Recent blog entries for wichert

Annoyances
Telfort still has no clue.. my cellphone still does not work, and I have had no luck at all reaching them. Their support number seems to be completely overloaded so I have no way to reach them and complain loudly. It's probably time to switch providers, and get a nice tripple-band GSM phone at the same time.

Another annoyance that seems to get more frequent is information that can't be released.. on occasion I get some very nice information that I would love to tell everyone (like the fact that Debian won the IDG/Linus Torvalds community award) but am not allowed to tell anyone yet. Probably an inevitable result of the fact that companies are a part of the free software world now and the accompanying worries about public image, appearance, etc. Anyone remember when we were just simply hacking on software? That feels like a long time ago..

Work
Finishing up little brother for Cistron. It seems to be working pretty well, except for this little memory leak we can't seem to find. We've been looking for it for quite some time now, but it keeps eluding this. Having a service monitoring tool take down the machine it is running on is not exactly a feature we were looking for.. it seems lb will be up and running soon though which means I can focus completely on my new job. Whee!

I've been neglecting this for ages, and tali (no link yet, more people need to convince her to create an account here or a webpage elsewhere :) keeps mentioning that I should update it, so here we go..

Interesting thought for this week:

How would we react if Microsoft decided to release MS Linux, based on Debian GNU/Linux?

I can't make up my mind as to what I should think about it..

Catching up
Returned from California only to find my grandmother in hospital and my cellphone disabled. Very nice.. Seems the cellphone company (Telfort) suddenly realized they never sent me the bills for march, april and may and decided to disable my phone until I paid for them. How I was supposed to know about those bills is still a mystery to me.. And of course they didn't bother to mail me about that until a couple of days after they disabled it, and their customer service number is nicely broken so I can't even complain to them. I'm seriously thinking of switching provideres now. Luckily my grandmother is doing much better then my cellphone and at this rate will make it to 90 just fine.

LinuxWorld
Last week was mostly filled with the LinuxWorld expo. I'm not going to do a writeup of that, there are enough of those out there already. I'll just note that the show was bigger then last time, but the booths were also a lot bigger so in the end there wasn't much more to see. It also definitely was more commercial, which makes it less interesting for my tastes. Debian was all over though, thanks to our nicely timed potato release (and yes, that timing was a lucky coincedent, we didn't delay or hurry the release for this), lots of promotional help from OSDN and of course the fact that Debian won the IDG/Linus Torvalds community award (is that the correct name now? I've seen it named different things..)

Older stuff
I'm too lazy to write about everything that happened between the last diary entry and this one.

Wow, I knew I hadn't writen a diary entry for some time now, but it seems it's been a month already! Lots of stuff happened in the meantime.. there was the Linux Expo in Montreal, then a bit later another expo in Madrid. Both nice shows, and in both cities a lot of friendly people. Madrid seems to have a big contrast between cabdrivers who seem to be most happy ripping of tourists, and other local people who are really friendly. Just a tip for people travelling: it definitely pays to try to contact local developers. I've had a great time meeting other people on all my trips. Just also be open to showing people around who visit your area.

Another entry to cover a couple of days.

I arrived in Montreal on Saturday after a pretty eventless trip. When I got there it was raining, but a cab driver told me that it would be good weather the next day. Reality didn't agree though, I woke up on sunday to greeted by a snowstorm outside. Just what you want when you want to look around a city.. I ended up spending the afternoon and night to catch up on some strace work as well as cleaning up doc-central for its first public release. For those we haven't seen the announcement on debian-devel: doc-central is a small collection of python scripts that allows you to browse the documentation installed on a Debian system via a simple web interface. It still needs some work, but mostly in areas where I need help from others (any good html-designers reading this? :).

The weather on monday was much better so it was time to visit the the expo and see what was happening there. After some fun with getting a badge (seems there computer didn't think I existed and they had to enter me all over again. With typos of course, so I am now representing `Deblan') got in only to see almost nobody there.. apparently monday is a tutorial-only day and the expo floor doesn't open until tuesday. I did see Peter Ganten prepare his Wine talk and run internet explorer under wine, somewhat slow but definitely impressive. I think I need to try it again and see if I can't run my banking software with Wine now.. I hate to reboot my server just to use that.

It seems Advogato is being read a lot - I mentioned the OpenNMS project on friday and on sunday I got an email from them stating they were happy see that I mentioned them and promised to improve their website. I'm impressed a little diary entry here can have that much effect.

Just traveling
I'm not doing much today except packing up and spending long hours flying to Canada.. with some luck I might catch up on some strace work during the flight, but I'm not betting on that. Those seats are just too cramped to be able to use a laptop. Perhaps catching up on sleep is a better plan, I could sure use it.

Okay, the rest is actually yesterdays entry but I didn't submit it then..

Not my day..
This day just started out wrong.. it started by discovering that the people from the Linux Expo in Montreal apparently managed to mess up my hotel reservation and only booked me for half the week. At least that's what it says on the flight plan I received yesterday.. I fired an email off to them so lets hope it gets sorted out quickly. Then someone told me about the OpenNMS project which seems to be doing the exact same thing as the Little Brother project I have been working on for Cistron. Their project looks interesting, but there doesn't seem to be any code or detailed info beyond some marketing-speak. I think I'll just pretend I don't know about them and finish Little Brother :). I should probably put the code for that online somewhere before someone will accuse me of doing the same thing..

Debian on the move
Interesting stuff is happening on the Debian-frontend it seems. IBM and Alcove released a press release which mentioned that Debian is now the market leader with 27%. It doesn't list which market or where that figure comes from though, and the only similar number I can find is the result from a slashdot poll. Weird things are happening when the blue giant needs to rely on the reliable results of a slashdot poll..

I'm really happy with the current porting efforts as well, it seems that our mips port is progressing nicely (thanks to Florian Lohoff and Guido Guenther), so hopefully I'll get my new indy to do something useful soon. I also heard that the PuffinGroup (not part of LinuxCare decided to make Debian their official PARISC port. Expect some cool things coming from there! And finally tausq mentioned he build dpkg for ia64. Now if I could only get my hands on an ia64 to actually see that..

I figured that after registering myself here I should probably do something here. The obvious first thing was try and certify people. Being lazy I decided to start with the people who had already certified me and was shocked to see people certify me who I don't even know.. weird but pleasant experience :)

New toys!
The university here sold some SGI indys and I got my hands on one of the blue pizzaboxes. Unfortunately it seems the Linux port isn't very stable yet and so far I've witnessed a lot of ext2fs errors, unexpected errors, internal failures and other interesting events.. it's still a cute machine though!

Another expo..
Also started preparing for the Linux expo in Montreal next week. I'm scheduled to leave here in saturday, but I still haven't seen the tickets yet or heard in what hotel I'm supposed to stay.. Lets hope the rest of the show is better organized..

It will be nice to get away for a week, hopefully I'll be able to relax and catch up on some overdue Debian work as well as check if Montreal is really as fun as everybody is telling me it is..

Just created this account here while waiting for a system to reboot so I can test the new Cistron Little Brother on it..

Someday I'll actually put something interesting here :)