Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

23:56 JST

The weather today was disgusting. Rain, rain rain. Horizontal sheets of water. Really unpleasant.

This morning, we went to see the giant panda at Ueno Zoo, but it turned out that Ling Ling died of a heart attack a couple of years ago. Perhaps I need to rethink my fondness of Japanese cuisine a bit. Happily though, there were many other animals to cover for the disappointment. Particularly interesting was the aye-aye forest. Most of them asleep, but the one or two who were awake were highly entertaining. There was also a hyperactive Galapagos Tortoise, but of course it can't compete with an astro-chelonian.

Pity about the Panda. There's one in the Berlin Zoo I've consistently failed to visit for the past couple of years though. Maybe next year we should visit Berlin a couple of days early and see about the Panda.

Dinner this evening reminded me of why I don't mind sitting in a small metal tube pointed at this island for all too many hours. We spotted the restaurant by the (very!) cute waitress letting out the previous party. It was a tiny place. Three tables only. The kind of place I gravitate to.

Our starter was sashimi, including a bowl of small living fish. I'm actually not sure which fish they were. It was not ikizukuri, which I've had in Kyoto two years ago, but a bowl of small eelish creatures. I understand other people's sensitivities towards things like that, but really - carrots weren't uprooted by choice either, get over it. Just bite once and the vital problem isn't so vital anymore. Also on the plate were uni and some other tasty things. It was realy, really tasty

This was followed by a fried fish and udon and then cold soba. Yum yum!

All this was of course accompanied by some tasty sake.

The cute waitress disappeared at some point, but the food made up for her absence. We have the address of the place, we'll be sure to visit it again.

I asked Sato-san to ask Them to turn off the rain. It seems They have misunderstood though, and it now started snowing. This is suboptimal. I'll have to spend more time in restaurants. I'll end like the Panda, mark my words!

16:49 JST

Hard to believe another year went by. I got back to Tokyo last Friday via Copenhagen. I tried to burn some expiring miles to upgrade Kristof who is travelling with me to business class too, but it turns out they gave him the upgrade without deducting my miles. Very nice. Conversation made the flight over much less boring than usual.

So far, the food is working out very well. Last night, Sato-san recommended us a yakiniku-style establishment in the vicinity of Shinjuku station. The one with 200 exits and millions of people using them all at once. Despite the daunting location, we found it very easily. And the food was scrumptious, as expected.

Earlier today, we met up with the Italian invasion and went to check if Meiji Shrine was still where it was last year. While taking my annual picture of the enormous wooden structure leading to the shrine, a Dutch voice over my shoulder wanted to know if we were sure we could take pictures. Turned out to be Paul and Cor. Bumping into familiar people by accident in a city the size of Tokyo is a bit unexpected. On the other hand ... can't avoid the Dutch, right? ;-)

Food tonight promises to be interesting again. Watch this space!

I am the proud owner of a Bluetooth headset. My laptop also speaks Bluetooth. Getting the two of them to talk to each other is less than obvious though. There seems to be plenty of documentation for ancient BlueZ versions, but none for more recent ones.

For future reference.

• First put the device in pairing mode

• Now use a cleverly hidden Python script (which depends on dbus and gobject, of all things) to do the pairing. I have no idea how I stumbled into this, and the only way to figure out what it does was reading it through. Highly intuitive!

  # python /usr/share/doc/bluez/examples/simple-agent hci0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

• The good news is, once the thing has been paired, it Just Works[tm]:

  # mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth foo.ogg

I have Opinions on dbus.

This year, FOSDEM didn't completely kill me like last year. Cleanup still turned me into a living corpse (despite the availability of Club Mate -- thanks to the Hackerspace Brussels crowd) but at least I'm back among the living a day after the event instead of a week.

I was very impressed with the network this year. Thanks to AY, Jerome and Peter from Cisco, and of course the FOSDEM networking team. We had to tell people to use more bandwidth. People even came to the infodesk asking us when the network would break because it didn't feel like FOSDEM to them. Yeah...

Taking it a little bit easier over the weekend, I was able to keep an eye on the noise on IRC. This little graph is highly amusing:

Back to work today. Very few days remain in my current contract, but that doesn't mean the work doesn't need finishing. :-)

Looking through my calendar (yes, I have one) for 2010 this morning, I discovered that I will be proctoring quite a number of BSD Certification sessions this year. Plenty of opportunity for people (you?) to sign up!

• 7 February at FOSDEM 2010
• Sometime during AsiaBSDCon 2010
• 6 May at NLUUG

Chances are there will be other opportunities throughout the year too.

Keeping up the appearance that planet grep is a collection of drunks, I accepted Elise's invitation to join a whisky tasting with a group of people able to compress their thoughts into 140 bytes or less.

First of all, I was impressed at the decompressed presence of all participants. They failed to depict even a single stereotype! Except maybe taking pictures of bottles, but I think that can be forgiven. ;-)

I was particularly impressed by the Caol Ila and perhaps even more by the Black Bush. The Sazerac Rye was also highly tasty, but I felt it was no match for the Templeton Rye Brooks introduced me to a while back.

In addition to whisky, the tasting session also included an amazing stilton and cheddar (not of the radioactive orange variety). I found these went very well with whisky.

In the end, I bought a bottle of Laphroaig 19 year old tastiness. Yum!

I don't think this will be my last whisky tasting session.

My trusty x60s is "written off" this year, so it was time to get a new machine. Blatant consumerism and all that.

Unless you drink the Apple kool-aid and are able to put up with their programmer-unfriendly keyboards (though that's gotten better of late), ThinkPads are still the only reasonable choice for a laptop. The logical successor to x60s was the x200s.

While I'm generally very happy with the machine (it's even lighter than the previous one and the nine-cell battery lasts even longer - about 10 hours, PXE just works, suspend/resume just works, it still has a proper nipple instead of a silly touchpad -- basically, it's still a ThinkPad) Lenovo made some really strange design decisions this time round.

• Why does it have to be so wide? As far as I can tell, the extra width is mainly caused by a wide bezel on each side of the screen. It's still very compact (about the size of a sheet of A4 paper), but it makes you wonder.
• The increase in width has subtly changed the keyboard dimensions in a way I can't quite put my finger on. I seem to be making the strangest typos on this keyboard. I'm sure muscle memory will catch up eventually.
• Why would you put a camera on a business laptop? Does anyone else feel uncomfortable staring at a camera all day long? I know it's not doing anything (because I don't put drivers for that useful thing in my kernel), but it's just "there". All the time. I'm looking for a sticker to put over it.
• The nine-cell battery sticks out the back a bit, like the extended batteries on X-series ThinkPads have always done. It no longer sticks out over the entire width of the laptop though. Which again makes me wonder why the laptop is wider. Surely they could have made a 12-cell battery that sticks out over the entire width, or just preserved the previous width?

I have basically come to terms with the idea of "wide screen", even though it's unnatural and crazy. I find myself using :vsplit more than split, but I still think it's nuts.

This particular model comes with an Ericsson F3507g Mobile Broadband Minicard, which is a very fancy gadget. I haven't tried it yet, because I don't have a spare SIM, but it brings an amazing collection of radios with it. It also adds a privacy concern: "theft deterrents" in the BIOS. I don't particularly want my laptop reporting my location (there's a GPS radio in it) to anyone who listens at all times.

Presumably, these things need operating system support and I can turn them off in the BIOS, but how do I know they're really off? Time to spend some more quality time with the bootloader to make really sure.

Overall, I'm very happy with the new gadget. It does what I need it to do and will presumably do it until it's written off.

I'm still trying to decide what to do with the x60s now. Other than the keyboard, which is predictably beaten up, it's in fairly good shape. Probably donate it to a school or a geek in the larval stages.

Of course there will be a Friday Beer Event at FOSDEM this year. Only this year, it won't be me organizing it. I felt it was time to do something different and it looks like Jochen has a very firm grip on things. I'm looking forward to attending the beer event as a participant.

What to do with the so-called free time now though?

It seems I've inherited the keysigning bits.

Setting up a very basic key submission server required a mere couple of hours of remembering why Perl is a write-only language. The results of that exercise can be admired at http://ksp.fosdem.org/kspd.pl.txt. Announcing the existence of this service to the world was rather more involved.

The ordeal reminded me -- again -- of primitive cavemen.

Every time someone wanted to paint a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, they'd have to draw it from scratch, either with reference to a previous drawing, or from memory. It was impossible to reuse previous mammoths.

One glorious day, a bright caveman discovered that certain rocks can be rubbed against thin sheets of skin to leave an impression, and the impression can then be used to draw new woolly mammoths. Even more (haha) impressive was that the impression could be used to make a new, slightly modified (longer tusks, who knows?) mammoth-template. Previous impressions could be saved for future generations, to teach them what woolly mammoth looked like in grandpa Thag's youth.

And thus version control was born.

Fast-forward many centuries. People no longer live in caves. Mammoths are now stored in "the cloud". Someone comes up with the wonderful idea of "content management".

One day, someone creates a mammoth and pastes it on the proverbial cave wall. A couple of days later, the mammoth needs changing a bit. In these modern days of the cloud, where mammoths fit in 140 characters or less, this can now be accomplished without going through the pesky process of archiving previous mammoths. Of course, the cave wall could be "configured" to keep old mammoths around, but why bother? In ten minutes time, there will be a new mammoth, and no one could possibly care about the previous one.

And thus version control died.

And mammoths are drawn from scratch again.

As technology advances, humans regress to compensate.

The keysigning announcement is now online. Being the caveman I am, I've also put it in a version control system, far away from any clouds. Just on the off chance that it may come in handy. You know, in a year or so?

Google is celebrating Newton's birthday today. Better late than never, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I feel it should be celebrated on 25 December and not on 4 January.

I am aware of the fact that the calendar was fiddled with around the time of Newton's birth, but I think the key defining element of a "birthday" is the day one is born (or birthed, depending on perspective). I'm sure Sir Isaac's mother thought it was 25 December.

If Newton was born in the 21st century, his mother would have had to fight her way through a forest of "christmas" trees to get to the delivery room.

It has become a yearly tradition for people with strong opinions about certain aspects of the open source ecosystem to suggest very noisily that FOSDEM should share these strong opinions. I don't think I need to remind anyone about the excitement earlier this year regarding one of our sponsors.

This time, Martijn is upset that there will be a Mono developer room at FOSDEM 2010.

Martijn's reasoning seems to basically boil down to we don't need Mono. He doesn't mention who those "we" are though. Mono looks like a very active open source project. Clearly the people working on it feel that it is needed. Martijn seems to feel that the open source software they are producing is not worthy of being produced. By that reasoning, why is there a need for the Linux kernel? Aren't there enough open source operating systems already? The BSD projects have been around for decades. Why have Python and Lua? Perl has been around forever.

I'm sorry Martijn. It's not because you don't feel a certain open source project is necessary that everyone feels that way.

The FOSDEM organization solicits motivated requests from open source projects who feel they would benefit from a developer room. The algorithm for deciding which projects are allocated rooms does not take into account the fact that some people may selfishly feel a project is "unnecessary". Our concern is to get the maximum benefit to open source development from the limited space we have available.

FOSDEM is not interested in politics. We don't want to be a forum for people to tell other people that their work is unnecessary. Strong language about "battles", "victories", "defeats" and "allowing to sneak" should be left at home.

FOSDEM wants to be a productive environment for open source developers to collaborate on their projects. Whatever those projects may be.