Older blog entries for cdfrey (starting at number 46)

apenwarr, I think you're neglecting to account for some data. You wrote:

The problem is, the math is much worse the other way. If the other three parties form a coalition government, then all three parties will have to vote in favour of everything in every bill. That's about as likely as them voting down a specific Conservative bill. In other words, terribly unlikely. You have to pile up an awful lot of assent before you can pass a coalition bill.

Actually, it is better. The coalition has a majority, which means it cannot be defeated except by itself (which is quite possible, if they get silly). And those barking sounds you hear are the wolves at the door of each of the three coalition parties. Compared to the Conservatives, they're broke. I think that's one of the key reasons that any of these cover-your-ass politicians actually took a stand. Harper tried to kill them financially.

Their poor financial state should work in our favour.

In my book, it's a shame that it took this long. If you listened to the debates, the left leaning parties overlap substantially on a number of issues. There is plenty to get done if they focus on those areas.

They just have to keep their backbone and not give up too soon. Voters keep whacking all the policitians with the minority cluebat, and they just don't seem to take the hint. Minority means: fight hard, but bend, compromise, and work together in the end. I haven't seen much of that lately, and a coalition is the best news I could have dreamed of.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I'm not afraid of another election. I'll most probably vote the same way I did the last time. I'm sure a majority for someone is coming eventually, but the coalition deserves a chance to show what they can do.

Harper already had his.

The one thing that does disturb me is the lack of understanding that some Canadians are showing regarding the Parliamentary process. Yes, this new coalition is relatively earth-shaking, but it is how Parliament is supposed to work. It is really quite beautiful, because the real voter majority still has a chance to have their say.

The Ontario Linux Fest for 2008 is being held this coming Saturday 25th in Toronto. The day's schedule has been posted, as well as the detailed table of presentations and topics. Please check it out... there are some pretty interesting topics this year again, from the return of Open Moko, to human-machine interfaces, to legal matters and intellectual property, to OpenStreetMap.

If you haven't registered yet, there is still one more day.... today! Online registration closes on Thursday morning (the 23rd), which means if you want to get the lower rate of $40 (as opposed to $60 at the door), you need to do it today. You can register and pay for the Fest here.

With 27 presentations, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and labs, sandwiched between a Friday welcome party, and a Saturday night reception party, it'll be a fun-packed day of Linux and Free Software.

Hope to see you there!

At long last, the list of presentations at this year's Ontario Linux Fest is now available!

Please have a peek at the list, and then head over to the registration page to sign up in advance.

The Days Hotel, where the Fest will be held, has a special arrangement for the attendees. When you mention Ontario Linux Fest, the room price is only $89. I hear there are plenty of rooms available, but it never hurts to book in advance.

There is a welcome party on the Friday night before the Fest, and an after-party on Saturday night. Both will be held at the Days Hotel as well, so if you're attending the Fest from out of town, you may want to stay for both nights, and meet some of the presenters face to face.

If you or your organization were pondering being a sponsor for the Fest, the deadline for the show guide is in 1 day! The show guide includes your logo and ad, depending on your sponsorship choice. There's still time, but you need to signup quickly, and email me your desired logo and ad right away.

That's all the announcements I have for tonight. Hope to see you there!

For those of you who want to help spread the word of this year's Ontario Linux Fest, we have a poster available in PDF format, in both black-and-white and colour.

There are other ways you can help spread the word too. Here I'll swipe the suggested list from a recent email that John Van Ostrand sent out about the Fest:

• Tell your friends, family and co-workers
• Post on suitable forums, groups and mailling lists
• Tell your fellow students, alumni and professors
• Post flyers at your regular haunts: the water cooler, break room, server room door, classroom or favourite computer store
• Tell your favourite Open Source friendly company about it
• For all those writers, blog it
• For Facebook or LinkedIn users, join the "Ontario Linux Fest" group to show your support
• For users of other social networking sites why not create an Ontario Linux Fest group?
• And if you're hard core about it, add it to your email signature

It is high time I caught everyone up with our progress at the Ontario Linux Fest, so here's a quick status update. As you know, this year it is being held in Toronto, Canada on Saturday, October 25, 2008, at the Days Hotel and Conference Centre.

The two keynote speakers this year are Jeremy Allison and Jon 'maddog' Hall.

We are working on getting the remaining speakers on the main website, so expect more updates over the next few days and weeks.

Registration is open! It involves creating a Drupal account and filling out the contact information and survey. Tickets are $40 in advance, and $60 at the door, so it pays to sign up early! Remember there's the welcome party on the Friday night, and the reception party Saturday night, where you can rub shoulders with the presenters and attendees.

It should be another fun and informative event, and I'm looking forward to seeing you all there.

Till the next update...

I started writing a little simulator for fun, and while trying to compile, make tells me:

make: *** No rule to make target `lender.o', needed by `economy'. Stop.

I feel the need to post about this issue in the hope that similar problems can be avoided in the future.

My initial disclaimer is that I'm not a package maintainer for any of the major distros, so I'm not intimately familiar with the stresses or workloads that they may face everyday. I am, though, the lead developer on a project that I hope one day will be included in major distros.

Whenever I get some interest from potential distro maintainers, I try to stress my keen interest in getting any downstream patches. This is to hopefully lighten their workload as well as to improve the software for everyone.

Unfortunately, it appears to me that the patch that caused the trouble in Debian recently was not fed back to the upstream developers, and if it had, it may have been caught much earlier.

What can be done from an upstream developer's point of view to encourage these upstream patches to keep flowing?

And is it not almost a duty for all downstream package maintainers to send patches upstream whenever possible?

Perhaps in some cases, the upstream packages themselves are not actively maintained, in which case being a distro package maintainer is even harder. But OpenSSL is not such a case.

I've run into 3 cases so far where a bad patch to the libtar library has sneaked into various distros and caused trouble for people trying to compile Barry on their systems. Would it not be better for these distro-specific patches to be fed upstream, and get rejected with a proper reason? Would it not be better for all distro maintainers of a particular package to be subscribed to its development mailing list, and see these issues first hand?

Obviously I think so, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. I think it is an issue that needs to be discussed, and now's the perfect time.

The planning stage for the 2008 Ontario Linux Fest is well under way. Richard Weait recently posted an announcement on the KWLUG mailing list, which you can read in detail in the archives. I'll summarize briefly here:

When:

Saturday 25 October 2008

Where:

Days Hotel and Conference Centre - Toronto Airport East
1677 Wilson Avenue
Toronto, ON M3L 1A5

The venue is at "The Days". There is a shuttle from the airport, and it is an easy connection to the Wilson subway. If there is enough interest, a shuttle from the subway to the Fest can be arranged, so let us know. Since the venue is both a hotel and conference centre, there are special deals on rooms, and ample parking on-site.

Who:

The call for papers is now open. See the Papers page to submit your topic. There are spots open for formal presentations, for lightning talks, for Birds of a Feather sessions, for Demo room sessions, and for Vendor room sessions.

How:

There are also various levels of sponsorships open as well, for FLOSS-friendly companies and groups. See the Call for Sponsors page if you or someone you know is interested, from multi-nationals to family businesses to Linux oriented groups.

How To:

If you have a suggestion, idea, desire, or criticism, we want to know!

Mark your calendars. I hope to see you there!

I ran into that performance problem too, with my simple newmail.cc mbox summary program (see update_mbox_cache()). You can work around it by replacing std::getline() with the normal .getline() member of the io class, and using a non-std::string buffer.

It's still processing things line-by-line, which when compared to something like grep, is inefficient. Grep reads large blocks of the file, I think 16k or more at a time, and does its own very fast processing. But replacing std::string with a char buffer made the performance acceptable for me.

I believe the main cause of performance issues with std::string stem from the way iostreams insert a character at a time, and when using std::string, it is not very smart when growing its buffer.

I also find Boost regex to be rather slow at times, but perhaps I'm not using them correctly.

As you may know, the Ontario Linux Fest is being held in Toronto on this coming Saturday, October 13. Advance registrations are closing tomorrow (the 10th) at noon, so if you plan on being at the event, register now and pay through PayPal. It's all handled through the onlinux.ca site linked above.

It's going to be a day packed full of Linux goodness. I look forward to seeing you there... I'll be the big guy helping out at the sign-in area.