), a carrying bag (50$) and a CF card (100$). Ouch.
Spending 2k$ on a hobby, that is just very not me.

2005-10-24T19:46:00.000+03:00

Finally. I got the reply from Google - they want me to fly-in for an on-site interview. They will handle the flights, hotels, eating and other relevant issues and all I will have to care about is providing good answers to the questions that their engineers will be bombarding me thorough the day.

Unfortunately this silver lining has a little cloud in the middle - USA is out of H1b visas 'till Oct 2006, so I am asked to work at the Dublin office.

When I analysed the locations they gave me in the beginning, the Dublin office scored just below the Mountain View office. The good things were: being closer to Latvia and being inside EU (no visas, easier to travel), and the bad things were: weather and Irish terrorism.

Well ... let's see what they'll offer me in the end and maybe I will go to the Dublin office and then in a year or two transfer to the new Moffet Field facility or to the Chinese office :D

UPD: I am told that my gut feeling about IRA being a threat in Dublin is very far from reality. I must find out more about this city.

2005-10-21T14:38:00.000+03:00

Many people have mailed/irc'd/called/commented asking my what's up regarding that Google thingy. Well ... everything is still up in the air.
Apparently Google recruiters have hard time getting a report back from one of the engineers that interviewed me. :)

2005-10-14T23:46:00.000+03:00

The rule of crunchy goodness.

I have no idea if anyone has formulated this before, but here it goes. While I was making myself a salad (yes, that happens if you get addicted to that in HEL) I recalled that one of my friends was doing some experimentation to derive the optimum size of pieces to cut stuff in for a dish of his making. Basing on this i summarised my experience in the realm of salad and came to a conclusion:

Cut crunchy stuff in big pieces and chewy stuff in small pieces!

Following this simple rule we would cut salad leafs quite small and cabbage would come out relatively big. This way the salad will be crunchy and not slimy. Also you must remember that some stuff gets un-crunchy after the dressing soaks in.

That's all for the salad theory today - have some as a homework :D

2005-10-12T03:36:00.000+03:00

A few hours ago I went trough the third Google job interview. In many ways it was very similar to the second one - the difficulty level was almost the same, the questions were similar in nature and detail. The only problem is that I stumbled twice on this interview. First of all I needed a tiny reminder to do a bit of strace'ing before diving into source to debug a problem. However that was tiny compared to the fact that could not remember some details about the physical layout of a file system, specifically the structure of inodes was a bit under my radar.
I must say that I am really enjoying the questions - deep, insightful and satisfyingly complex. It is a pleasure to see my knowledge (or lack of it, sometimes) exposed in a professional way. :)
Many have asked me what to expect from a Google job interview. I must say - expect good questions. Ask yourself, if you would need to uncover as much of your relevant knowledge over a phone line, how would you do it? Expect factual questions about powers of two, programming algorithms and data structures, learn everything that goes on on all OSI levels, practise debugging problems, be inquisitive.
You can only be a true geek if you always want to know how exactly every thing works. You are a true geek, when you do know and understand it. You are a true hacker, when you can use it to your advantage.
If you are a true hacker, then you will have no problems on the interviews.
(Just being a geek also might just cut it ;))

P.S. I tried to follow the latest meme, but according to Google, I need nothing. I wish it was so :D

2005-10-10T03:40:00.000+03:00

A tiny Google Maps bonkers - Google does not exist!

2005-10-08T17:08:00.000+03:00

Okay, why this, the fact that I had to talk a lot about my involvement with the anti-swpat campaign in EU on my my second Google job interview, and the fact that they have contacted me for a third phone interview (seemingly from a different department) seem to make my brain go *click*?

2005-10-07T05:41:00.000+03:00

A quick note to those few people that read this blog and have at least a remote chance of bouncing into me in Real Life - I have shaved my mustache.
Yes. Really. No, I am not kidding you. I am perfectly aware that this is the first time I've done it in my entire life.
Anyway, if someone you do not recognize comes up to you on the street and is very friendly and a bit familiar, do not hit him with a baseball bat until you are sure that he is not me. :D

P.S. No photos of me without mustache exist, so hackergotchy must remain painfully out of date, for now.

2005-10-06T10:10:00.000+03:00

Google job interview, part 2. Technical knowledge - check!
Looks like I did well on the interview - answered all question and only messed up one of the advanced cached sorting algorithms (one of those when you can't load the whole data set into memory). The principles were correct, but I was a bit off on the specifics of the implementation. It looked that the engineer doing the interview was quite impressed. Let's see what the human resources people will tell me now. I was told that they will most probably get back to me next week - so I can relax a bit over the weekend and ... go bowling. Have not gone to one of those for a while :)

2005-10-04T22:41:00.000+03:00

In less then 24 hours I will face a good challenge - the second stage of my Google job interview. A Google engineer will call me and ask me deep questions to determine the bottom line of my knowledge. To prepare for that, I wrote a list of thing that I would want to refresh in my mind or to read up on.
There are two saying that came to my mind when I finished the list:
* The more you know, the more you forget
and
* The more you know, the more you realise that you don't know a lot more.

On a bright side that means that I must really know a lot to come up with this list, on the other side I will not manage to even browse trough materials on all those topics.

It will be fun :)

2005-10-03T09:06:00.000+03:00

I just had the weirdest dream ever - I am attacked by a daemon who has been raised to believe that the purpose of his existence is to kill me. I overpower him using some of my aikido, but when he tries to kill me while breaking his own arms, I try to stop him by threatening to kill him. He does not listen and I stick his own two knifes in him. He does not die, but weakens considerably and explains that I can't kill him because I do not want it enough, which seamed logical. :)
At this point the strangest thing starts - a small book made of round leather straps falls out of his pocket. The book. The language is clearly demonic, but I (and my friends that are gathered around) try to understand anyway. When we turn to the back of the front cover of the book, I find a circular writing that seams to be in Latin. In a jolt of intuition I start to read it in rhythm of a popular pop song. After around the half of the text, my friends join in. When we finish, we find that the book has transformed form 10cm circular thingies to a proper A4 book and when we turn the page, we see that the text is in Latvian now. We tried to browse forward, but text turned into gibberish further on.
A book that can only be read sequentially and translates itself to the language of the reader - nice idea. :) Unfortunately I woke up at that point and I still have no idea of what was written there. :(

2005-10-02T16:28:00.000+03:00

http://bounce.at.motorsport.lv/ - simply great photography

2005-10-01T17:18:00.000+03:00

It's been a long time since I've had a muscle pain after aikido sessions, but today I do. On Thursday we had a special session when our trainer made one of the best students lead the training and joined us in exercises to "get us know better" :)
In our training we have an emphasis on how the uke (the attacker, who is then being thrown around by the one doing the technique) must help nage (the one doing the throwing) to do the technique properly by only reacting to a proper technique. That means to not fall if you're not out of balance or in pain.
So, then the trainer paired up with me for one of the techniques. We bowed and started the practise. I was the uke, so I attacked. The trainer caught my wrist and twisted my arm. I just stood there as there was no pain - he didn't twist it enough. The trainer looked at me, looked at my arm, said "Hmm" and we started over. Again attack, grab, twist (as hard as he could) and again a "Hmm" - this time a much louder one.
It appears that during the year and a half that I've been showing up to the aikido sessions (very irregularly) my joints have gained really impressive flexibility and some of the techniques just don't work on me anymore (I have been commented on my flexibility before - in a mountain climbing class). So the trainer spent next 20 minutes trying out all the extreme variations of the technique we were doing trying to find a way to bend my arm further. He got to try every one of the dangerous moves he always wanted to and many times I managed to escape grips that he thought were solid as rock. At few point the rest of pupils stopped doing their exercises and just watched me and the trainer rolling on the floor in a deadlock (usually with few of my limbs bent far beyond the angles they were designed for, but still resisting).
It was a really great fun both for me and for our trainer. Except for the muscle ache that for a strange reason only kicked in yesterday evening and really shines today. Ouch. :)

2005-09-28T16:30:00.000+03:00

Meike, about the work dullness - you identified some of the ways of improving your workspace yourself, when you descried it:
* experiment with your audio environment: either speakers or headphones, either pop music, classical music or sound of the forest
* get yourself a cup of tea with sugar and chocolate
* try to find a more comfortable working posture: experiment with chairs, headrests, handrests, legrests, cup holders, mouse pad holders. Envision your perfect working position (without account on any chairs or tables or stuff, but taking laws of physics in mind) and try to realise it using the things that you have around.
* get some kind of a plastic mat under your chair
* get some cube goodies to spice up the rest of the environment around you

Just be creative :)

On a very unrelated note: got a job offer from Google, exploded with excitement, gathered the pieces, replied with a CV, thinking about meaning of life and this particular implementation of it ...

2005-09-26T22:04:00.000+03:00

Surveying web projects to remake the Latvian Open Source Associations web page. At this point we are hosting it on TikiWiki, but people are increasingly unhappy about it and so am I. I like very much that Tiki is very integrated and has all we need and all we might ever need (wiki, blogs, forums, articles, photo galleries, categories, users, messages, comments, calendar, ...), but it has several shortcomings:

The wiki syntax is very complex and hard to learn

The code is very bloated

Tiki eats lots of memory and CPU

It is kind of brittle - in many instances pages are sent out incomplete and only reloading the same page fixes that

There were some security issues with user uploaded files. I personally think that all files should be held either in database or in folders inaccessible by the browser and fed out to users by a specialised script

Plugins, while a very powerful tool, make the complex syntax even more complex

Many pages that the user gets can/should not be refreshed as that will cause a repetition of an action (adding another copy of the same comment, ...). In my mind,

The generated HTML pages of Tiki are huge - starting with a 100 Kb per page (including css and javascript, but excluding any images).

Many features that are natural for uses of PHPBB2 or other forums come like an afterthought in Tiki, like threading, named multilevel quoting, avatars

It is hard to maintain a modified version of Tiki and keep up with upstream changes

My ideal feature set:

Wiki

Forum (multiple named forums in categories)

Blog (multiple separate blogs with sepatare set of tags and a rss/atom feed for each blog, tag or combination of tags)

Calendar for planned upcoming events

Additional technical requirements:

Every object must be commentable

The same Wiki syntax must be used everywhere

Unified linking schemes with InterWiki support

There should be WYSIWYG edit option

Unified users and groups

Every page that users view must be a view page and not an update page. For a simple example: user is at viewpage/SomePage and fills a form there that will add a comment to the page, the form is being submitted to addcomment/SomePage with the comment data in POST headers, when the addcomment script has added the comment, it redirect the user back to the viewpage/SomePage, maybe indicating which comment was just added, so that user can see the change highlighted. Even better if it can be done, like in GMail, when the new comment is incorporated into the page without a reload and a request is sent to the server independently.

Names of Wiki pages must not be limited neither to CamelCase nor to ASCII chars. I want to be able to have pages called "Juridiskā informācija" or "開眼の司会者" :)

WAP version

It should be possible to attach files and images (with proper preview thumbnails) to each and every item: wiki pages, comments, blog posts, forum posts, news items, calendar entries, other files and images (hmm that would be weird :P)

It would be perfect if it was written in Python with proper objects for everything and database based object persistence

As you can see, I face a long selection/adaptation/programming prospect. I wish I could use as much of existing open source components and contribute my changes back, so they can be properly maintained within respective projects.

The optimum scenarion would be a construction of some kind of TikiWiki Light with the needed functionality, code cleanup, restructurisation, ... Will have to talk to TikiWiki project heads for that.

2005-09-06T03:57:00.000+03:00

Lets start a new meme - a useful one this time.
http://www.highiqsociety.org/noflash/nonmembers/iqtests.htm
This page has 5 IQ tests with a very good content.

I got 136 on the first test.
Now I am trying the "Test for exceptional intelligence". The crack that authors of this stuff were smoking is so strong that it qualifies under weapons of mass destruction. After two hours I tried to work trough 14 of 25 questions and only managed to answer 4. I wonder how long will it take for me to acctually finish the test :P

Once again - be prepared, this is not for the weak of mind or the short of time.

2005-08-25T22:51:00.000+03:00

Must ... resist ... latest meme ... Failed.

Hmm, nice. :D

2005-08-17T20:26:00.000+03:00

Remote restore fixed. Full planned functionality reached.
All that I planned to do for Simple Backup is done as of version 0.7.
Now I only need to wait for the evaluation from my mentors at Ubuntu and to fix all bugs they and all other users find :D

I also did a bit of refactoring in this release oriented towards less memory usage. Results:

Memory usage while restoring dropped by 30-50%

Memory usage while making a new backup reduced ... tenfold?!?!

I like it :D

What I do not like is the performance of GnomeVFS over ssh (Bug #155872) and also a need to download all the backup image *twice* to restore anything (in the worst case). Sadly I can not do much in either case :(
( Of course I could fix the GnomeVFS ssh module and write a new tar implementation with an external file positioning cache, but I fear that it is somewhat beyond my capabilities :) )

A World of Warcraft World

2005-08-15T09:34:00.000+03:00

A World of Warcraft World

Kind of a scary list of things that will, according to the author, happen in the future of global MMORPGs. I have read many books on the subject and I find that the author should propably read "False Mirrors" by Sergej Lukjanenko. At this point that book is the best description of how our world could look like when taken over by Internet and MMORPGs.

Nerd Quiz

2005-08-13T23:42:00.000+03:00

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz: "
"
Didn't expect to score that high after aswering some of the questions in thuthful and not geeky way, but ... :D

2005-08-11T03:30:00.000+03:00

Ok, now the 0.5 release of my Simple Backup suite can now actually restore something from your backups! (both command-line and Gnome interfaces) It now even does automatic backups (and not just claims that it does). It even doesn't store empty folders in the backup. Oh and some usability fixes are also thrown in for no extra charge. :)
Note: due to a small, tiny bug in gnomevfs, restoring files from remote backup locations doesn't work yet. I'll have to do a lot of hacking to get that working :P

Yoga + breathing

2005-08-08T05:00:00.000+03:00

Between two hacking sessions I also did a yoga session today. I think that I realized, why such simple actions take such great effort when you are doing proper yoga. I think that the point is that you twist/bend/compress you body into an inconvenient position and then the real exercise starts: 1. maintaining a position is harder then assuming it, 2. you must breathe deeply and forcefully thus forceing your lungs to press against other organs and expand you body. Your muscles will have to strain quite a lot just to keep your position under increased pressure. Then when you breath out, your muscles will relax. This is just like your common workout in the gym, but in the case of yoga you will strain such muscles that you would not be able to strain otherwise.
Note: I somehow feel that my spellcheck is not working. That sucks :P

0.3 release of SBackup :)

2005-08-08T03:54:00.000+03:00

This week was a productive for me, but I did run into some unexpected
technical difficulities and thus had to work throught the weekend to
catch up.

I just did the 0.3 release on freashmeat and sourceforge.

Progress checklist:
* backend daemon - ok
* GUI configurator - ok
* commandline restore - 50% (need to write a directory extraction
function that is missing from python tarfile module)
* GUI restore - 95% (depends on command line restore)
* GUI to write a backup snapshot to cd - 0%, optional

Of course extensive optimisation, testing and polishing is quite needed too.

I should be able to finish the restore tools tomorrow if no other
major problems occur.

2005-08-06T02:19:00.000+03:00

I am behind my planned schedule by allmost two days, mostly because tarfile module for Python is ... not too complete, for example you can only extract files one by one :P
It looks like I will have to implement extraction of directories myself. Of course I will send it to the tarfile upstream authors, along with something heavy ...

2005-08-03T03:02:00.000+03:00

Still writing a restore tool :(
Last two hours were spent debugging an interesting problem with TreeView in PyGTK. It was too slow to parse and add all files from a backup snapshot to the tree view at once (not to mention that it took 35 Mb of RAM :P), so I decided to load the tree as needed - I would add the children of a node only when this node gets expanded. So I happily wrote a handler to 'row-expanded' event that does just that - adds some children to the newly expanded node.
Note: as the node cannot expand if it doesn't have some children already, I also add a dummy child to all directory nodes
Then the problem came up - once I enabled my handler, the nodes would not expand anymore: the expansion handles were there, I could click on them and see the CPU being chewed away by the parsing of the 6 Mb nodelist, but nothing changed in the interface - even the dummy node didn't come up.
That confused not only me, but also #pygtk people. I wrote a 15 line simple script to replicate the problem, but everything worked fine there :O. At this point I started commenting stuff out at random and found out that breaking the link between treestore and treeview (recommended in docs to avoid excessive updates) resets the expansion state. Doh.
But it was not the end yet. After that I noticed that the nodes didn't expand on the first try, but only on the second. 8) After some mental mummbo-jummbo I came to an idea that proved to be dumb, but correct. Prepare for a gem boys and girls - if, in the process of execution of row-expanded handler, at at least one point the expanding node has no children (like when you have removed the dummy node, but still haven't added the real ones) - the expansion doesn't happen!
Two bugs^Wfeatures with the same effect. Oh, the fun of debugging never stops :D

2005-07-31T00:05:00.000+03:00

Simple Backup Solution 0.1 is out !

With this simple and humble name my SoC project has met the first milestone - I have a fully functioning backend for my backup solution. The GUI is to be done next week.

You can get see the spec here, get the 0.1.1 version here and monitor all my development activity via my online repository. (You can access it with your web browser or with bazaar-ng.)

A Debian package will be uploaded after completion of all planned functionality, i.e. in a couple of weeks.

2005-07-30T15:37:00.000+03:00

Silence in the Net
Only spam is making a background noise
Saturday it is

(Haiku format was lost in translation :) )

2005-07-29T13:44:00.000+03:00

The python-gnome2 bindings for gnomevfs are completely undocumented :P
I so wish i could kick that developer in the^W^W^W^W^W donate small amount of money to have it fixed. :)

2005-07-28T21:18:00.000+03:00

Currently I am very busy writing my Summer of Code project. You can see my plan on the Ubuntu wiki: http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/SimpleBackupSolution and follow my progress in my bazaar-ng repository.
I must say that bazaar-ng is a simple as subversion and as powerful as arch, but as complete as current Xorg package for Ubuntu unstable (aka breezy) ;P
I am writing all of this SoC code in python which is my first real life exposure to this language. I am deeply impressed by the easiness of the language, but slightly depressed by the lack of documentation in some areas, for example python-gnome modules are mostly undocumented. While the simple stuff can be scoped out from some examples, a more advanced use would require much guesswork.
I like that in python everything is an object and that objects with similar interfaces are interchangeable, for example: Tarfile module makes .tar archives. It would really like to write them out to a file, but will also accept a fileobj. It acctually only need this object to have a proper write() function, so a Handle from Gnome-vfs module should do nicely there. That would allow a transparent reading/writing of the resulting .tar to any destination supported by Gnome-VFS.
Now that is cool.
I am writing a backup daemon now. The due date for this is tomorrow. I have local plain file and local .tar backups working. I still have to make Gnome-vfs .tar backups work as intended, make incremental backups work and do some configuration file parsing. Also a simple restore utility must be done 'till tomorrow. I might just make it :)
(GUI tools are scheduled for the next week)

Kittos

2005-07-21T00:48:00.000+03:00

I am still recovering my sleep after the Debconf5, but I now have a bit strength to say what I thing about it in general:
It was great! Thank you very much to all that helped to make it happen!

Back + foot

2005-07-16T12:42:00.000+03:00

I've been hit by two health problems today - my back muscles are cramping up: I cann't turn or bend without a powerful stroke of pain, and I found that a tiny piece of glass managed to embed itself into the sole of my foot and it is getting increasingly painful to walk. Oh well, I will have to miss most of the talks today, but at least I'll try to catch up with the bloging and might also do something useful in the SoC area.
Note: If you are reading this blog trough any kind of aggregation (like the Debian Planet), the photos will *not* show up. Bug already filed.

THE day of socializing

2005-07-13T12:59:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, the 13th of July was the one day that all (or at least most) of Debconf hackers were forcefully disconnected from the Net and thrown into the socializing, sun and nature. It worked pretty well.

First of all we all woke up early this morning - a lot of people even made it to the breakfast after a warning that today's lunch will be comparable to our regular breakfasts. Two boats were organized to bring all the hackers over to the Finnish Fort islands. (Some, like aj, escaped and went sightseeing to the Helsinki)

There was an interesting moment on the way as the boat passed under a bridge that was so low that you could just touch the bridge with your hand without much of a trouble. We also went throughout the jachts of the Baltic Sea regatta and were overtaken by the superseacat ship.

After arriving on the islands, we had to wait almost for half an hour for the second boat to arrive. To our surprise Holger was on top of it weaving a Jolly Rodger (more about it later).

After being divided into 6 groups, we were lead to see the Fort - walls, cannons, parks, and sand barriers were up for our inspection and admiration. In the tradition that is well known to any software developer, the project manager promised to his king to complete the fort in 4 years. It took 40. Now that is a slight delay none of us would want to experience. This project manager even managed to die in the process of construction, but the king ordered him to stay in the place anyway and designed a monument for the grave with his own hands as a compensation. You can also see our guide in one of the pictures here.
It is worth mentioning that there was an interesting guiding system in this place - every guide constructed his excursion from a set of checkpoints taken in order based on his/her preference and on what checkpoints the other guides are now.
Also you can see a couple of photographs that include me - this is a rear occurrence.

After the excursions, we had lunch in a truly Debian fashion - pieces of bread, butter, meat, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, apples and small drink packs. Then everyone went around and assembled his own lunch. The Debian party was occupying most part of the biggest lawn of the islands - that looked pretty strange.

In the progress I discovered that the not only shoes of Andreas Tille have a logo with a swirl, but that it is also extremely similar to the logo of Lithuaninan Open Source Association. That is fun.

On the way back I was on the small boat that went first. Amaya and Holger were here too. The made quite a team - Holger waived the pirate flag, Amaya waved her hand. Noone could resist that - everyone waived back :).

We went a bit more quiet after the military showed their interest.

One more fun thing - that is a really bad way to choose a name for a ship :P

And here you can see my selfportrait attempt. Looks quite ok to me :)

After that great fun, some waiting for Gunnar come back on the second boat with the key to our room (doh.) and a dinner, I went off to search for the big sauna. After some asking around, I fond it and also found all Japanese people there. After about half an hour the sauna key was finally found and we could get the party started.
The place had two saunas (electrical and wood) and a big rest place with a piano. I first occupied the big sauna (which was heated up beforehand by some kind soul) and started pouring water on the stones and entertaining the constantly increasing audience. After some time the sauna was full, but thanks to my activity, some people started to go out to cool down - the logical turnaround of selfregulation started. The second sauna warmed up in an hour and fast became the most popular one, despite it being able to only fit 5-6 people at a time.
Debian is a truly unique society - were else will you see lots of naked people of both sexes listening, with a great interest, a classical piano concert or singing "Yesterday" or "Over the rainbow".
Somewhere around midnight I understood that basically almost every person in the world is a geek, but most of them are so afraid and ashamed of it that they hide it, because otherwise they would be shunned by the society. On the other hand Debian is the society that encourages geekiness and grows on our differences. I think that a geek is just a person that is not afraid to show his individuality and that is increasingly important in our globalization obsessed world.

Debconf5 group photo

2005-07-12T23:00:00.000+03:00

Here it is (Google sized down the picture, so I used p.d.o :()
Many thanks Arto Teräs fot taking the picture! There will be a version with an imagemap with names soonish.

Note how shy and unnoticable I am in the picture - the one in the yellow t-shirt, in the middle :D

July 12th - still Debconfing

2005-07-12T12:20:00.000+03:00

This post is kindof a warm up before the comprehensible report about all activities of the June 13th, so this will have more pictures then usual, but less then the next :)

First of all I must note that I've been walking barefoot for most of the week and I must say that it feels really good, except for the really sharp stones. Walking on the grass feel especially good.

The other thing is how Debconf is not fully empthy even at 6 in the morning - you can see the dorm hacking area here has some people already awake (the people that were still awake, went to sleep half an hour ago).

A breakfast is quite light around here, but if you are skillfull at maquerading, you can get a second serving :). (Note: the person in the photo is facing the camera)
Some obligatory photos of the speakers have been skipped this time - look at the group picture if you want to see how they look like. I will try to blog about the other things happening here - things that are not going to be available as HD video.

Here is the photo of the (currently empthy) second room where some of the talks are held. I went here for the presentation from the OpneOffice.org Debian Team. That sure sounds big. But it apears that there are only two people on the team and that feeling of having a big team is kind of hurting them. So - OOO@Debian *does* need your help.

One other unconvential event is Branden jumping around and screaming "It did it again, you are my witness" and putting an obscure error message op on the big screen - you can see it here in all the glory. It seams that Mozilla screws up the type detection :)

And even trough the daytrip is planned tomorrow morning, the fun still goes on far into the night.

Another success

2005-07-12T05:38:00.000+03:00

... at waking up at 5 :)
The only reason for that was that I was very tired yesterday and went to bed at 20:00 or even earlier.

11th of July in HEL

2005-07-11T23:33:00.000+03:00

The first thing I really noticed in the morning was that I missed the breakfast, again.
On the other hand this wall in the cafeteria caught my lens - this is a clock up in the air, aprox. 3-4 meters up from the floor. Now that you know, where it is, notice the power plugs ... I mean ... why???

Soon after that I got the chance to play around with the new Nokia 770 toy. It really is a marvel - beautiful software, great hardware. You can see it here accessing the Slashdot over GPRS.

One of the talks I've been more interested in was the CDD talk by Andreas Tille (see my other blog entery about it):

I didn't take many photos this day, so this one gets into top packages - this is the cafeteria full with Debian Developers over the dinner time.

Soon after that I went to the dorm room to do some UI prototyping in Glade for my SoC project, but I was too tired and I had to go to sleep after a couple of hours.

CDD ideas

2005-07-11T14:17:00.000+03:00

I am now at the speach of Andreas Tille about CDDs and let me dump here my idea, what the CDD framerowk should do.

it should be enough to write one structured text file to create a CDD

you can select a set of packages that are: needed, recommended, conflicted;
you can preseed debconf database with answers;
you can do some specific changes to the conffiles or other files (as diffs or rewrite rules);
you can add/remove some text or binary files;
you can recompile a package (with a patch);
you can add some package that is not yet in Debian;

the framework can generate a set of packages that could be uploaded to Debian, to allow a Debian user to 'apt-get install cdd-something'
the framework can generate a simplified installation CD that installs the CDD with a minimum amount of questions
the framework can generate a LiveCD with the CDD
a summary of bug reports that relate to the CDD should be gettable
all the actions for a CDD should be possible to be done on Debian infrastructure. cdd.debian.org portal with standartized interfaces for every CDD for documentation, information, bug summaries, cvs/arch/svn/... links, links to all CDs, links to web forums, ...
all the actions for a CDD should be possible to be done fully independently from Debian. Packages for that should be inside Debian and should be easy to install/configure
a CDD must be able to do releases independantly from Debian
the should be a way to do security updates for all relased CDDs for some fixed time period
any CDD could be derrived either from plain Debian of from any other CDD
The feature set must be complete enough to have Ubuntu as a CDD

I will add more, once I remember more ideas.

Delayed photoblog - July 10

2005-07-10T22:31:00.000+03:00

This day is rich on pictures - 8 of them got in here, but that is a bit compensated by low number of photos tomorrow :)
Here is a photo of the cafeteria where all meal are served at the Debconf. It is not a bomb bunker.

This is the breakfast of mine for the day. You might wonder - why does that look so much like a lunch? Because it is. I missed the breakfast and only woke up at lunch. Doh.

And the I arrived at the talks and the first thing that I see on the screen is ...

Branden followed that up with a detailed talk about man pages. You can now also see that debconf2x-man generates better man pages then the first version.

The talk by Enriko was also very interesting, but despite being a bit sleepy, he moved so fast all the time, that I have no usable picture of him :(
Going back to Smokki we went by 'the lost band':

Here is a very bad attempt of mine to make a panoramic photo of the Smokki hacklab:

Many people wondered, why the hacklab webcam vibrates while going right and left. Here you can see it:

After the long hacking hours, many developers like to relax and have some kind of movement, for example like this:

Also sauna is an option. Today sauna was particulary good as it was finnaly turned up to 100 C, like I asked for the last two days :)

DC5 - Jul 9

2005-07-10T15:29:00.000+03:00

After some nice breakfast, the Debian Day started with an address from the leader.

Jaldhar H. Vyas did a nice talk about the Debian in general, touching a lot of later subjects too - due to some technical problems, he had to go without his slides:

Then Gunnar Wolf did a talk about free software, where he also touched on the patent issues. After that my talk was up. While the video team was trying to get a nicer display of my presentation on the complex presentation system of the room, I introduced myself and noted my involvement with the swpat issues in EU. After the applause stopped, the hardware was ready and I could start with my talk. It went very well despite being prepared the night before - the CDD possible relationship with Ubuntu inspired some ideas that, I hope, will make Ubuntu into a kind of CDD.

Here is a picture of internals of the CS department building that the talks are happening in. You can see that the weather here is just perfect.

Alexander Schmehl's speach about involvement into Debian as an end-user was even more funny then expected because of repeated and different hardware failures of the presentation beamer control system and attempts of the video team to repair it. I didn't manage to get a clear picture of Alex banging his head against the blackboard, but this face expression of his is allmost as good, but see the video for the best effect. :D

After that allmost all DDs went to the Smokki hacklab to do some hacking. Here we can see some GAIM hacking in progress :)

Later in the evening there was a great game of Ultimate (5 on 5). I was on the same team as Mark Shuttleworth and I participated in all scorings from our team, but the problem was that there was not too many of those. While we didn't keep the score (this game is very exhausting), our team definately lost :(. After that the Ultimate players occupied the sauna - Ultimate Sauna was that. It was quite fun despite the low temperature. No photos from there, again. :)

1.08 Euro?!?!

2005-07-09T14:58:00.000+03:00

This will not wait until the daily summary: in Extremadura all mainterance costs of all LinEx distributions, including a dedicated system administrator in every school and including three developers only cost them 1.08 € per computer per year !!!
This is simply fenomenal.

Debconf - first day + morning

2005-07-09T13:25:00.000+03:00

Let us try out a photoblogging format for the daily Debconf5 reportings.
I only arrived here yesterday and here is the schedule of the bus from the center of Helsinki to the campus region:

After following the many friendly signs, I arrived to the site and spotted the first developers:

Some more were just around the corner:

After trying to start the wireless according to several mystical HowTo's and giving up after two hours, I had to plug myself into the Ethernet jack in the dorm room and start working on the presentation for tomorrow. Actually I was not the only one doing that on the last night - developers are lazy :)

The night was long and funny

Around 70 developers were said to have arrived on this day

No photos from the dorm sauna, sorry :)

In the morning we only got up half an hour before the end of the breakfast - around 8:30.

SOFTWARE PATENTS REJECTED!!!!!

2005-07-06T13:29:00.000+03:00

Hurrray!
648 in favor (of rejection), 14 against, 18 abstentions

Anime night

2005-07-05T17:49:00.000+03:00

A couple of days ago I was at an event of the local anime society - half a night of anime. The selected movies were really psyhic. It started with a simple and easy "She and her cat", continued with a nice and romantic "Voices of a distant star" and then went into overdrive with "1001 night", "Perfect Blue", "Cat soup" and "Tales of the Labyrinth". In the end there was a chillout period with "Ghiblis" and another version of "She and her cat".

As that was not enough for us - we went for an afterparty: watching "Fruit basket" 'till the morning :D

Slow and Strange hangs

2005-07-05T17:41:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I started to try to configure my desktop and my notebook to talk to each other via wireless using the AdHoc mode. The results were far from good - the best I could get, after few hours of desperate hacking around, was a working link with 100 Kbit/s.
The best thing was that my desktop started behaving erratically - almost all programs started to have strange 2 minute hangs all the time. Strace showed that they tried to connect to the portmapper. Disabling, enabling or even removing the portmapper didn't help. After much head bumping I traced the culpit back to a SNAT statement that I put up to allow my notebook to get some Internet - I appeared to SNAT all localhost connections and they had to timeout instead of getting an instant 'Connection refused'.
Doh!

Return from BXL

2005-07-05T17:36:00.000+03:00

When I came back from Brussels, my bag went missing in the airport. It seams that BXL airport folks lost a trolley or something, as I was not alone in this. The airport people took my phone number, home address, tag and ticket numbers and a description of the bag.
The next day they called in to say that they found it. In a half an hour a delivery man from the airport came to my house to bring my bag.
All well what ends well.

Whooaaaaahaaaa

2005-06-30T18:57:00.000+03:00

Today I cook for the FFII apartment and nobody can stop me :D
I am trying out a variation of the spagetti with a meat/potato sauce, so nothing can go wrong there. Or so you thought ...

June 30

2005-06-30T17:23:00.000+03:00

A slow start of a slow day - I broke my 5 am rule :(. I only woke up at 9:30. The breakfast hall had a lot of Russian tourists - you cann't avoid them anywhere :).
Nothing FFIIish to do today - all Latvian MEPs are gone. For that reason I am in the FFII apartment catching up on my mail, filling Google SoC application and tax forms (I hate taxes!) and helping all the guys here to make the decision that they do not want to make :)
It turns out that at least five separate groups have tabled our "Rocard-Buzek compromise" amendment sets and there is a bit of a confusion in the tabling office regarding the name of this set in the official papers.
It's a pity that I've not yet started writing anything for the SoC - that is bad. I will spend the whole of the next week on that to catch up with the schedule that I still have to make :)