Planet Claws Mail

Ricardo Mones: Go virtual and die

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:44:43 +0000

Yesterday I got a interesting announce in my inbox: try our hosting solution for free during two months. The announce came from the nice people of Gandi, the registrar where I maintain my mones.org domain.

So far, so good. Applied and got my share in minutes. The features are not impressive, just the minimal: 256 MB RAM, 3 GB (system) + 5 GB (data) disk, 5 Mbit bandwidth and a 1/60th part of the processor, which is marketed as something between a Pentium III and Via C7 processor (not very informative).
What took most time was to wait the reverse DNS to be active because of my change of mind in the middle of the process :-). The system installed was Debian Lenny, of course, and took just minutes.

Less than 24 hours later you can see what happens, and I have not access to the server... despite I love the way Gandi does business those are not the things that inspire confidence in a hosting solution :-(.

Colin Leroy: Deux mois sans cigarette

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:42:16 +0000

Ça y est, ça fait plus de deux mois que j’ai arrêté de fumer. J’en suis fier :)

Depuis ce post à J+ 3 semaines, j’ai continué à évoluer sur le chemin de l’ex-fumeur. Les clopes réflexe (après manger, en attendant le train, …) ne sont plus dangeureuses et ne me tentent plus du tout. La plupart du temps, je n’y pense même pas ; il arrive cependant que l’idée me traverse la tête que c’est l’heure de descendre fumer après le film, par exemple. La force de cette habitude ne doit pas être sous-estimée, pourtant : Clo m’a dit qu’il lui arrive encore de se dire qu’elle allait, par exemple, lire son mail pendant que je serais en bas, avant d’avoir un “instant pff n’importe quoi”…

Il reste la difficulté des occasions exceptionnelles et spéciales où j’avais l’habitude de fumer, par exemple une situation conflictuelle me provoque encore une envie de fuite vers une cigarette. Il faudra que je me méfie lors des prochains mariages, sorties ciné. La prochaine occasion du genre c’est dans un mois, fin juillet, concert de Prodigy. Truc de punk, méfiance, j’ai peur de ne pas pouvoir me reposer sur la loi Evin sur ce coup là. Je compte sur le tassement de la foule pour empêcher les gens de fumer.

L’avantage de pas fumer c’est que ça va quand même beaucoup mieux dans mes poumons. (Comme dirait mon médecin traitant en rigolant, “Ooooh, c’est vrai ? Quelle surprise, je m’y attendais pas du tout !”) Je n’ai plus besoin de traitement de fond et très rarement de ventoline. Je peux faire trente kilomètres à vélo avec un non-fumeur entraîné (hello Yann) et le suivre, ou en faire six comme un bourrin pour ne pas rater le train (et arriver à l’heure sauf que y’a grève, mais ceci est une autre histoire). Un autre avantage c’est que quand il flotte ou qu’il fait 34°C à l’ombre j’ai pas besoin de sortir.

Sinon, d’autres indices me laissent croire que ça progresse plutôt bien : au boulot, l’empêcheur d’arrêter en rond n’essaye plus de me pousser à la clope, depuis peu. On ne me dit plus que je suis chiant depuis que j’ai arrêté – c’est vrai que j’ai eu une phase où j’ai été, on va dire, plus direct qu’avant. Je crois que ça m’est resté un peu, mais d’un autre côté, envoyer paître, à dose raisonnable, ça fait moins de mal (à tous) que de serrer les dents en attendant que l’agacement passe. Enfin, les clopes des autres commencent à puer à peu près tout le temps (au début de l’arrêt, elles sentaient bon), et lorsqu’un collègue fumeur vient me demander quelque chose juste après sa clope, c’est une infection. Chers collègues fumeurs, vous commencez à sentir mauvais dans mon nez, et je m’en réjouis, c’est bon signe pour moi.

Colin Leroy: Escalade en falaise : vidéo

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:15:48 +0000

Voici un petit montage des vidéos du week-end dernier.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Colin Leroy: Première sortie escalade en falaise !

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:59:05 +0000

Dimanche, Clo m’a fait une super surprise de fête des pères et m’a emmené au pied du Roc d’Anglard, à Saint-Antonin Noble Val, grimper en compagnie de Pascale et Gildas et d’Ariane et Olivier. Ça fait maintenant plus d’un an que j’ai commencé l’escalade avec mes collègues et j’arrive à peu près au niveau 6b. Mais jusqu’ici je n’en avais fait qu’en salle, à Altissimo Saint-Martin. La salle est super, avec une partie bloc et une partie voie ; mais ça reste du mur artificiel avec des prises de couleur à suivre.

Dimanche, j’ai donc découvert plusieurs choses que je ne connaissais pas.

Tout d’abord, au pied de la falaise, on a l’embarras du choix pour commencer la voie (ou pas !). Pas de couleur pour se guider, juste une direction générale, celle de la prochaine plaquette… Et parfois il faut tâtonner, ou faire un léger détour pour se simplifier la vie.

Jusqu’ici, en salle, je n’avais jamais grimpé qu’en moulinette (où la corde est déjà passée en haut de la voie, et redescend, ce qui suspend le grimpeur qui chute. En falaise par contre, lorsque la corde n’est pas encore placée, il faut grimper “en tête”, c’est à dire que sur chaque plaquette rencontrée (tous les un à deux mètres), il faut poser une dégaine puis y accrocher la corde. Lorsque l’on dépasse ensuite la dégaine, on est au-dessus du point d’assurage, et une chute fait redescendre de deux fois la distance qui nous sépare de ladite dégaine. C’est donc avec beaucoup plus de précautions que j’ai entrepris chaque passage difficile, et je n’ai pas expérimenté cette fois ce qu’on appelle un vol. La confiance dans l’assureur et dans le matériel me semble indispensable pour grimper en tête sans avoir (trop) peur du vol… C’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison que j’ai refusé d’assurer les autres, car je n’ai pas (encore) appris à assurer avec un 8.

Une fois arrivé en haut de la voie, on rencontre un anneau souveau doublé d’une chaîne. Il sert à y passer la corde afin de pouvoir redescendre en moulinette sans laisser de matériel : on récupère les dégaines en redescendant. Pour installer cette moulinette, il faut d’abord se vacher, c’est à dire s’accrocher solidement à l’anneau à l’aide d’une longe adaptée et d’un mousqueton adapté lui aussi. Une fois vaché, l’assurage ne sert plus : on est accroché à la paroi par la longe. Il faut alors passer la corde d’assurage dans l’anneau sur le mur, puis la défaire du baudrier. Ceci doit être fait dans cet ordre afin d’éviter de laisser malencontreusement tomber la corde, et se retrouver coincé là haut en attendant les secours. J’ai donc fait ma première ascension en tête après m’être entraîné à la manoeuvre à terre :-) et j’ai malgré tout réussi à me tromper, en passant ma corde dans le mousqueton de ma vache au lieu de l’anneau du mur… Et j’ai donc recommencé la manoeuvre deux fois. (Je précise à l’attention de ma Maman que cette erreur n’était pas dangereuse, ç’aurait été impossible de se dé-vacher sans réaliser le problème. Ne t’inquiète pas Maman :-)

Les fois suivantes je ne me suis pas trompé :-)

Au final, j’ai beaucoup aimé cette journée (dont j’ai mis plus de photos sur cet album) et j’espère bien y retourner cet été !

Holger Berndt: Nautilus Split View Update

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:20:00 +0000

I've been working on cleaning up the history of the my Nautilus split view branch, and basing it on the official git repository. That's done now, so consider this post a call for testing! Grab the source and get it running. Please send emails with bug reports, patches, remarks, and also success stories. I'd also be interested in reports from spatial-mode users, just to make sure the patchset doesn't introduce any regressions for them. I'd really like some more testing before requesting a review upstream.

Some visual polishing took place compared to the old screencast, for example the thin border in the theme's selected-color around the active pane, and shadow around the inactive pane.

The buttons with the greyed-out look in the location bar on the right side of the screenshot are in fact sensitive. Clicking e.g. directory buttons changes to the respective directory and also make that pane active. The grey zoom control widgets and the insensitive-looking background work in an analogous way. That's not exactly HIG-compliant, but it seems very natural and intuitive.

Colin Leroy: Politicards à la con

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:48:05 +0000

Levebvre, porte-parole de l’UMP, après que le conseil constitutionnel aie tranché en défaveur de certains points de la loi création et internet (Hadopi): “Les socialistes [...] n’ont pas de quoi être fiers. [...] après le recours devant le Conseil constitutionnel, ils auront des comptes à rendre aux artistes et dans les urnes“.

Riester: “Le texte permettait déjà aux internautes de déposer un recours devant le juge. On gagne une étape, on va directement au juge. Donc le caractère dissuasif sera encore plus fort“. À part le fait que ta loi foulait la présomption d’innocence aux pieds, t’as tout compris…

Veut-il dire qu’ils auraient préféré passer une loi anticonstitutionnelle sans rien demander à personne ? Y’en a vraiment qui doutent de rien…

Enfin, je me rends compte que bien que ces gens m’indignent, j’arrive mal à expliquer pourquoi. Mon avocat préféré y arrive beaucoup mieux.

Colin Leroy: Webkit2pdf

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:56:28 +0000

Some time before Christmas, I was looking for a nice gift to Clo and had a idea I found good: a good quality printed version of her blog, for the souvenir, would be quite unique and nice.

Problem is that printing it would be really painful, with about 80 posts, I didn’t want to do that manually and thought it’d be better to be able to automate that with html2ps or something like this.

html2ps having a really crappy rendering, I investigated Webkit and found it would print nicely, but it only supported printing via print dialog, which was painful too. So I dived into webkit-gtk’s code and patched it and added support for PDF export (via GTK+ print support); then proceeded to write a little app to batch-export to PDF a list of URLs.

That done, I used pdftk (the PDF ToolKit) to concatenate all these PDFs into a big one, uploaded it to lulu.com and there was the result:

Some more iterations of the webkit patch later and with the help of Gustavo Noronha of GNOME fame, an official API was defined, implemented and commited to Webkit. After reworking my app a bit to fit this API, I’ve been able to test it with the second volume of Clo’s blog (yes, she writes quite a lot, this second volume has 350 pages for little Paul’s first six monthes !), and here’s a new piece of free software born: webkit2pdf. It requires a fairly recent Webkit version; I’m not even sure they released since the patch’s in.

Colin Leroy: Statistiques sur les mesures ANFR (Agence Nationale des Fréquences)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:13:23 +0000

À force de lire des articles sur les ondes pulsées du réseau GSM, qui nous émettraient trop fort dans les cerveaux, provoquant des cancers et des maux de têtes (mais pas dans cet ordre), j’ai voulu voir par moi-même l’étendue des dégâts concernant ces antennes.

Il paraît que le consensus scientifique est qu’un seuil d’exposition inférieur à 0.6V/m est réputé non dangereux pour la santé, et certaines associations comme Robin des Toits militent pour atteindre un tel seuil partout sur le territoire. Le but est noble, mais le ton alarmiste et je n’aime pas le ton alarmiste, surtout que les médias relaient (héhé) bien souvent les cris Au Loup sans aucune analyse derrière.

N’étant jamais si bien servi que par moi-même, après avoir regardé sur le site de l’ANFR, Cartoradio, à combien de V/m j’étais exposé à la maison, et après avoir trouvé ces chiffres (entre 0.11 et 0.51 V/m selon la bande) très peu inquiétants, je me suis demandé si j’étais juste chanceux ou si la plupart des antennes relais arrosaient déjà relativement peu.

J’ai donc enregistré toutes les pages de mesures de l’ANFR de la numéro 1 à la numéro 16328, modulo celles qui n’existent pas, grâce à ce script ; notez bien qu’une pause de 2 secondes a été insérée entre chaque enregistrement, pour le cas improbable où j’aurai pu mettre leur serveur à genoux à moi tout seul.

Profitant du fait que chacune des pages est sur le même modèle, j’ai ensuite extrait les valeurs correspondant aux émetteurs GSM avec ce script vers ce fichier CSV, que j’ai ensuite importé dans une base MySQL (car je suis nul en tableur) afin de pouvoir manipuler toutes ces données. Pour ceux qui sont nuls en base de données, il est aussi possible de l’importer dans un tableur en utilisant le séparateur de champ “,”. Pour ceux qui ne font pas confiance au fichier CSV, mes scripts sont disponibles pour le refaire.

Voici quelques résultats. J’ai été surpris de voir le niveau moyen et médian augmenter au fil des années : j’aurais pensé que, la technologie évoluant, les émissions auraient nécessité moins de puissance. J’ai aussi été surpris de voir une médiane inférieure ou égale à 0.6V/s : suite au bourrage de crâne des médias, je supposais qu’on était assaillis d’ondes néfastes en permanence. Ceci dit, ce schéma sur la FAQ de l’ANFR a tendance à montrer qu’il faut, pour être irradié dans les règles de l’art, se mettre pile en face d’une antenne relais. En dessous, on ne risque pas grand chose.

Quant au wifi, à 0.3V/m à 40 centimètres de la borne, à mon avis, ce n’est pas vraiment la peine de flipper du hotspot de l’hôtel d’à côté. Robin des Toits mentionne aussi la dangerosité du Bluetooth (portée de 10 à 100 mètres) ou encore des tags RFID (portée de quelques centimètres dans la majorité des cas – on trouve par exemple un tag RFID dans les systèmes de déverrouillage de portes à ventouse) ; de mon côté, j’émets (huhu) quelques doutes là dessus. L’ANFR ne mesure même pas ce type d’émission.

Ceci dit, on fait dire ce qu’on veut aux statistiques, donc j’enjoins quiconque est intéressé de faire ses propres statistiques, à partir du fichier CSV, et de me prouver que mon cerveau est déjà fondu.

Quelques chiffres que j’ai trouvé intéressants :

Nombre total de mesures : 14829
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 0.6 V/m : 9584 (64.63 % du total) (entre 0 et 0.6 V/m :9584 – 64.63 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 1 V/m : 11500 (77.55 % du total) (entre 0.6 et 1 V/m :1916 – 12.92 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 2 V/m : 13429 (90.56 % du total) (entre 1 et 2 V/m :1929 – 13.01 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 4 V/m : 14353 (96.79 % du total) (entre 2 et 4 V/m :924 – 6.23 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 10 V/m : 14780 (99.67 % du total) (entre 4 et 10 V/m :427 – 2.88 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 20 V/m : 14821 (99.95 % du total) (entre 10 et 20 V/m :41 – 0.28 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 30 V/m : 14827 (99.99 % du total) (entre 20 et 30 V/m :6 – 0.04 % du total)
Nombre de mesures avec signal <= 50 V/m : 14829 (100 % du total) (entre 30 et 50 V/m :2 – 0.01 % du total)

Nombre de mesures par puissance, de 0 à 5 V/m

Nombre de mesures par puissance, de 5 à 50 V/m

Les quatre mesures dont le signal est supérieur à 25 V/m sont : 8165, 8166 et 8181 (même endroit) et 13919. La distance de mesure est de 1, 3, 3 et 5 mètres pour chacune d’elles et la zone de mesure est interdite au public.

Moyennes :

Moyenne des 227 mesures en 2001 :0.67 V/m – médiane 0.3 V/m – distance moyenne* : 53.83 m
Moyenne des 741 mesures en 2002 :0.5 V/m – médiane 0.2 V/m – distance moyenne* : 66.68 m
Moyenne des 1632 mesures en 2003 :0.57 V/m – médiane 0.3 V/m – distance moyenne* : 80.79 m
Moyenne des 1737 mesures en 2004 :0.7 V/m – médiane 0.4 V/m – distance moyenne* : 63.71 m
Moyenne des 1941 mesures en 2005 :0.84 V/m – médiane 0.4 V/m – distance moyenne* : 72.4 m
Moyenne des 2634 mesures en 2006 :0.9 V/m – médiane 0.4 V/m – distance moyenne* : 72.29 m
Moyenne des 2380 mesures en 2007 :0.89 V/m – médiane 0.4 V/m – distance moyenne* : 62.7 m
Moyenne des 2525 mesures en 2008 :0.97 V/m – médiane 0.5 V/m – distance moyenne* : 66.5 m
Moyenne des 1007 mesures en 2009 :1.08 V/m – médiane 0.6 V/m – distance moyenne* : 81.23 m
Moyenne des 14829 mesures :0.83 V/m – médiane 0.4 V/m – distance moyenne* : 69.73 m

Moyenne et médiane des mesures, par an

*: les distances sont faussées par la présence de données vides et de données floues dans les données ANFR (’50 m – 100 m’ compte pour 50, ‘<50 m’ compte 0, par exemple).

Colin Leroy: New ride

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:05:39 +0000

English readers of this place may not know yet, but this post was about me quitting smoking. So, yes, I’ve quit smoking since a month, 39 days to be precise :-)

Given how I feel in better shape, especially in the body parts involved in breathing (allergies, asthma), I decided it was time to ditch my old, rusty and un-fun bike that my dad gave me 10 years ago and which has been built in 1992 or something (yes, if I treat myself with a bike after one month, I wonder what I’ll find after one year…). This old Giant Coldrock is now officially retired, and replaced by a brand new Giant (can’t help, they make good bikes) Rincon which is until now a very nice ride. I’ve only used it in the city for now, but I can’t wait to put some mud on it.

The mandatory pictures :

Old Giant Coldrock – Photo courtesy tmbs.nl

new Giant Rincon – photo courtesy Giant bicycles

All of this doesn’t help me patch Claws Mail…

Paul: Greedy, Thieving Bastards

Mon, 25 May 2009 09:55:17 +0000

It is said that public confidence in politicians is at a very low ebb following the Telegraph's leaking (and subsequent reporting by most newspapers) of the majority of politicians' questionable expenses claims. Claiming for second homes, piano tuning, clearing of a moat (£2,115), an ornamental duck house (£1,645), swimming pool maintenance (several claims), mortgages that don't exist (£15,000+), double-claims for council tax, a trouser press (more than one claim), home cinema system, removal of wisteria, trimming hedge around "helipad" (£609), leather rocking chair (£1,200), food, toilet seat, eye liner, biscuits, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

Politicians from all the main three parties have been exposed. Most give the appearance of being humbled in the media now that they have been found out, however, some, (the Tory gentry, as you may imagine), have appeared indignant that they should have to answer to the lower classes. An example of this is Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes in Devon, who claims that we are all just jealous of his million pound home: "I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy. I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

What is surprising, or perhaps unfortunate, is that it takes something like this exposé in the media to lower the public's confidence in MPs when just a quick browse through history will show that they have been stealing from us for years. Most people would face fines or imprisonment for theft, but these MPs just give an apology, pay a little back and feel exonerated.

There have been heated, angry public debates where politicians are confronted by their constituents, resulting in some MPs being in denial about the feelings of the people whom they are supposed to represent. One wonders if this could be the spark to ignite the summer of discontent of which there have been murmurings of in the press. There is a long history of social protest in the UK, as you can imagine (if you don't already know). Let us take the act of incendiarism as an example and quote from John E. Archer's 'By A Flash and A Scare', where he asks Why Incendiarism?:

East Anglia had a history of social protest prior to 1830 and the combatants involved in the riots, marches and demonstrations had learnt to their cost that open displays of protest brought in their wake punishments ranging from the death penalty at worst, to imprisonment at best. One has to remember the traumas and psychological impact that these sentences had on small village communities. In the village of Withersfield, for instance, with a population of 500, it must have been painful to witness the transportation of six labourers, who were later joined by their wives and children. In all, a short-lived riot permanently thinned this small village of well over twenty inhabitants. Many of these open confrontations were also unsuccessful in achieving their desired aims, the riots of 1835-36 especially so. Therefore there was little incentive to organize or protest if the ringleaders were to be singled out and given harsh sentences while points of grievance continued to exist. Open confrontation was also hindered by the increase in population, since employers held the whip hand on the employment market. Thus one major avenue of rural protest was closed up and the alternatives of individual terrorist action became a more viable proposition. Practicality was a strong driving force; fear of detection, fear of punishment, fear of association, all created a climate of secretiveness. The army, the yeomanry and the special constables were all powerless against such night-time attacks on property. To this extent Hobsbawm and Rudé were correct to view incendiarism as an active response to defeat.

If incendiarism was, as often argued, so detrimental to the economic interests of labourers, why then did it develop to such an extent before 1850? Farmers before 1830 were probably not insured and the fires would have caused financial hardship, but after that date insurance protected the majority and the fires were not so economically devastating. But was the main purpose of incendiarism to cause financial loss to property holders? The answer was considerably more complex than simple economics. Incendiaries never aimed to kill or injure property holders and their choice of targets was often discriminatory. That much we can be sure of. These acts of protest should be placed into a similar category as 'ceffyl pren' of Wales and the 'rough music' of rural England. It was a psychological weapon with a great deal of impact in the small communities. The sufferer was a target of hatred and he and the rest of the community knew as much. The victim had been singled out for special treatment and the fire was there to publicize the fact that he, more than any other person, had transgressed against someone or some custom. One labourer made the telling remark of an incendiary victim: 'the sooner he's out of the country the better.' In another case, Peck of Congham (Norfolk), although insured, claimed another incendiary fire 'would oblige him to relinquish business altogether.'

The publicity factor of incendiarism was important, for some fires were reported to have been visible across forty miles of countryside and they attracted large celebrating crowds, up to 3,000 in one or two cases. It is impossible to quantify the fear of fire but undoubtedly the farmers' fear was considerable. In a letter to Melbourne, the Home Secretary, the Reverend Brett of Congham wrote that 'panic generally prevails' in the county after the large number of fires. Labourers maintained 'nothing scares the farmers like a good fire'. This quite natural dread cannot be emphasized enough as a psychological weapon. Such a 'flash and a scare' provoked a repsonse from employers, often a favourable one, and to that end it has to be considered successful in a limited way.

Labour was adversely affected after a large stack or granary fire, especially if the fire occurred before the threshing season, but the incendiary's hatred transcended such considerations. To him the stacks and barns were symbols of wealth, oppression and power and the fires were a method of 'getting even'. If this was the case then it was more than likely that fires were lit in a less discriminating fashion during periods of greatest distress, because all employers would have been regarded in a similar way as oppressors of labour. Campbell Foster thought this to be the case in 1844 when he wrote:

Can we feel surprised that a labourer out of work half the week, and leaving his home, without having broken his fast … , should return a dangerous man, ready to strike a lucifer match and thrust it into the farmer's stack, who will not give him work, or into any stack, because it is the evidence of wealth and comfort, which, hungered and starving, he hates to see?

While farm work may have been adversely affected by incendiarism on a very localized scale—the individual farms which experienced arson attacks—regionally, employment was created by farmers keen to lessen the possibility of incendiarism in their neighbourhoods. Nightwatchmen were employed extensively during intensive periods of incendiarism. In a number of cases they proved ineffective and in at least two cases nightwatchmen were actually convicted of incendiarism. One labourer reportedly said 'the fires did poor men good, for they now get two shillings a night watching them'. General farm work 'not actually required, that is not immediately beneficial, such as marl and clay carting, cutting down fences, cleaning borders', likewise increased. Arson also halted intended wage reductions and, in some cases, forced them to rise by a shilling or two a week.

Incendiarism was primarily a response by labourers, especially the younger ones, to the oppressive social and economic conditions which they were forced to endure. It is possible to describe the fires as disorganized and uncoordinated acts of protest kindled by a work-force lacking bargaining power and fearful of open confrontation.

—
Links
MPs' expenses in detail (The Telegraph)
MPs' expenses on Google Earth (The Telegraph)

Paul: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Mushalla

Fri, 22 May 2009 13:43:06 +0000

A video of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble performing Mushalla outside BBC Television Centre is avaliable to view at the BBC website. A great track. They were billed to appear on the BBC television show Later with Jools Holland but did not – I don't know why.

They have recently released a 10" single, Alyo/Flipside, on the ever interesting Honest Jon's Records and a new album is due to be released shortly, (June 1st), also on Honest Jon's.

Other links:
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble website: www.hynoticbrass.net
Honest Jon's Records: www.honestjons.com
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble at Wikipedia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotic_brass_ensemble
Broad Casting Documentary Part 1: Tony Allen & Hypnotic Brass : www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBuwd2Dqul4
Broad Casting Documentary Part 2: Tony Allen & Hypnotic Brass : www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYQ1Hijuu_c

Holger Berndt: Geo-Tagging

Sun, 17 May 2009 08:25:00 +0000

Lately, I had to deal with digital maps at work - a very interesting topic. As I wanted to check out libchamplain anyways, I did a little plugin to display an estimate of the sender's location on a map in Claws Mail. This is a screenshot of one of my mails from a conference which I attended last year:

Of course, there's no way to infer the geographic location of a sender from the mail with any kind of certainty. For example, as mailing list management software tends to rewrite the mail headers, mails to the Claws Mail Users mailing list show up as originated here:

Other mailing lists (like GTK+, or Cairo) work fine, though.

The surprising (and somehow scary) result is that it works on a surprisingly large number of mails (in my quick test, almost half of the time), and if it does, it's oftentimes quite accurate, with deviations sometimes as small as 2 or 3 kilometers. I honestly wouldn't have expected that. The plugin is currently hosted on github, and requires Claws Mail from CVS and libchamplain 0.3.

On a side note: Also on github is an early version of a Gnome plugin, which includes the Gnome address book in Claws Mail's completion list. That plugin crashes on unload, though, which also happens during Claws Mail shutdown. I haven't investigated that in detail yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was due to a dependancy library not being plugin safe. Wouldn't be the first time.

Ricardo Mones: As times goes by

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:37:45 +0000

It's amazing to check and see how much has passed since last post. Not that I had nothing to tell, but maybe not in the mood to do it. Anyway there's not much excitement in my life lately, but looking back seems it isn't going too bad.

The project we were working at is already at production stage, and with only two or three phone calls to solve minor issues so far, which is not common, as I've heard. This is something I, as a the project leader, am proud of, and not being wrong with all the work-hours invested in testing and bugfixing ;-). The client seems to be happy with the results, and a second phase is planned, so more work waiting for our group. This contrasts with the landscape in other parts of the company, and the rumors floating around fed by the bad economic situation. Currently we already started other project for the our regional government, so we can't get bored at work until the end of year or so... Anyway, if luck smiles to me, I'll be doing more interesting things by the next year: yesterday submitted a grant application for review. Grants is a R+D program to provide funds for innovative ideas within the company. My idea is not so new, but it will be fun to investigate how to replace our Windows based SOE (i.e.: the image deployed in our laptops and desktops) by a Linux based one.

Time for lunch now...

Colin Leroy: A taste of Prodigy’s latest record,

Thu, 14 May 2009 20:16:09 +0000

…Invaders must die, which I can’t stop listening to since two weeks :

Here’s a video where they explain a bit of each track’s history. I didn’t get much of what they say :-) but it gives a good taste of the record’s energy.

Invaders Must Die, track by track from The Prodigy on Vimeo.

At the start the record surprised me quite a lot, but with more listening I find there are some similarities with the Experience, their first record (Charly, for example).

Colin Leroy: Un pas de plus vers la perfection

Wed, 13 May 2009 18:09:04 +0000

Voilà bientôt trois semaines que je suis parti en vacances avec ma petite famille…Mais Clo a très bien blogué sur le sujet et je compte plutôt vous raconter autre chose.

Je voulais profiter de ces vacances pour me débarrasser d’une mauvaise habitude, et je crois bien avoir réussi : quelques jours avant le départ, je me suis fait prescrire des patchs et pastilles à la nicotine, et le jour du départ à Beaulieu, je m’en suis collé un, j’ai jeté mon tabac et mes feuilles, rangé le briquet à côté de la gazinière et nous sommes partis.

Le premier jour j’ai eu pas mal envie de fumer, j’ai mangé quelques pastilles. Avoir attendu les vacances était effectivement une bonne idée, car l’envie m’a semblé plus une envie d’habitude qu’un manque physique (et pour cause, j’avais un patch) : la clope d’après le café, la clope de la pause sur l’autoroute, la clope d’après manger, …

Le deuxième jour, la même chose, le plus difficile était de passer outre l’envie-réflexe d’allumer une clope aux moments habituels : remplacées par des pastilles. Les pastilles, ça fait mal au ventre cependant.

Le troisième jour j’ai essayé de résister sans pastilles, et ça a marché.

Le quatrième jour, j’ai oublié de mettre un patch. Je m’en suis rendu compte peu avant midi, et j’ai décidé d’attendre de voir si j’en aurais réellement besoin. C’est ce jour là qu’on est allés m’acheter des chaussures à Nice Étoile, en plein centre de Nice après une heure de bouchons et sous la pluie donc le centre co était blindé. J’ai un peu grincé des dents mais… c’est passé :-) Clo ne m’a pas spécialement trouvé irritable, ou à peine.

De retour au boulot, dix jours après l’arrêt, je n’ai dit à personne que j’avais arrêté de fumer, histoire de gagner un peu de temps de tranquillité pour casser les habitudes de la clope au boulot. Je les ai remplacées par des verres d’eau, les clopes “faut que je me lève de mon siège” ; par un bout de discussion avec un collègue, les clopes “avec le café”. Et celle d’après manger, par plus de discussions à table (j’ai lu partout “ne restez pas à table après manger pour éviter la tentation”, mais ces conseils datent sans doute d’avant que les restos soient non-fumeurs), au lieu de lâcher tout le monde en avance…

C’est plus difficile qu’en vacances où l’on est dans un cadre inconnu, sans routine. Pas mal plus dur. Mais ça a l’air de tenir ! Faut juste pas me faire trop chier… :-)

Puis j’ai fini par le dire, que j’avais arrêté, lorsqu’on m’a explicitement demandé si je voulais accompagner pour une clope. Et là, je n’ai pas regretté de m’être octroyé une petite semaine de secret… Ça n’a pas raté, forcément et comme prévu, y’a un boulet pour essayer de me tenter par tous les moyens possibles. Il ne m’a pas encore collé une clope sous le nez mais ça ne saurait tarder. J’ai de la chance, il n’y en a qu’un (sur quatre fumeurs). J’m'en fous, en un sens ça m’agace mais il n’y arrivera pas, contrairement à moi qui y arriverai. Et puis il fait ça parce qu’il est jaloux de mon succès et de ma classe.

J’en suis donc à 18 jours sans tabac. C’est curieux mais depuis, j’ai (presque) plus besoin de mon traitement anti-asthme, et presque plus d’allergies non plus… Trop cool :-)

Pour les gens qui ont envie d’arrêter, j’ai trouvé un site suisse vraiment bien fichu avec plein d’informations, tests de dépendance, compteurs motivants, forums etc : stop-tabac.ch.

Colin Leroy: Souvenirs d’enfance

Wed, 06 May 2009 06:08:24 +0000

Bon, suite au sale coup que Mathieu me fait me voici dans l’obligation de répondre à quelques questions. C’est une idée de son grand frère que je ne connais même pas, mais si je joue pas le jeu Mathieu va se faire taper, donc je fais un effort.

Le but : répondre à 6 questions sur les souvenirs d’enfance et passer ensuite le relais à 3 personnes. Voici les questions :

Quel est le jouet qui vous a fait le plus plaisir ?
Quel cadeau vous a particulièrement déplu, avec impossibilité d’exprimer votre sentiment, bonne éducation oblige ?
Quel jouet avez-vous rêvé d’avoir sans jamais qu’il vous soit offert ?
Quel jouet avez-vous détourné de son objet initial et avec lequel vous avez passé beaucoup de temps ?
Quel jeu a fini au fond de l’armoire après une demie-heure et a constitué le plus gros gachis ?
Quel jeu a occupé vos récréations un bon bout de temps ?

Et mes réponses :

J’hésite. On va dire mon premier vélo de grand, un vrai VTT avec des roues de 24″ et DIX vitesses !
Peut-être ce livre d‘Histoire de France. Un jour où je m’ennuyais, j’ai fini par le lire et au final il m’a plu. J’ai eu deux ou trois cadeaux vraiment pires, mais plus tard, une fois adulte, donc ça n’entre pas dans le cadre de ce post et il n’y a pas prescription, donc motus.
Je ne me souviens d’aucun. Par contre je me souviens d’une déception immense lorsqu’il a fallu rendre mon Apple //c pour le remplacer par un Mac LC. (La remise était non négligeable à l’époque, 5000F sur 15000, donc je peux comprendre, mais quand même, j’étais dégouté).
J’ai passé énormément de temps à jouer au Lego, mais je ne pense pas avoir réussi à détourner ça de son objet initial qui est quand même assez vaste.
Une voiture téléguidée pourrie (avec un fil et qui tournait que quand elle voulait). Par contre j’ai aussi eu (plus tard) une vraie voiture télécommandée qui faisait du 30km/h et avec laquelle j’ai accidenté pas mal de choses dans l’appartement.
L’épervier (en primaire) ou un truc du genre. Et les billes (plein !) Après c’était sans doute plus varié… J’ai souvenir d’avoir lu les manuels du BASIC et du DOS pendant la récré au collège, mais ça m’a pas pris quatre ans.

Donc voilà, ça, c’est fait. Au tour de : Clo, Erwan, et Antoine. Soyez forts :-)

Holger Berndt: Easter weekend coding fun

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:17:00 +0000

Had some slack time over the easter weekend, so I was able to do some fun coding.

The Nautilus crew accepted two small patches of mine to deal with keyboard shortcuts. Now it's possible to assign shortcuts to Nautilus scripts, and the shortcuts are remembered accross sessions. That's fixing two long-term annoyances of mine. It landed just in time for Gnome 2.26.1, meaning the Ubuntu Jaunty is shipping the fixes already. Good timing.

The Nautilus split view branch that I have been blogging about (Planet readers: There is a screencast embedded in the previous post) is an ongoing pet project. I consider the branch pretty feature complete, except maybe background color modification of the inactive pane. However, the branch is currently based on an older revision, so the next big thing to do would be rebasing to the current state. In general, I am not hesitating to rebase the public branch on github when appropriate, even though I know that it's bad. Drop me a message if you want to contribute, and that poses problems for you. Anyways, with Gnome moving to git, all that is becomming easier, especially for externals. Did I already mention that git is awesome?

Of course, Claws Mail got some love, too. The notification plugin got support for window manager urgency hints and the fd.o sound specification. It also got a reworked bubble logic, to fix issues with Ubuntu's broken notification daemon. That will be going into cvs once I was able to test with Ubuntu Jaunty. I also wrote a little patch to include Gnome's addressbook in Claws Mail's address completion. The latter is not likely to go into cvs, but I may wrap the patch up and create a plugin for that.

Paul: Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin - version 3.5 unleashed!

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:01:52 +0000

A new version of the unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin has been released. Version 3.5 supports Clam AntiVirus™ version 0.95, libclamav 6:2:0 — that is, at least it does once you apply the Personal Build patch.

Further details and downloads can be found on the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page.

Colin Leroy: Paul having fun in the bath

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:08:12 +0000

Hi!

I couldn’t resist putting this short video from Clo’s blog (even if it’s flash, yes :-)

[See post to watch Flash video]

The water level was 8 centimeters lower after 15 minutes of this game… (that’s 3.2 inches for you strange-unit-using people :-P)

It looks like the age where Paul will refuse to go to bath is far, far away!

Also, Paul is starting to be able to stay sit for a few minutes; he has a tooth pointing, and he started eating mashed vegetables since a week or so. He’s growing so fast!

Miquel: Railscast script II

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:08:04 +0000

Hi there

Some of you would remember Railscast script, so I coded a new version using SQLite3.

The new version is this one and the empty database is that one.

Enjoy it

P.S. Remember to rename the empty database file from EmptyRailsCastDownloader.db to RailsCastDownloader.db.

Miquel: Railscast script

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:08:00 +0000

As some of you know, I am coding using the Ruby On Rails framework right now. Apart of this, I am a huge fan of http://railscasts.com/ and I like to watch the screencasts published in it.

Some weeks ago and during four weeks, my internet connection took me back almost to the 56 Kb modem age (my download speed was 100 kbps) and I was not able to watch the published episodes. Years ago I coded a perl script named deb-downloader because I was in a similar situation and I had to upgrade my Debian sid so I decided to code a little ruby script to download all the episodes from wherever I was and watch them at home.

This is the script and it is used for downloading the episodes you don’t have (the episodes already downloaded are stored in a text file and to not be downloaded again). If you like this script, you are free to use it, modify it and distribute it (it is under the GPL license) and even send me suggestions about how to improve it or add new functionalities.

Btw, I have downloaded all the episodes and I’m waiting for the new one (it is usually published every Monday).

Colin Leroy: Vos sauvegardes : faites-les. Ou regrettez-le

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:21:03 +0000

D’expérience, ça ne sert à rien de le dire. Il faut l’expérimenter pour s’y mettre.

Songez à ce que contient le disque dur de votre ordinateur. Des documents, des emails, de la musique, des photos, des films. Sur les photos, les emails, et les films, on peut retrouver des moments normaux : un pique nique, une discussion sur les horaires de train pour les vacances de 2003. On peut aussi y retrouver d’autres moments : votre mariage, préparation, photos du jour J, photos du lendemain ; votre fils à sa naissance, à 2 jours, à deux semaines ; un voyage à l’autre bout de la terre…

Voici à quoi ressemble ledit disque dur :

Le plateau tourne à 7200 tours par minute, et la tête de lecture flotte à une dizaine de microns au dessus, ce qui se représente un centième de l’épaisseur d’un cheveu.

La question n’est donc pas si, mais quand cette belle mécanique va faillir. Lorsque ce sera arrivé, tous les fichiers stockés dessus disparaîtront à jamais. Et même si vous en êtes conscients, ça vous arrivera car vous aurez repoussé et repoussé le moment de mettre une bonne sauvegarde en place, jusqu’à trop tard.

Maintenant que vous avez expérimenté la perte de quelques gigaoctets de données irremplaçables, le moment est venu de la mettre en place, cette sauvegarde. Il y a différents points à suivre :

Mauvaise sauvegarde

Procédure manuelle (insertion d’un disque externe ou d’un DVD vierge, opérations manuelles pour copier les fichiers) : vous allez en avoir assez très vite et le problème réapparaîtra.
Sauvegarde non testée : Une fois les fichiers sauvegardés on met tout ça dans un placard et on n’y pense plus. Tant qu’on n’a pas relu les fichiers présents sur la sauvegarde, on ne peut être sûr qu’elle est correcte.
Sauvegarde sur un unique média : Si la panne arrive au début d’une sauvegarde, celle-ci sera vide. Il faut au moins deux médias.

Bonne sauvegarde

Automatique : crontab sous Linux, tâches planifiées sous Windows, Time Machine sous Mac OS X.
Sur deux médias ou plus : par exemple deux disques externes, ou une sauvegarde distante : Dropbox par exemple.
Vérifiée à intervalles réguliers.

Oui, c’est pénible, mais ça vaut le coup. Je me suis fait avoir une fois, ma mère s’est faite avoir une fois, des milliers de gens se font avoir chaque jour et perdent les photos de leurs enfants ou les 2 ans de travail passés sur leur thèse.

Colin Leroy: On se “fait” un Scrabble

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:29:30 +0000

À chaque fois qu’on a envie de se faire un Scrabble c’est le même problème : on n’en a pas.

Avec Clo, on a donc décidé de prendre le taureau par les cornes. Ingrédients:

Wikipédia
Google Images
Carton
Papier
Ciseaux
Stylo
Surligneurs

Deux heures plus tard, ça donne :

On en est très fiers, et il est tout à fait jouable même si les lettres sont plus légères que d’habitude !

Paul: Google offers large donations to FOSS Email Application projects

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:02:07 +0000

If only it were true.

Since google launched gmail IMAP the Claws Mail development team (and several Claws Mail users) seem to have devoted a proportionately high amount of time to answering questions and working around problems that arise through gmail's IMAP implementation. The same must surely be true of other open source teams. How many wasted man-hours must that add up to through all the different development teams and how many more useful things could have been achieved in that time? How far will they set things back?

Don't believe the hype!

Colin Leroy: geekounet.org soon available

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:36:57 +0000

Dear readers,

I’ll stop renewing one of the domain names I have, geekounet.org, because I don’t use it enough. It expires on April 12th.

If someone there is interested by this domain name, just tell me, I’d rather transfer it to someone I appreciate than to let the domain squatters get hold of it.

Update: I’ve started the transfer procedure to Pierre, who’s going to make a much better use of the domain than these idiot professional-domain-grabbers.

Colin Leroy: RAID1 array enlarging

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:12:13 +0000

Here’s a quick recipe to easily enlarge a RAID1 array with the least possible downtime, using linux 2.6 and mdadm.

We’ll start with a two-disk setup, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, containing two arrays, /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. /dev/md0 is mounted on / and /dev/md1 is mounted on /backup. We want to grow /dev/md1 from 230GB to 898G (switching from 250GB disks to 1TB).

/dev/md0 has /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, /dev/md1 has /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3, while swap partitions are on /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2.

Obligatory warning: Use your own brain when following this procedure. Don’t follow me blindly – it’s your data at stake.

Booting on degraded array: don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

When you’ll remove one of the existing disks, your computer won’t be able to boot if grub isn’t installed on the other disk’s bootsector, so make sure that grub is installed on both disks’ MBR:
#grub
grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
(hd0,0)
(hd1,0)
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> root(hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)

Shutdown the computer, remove sdb, put in one of the new 1TB disks in place, and reboot. Booting can take some time while the initrd’s mdadm tries to find the missing disk.

You’ll boot with degraded arrays, as shown there:
#cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0]
19534912 blocks [1/2] [U_]

md1 : active raid1 sda3[0]
223134720 blocks [1/2] [U_]

Now, we’ll dump sda’s partition table:
#sfdisk -d /dev/sda > partitions.txt

Edit the partitions.txt file to remove the size=xxxxxxx field on the sda3 line, so that the biggest possible partition size will be used. The file will look like:

# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors
/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size= 39070017, Id=fd, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start= 39070080, size= 1959930, Id=82
/dev/sda3 : start= 41030010, Id=fd
/dev/sda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0

Disk initialisation

Now partition sdb using this table:
#sfdisk /dev/sdb < partitions.txt

recreate swap if needed:
#mkswap /dev/sdb2; swapon -a

Put sdb back in the arrays:
#mdadm –manage /dev/md0 –add /dev/sdb1
#mdadm –manage /dev/md1 –add /dev/sdb3

Wait until the array is resynchronised and clean. I use:
#watch cat /proc/mdstat #(quit with Ctrl-C)

Install grub on the new disk using grub, like previously (sdb is hd1 for grub), so that you’ll be able to boot from it.

Changing the second disk

Shutdown, remove sda, put the second new disk in place of it, and reboot – make sure your BIOS is configured to try and boot on both drives.

Now you’ll have degraded arrays again:
#cat /proc/mdstat
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[0]
19534912 blocks [1/2] [_U]

md1 : active raid1 sdb3[0]
223134720 blocks [1/2] [_U]

Redo the whole disk initialisation section, this time on sda instead of sdb. Don’t forget to reinstall grub on sda.

In the end you’ll get your arrays clean as they were before, but /dev/md1 will still be 230GB instead of using the whole available room on the disks’ partitions 3.

Grow the things

Let’s ask mdadm to take the whole partitions size for md1:
#mdadm –grow /dev/md1 –size=max

You’ll have to wait for synchronisation again (watch cat /proc/mdstat).

The only remaining thing is to grow the ext3 filesystem sitting on md1, and that’s where the most downtime happen (your data won’t be available unless you do a live FS resize, which I didn’t want to test); these steps took about 30 minutes to complete for me:
#umount /dev/md1
#e2fsck -f /dev/md1 #(it’s better to force a check to avoid a resize failure)
#resize2fs /dev/md1 #(this makes the filesystem the biggest possible)
#e2fsck -f /dev/md1 #(verify that everything is OK)
#mount /dev/md1 #(and you’re done, as df -h should show you):

# df -h /dev/md1
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1 898G 228G 634G 27% /backup

Rambling about half-finished RAID setups

One thing you may have noticed is that I’m installing grub on both drives. This can seem evident, but most software RAID arrays I’ve seen couldn’t boot out of the second disk for lack of an MBR. It makes the RAID setup useful when your second disk fails, but if it’s the first, you’re forced to resort to a rescue CD or PXE boot to reboot your server. This makes things much harder to fix, provokes cold sweats, downtimes, and user annoyment. Install grub on both disks. Check the system boots when removing one disk, both the first or the second, before going into production. Don’t misunderstand your RAID arrays as a backup system. RAID arrays provides redundancy and eases (a LOT) recovering from a failed disk, but it doesn’t eases recovering from two failed disks; and it doesn’t recover lost data from human mistakes either. Regarding failed disks, best results are achieved by monitoring the disks – with smartd for example – and replacing suspicious disks too soon rather than too late.

Ricardo Mones: Facts and things that happen

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:26:01 +0000

Since last post...

A new year has began! (according some calendar systems, at least)

Obama is ruling the world! (yes, they could)

Debian Lenny is out! (congratulate ourselves!)

CVS packages built by hydra are uploaded nightly to claws-mail.org

Recent claws-mail packages are again uploaded to unstable (thanks to libetpan maintainer who uploaded it to sid)

Still working 10 hours a day...

But given current economic situation we have to congratulate for it... :-(

Colin Leroy: 0.30 defect/KLOC

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:31:55 +0000

I’ve had Claws-Mail added to Coverity’s scanner. The first result is : 0.30 report per 1000 lines of code. This is quite good I think, although these metrics aren’t a holy graal and static checking doesn’t catch everything.

There are 91 reports to look at, which I’ll start doing tomorrow evening – I’ll be alone at home this week, will use this time to bugfix!

Update: 6 reports remain, which are false positives. The fixed problems were mainly resource leaks (either fds or memory allocations), missing NULL checks when dereferencing pointers — most of them harmless but good to have fixed anyway, and uninitialized variables. No horrible bug was found by Coverity’s scanner, just corner cases. I’ve also ran some external plugins through it, and most of them are rather clean, with the exception of VCalendar, where most reports are due to libical which uses an apparently confusing memory allocation/free scheme.

Holger Berndt: Splitting the Shell ...

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:58:00 +0000

... but hopefully without cracking it completely.

Some time ago, I read up on split view filebrowsing in Nautilus, Gnome's desktop shell. The requests, comments, discussions, polls, and flames fill endless bugreports, forums, ideas, articles, and mailing list threads. Well, I am one of those people that like Nautilus, but miss the split view capability during heavy duty filebrowsing jobs. I liked Norton Commander back in the old days, and its numerous successors. And I am not alone.

So, in the true spirit of Open Source, I finally got my hands dirty and got a shot at it. It's not completely finished, but in a state that allows for a screencast preview:

The code is hosted on github:

$ git clone                                               git://github.com/hb/nautilus.git
$ git checkout -b split-view origin/split-view

But will it blend? That is the question.

I am curious if that branch will make it upstream. If you'd like that, you can help with testing and reporting (both, failures and successful uses)! While the patch is UI-wise minimal-invasive, quite a lot of code had to be shoveled around, so I am happy about every tester.

(the beautiful shell picture is by giopuo, published on flickr under Creative Commons by & share alike)

Miquel: Lenny (Debian GNU/Linux 5.0) released

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:08:02 +0000

Good news for the open source world. Lenny, the new Debian’s stable version, is out

Read about it here

Paul: Sentenced to education

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:58:46 +0000

Following on from the previous post, it is worth noting a recent news item which has revealed that, on average, in England and Wales a parent is sent to jail every two weeks for their child's truancy. There were 10,000 prosecutions in England alone in 2007.

This is all part of New Labour's target, launched in 1998, to cut truancy, which includes pouring millions of pounds, (over £800m), into the initiative, giving the police new powers to drag kids back to school, hefty fines and imprisonment for parents, paging and text messaging of parents, electronic tagging of parents, withdrawal of child benefit for truants' parents, spiked security fences tipped with paint which marks pupils' uniforms if they try to climb in or out, swipecards for pupils, fingertip scanning of pupils, informing travel agents to warn parents of the dangers of term-time holidays, and so on.

Does it work?

In 2008 truancy rates in England reached their highest level since 1997.

If school days are the best days of your life, go and see a psychiatrist!

Miquel: RoR and SQLite3 problems

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:36:41 +0000

I wrote an entry some time ago about the one-file SQL engines and I wanted to code an experiment about a website using SQLite3 as database. I coded a little site named http://www.cheatsheetsandrecipes.com and it worked ok, so that was the time to deploy it in my server in production mode.

Once the site was deployed, I spent some days trying to solve a problem with my database queries and finally I found the problem. There is a problem with rails 2.2.2 and sqlite3 version (explained here) which forces me to change to mysql and cancel my experiment because in my workstation sqlite3’s version is 3.5.9 and in my server it is 3.3.8.

Now the web is working with mysql (maybe I’ll change it again with the new debian stable version codenamed ‘lenny’ which is going to be release this weekend if everything works fine) and feel free to provide cheatsheets and recipes.

See you.

P.S. Maybe accessing to http://www.cheatsheetsandrecipes.com doesn’t work. It is because I bought the domain some hours ago and dns are replicating the ip address (be a little patient).

P.S.S. http://www.cheatsheetsandrecipes.com is beta, don’t be cruel with it (it began as an experiment and there are a lot of things to improve).

Paul: It's a class thing

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 10:52:23 +0000

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is "a new study on the white working class and ethnic diversity in Britain"¹ published by The Runnymede Trust, an "independent policy research organisation focusing on equality and justice through the promotion of a successful multi-ethnic society."²

"The essays in this volume all point to the paradoxical and hypocritical ways in which the ruling classes speak for the white working class on the one hand, and how they speak about them on the other. Whereas middle class commentators are happy to defend the white working class interests against the onslaught of politically correct multiculturalism, they will simultaneously deride and riducule the feckless and underserving poor, who have squandered the opportunities gracefully given to them by the state, and therefore righfully be left to wallow in their own poverty."³

The study has been prompted by "a recent emphasis in the media and by other commentators on the segragation of, and competition between, ethnic groups [which] has suggested that white working class communities may be losing out in the conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. … [It] shows that … the most disadvantaged working-class people of whatever ethnic background, roughly the poorest fifth of the population, are increasingly separated from the more prosperous majority by inequalities of income, housing and education. By emphasizing the virtues of individual self-determination and the exercising of 'choice', recent governments have in fact entrenched the ability of the middle and upper classes to avoid downward social mobility and preserve the best of life's goods for their own children. Moreover, the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has tended to abandon the description 'working-class', preferring instead to use terms such as 'hard working families' in order to contrast the the virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving. … life chances for today's children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications — in other words, class. The poor white working class share many more problems with the poor from minority ethnic groups than some of them recognise."⁴

The media's skewed portrayal of the white working class, e.g. the BBC's White Season and Channel 4's Immigration: — The Inconvenient Truth, is exposed as fallacy, "the white working class are habitually pitched against those of minority ethnic groups and immigrants, while larger social and economic structures are left out of the debate altogether. … The media's efforts to acknowledge and discuss white working class grievances has excluded issues such as the legacy of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation, or the rise of the super-rich under Labour. Instead, there is a fairly consistent message that the white working class are the losers … while minority ethnic groups are the winners – at the direct expense of the white working class."⁵

"The white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the social spaces they frequent, the postcode of their homes, possibly even their names. But they are not discriminated against because they are white."³

"When commentators argue over the neglected interests of the 'white working class', the comparison to other groups is always in terms of their ethnicity, with Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, or Pakistanis in Oldham. The distinctive social position of these groups is presented in terms of their ethnic identity, as cultural or religious difference, rather than by the very marked class inequalities that they also experience. This exaggerates the differences between ethnic groups, and masks what they hold in common. By stressing the whiteness of the white working class, the class inequality of other ethnic groups also slips from view. This sidesteps the real issue of class inequality."⁶ Of course, this is how the game works for the ruling classes: divide and rule. It always has. For example, see the employment and vagrancy laws, first in the UK, then later in the colonies, bending workers as far as they will go before they break.^*

"The rising significance of education in British society has not undermined the role of class; instead it has opened up new avenues for class competition and disadvantage. … despite the meritocratic values⁷ of British society, high social position still helps to 'insure' against weaker educational performance, and numerous studies show that if we compare lower achievers, those from more privileged backgrounds have much better careers than their less advantaged peers. … the fact remains that it is often harder for privileged children to fail than it is for disadvantaged children to succeed."⁶

England is the "most explicit example of the use of schooling by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes. … Adam Smith epitomised the English bourgeois viewpoint regarding working class education in The Wealth of Nations:

An instructed and intelligent people besides are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant one … less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government.

For Smith, as well as for the vast majority of the political, and intellectual élite at the time, the schooling of the working classes was always to be subordinate and inferior to that of the middle classes, designed to contain and pacify rather than to educate and liberate.⁸ When the English state schooling system was set up in the late 19th century the intention of the dominant classes was still to police and control the working classes rather than to educate them."⁹

All well and good, and to paraphrase a line from the introduction, this may all appear as truisms to you or I, even verging on the banal, but it is good that an organisation such as the Runnymede Trust has finally lifted the corner of the carpet and reported on what they've seen brushed under there. I welcome this publication, even if it does put itself well within the bracket of the middle class once again speaking about and for the working class — then again, the main body of readership will be the middle class, that is, I guess, its target audience. Mostly the essays are highly readable but, for me, it fell down in two places. One of these essays in particular made for nauseating reading indeed: the 8th and final essay. It starts with, "The remit for this chapter was to produce a contribution which translates academic thinking to non-academic audiences"¹⁰. An incredibly condescending read! Who did the author think he was writing for, the odd working class person who happened to come across the publication? If the difference between academic writing and non-acedemic writing is the dumbing-down for its apparently dumbed-down audience, then he did a great job. But, seriously, the main difference between an academic person and a non-academic person is the academic's ability to produce prose, but not his thought processes and his ability to understand and reason. This last essay was unnecessary.

Having said that, the report is, however, a stimulating read on the whole. If it works towards creating more solidarity and self-awareness within the working class, then it's a good thing.

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is available as a free PDF from the Runnymede Trust, here.

——
1. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/
2. Who Cares about the White Working Class?, inside cover.
3. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, What Does this mean for Race Equality? — The Aims of this Volume, pp. 5-6
4. Dr Kate Gavron, Foreword, pp. 2
5. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, Class Re-emerges in Political Discourse, pp. 5
6. Wendy Bottero, Class in the 21st Century, pp. 7, 10
7. …or, rather, because of them?
8. So little has changed.
9. Diane Reay, Making Sense of White Working Class Educational Underachievement, A Brief History of the Working Class Underachievement, pp. 23
10. Danny Dorling, From Housing to Health — To Whom are the White Working Class Losing Out? Frequently Asked Questions, pp. 59-65

Colin Leroy: Some news – at last!

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:25:17 +0000

Hello, dear abandoned readers, and happy new year!

I’ve not been very verbose on my blog this last month… Let’s try to fix that!

I’ve been pretty busy, first with holidays, where we drove over two tousand kilometers to Clo’s father’s place, then to my parents’, then back to Clo’s father’s. These were great holidays, we’ve been able to see about everybody we wanted to see on such occasions, and we’ve been able to rest quite well, as this is the moment that our son Paul chose to… start sleeping complete nights! Yay! So, since December 19th, we enjoy normal nights with no 3 am wake-up (well, actually Paul woke up once or twice since, but that’s a good ratio anyway).

We came back in Toulouse a few days after the new year, only to find that our heating pipes started leaking during the holidays. Yay. One more apartment problem. We really didn’t need this, as this means no heating… in January… with three months old Paul :-(

Since then we’ve started Cold War with our landlord, who is rather reluctant to pay for the fixes — it’s not as if he had the choice, as a decent apartment is required by law and decency includes heating — but he’s taking his time. We’re trying to leverage the little power we have, and we should have news next week now. He won’t be able to escape for much longer.

Don’t worry, in the meantime we have backup heaters which suck a lot of electricity, but keep the flat approximately warm. We decided two weeks ago that Clo and Paul should go spend two weeks at her father’s, in order to enjoy a normal modern house with heaters in all rooms, so we went there (on the Atlantic coast) on January 23rd… and woke up the 24th after the Klaus storm with an electricity outage. In Clo’s father modern house, no electricity means no light, no heating, and no hot water. Thanks, Murphy. At least this house has manual shutters, contrary to his neighbors who have electric shutters and thus were condemned to live in the dark with candles the whole day !

In the end, Clo decided to stay, waiting for the power to come back; it came back on the following thursday, but they managed to get an extra heater too, so lived well through this. Clo blogged about it when internet came back :)

Apart from this, I’m doing approximately five differents things at once at work — five interesting things! In particular I’m starting a new intranet project which involves starting from scratch and use interesting technologies I’ve not used a lot, like AJAX. It makes the development very fun and, combined with clean object-oriented PHP5, very fast. I’m amazed at the ease of progression, plugging bricks with each other.

All of this explains why I seem to have fallen out of Internet…

Salvatore De Paolis: Persistence of Bit

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:20 +0000

…things are almost done, I just need to move few other stuff from my home pc to this nice new server.

Actually I’ m going to install an E-learning platform and an eportfolio & social network framework here but I cutted a small slice to host this blog and few other things…probably an svn or git repository too.

Paul: The disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:24:57 +0000

In 21 days, 27-Dec-08 to 18-Jan-09:

Total Casualties:

Palestinian			Israeli
1,300 dead	5,100 injured		13 dead	80 injured

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jan/03/israelandthepalestinians

——
Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/
Stop the War Coalition: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
War on Want: http://www.waronwant.org/
Jews for Justice for Palestinians: http://www.jfjfp.org/

Colin Leroy: Funny pdf

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:22:29 +0000

When converting a rather broken PDF (ugly fonts) to PS, pdf2ps told me:

**** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
The following fonts were not embedded:
OptimaLT

**** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
**** The file was produced by:
**** >>>> Adobe Photoshop for Windows <<<<
**** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
**** file that it does not conform to Adobe’s published PDF
**** specification.

Quite ironic :-)

Miquel: Wordpress upgraded

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:14:13 +0000

Hi there

After a long time without writing anything, I have decided to write this post to thank to all wordpress people the efforts done to publish this fantastic software.

I’ve upgraded this blog from 2.3.1 to 2.7 and what I have had to do are:

Execute my wordpress database backup script.
Untar latest.tat.gz in my apache directory.
Copy the wordpress themes used in the new version.
Copy the uploaded files.
Change the blog link from the old version to the new one.
Access to my blog after upgrading.
Click the link to upgrade my database structure.

e voilà!!!!

Isn’t it amazing

Ricardo Mones: back to vacation!

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:55:30 +0000

Getting older left me a nice flu as a birthday present. So nice that I had to take my first couple of sick leave days. The fever, which reached 39.1 Celsius degrees at some moment, didn't let me do other things than stay in bed and sleep (when possible). At the beginning of the week I was somewhat recovered, but today my throat still hurts slightly (probably because I've stopped taking analgesics as soon as fever disappeared).

Anyway I feel better now, and despite having missed the Claws Mail 3.7.0 released completely (no Spanish translation updates again) I can at least bring the Debian packages as a Christmas present ;-)

They're at experimental (claws-mail and extra-plugins), as previous ones, because required libetpan is still there.

This time it happened Sylpheed has released also a new version, namely 2.6.0, also in experimental now. On the other side the sylpheed-gtk1 package has been removed from Debian. I doubt someone uses it currently. Anyway, after the massive bug cleanup will let see if someone cares :-)

I have also a pending release of Clawsker, to support the new hidden preference in 3.7.0, but tomorrow we're going to visit Madrid for the weekend, so I guess it can wait until next week or even the new year! Going by car, I hope the snow and ice don't take part in the travel... wish me luck! :-)

Paul: Henry Snowstorm - Demolition Ballroom

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:15:29 +0000

Track Listing:

1. The Western Rising
2. Henry's Pipe and Tool Works
3. Sneak Attack
4. Sing a Song of Violence
5. Hashashin
6. Demolition Ballroom
7. My One Flesh
8. Lights Went Out
9. Saviour
10. Don't Let Go
11. Airflow
12. Hang On

the Wild Beast Records (TWB 2)

The new album from Henry Snowstorm has just been released — 12 instrumentals in a hiphop/downtempo flavour. Like the previous album, Civil Unrest, it's available as a free download.

What's in a name? Think Cheltenham Road, Bristol, circa 1985. I'll say no more.

This album has been produced using only FOSS.

Henry Snowstorm gets the party started

therefore consider seriously what you ought to doe in this cause, now is the time to break the neck of tyranny, which if you do not, be sure that Tyranny will breake your neckes one day, because you had him in your power, and did not break his neck. I would not have you kill Tyrants, for then you might kill your selves, but first destroy tyranny in your selves, and then in others: first doe such things your selves, as you would have others to doe, for he that bids me do, and doth the good he bids, he leads me to the substantive, and leaves me not in quid.

Tyranipocrit Discovered, 1649

Ricardo Mones: 14

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:14:01 +0000

Hint for subject:

final class Age {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    System.out.println (java.lang.Integer.parseInt ("14", 32));
  }
}

It was last Friday, in fact, but I'm so absorbed by work lately that had no time for anything else.

Today I've been (somehow) gifted with the last album from Henry Snowstorm. In one word: captivating. In three words: craving for more. It made my afternoon despite having to waste it filling a powerpoint with useless project data for a Delivery Assurance meeting tomorrow. That doesn't mean I'm against DA, nope. But starting to do it when the project is nearly finished instead doing QA (fixing bugs) is a waste of time IMHO.

As a curiosity this post is being written from Safari under Mac OS 10.5 AKA Leopard. After being able to get a copy for free (free for me, not for its owner) I resized partitions in MacBook and reinstalled everything again (30 Gb isn't enough for Leopard upgrade from Tiger, but a Leopard installation from scratch takes much less space, which I discovered too late, after having doubled it). Now will see if I can use/build Claws Mail natively on it. For now I can see its display under the included X11 server, which seems to be a new feature in Leopard. Another one is "Spaces"... yep they have discovered multiple desktops now... amazing, isn't it ;-)