[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Note to self: You live in Ottawa. Ottawa is in a big, flat, river valley. When it is windy, it is VERY windy. When you know it is going to be a rainy, windy day, you need to bring the big, industrial-strength umbrella, not the wimpy retractable one you keep in your bag for emergencies.
gman: As I was reading recentlog, I saw your song posting, and as I read it, the words formed in my brain with a British accent and in the tune of the song. I didn't even recognize it at first as Pink Floyd... the song just formed in my brain. Very strange...
And now I am going to have that song in my brain all day... ;-)
tim: Good to see you here! I didn't realize that you were. Interesting article.
Remote access HOWTO - Finished up and released a HOWTO on accessing our server manager using SSL which is a new way in the latest version of our product. Rather cool for people needing to remotely administer a server.
Security white paper - Spent most of the day writing an update to our security white paper. The version currently available (the previous link) is for our "e-smith server and gateway 4.1.2" product. We need it for the new version 5, a.k.a. the "SME Server V5". So it was a lot of executing commands and gathering text. New version will be online at some point soon.
LPI Testing - Proctored the LPI Level 2 beta exam for 8 local Linux users... It took 2+ hours for most of them. Having taken the beta exam, I can say that it is one tough exam. People passing this exam will definitely know their stuff about Linux.
Time to head home...
[Written on Monday, Oct 22nd, and never posted.]
Beautiful fall day today... only issue is that I am getting over a cold that hit me all weekend... hardly slept at all last night.
makefaq for Windows - In an interesting development, a person named Morgan Feldon sent me a note saying that he had converted my makefaq app to run on Windows. You can download it from his site. Now, my version, being a python app, works perfectly fine on Windows, providing you have python installed. Which, of course, many Windows sites do not. This gentleman created a .EXE file, not sure in what language.
In a quick look, it loosely follows what feldspar and I did with makefaq. It uses a similar format for the data file, although with square brackets around the tags instead of angle brackets. In a rather cool way, he puts some of the overall config info into the data file itself, rather than into separate header/footer files like makefaq does.
All in all, it is cool to see someone taking the work we started and developing it in a different way. For Windows boxes without python, this should work very well.
Literate Programming - Found this link in the docbook-apps mailing list today for "XML-Lit". Interesting stuff as it potentially makes it easier to document code. Another user on docbook-apps also wrote up his approach to the same thing.
Ottawa Python Authors Group - OPAG has an updated web site all generated dynamically using a python CGI script (of course). Kudos to Mike Soulier, OttawaDave and others for putting the site together... it looks cool!
Rebooting into Windows - I finally had to suck it up last Friday and reboot my laptop into Windows 98 in order to participate in a "virtual classroom" training session. The plugins for the browser only work on Windows. Now, I tried to participate using a browser inside of a VMWare session of Windows2K, running on top of Win2K. It was, however, a completely horrid experience. So I had to actually reboot into Windows for the first time in months. Someone here at the office suggested that I could have reniced the vmware process... yes, I could have... but the results could have been interesting... something to try sometime, I suppose.
LPI Level 2 exam - Tomorrow night, I will be proctoring the LPI Level 2 exam for 7 members of OCLUG who will be taking it here at the Mitel office. Alan Mead has made it incredibly easy to administer paper-based versions of the LPI exams. It is very cool!
Curling - Feeling too sick to go tonight... bummer...
mperry: I know what you mean about change... and yes, we must embrace change... "change is good"... (it sounds good to keep repeating to yourself when you are in the midst of chaos! :-) Best wishes with it all.
DV: Thanks for the new version of libxslt. I'll help spread the word. Thanks also for the clarification on the W3C Working Group.
A stunning indictment of Windows XP - Brian Livingston has been a long-time Windows columnist for InfoWorld, and has written a whole series of books along the lines of "Windows XX Secrets" (with XX being whatever the latest version happens to be). When I read his columns I usually expect him to be a strong proponent of Windows and he usually is. So I suddenly pay attention when we writes an article about why he will NOT be using Windows XP. I agree with his reasons, but it is just nice to see someone of his stature speaking this way.
Training - Long day of getting ready for a training class for the next three days... for a number of new resellers... looking forward to it.
One year ago today... my wife Lori and I (and our greyhound Atticus) crossed the U.S./Canada border at the tiny border crossing of Rock Island, Quebec. We stopped there for about an hour while they processed my work authorization (at which point I could work in Canada!), and then drove to our temporary home for six weeks at the Les Suites hotel in downtown Ottawa.
What an incredible year it has been! And now we love Ottawa and seriously are considering staying here for quite a long time... and I have to say that this company is by far one of the best groups of people with whom I have ever had the privilege to work! It is truly a great place to be.
Save LWN! - In their latest edition of LWN, the folks there put out a call for help about how to stay in business. Personally, I view LWN as one of the best resources for news that we in the Linux community have, and would encourage everyone to take a look at what they wrote and join the discussion. Somehow, we need to keep them with us.
DocBook resources - Learned of two new online resources for people working with DocBook:
W3C Patents - It is good to see that Bruce Perens is joining the W3C Patent Policy Board. Very good news, indeed.
XML-RPC - I find myself very interested in XML-RPC for some different ideas. I found this HOWTO particularly helpful. I downloaded the latest python library to try it out. Interesting stuff...
Upgrading to Red hat 7.1 - As I got myself into RPM dependency hell last week, I decided to upgrade my desktop system at work from RH 6.2 to RH 7.1. It was quite interesting to browse through all the choices of packages as I was deciding what to add (or subtract) to (from) my system. But two CDs for the install... it's a long way from that Slackware install I did onto a laptop using, I think, 14 floppy disks!
Upgrade went well... only annoying thing is that now 'onsgmls' is more particular about SGML validation. It will no longer let me do:
<imagedata fileref="foo.jpg" format="JPG"/>
But instead I need to do the correct SGML form of:
<imagedata fileref="foo.jpg" format="JPG">
which creates a problem when I want to have one file that is both SGML and XML. Weird thing is that it worked fine with the version of openjade that I compiled myself. Now it will not.
Misc...
jfleck: Well-written article! I enjoyed reading it (the one you wrote about the geologist). Thanks for the pointer.
jooon: Ich wuensche Ihnen viel Glueck! Als es nicht viele Deutschspraecher im Ottawa gibt, kann ich mein Deutsch nicht benuetzen oder ueben. Ich werde schon viel vergessen.
Ilan: I always liked that quote from Dune, too.
Off to another night of curling...
Yesterday morning I woke up to -1 degree Celsius. That's about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. We had a strong frost. Plants will now die. That is the way of the change of seasons.
We also had a very brief hailstorm (as in, 5 minutes) Monday afternoon. Just enough to remind us that in a few short months we should be seeing snow on a regular basis.
Public Transit - Yesterday I took the bus out to the Mitel office in Kanata. 35 minutes going out (it is only a 15-minute drive). About an hour coming home. And I also learned that the bus does not start running back into the city until after 3pm. Still evaluating whether it will be worth it to do this - or if we should just suck it up and get a second car. Trying to avoid that if at all possible.
SourceForge - Almost registered another project there today. Then I didn't. Not ready to yet. I may have more to say soon.
XSLT - A great amount of work with XSLT today, trying to go from an XML format (and not DocBook XML) into HTML. Learning a great amount.
I woke up this morning and decided that with the weather still not too cold it would be a great day to bike in to work. So I got up and went in the next room to get dressed in my biking clothes... and heard something hitting the window. Opened it up a bit and yes, indeed, the rain was coming down hard! Oh, well. I am not that into biking that I will ride in cold autumn rain... back on the bus for me.
dsifry: Best wishes with it all!
csm: Sorry, guy, I just had to reply.
3 years in the life of LPI - It just dawned on my today that I missed an anniversary... it was three years ago on October 1, 1998, when I wrote my little article about why I thought there should be a Linux certification program. It was there that I said:
I don't necessarily have the answers - but I would like to participate in the discussion. If someone can suggest the appropriate forum in which this discussion should take place (or is currently taking place!), please let me know.
csm, Tom Peters, Scott Murray and about 50 others answered back that they wanted to join in. Jon 'maddog' Hall soon put me in touch with Evan Leibovitch... dsifry offered a mailing list hosted by this very, very tiny startup called LinuxCare (note the capital "C" that was in the original company name, but soon thereafter was dropped to lowercase)... and the rest, as they say, is history...
Wow... what a long, strange, amazing trip it has been! I have met so many great people as we worked together to build what would become LPI... it truly has changed my life.
And I am incredibly pleased and proud to see LPI sailing along fine without me under the leadership of csm and with great people like jewelsthorn involved. They are doing great stuff and it is fantastic to see.
We will NOT be March Networks - For quite some time, it was widely and openly discussed that Mitel Networks would be merged into March Networks and we would all be one large company. We have already done a good bit of branding with "March Networks" in the SME Server V5 in preparation for the merger. The merger is now off, but we will continue to work closely together, since both companies are owned by Terry Matthews and share the same CEO (Don Smith). Other than needing to rebrand things, this does not really affect us all that much. The good news is that I will not need new business cards. :-)
Linux Documentation Project - Someone on the LDP discussion list pointed out this interview with Matt Welsh, one of the founders of the LDP. Rather interesting read to see where it came from. Today it moves forward under the able leadership of dmerrill, gleblanc, Greg Ferguson, Guyhelm, David Lawyer and a host of others...
RPM Dependency Hell - I just wanted to install one little RPM! That was it. Problem is, my desktop is still a modified Red Hat 6.2 and this RPM required glibc 2.2... so I tried to install that... but it needed other things and broke other dependencies... so I added more and more to the directory... which each solved some dependencies and then broke others...
In the end I just gave up. It will have to wait until I get around to doing a full upgrade of my desktop. Yes, I could have added "--nodeps" and installed this RPM, but then it probably would not have worked right... so there we are. (And yes, I know my Debian friends will rave about 'apt-get' and those using Ximian will talk about Red Carpet... but I don't use either of those.)
Parliament Hill webcam - While sitting in my cube, if I turn to my right, this is more or less what I see. There are a bunch of buildings in the way, of course, so it's not quite as nice of a view.
Thanksgiving - Monday is "Thanksgiving" here in Canada. Businesses will be closed so we all have a 3-day weekend. Why now versus when the US does it in late November? You can read about the history here.
Have a great weekend. I probably will NOT be online.
Dionys: Sorry to hear about missing the LPI exam again. And no, that I know of, there is no equivalent to LPI for the BSD world.
nymia: I think we are all on a journey to find out the message... best wishes for your journey.
Windows ssh and WinCVS - I am trying to advocate that some Windows-based folks consider using CVS. In order to do so, I needed to set up a sample environment. I have Win2K running in a VmWare session on my Linux laptop, so I followed the SourceForge instructions on setting up ssh to work on Windows. Then I set up WinCVS to work. And after a bit of tweaking of ssh (i.e. finding a program that would actually generate RSA keys), it all worked well.
The only thing that did not work is the display of files in WinCVS. I don't know if anyone else out there uses WinCVS, but once you import a module, it nicely shows up in the left pane. In the right pane, you see subdirectories of the module, and it seems like you should see files as well and be able to act on them. I don't see any files, though. If I switch to the Explore view, I do see them, but I would expect to also see them in the regular "Modules" view.
If anyone reading this has experience with WinCVS and has any ideas what is up, please email me. I am using WinCVS 1.2. Thanks.
More reasons NOT to use SVG - Beyond Kodak, now another example of why the SVG format should be avoided: LWN mentions that Apple has a patent that they will license under RAND terms. Read about it here and here.
Interestingly, Chris Lilly from the W3C indicates in his message that Kodak has released their claim on SVG and the SVG committee worked around Apple's issue. So perhaps the issue is a bit better than it appears. It would be nice if it were, as SVG seems to be an interesting format.
XSLT - During a break this afternoon, I took 10 minutes to enter an XSLT stylesheet found in O'Reilly's new "XSLT" book that counts up the elements in your XML file. Rather cool. Here is a taste of the output:
$ xsltproc element-list.xsl sample.xml
Summary of Elements
Element author occurs 1 times.
Element book occurs 1 times.
Element bookinfo occurs 1 times.
Element chapter occurs 1 times.
Element emphasis occurs 2 times.
Element imagedata occurs 2 times.
Element para occurs 11 times.
<output snipped for brevity>
There are 45 elements in all.
$
Now what is much more interesting is when I do it on the DocBook XML file for our user manual, as that is a much bigger file. What is useful to me is that I can see, for instance, that I have 93 <mediaobject> elements, yet only 92 <textobject> elements, meaning one of my images will not have an ALT attribute in HTML... so I can fix that. Rather cool stuff.
The West Wing - I thought the special episode they aired last night on terrorism was very well done. It dealt with the issues around terrorism and did so in, I thought, a balanced and thoughtful way. Quite good.
The only very minor quibble I had with it was with their geography at the beginning of things. Something bothered my last night at the very beginning when the FBI agent said that a suspected terrorist had crossed from Ontario into Vermont, but I couldn't place it. This morning's paper had the solution... Ontario does not have a border with Vermont! Vermont touches the Quebec border. Minor detail... and not something that detracted from the rest of the show.
Enterprise - Speaking of TV, I have now taped the 2-hr premiere of Enterprise and also the episode last night. I haven't had time to watch either, but look forward to doing so soon.
Time to go to OCLUG...
Ahh, I love the autumn weather... it is just such a wonderful time to be alive.
A game HOWTO - Well, I received our first contributed HOWTO document on running a game server on an SME Server V5. The game is Counter Strike, and I guess there are quite a number of people who like to play it. Anyway, we now have our first gaming HOWTO on the long list. Rather cool.
Friends don't let friends use IIS - I had heard about it, but today a colleague pointed me to the actual page from Gartner with their warning about not using IIS.
The W3C Patent Wars Continue - Nice to see the W3C's response and their lengthening of the comment period. Now it is time to get some longer and more solid comments in there. Of course, judging by the comments at LinuxToday, the W3C seems to have lost a great amount of credibility in a number of people's eyes.
Curling - Played in the first game of my league last Monday. Did fairly well given that it was only my third time on the ice. Our team lost, but we had a good time. We do not play next Monday, as it is Canadian Thanksgiving, but we are up again on the 15th.
Public Toilet Map of Australia? - You do have to sometimes wonder about our friends down in the land of Oz... Their explanation contained this:
Although the Map will be of use to all persons requiring information about public toilets, the Government recognises that incontinence can be an isolating condition which makes travel difficult. For this reason, the Map was designed specifically to assist persons experiencing incontinence with travel and daily living arrangements.
Nice that they are so concerned about incontinence... (this was sent to me by one of our Aussie developers)
I am an uncle - My wife's sister just gave birth today around 3pm. I now have a new nephew, Nicholas, who came into this world at 9 pounds, 7 ozs. Very cool!
Royalty-based standards on the web?
lilo - Thank you for the pointer . I filed comments there before the deadline. We all need to... this is rather disappointing to see.
Why NOT to use SVG for graphics! - So the SVG standard is barely out the door, and already there is a reason NOT to use it.
Why should we start using a graphics standard if Kodak can later assert a patent and start charging a fee?
Too bad, as the standard looks really interesting and I was planning to use XSLT to process some items into SVG.
Yet another grey, dull, rainy day in Ottawa. I think it has been this way since last Friday.
paci: Congrats!
Curling - Well, due to all this rain, the humidity was too high for the curling club to lay down the ice earlier in the week. So the clinic that was supposed to be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday never happened... I went Tuesday night for a section on theory/equipment, etc., but I did not learn too many more things than what I had picked up from reading. The other two nights were cancelled... which brings us to last night, when...
The club had its first "bonspiel"... and I played in it. Basically, it is a three-day competition. We played last night, again tonight, and then once more tomorrow. So I got a five-minute quick lesson on the ice... and then I was off with my team. I was throwing "lead" - the first position where your throw is not as crucial to the scoring. So my first two rocks didn't even make it down to the other end of the sheet. Next time up I put too much power on them and they sailed through the "house" (the target at the other end) and to the end of the ice sheet. Later in the game I did actually make some real shots... a draw, a guard, a takeout... not necessarily by any great plan of mine but more just because things worked out. :-)
I had only one major fall (rather dramatically!) and the other folks were very patient with me. It turned out to be a lot of fun (and a LOT of exercise) and our team only lost by one point. Quite good and I am looking forward to tonight.
Seen on the OCLUG mailing list - the following message:
I heard that if you play the Windows CD backward, you get a satanic message. But that's nothing compared to when you play it forward: It installs Windows.
I laughed. It has been that kind of day.
SuSE 7.2 - Finally bought a copy to upgrade my home (SuSE 6.4) server. Yeah, I could have downloaded it, but CDs are easier, and I don't mind supporting a Linux company.
XSLT - Picked up O'Reilly's brand new "XSLT" book by Doug Tidwell. Looks rather interesting... one more for my library.
Hope folks have a great weekend...
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!