OSS

There are two things in nature here that I don't like. The ever-strong wind that slows me down when I cycle to work ... and trees! I bought this radio-controlled airplane yesterday and went to the park to try it out. The flight went very well thanks to some help from ... well, the wind. The result?



(Try to find it on the big picture, it's not too easy. :-))

Something I really do like here is World Market, though. They actually sell this candy we call "drop" in .nl, and it tastes pretty good:



I just wonder why the German pack says "katjes" instead of "kätzes" or something like that. And there are fishes inside, not cats. They're pretty tasty though, so I don't care.

Work is still going well, my main mission for during my stay here is done. I got two more weeks here before I have to go back to Dublin, so that's well in time. It'll be nice to be back in Europe, at last...

In other news, worked on BitlBee a bit more again in the last few weeks. Worked on the API a bit, so the next time someone says porting Gaim modules to BitlBee is easy, please don't listen. It's a lie. ;-) And there's basic support for Jabber chatrooms now! Just for the non-anonymous ones, unfortunately. (And the majority of Jabber rooms I know of are anonymous.) Will work on that support later, unfortunately it'll be very complicated and hackish.

And this weekend, besides "dropjes", I'm enjoying eye candy from Beryl on Ubunty Feisty. Wobbly windows and all the other stuff. Hey, I wanted some of my OS X eye candy back, okay? ;-)

I really don't like PHP ... Or maybe s9y is buggy here. All of a sudden (or probably since I upgraded to the newest version of s9y?) the timezone applet was broken. I just noticed it, it was two hours ahead of the real time in two zones. grmbl I have no idea why. So now I'm not using the PHP-internal Date module but just let libc do the work instead of the PEAR Date module. Calling /bin/date from a webscript might be considered evil by purists, but at least it works.

Just in case someone came here somewhere in the 5-minute timeframe where the whole page was broken. ;-)

cp: Dream Theater - Surrounded (yeah, still live)

The first week of April passed already. And I'm halfway my stay in the United States now. My colleague Rafael (who started working at Google Ireland on the same day I did) will return to Dublin tomorrow already. Because I'm in the Search/Traffic teams I have to spend a very long time here, apparently.

I'm making progress with the learning. Generally, my feeling of productivity is growing. It even happens sometimes that I can follow a complete conversation and understand it completely, which feels good, of course.

Didn't have too many trips lately. Bought a bicycle, cycling around a bit now in the weekends, and possibly from next week I'll use the bicycle to go to work. And I bought a new digicam this week, hopefully I can make some cool pictures this weekend. Pretty satisfied so far, even though I didn't manage to buy a cam that fits into my pocket a bit better than the previous one (on the contrary, actually). I hope the pictures will be worth this little sacrifice. :-)

Also, I managed to find some time to work on BitlBee. I'm finally working on replacing the old Gaim API. It's mostly a mass-rename of functions and, where necessary, rethinking some parameters. Got rid of a lot of redundant stuff like three different functions to report errors to the user. Once I finish this the handling of away messages should certainly get better, and hopefully I'll also be able to implement Jabber groupc^Wconference rooms properly.

Oh yeah, and indeed CD prices are pretty nice here. Porcupine - In Absentia for less than eleven dollars. IIRC I didn't buy it in .nl because the price was around/over 20 euros. I'll have to hunt for more good CDs here. :-D

cp: Dream Theater - Metropolis (Live at the Marquee)

So last week I decided to start playing with Cacti a bit. Too lazy to figure out rrdtool, and Cacti adds a pretty nice interface for actually looking at the graphs too. Somehow the machine that runs the graphing tools always seems to be busy, but I suppose this has something to do with quantum mechanics. ;-)

I'm especially proud of my e-mail statistics, because they're partially generated by a cool Perl script I wrote especially for this. It parses logs on the fly and returns SNMP stuff in a pretty efficient way. Maybe I should put it online, so far all the scripts I saw are pretty hackish and don't work if rrdtool and Postfix don't run on the same machine, for example, or just do more I/O than necessary.



So now I got pretty graphs that have so much information that they're unreadable. Got enough to do. ;-)

Oh yes, and the Google ice cream really tastes pretty good. Tried it last Friday, and I think I'll get me another one this week. :-D

Also spent some time in San Jose yesterday. Found out there's a "Woz Way" there, indeed called after the hero called Steve Wozniak. For the people who don't know, he and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer (now known as Apple Inc, for some reason they deny the fact that they sell computers these days) years ago. Woz was the genius who designed most of the stuff, and tries very hard to not be famous. ;-)

Back to work tomorrow. And after work I'll go to my new home, which you can see on this map.

cp: Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother

So yesterday I added this cool weather applet so you can all see the current weather in Dublin. Seemed nice to me for a blog like this one. The original applet is pretty bloated and takes up too much space for my taste, so I made a compact version with only the more interesting information. Might want to share it with the original authors...

And then suddenly last night there was this ugly error message instead of the right panel. I didn't change anything and suddenly it was there, and it didn't want to go. Yay! Probably because I messed with PEAR a bit while trying (and failing) to get a working Cache.php module. Don't you just love PHP/PEAR?... /o\

So then I just upgraded s9y. Which is said to be pretty trivial, but not if you actually care about security and refuse to give webapps root access to MySQL. It's nice that recent webapps all have their automatic setup/upgrade tools, probably great for people who are stuck with some shared hosting server without SSH access. But it'd be nice to still provide other ways to upgrade/install stuff too.

And of course, when the upgrade was almost finished, my "ISP" (aka unsuspecting neighbour) went down again. And it's still down. Normally these downtimes are a lot shorter... :-( So I'm stuck with this 3G/GPRS card I have here. And I just found out that GPRS is actually more stable than 3G (aka UMTS in some areas). While ping gets just 0-2% packet loss (which is pretty okay, I think), it's completely impossible to keep a TCP connection alive for more than a minute. I don't understand why, but it's really annoying.

I'm really looking forward to the trip to Mountain View... sigh (Which will probably be in two weeks.) Meanwhile I'll work on my WEP cracking skills a bit. It can't be that hard... ;-)

In a week I'll be in Dublin already. My flight will leave at 13:00 and will arrive 13:35. (Don't you just love timezones?) So then I'll hopefully post more frequently.

Got one week then to get familiar with the city, and on Wednesday I'll have my "one day home search", which means someone will show me eight houses and I can make a decision and hopefully move into that house pretty soon then. :-D Until that happens I got temporary accomodation just around the corner from Google, so that's great. I can walk to work. :-)

Have to say I'm looking forward. It'll be an exciting time, I'm pretty sure about that.

Meanwhile I'm just trying to relax a bit. My long semi-holiday is almost over. Planning just the last things I can do while I'm still here. Meet some people, instruct my successor at my former job on Friday, etc. It'll be strange to be away from here for so long...

And of course I'm happy that testing.bitlbee.org is back in the air! It also helped me to find some very strange bugs that happen when using libevent and epoll and running BitlBee in ForkDaemon mode. Did you ever see processes receiving each other's event notifications? I did. ;-)

Just back from a short trip to Belgrade, and now I'm in the last days of my current job. As I could expect, time is running out, and there's always more to do than I thought, also thanks to having some "bad luck" with the only server with only one hard drive (yes, I know RAID != backup) and broken backup software. Suddenly it turns out that debugfs is not quite the best data recovery tool after all. ;-)

Meanwhile preparations for Dublin started. Looks like I'll go there on the 17th of January already to spend the rest of that week on an introduction tour through the city and another day for looking at some houses that might be good for me.

Meanwhile I didn't have too much time for hacking. The new BitlBee Jabber module isn't completely finished yet, I'm afraid. Would be nice to find some time for it soon...

Oh yes, and the following quote is making me a bit nervous: "All systems administrators have their horror stories. For me, it was setting up a HP Color Bubblejet under Linux using ghostscript before linuxprinting.org was alive. Well that was a piece of cake compared to what I am about to describe in this document."

I know how terrible the Linux printing hell is, so maybe I should go for Maildir after all... ;-)

Just to express my frustration of the day a bit. I want the left column to be higher than the right one here. ;-)

From time to time you hear people boasting that they can use standard tools to handle .deb archives. "ar x blablah_0.123-4_z80.deb" and you get two standard tar.gz files to play with. That's indeed convenient, more convenient than rpm2cpio.

However, just try, on a Linux system, to convert those two tarballs (and the debian-binary file, of course) back to a .deb. "ar cr blablah_0.123-4.1_z80.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz" will do, right? Try to install it using dpkg... Yes, it works! But then, try to put it in your apt repository!

{{ pool/main:
E: This is not a valid DEB archive, missing 'debian-binary' member
E: Errors apply to file 'iso/pool/main/b/base-installer/base-installer_1.42ubuntu12_amd64.udeb'}}

Turns out that there are multiple ar formats and that Debian uses a very simple format and doesn't (fully) support the ar files produced by GNU ar. It's quite confusing that dpkg does support these files while apt does not. Some consistency (or at least packaging a version of ar that is compatible with apt) would be nice, guys.

Anyway, to not be too negative in this post: debian-installer is pretty cool, once you understand the internals a little bit. I just spent a couple of days now on customizing an USB stick installation image, and I think I understand the system at least for a few percents by now. ;-) Have to find the limits of what can be done with preseeding files now. Having fun!

... What ... if anyone reads this? Dunno. :-P

(See also: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=161593)