Older blog entries for thom (starting at number 43)

Robin Cook made an excellent speech in the House of Commons last night to announce his resignation from Tony Blair's cabinet. This has sparked a wave of similar resignations, but from no other big names. Clare Short has decided to keep her hypocritical power-grubbing mitts in power.

anholt: You see, those are facts. These are things that aren't interesting to people only wishing to make a biased and indefensible statement ;-)

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.