Last evening, at around 17h, three apartments in my building got broken into.

Mine was one of them.

In fact, they were so good that I didn’t realize that something was amiss until I tried to pick up my computer and came up with thin air.

At first, I thought I was being absent minded, so I spent a while looking for my stuff. Then I thought that maybe I brought it to the office, or left it somewhere. But no, I bumped into the landlord as he went to fix someone's window.

As far as we can tell, this is what happened:

The thief got buzzed into our apartment building by someone. Since we have no intercom out front, this happens with alarming regularity. The thief unlocked the fire escape door, climbed up the fire escape and broke into #1, #8, and #9.

For the other two apartments, the thief had to smash in the window to get at the latch. For mine, the latch was broken anyway, so it was a simple matter of sliding it open.

When the thief got to my apartment, he or she emptied out my knapsack and stuffed my laptop inside. Then grabbed my camera bag and went back out the window. The other two apartments had laptops stolen too.

After getting the loot, the thief went down the fire escape and waltzed out the front door. Somewhere along the way, there must have been a scuffle with my cat, because Timin is now sporting a black eye.

I lost:

• Thinkpad T60p laptop, model 200793U, serial L3KW212
• Canon EOS 5D camera with a Canon EF 24-105L IS lens, model 0296B114[AA], serials (21)2621200591 and (21)00860552
• Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash, unknown serial number

The police have the serial numbers and will be checking the pawn shops. If you guys want to help, please do a quick search on any online trading sites you use, like Craigslist, eBay, Kijiji, and LesPAC.

Thanks!

Crossposted to montreal and montrealforsale.

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm working on the logos for DemoCamp Montréal and I want to be able to make them open content. Unfortunately, the original logos were done in Adobe Illustrator CS2 and I don't have a copy of that.

Would someone with a copy be able to take those files and export them as SVG? If so, I'd be most grateful.

Many thanks!
Simon

TrackPoint
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

At the end of September, my laptop decided to stop working. I spent a frustrating few days trying to resuscitate it, but that effort failed miserably. After six years of faithful service, my A20m was dead.

So I ordered a new laptop. I had been looking at getting a new ThinkPad over the past two years, but had never gotten around to it. After all, my previous laptop was portable, connected to the Internet, and let me do my thing. I was prepared to go through a terrible experience. I looked at various websites, decided that I still like ThinkPads and tried to order a laptop from Lenovo through their website.

This failed miserably, so I sent them an e-mail and forgot about them. The next day, Shanley e-mailed me from her office at Lenovo Canada. Apparently, she wanted to sell me a ThinkPad T60p with the specifications I wanted. And it was cheaper than I could have possibly ordered online. In fact, Shanley was so nice at taking my money in exchange for a new computer, that I'd recommend her for any of you wanting to buy a ThinkPad. It was surprisingly painless. Just ask me for her e-mail address.

I received the machine after a weekend of waiting. It just showed up at the office is a big cardboard box. I pulled it out, assembled it, and looked at it. This is one of Lenovo's first ThinkPads and it seems like they haven't ruined it. The TrackPoint is still there, the keyboard is just as nice, and the machine is solidly built. Satisfied with my inspection, I looked around for an installation CD. That's when I realized that I had an Ubuntu beta CD I was hoping to try out. Why not?

Grabbing the CD-RW I had recently burnt, I popped it into the laptop and found that everything showed up fine. I had a brief struggle with the proprietary hardware inside my computer, but that was something that installing the linux-restricted-modules-generic package solved handily. I did, however, manage to find quite a few bugs in the whole process. And as the QA person, I certainly reported them.

I'm still getting over how fast this machine goes. With two processors, gobs of RAM, and a plentiful hard disk, this machine is going to last me for a good long while.

Day against DRM
Originally uploaded by Naufragio.

Today is the day against DRM.

Thousands of people around the world are spreading the word about Digital Restriction Management technologies. The interesting thing about the people building DRM systems is that they're doing evil. They may not think they're doing evil, after all they're generally good people, doing their jobs, feeding their families, and protecting their interests. It's not a big evil, but it is a subtle one. And that's why you shouldn't support them.

For decades, the music industry has been making money by selling records and tapes. This was a good business, because it was difficult to produce records, and it was difficult to get tapes into the hands of consumers. They made quite a tidy sum over production and distribution of art, which is a pretty decent living. But then came the Internet. And the Internet got big. Big enough that you're reading what I'm writing, even though we come from completely different backgrounds and are probably miles apart. The interesting thing about the Internet is that copying a song and sending it to someone else costs almost nothing. Zip, zero, zilch.

Now traditional media distribution houses are upset. The service they performed was valuable and the goods they sold were scarce. Nowadays, neither of those are true. People can record music in their garages, edit it on their computers, and publish it online. The digital medium has turned art from a scarce resource into an abundance.

So what do these companies do? They feel that they have to protect their existing business models so they try to push through laws that would make it illegal to provide abundance. That's like arresting farmers for planting seeds they've harvested from their own wheat. But this is wrong. People are now using the Internet to make and distribute art like we've never seen before. The proliferation of new songs, new pictures, new videos is just enormous. The creative community has exploded through sharing, some of it illegal, and we can all see what a vibe this has caused.

DRM is meant to put a stop to that. It's designed to have two components: one is the technology that monitors and restricts what you can do with the art that you've bought, the second is the legislation that makes it illegal to circumvent this technology. So only criminals will be able to give music to their friends. But criminals will do that anyway, laws won't prevent DVD duplication in Asia. They will, however, stop you from listening to music in ways some corporation doesn't want you to.

What can you do about it? Make it known that you're against DRM. Make it known that you're against proprietary systems that stifle the creative spirit. And only purchase open systems. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because they won't hold you hostage.

My laptop's hard disk died last week. It's been going on and off for a while, making these little clicking sounds and stalling on reading. That's always a bad sound, but I was always too busy to deal with it. But you can never leave these things for too long. I suppose those times I dropped the thing weren't very good for it.

One day, I was using the machine when it refused to work any longer. I suppose this was a fairly long-lived chunk of hardware, as it was built in May 2000. Six whole years. I tried pulling out my spare laptop disk and using that, but this was doomed to failure. Back when I got to second disk, they were still making 12mm-height drives. Which don't fit very well in a 9mm slot.

So today, I went to the computer store and got myself a brand new disk. They make really large hard drives these days! I put it in, installed a new version of Ubuntu, and I was off to the races. Hurray!

Now I have to get all my configuration files back on. Oh dear.

Update at 2006-09-27 18:29: The new disk died today. It didn't even last twenty-four hours. I brought it back to the shop where they reluctantly exchanged it for a new one. I hope that things turn out better.

Update at 2006-09-28 1:34: The newest disk seems to not like the laptop. I think it's overheating. Damn.

Update at 2006-09-28 2:10: Nnggh. Nope. It looks like I have a bad bit of ram at 73.3MB. Time to see if I can get the badram patch working tomorrow.

Update at 2006-09-30 12:02 Oh, I give up. This machine is not going to work again, for any reasonable approximation of working.

I attended class this morning.

Well, sort of. I showed up in #ubuntu-motu-school where I led a session on how to triage bugs.

I got some pretty good attendence, even though there wasn't a lot of fanfare about it. And we certainly got a few newcomers to the BugSquad, which is always important.

There's a transcript of our little tutorial that you can read, if you feel in the mood. And please, join us in the fight against bugs!

Magicicada
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

Daniel and Sebastian inform me that we have a plethora of desktop bugs. GNOME bugs. KDE bugs. That's because we've got new versions of GNOME and KDE in the archive for Edgy Eft.

We want your help. Yes, you!

Join the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. You can help by triaging new bugs that come in. Or you might try your hand at fixing some of them.

You can read up on some more information. Or you can jump right in. We're a friendly bunch! *hugs*

Come join us for bug-squishing fun. Except for the one above: magicicadas are harmless.

Forklift
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

I look forward to going to Ottawa every June for the GCC Summit. I've gone every year since it started in 2003 and have no intention of stopping. That's because it feels so much like a family reunion. Let me explain.

The core people who have worked on GCC have been doing it for years. They're people who used to work for Cygnus Solutions, back before they were bought out by Red Hat. They're people who work for CodeSourcery. And they're people working for Intel, HP, and IBM who are compiler writers first and employees second. And they all know each other like dysfunctional family.

When I first showed up at the first Summit, Jim and I were the new kids. We had just finished typesetting the Using GCC manual that was published by GNU Press. So I went around absorbing compiler technology by osmosis, and trying to get as many developers to sign by pre-press draft.

The nice thing about the GCC Summit is that there is only one track of talks. So you never have to choose between two talks that you're interested in. It's a little bad though, since you're always tempted to check your e-mail when there's a lull in the interestingness of the presentations.

This year, the focus seemed to be on profiler-driven optimizations. I'm not really sure those are very profitable, as they actually require developers to run their applications as part of the build system. And we all know that humans are lazy. But perhaps I underestimate the heroics that build-systems people will go through to squeeze out that extra ounce of performance.

Danny Berlin and Kenneth Zadeck talked about dataflow analysis and getting rid of the terrible implementation inside GCC. I had heard horror stories about flow.c before, but have yet to actually look inside it. Their talk has disuaded me even more.

The last thing that sticks in my mind is the GDB talk, which seemed to be the only toolchain talk this year. But these things wax and wane.

I skipped out on the afterparty this year, which meant that I couldn't help with the monumental challenge that awaits us after each summit. But I shall return.

Hug Day turned out wonderfully. According to Andy, we closed 65 bugs and triaged many more.

Hugs and thanks to everyone who showed up and helped out!

It turned out so well that we're going to have another one next week. Only, it'll actually last a whole day around the world. Next Wednesday, all day, from 0:00 UTC+14 to 24:00 UTC–12. That's fifty whole hours of bug-hunting goodness!

Daniel has announced today's Hug Day. The idea of this is that we all go on IRC, join the #ubuntu-bugs channel, and help manage bugs in Ubuntu.

Why is it called Hug Day? Because people gets hugs for doing good work, of course.

So join in! It'll be fun and edumacational!

Dapper Drake and friend
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

It's the beginning of my second week at Canonical.

The first week was absolutely hectic. Like many Canonical employees, I work from home, so my first contact with people was over IRC. Everyone was super friendly and I got to see a couple of familiar names to boot. But it was soon apparent that I would be doomed.

You see, I'm the new Quality Controller at Ubuntu. And we have a growing number of bugs to triage every day. With a release candidate coming out soon, this leaves little time for us to fix the multitude of bugs.

Doomed!

That is, until I heard about the BugSquad. These guys are great, they've been hunting down bugs left and right all week long. But it still looks like a losing battle. I quit working on Saturday with 1180 bugs, and we're now back to 1217. Oof.

I'll let Daniel announce it officially, but we'll be holding another Hug Day on Wednesday. This week, we'll be concentrating on crasher bugs: segmentation faults, assertion failures, if something just gives up and dies, we're going to triage it.

Don't worry if you're not a programmer! We need your help. You can learn how to sort out bugs, look for duplicates, and ask for more information. And if you are a programmer, maybe I can teach you a few tricks to find memory faults.

Wow. This release is going to be an exciting ride!

 ____       _     _               __  __           _               
|  _ \  ___| |__ (_) __ _ _ __   |  \/  | ___  ___| |_ _   _ _ __  
| | | |/ _ \ '_ \| |/ _` | '_ \  | |\/| |/ _ \/ _ \ __| | | | '_ \ 
| |_| |  __/ |_) | | (_| | | | | | |  | |  __/  __/ |_| |_| | |_) |
|____/ \___|_.__/|_|\__,_|_| |_| |_|  |_|\___|\___|\__|\__,_| .__/ 
                                                            |_|    

So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering?

Debian stein

Absolutely everything!

We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montréal to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal!

Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise!

The relevant details:

Who:

The Debian community.

Where:

Hurley's Irish Pub

Date:

Saturday, 7 January 2006.

Time:

17:00 or 5 PM.

I suppose it would be a good time to mention that http://open.nit.ca is up and running on a nice new server in Montréal. That's the website that hosts all of NITI's free software offerings.

About two months ago, our mailing lists were eaten by a disk failure. We've managed to get the archives back, from our subscription lists are all gone. But I've got them up and running now, on GNU Mailman no less, and have subscribed some people to them.

They have doubtlessly noticed this because spammers have been hitting two of our mailing lists like crazy. After going into denial for a while, I have decided that I ought to moderate these posts.

Oh hey. The new XPLC got into Debian. Too bad we realised that we need to kick in another change soon. Ah well. I look forward to pushing out a WvDial release over the holidays, as it really needs to get out the door now.

Casa Magica
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

There's this artists collective on St-Laurent, across from La Sala Rossa. They call their place Casa Magica, and it's really quite groovy. They've got this cozy living area with an open plan. The kitchen is separated from the living room with a tiled countertop someone built themselves. It's decorated in that way with splashes of paint, splashes of light, and furnishings that look like they grew there.

I showed up at this place to meet some people in the Free Software world. I've been in Montréal for about a year and I still don't know very many hackers in the city. So when I got invited to Les 24h SQIL, I decided to show up and meet some people.

I went up St-Laurent to a non-descript red door with a poster about SQIL on it. "This must be the place," I thought as I tried the door. Upstairs, I was greeted by a living room full of random people: some sitting in front of computers, some chatting away, and one guy fiddling with a projector. I wandered around in a state of confusion until I was introduced to Robin.

Robin Millette seems to do a lot of work for FACIL, which is an organisation for promoting free content in Quebec. He introduced me to a bunch of people, like Simon Raven whom I helped with finger-ldap. I met François from Quebec City, who was interested in Nitix. There was Nicolas who is a Java developer that writes web-based applications. And other people like Alex, Yan, Marco and Matthieu who seemed nice but I can no longer remember what they do.

I returned later in the week to Robin's birthday party where I happened to meet Fabien, who is a consultant that does work on Firefox and Yannick who's a Ph.D. student at McGill. We had a good time talking about quantum computing and how to design a programming language for quantum computers. Good geeky times were had.

I'm writing this entry on Jeff's little handheld computer. Literally! The handwriting recognition is a little difficult to use quickly but it is rather tolerable once you get used to its quirks.

Update at 1:44: The Nokia 770 is actually a nice little toy. Its LCD screen is unbelievably crisp and the computer is relatively responsive. Although there are some annoying usability problems with the interface, these are nothing particularly bad. And they are relatively minor.

I think I would be interested if they were thinner and had more permanent flash storage. It's the size of a generous notebook but with very respectable amounts of computing power. Plus, it runs Debian, so porting any missing software that I want to use would not be too difficult.

I feel compelled to tell you that I've released WvStreams 4.2.

I was going to tell you how wonderful WvStreams is, what new features it has, and how excited you should all be. Except you'd only be really excited if you're a C++ programmer. And need a library that does what WvStreams does.

But if you do, it's just grand.

A couple of months ago, the server at work which hosted a lot of our Free Software things was pulled off-line. So I think I shall try to get our mailing lists working; we have a new machine in the corner that seems to be a likely candidate for this sort of thing.

With Eric Côté's help, I've discovered some bugs in finger-ldap.

And because he had the most puzzling problem, I've worked for several hours on it. How that was resolved is not particulary important. What is important is that I've just pushed out version 1.3.

Never heard of finger-ldap? That's because I wrote it.

But seriously, it's only really useful for people who use LDAP as their name-server source. But if you do, you owe it to your users to install it. Finger runs so much faster if your entire LDAP database isn't slurped down to find a user.

You know how sometimes, you see this really great thing and you think, "oh wow! I have to get me one of those." Now, I'm usually on the trailing edge of technology adoption, as many people can attest. I mean, I haven't even gotten a mobile phone yet.

But Jabber was one of those things that really caught my eye in 1999. An open, extensible, standard point-to-point chat protocol. Nice! So I got myself an account and poked around. It had server-side buddy lists, so you didn't have to back them up or cart them around. You could send messages to people on other Jabber servers, so your friends didn't have to all be on the same host. Excellent!

Oh, except nobody was using Jabber at the time. They solved that one too, by writing transports that would let your Jabber account hook in to your other accounts. So I imported my ICQ buddy list into Jabber, and didn't look back.

Oh, until about four hours ago.

You see, the world went in another direction. Instead of adopting Jabber, people decided to use clients that could talk multiple protocols natively. So instead of converging toward one common network, we still have around five disjoint flavours of instant messanging in the world. When I talk to younger folk, they'll rattle off a list of their account names, in the hopes that their newfound friend will be on at least one of these services.

Crazy. But true.

I won't go into why Jabber transports failed. But needless to say, I've abandoned their use. Poor Bitlbee is now hooked into three different servers at any given time. And I had to spend a good hour dumping out my client-side ICQ buddy list into the Oscar server. (Yes, I am that out-of-date.)

But at least I see which people are on-line now.

On Saturday, as I was turning on some music, I realised that the left speaker didn't work. I thought this might have been because it got rained upon, so I tried to figure out what was wrong. I turned on the television, started fiddling around with the controls, and eventually decided that the equaliser inside had fried. I was going to take apart the amplifier when I noticed the television had gone blank.

Then I noticed that the TV output on the video card of my living room computer had blown out. That's not so bad, because I can still use it over the network, but I can't see anything on its display. I guess I'll have to use a multimetre and see if it's something obvious. I didn't see any burnt chips or resistors on the logic board, so I'm praying that it's a bad solder joint. But I guess I can still use the card in some other computer, even if I buy a replacement.

Then, sometime Sunday morning I realised I was lame, and forgot to feed Diva. I wonder if she'll forgive me if I brought her some salmon, or some roast chicken?

Do not rub hard
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.

It is well past my bedtime and I'm still at the office. Things have been mighty busy at work, but I feel like I've been doing important tasks; so I don't mind too much. As long as the things I do channel into keeping people clothed and fed, doing these things seem like a pretty good utility to me.

Co-workers can get pretty annoying if they can no longer afford food or clothes. Being hit up for spare change while at work is totally uncool.

In fact, I've been so busy that I haven't had time to write any interesting things at all. Unless you count Subversion commit messages as interesting. Say, I've got a great idea. Maybe I could write all of my commit messages in verse! That's an awesome idea.

Or maybe it only seems that way because it's almost three in the morning.

The past two weeks or so have blurred. I've worked overtime every day: waking up to the computer, having some food, staying at the office until really late, and then going home. I worked over the weekend and even forwent a dinner party.

I did manage to meet up with Tor when he showed up in Montréal. I knew he was travelling up here, but he never actually told me which weekend. Since it is a 700 kilometre trip to Waterloo, it was the least I could do to hang out with him for a while. Good thing I checked in some code that day.

Now I'm sitting in the office, waiting for the hours to tick away. About every two hours, I go to the server room, unplug some computers, and plug them back in. Testing, you see. The good news is that everything is passing with flying colours. I don't want to think about the bad news. Instead, I will have another cup of tea.