Older blog entries for thom (starting at number 41)

Life:

Just got back from Snowboarding in Colorado (Winter Park and Breckenridge) and hanging out in San Fran for a few days in the middle. Had a really cool time, up to virtually the last day, whence I landed on my shoulder and seperated my clavicle and chromea(I think this is how the bone is named. Close, anyway).
Came back and returned to work the next day, so I'm still jetlagged and ugh :-)

walters: You can post diaries with xml-rpc; see http://www.advogato.org/xmlrpc.html for more details. I guess a quicky chunk of python to just write a webpage and then fire the same chunk of diary to advogato would be pretty easy...

I'm a gibbering wreck. It's not often that I get shocked speachless but receiving a mail into my inbox with the title "Invitation of Commit Access from the HTTP Server Project" has pretty much done it!

Life:

Had forgotten how much fun clubbing is. Went to Fabric last night, which is their house/techno/stuff night, and had an absolute blast. Also ran into a friend I was living with in sydney, who now works there, so that was awesome. Have to go for a beer with him soon
My CD buying spate goes on unappeased - I picked up Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf, BT - ten years in the life (US import - £30!!!!), David Holmes' Free Association and Terry Francis' awesome Fabric set. Most cool, but causes my friends serious ire when they want to buy me presents ;-) Must get a list of what I have up at some point.

Ugh. too much work, and too much hangover. (Oh, and a totally incompetent hardware supplier)
So what I'd love to do at this point is just to leave until everything was sorted out to the point where I can do the stuff I need to, but instead it looks like I'm going to be working pretty much every day next week excluding xmas day itself. fun fun.
Hackery
Been bouncing ideas for a decent task tracking system; accessable from multiple computers via different mediums, ie web/rss/xml-rpc. I've not found anything that does something remotely like this, and it's something that i badly need. It especially needs to be able to have multiple task streams.
Also looking at porting gtetrinet to OS X natively, rather than getting my fix from the gtk version running in XDarwin.
The other thing I want to do is fix up a system for allowing Apache's Include directive to ignore certain file patterns in a runtime configurable way.
Work
I need to write (and I can't believe no-one has done this in a way that works correctly) a module for apache that limits concurrent connections. throttle claims to do it, but watching its output there appears to be no relation between its behaviour and the output in server-status. Also, throttle bumps the load average by a couple of orders of magnitude. Which is a problem.
Oh, and having something other than basic authentication for mod_auth_pam would be nice. And easier than the other problem...

chakie/mascot: Not completely true - modules kinda work, but you need the new module utils (called module-init-tools in Debian)

jfleck: no. Apache is a pretty good counter example, also Debian

sej: Wouldn't it be great if we could? But, it's pretty infeasible - the whole point of having a person integrated into the debian community to package the package is that:

They care about the software they're packaging

They're in contact with their upstream

They failover gracefully. If they don't have the time to keep up, they should ask for a co-maintainer to help; or for someone to take over the package, or even to orphan it and hand it over to the QA group.
It's great that you're willing to help out with Debian specific bugs, and I bet alot of maintainers wish for upstream like that.

sej: Well, it's an interesting problem. From Debian's point of view, why should we contact upstream? If the RM had to contact upstream before any changes, for any package (and remember, Debian currently contains (iirc) over 10K packages), rather than just announcing them to the only Mandatory mailing list for debian maintainers, he'd never get anywhere. That's what the maintainer is for, to act as a two way buffer between upstream and debian. Of course, the system breaks down when the developer is busy or MIA, but that's tricky to work around or solve.

Hrrm. and once again, it's been ages.

Debian:

So edd got his Debian account, which is cool. I've had to take a temporary break from doing Application Management (and handed gwolf over to a new AM) as between work and being "not too well" -- to the point of now having been teetotal on doctors orders for 3 weeks -- I had no time and less energy.
I'm still working on apache2 and related packages, but mostly in work time. The packages are now getting pretty mature, with a lot of input from debian's user community. I was breaking Debian's BuildDaemon system for a bit, but that is now sorted.

Personal:

As part of the cure for the variety of malaises I have, the doctor ordered exercise and diet. I'm currently 6'1" and 100kg (16 stone) so I guess that's fair enough. So on Thursday, I went down to Ealing Rugby Club to do my first rugby practise session for over a year. Sadly, I had forgotten that Thursday night means full(ish) contact. It is now close to midnight on saturday and i still ache. Everywhere. Still, I feel a lot better for even one session, so I'll keep at it.
I went to GameOn at the Barbican last saturday with RossBurton and his girlfriend, Vicky, which was a really good day out! Lots of really cool old kit, including a PDP-1, a pong machine, and all kinds of atari, sinclair and other gear which really took me back to my childhood. Tempest2000 on the Atari Jaguar is still awesome!

Music:

Just picked up a bunch of cds from HMV, including the new Death In Vegas album, which is, if anything, even stranger than the contino sessions, but very good. I also grabbed the Kosheen and White Stripes albums, and White Lilies Island. Seems like they're all pretty good. Been playing with GNUMP3d at work, and it's genius. The debian package is very well done, and the whole install took seconds from apt-get install gnump3d to a working server.

Response:

mglazer: Well, you seem to be disliked (I won't stretch to hated - very few people deserve to be that, and certainly not a person whose only "crime" is to be deluded and misinformed) and wrong, so that's not a great combo, although probably deserved given the xenophobia you repeatedly display. Calling a people whose culture is over a millenia older than yours "savages" is innane and ridiculous, and shows that you have no understanding of the situation. Rather than spreading hate, why not try to find some empathy with the tragedy of a people who find themselves in a position where they believe their only recourse is to kill themselves and many other innocents? And who were put in that position by the victorious Allied powers (so, read "USA,UK") at the culmination of world war 2, when they forcibly created a Jewish state. (I'm not commenting on the issue, merely how it came to be. I don't want to become embroilled in an arguement over which culture has the oldest claim on the land; or anything like that)
Note that I'm not condoning acts of terrorism, merely commenting on a side of the story that many people miss.
You should also note that the "Judeo/Christian" ethic that you praise so highly is (at least the Christian bit), directly or indirectly responsible for many of the bloodiest and most criminal acts of the last thousand years, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the conquest and decimation of many cultures in South America, India, Africa, and the Pacific by the major European powers, all of whom were to some extent "Christian".

Woah. So quite a lot has happened recently.
After continual beating via IRC and advodiary i finally cleared space in my schedule and did a full Bluez upload.
I now have commit karma on aprlib. Getting the email from the PMC about this reduced me to shocked speachlessness for quite a while ;-)
Apache2 is now in Debian unstable, which is kinda cool - there is already one package depending on it, so people are obviously interested...
I was lucky enough to make it to Toronto for DebConf at the beginning of the month, which was awesome.