Automatic stuff sucks.

wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip link set eth0 up
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
195.144.77.32/28 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 195.144.77.43
wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip route add default via 195.144.77.33
RTNETLINK answers: Network is unreachable
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
wouter@anything:~$ apt-get --purge remove network-manager

Yes, this really happened, and no, there were no pauses between the different commands except for the time needed for me to type them out.

Bill Gates on Windows vs Linux

From An interview with Bill Gates on Vista:

Actually, if you look at Windows strength versus Linux, or versus anything, it’s done very well, because we have this big ecosystem.

One word: ROTFL.

(Before any Microsoft drones hop in to say that Windows does have an ecosystem: Sure, I'm not contesting that. But saying that it's a strength which Windows has and Linux does not, that's hilarious)

Snow

I woke up this morning to ...

Hmm, no, let me rephrase that.

I woke up today to find this:

It's been ages since there was still snow around noon. Climate changes, anyone?

Names

I'm not very good with names. Given names I can manage, but I quite often forget what people's last names are. However, I'm not all that bad in remembering what I know people from. I've taken up the habit of calling people by the project they're known by if I can't immediately come up with their last name. This works, as people usually know who you're talking about if you mention, say, Dries Drupal, Philip Tinymail, Thomas Gstreamer, Guido Python, Theo OpenBSD, etc. It doesn't sound as good when you say Linus Linux, but then usually everyone knows who you talk about when you just use his first name.

I do wonder what I'd be known by, though...

Eww

For a project at work, I needed to write some application that would talk to sockets and store some state.

• Doing plain text files would be too much work (I need to parse the state afterwards, too)
• Doing a database server would be too fragile given the requirements of the system
• I don't like the SQLite API
• I don't fully know the libdb C API; but from what I remember when I last looked at it, I find it too cumbersome
• The Perl libdb API is just fine, especially if one uses use MLDBM, so I was planning to use that.
• Doing select() in perl conflicts with using the buffered PerlIO
• I didn't like the prospect of having to use Perl's sysread

So, I was facing a dilemma here: either use the cumbersome C API to libdb, or try to figure out a way to be able to talk to many sockets all at once from perl while still being able to use buffered PerlIO.

I chickened out.

wouter@country:~$ perldoc perlembed

Fast forward half a day, and I now have an application that will use perl to talk to libdb, and that will use C to talk to a number of sockets.

I feel dirty now. But it seems to work...

FOSDEM booth: more volunteers needed

Yesterday, I sent out an email to the debian-events-eu mailinglist, to ask for more volunteers for the FOSDEM booth next weekend. The situation is a little less desperate now than it was yesterday, but I would still need about 5 extra people who would want to put in one our at the booth.

Manning the booth at FOSDEM is not hard; you need to know a bit about Debian to be able to answer questions (which means that you don't even have to be a Debian Developer), and be sure to be at the booth for your designated hour. I fully expect you not to be there all alone, but you will have final responsibility for the stuff that's at the booth during your hour, and you are not to leave it, just in case everyone else does at some point, because of a rather interesting talk, or the keysigning, or some such.

If there are interesting things which you definately don't want to miss, then just let me know the hours that would work for you; I'll consider them then when I put you on the schedule.

The cool kids

Primary school is a long time ago. Still, every time I buy me some new toy, I somewhere in the back of my head wonder how this will have an influence on my social standing.

I have this Nikon D50 since a few months now, and have brought it to FOSDEM. Mostly to take pictures, but, well, I did think it'd make me look good—at least slightly so.

Turns out everyone and their dog has one. Guess I'll need to take my flute next time. Or, well, convince nattie to sing Aria 14, and then follow that up with Aria 15.