Finally, moved
It actually happened on tuesday, but I've been busy doing $DAYJOB and, well, finishing up things. But the move has finally happened!
It's only a month late. Well, almost, anyway.
Not that everything is finished now—you know how that goes—but at least I should be less busy these days. Or that's the idea...
Jokes
Eh, Bart?
That's
not "unhappy"; that's "just kidding". Just so you know 
Whee!
158 Ns+ Jun 04 Debian Bug Trac ( 13K) Bug#250202 closed by Russ Allbery
That only took, eh, four years. The report started out as a "I'm sick of all these confusing and different ways to package a package, we need a solution", suggesting a few extra targets to debian/rules, but then quickly changed into a proposal to add a README.source file to the debian/ directory. At some point, early on, I started to prefer the README.source solution way more than the extra debian/rules targets thing, but the proposal reached a stalemate as some people did prefer the extra targets thing. A solution was only reached when Russ Allbery wrote a compromise proposal that managed to satisfy everyone, which he first sent out about half a year ago.
Now, finally, the update is in. Which makes me really, really happy.
Köln
Went off to a much-needed holiday in Köln for most of last week. Had a truly great time in visiting the local landmarks there, and with listening to Heike and Heather and Ben playing music. Good music, at that.
But I'm home now. Much to do at this point: update laptop, prepare for a meeting tomorrow, finish up the apartment to a habitable state, upload pictures, blablabla.
First, though, I have to give Deutsche Bahn (who now likes to style themselves "Die Bahn" rather than "Deutsche Bahn", apparently) some points for doing what I ask them to. When I went there, I went to the Antwerp Berchem train station, and asked for a ticket to Köln. "Ik wil graag zo goedkoop mogelijk naar Keulen, desnoods met een IC-trein", I say: "Please get me to Cologne as cheap as possible, with an IC train if needed." His reply: "Een IC-trein naar Keulen? Da ga ni ze meneer!" -- "An IC train to Cologne? That's not possible, sir."
So I go to Köln by ICE, and pay approximately €43. This morning, then, I went to the trainstation in Köln, and asked for tickets back home. "As cheap as possible, please". The tickets I got this time were €10 cheaper, get me home by regular trains rather than high-speed ones, but require me to change trains 3 times (which I didn't mind). Sigh...
Awtch
Lessons learned: no unicode in filenames on my blog.
I had the great idea, a few days ago, to write a short blog post about my trip to Cologne, and to give the file a name with a UTF-8 character in it (the ö, to be exact). Except that I forgot how my blog actually works...
I use blosxom to manage my RSS feed and other parts of the blog; but to integrate it properly in my website, I wrote a whole lot of stuff around that. It's not just blosxom:
- All files are in a subversion repository.
- On the server, there is a file:/// checkout of the subversion repository in /var/local/blosxom. Files in this checkout are owned by the www-data user.
- The subversion repository has a rather long post-commit hook:
wouter@samba:/var/lib/svn/blog/hooks$ grep -v '^#' post-commit | wc -l 20
It takes care of updating the repository in /var/local/blosxom, and then fixes the timestamps on those files based on the timestamp of the original commit in the subversion repository. It's an ugly amalgam of svnlook date, svnlook history, touch and things, but it works. Sortof. Except if I remove a file, or if the svnlook history thing doesn't find the file itself. Finally, it will call blosxom itself, in the mode in which it creates files on disk rather than trying to do CGI output.
Apparently, however, subversion thinks differently about UTF-8 filenames if you do a checkout from a repository when using a http:// or a file:// URL. As a result, there were some issues in the post-commit subversion hook that I wrote, resulting in the svn up part of the post-commit not entirely succeeding. Or some such. Then, the touch is done, and the svn up doesn't work at all, anymore. In short, things started to break horribly, resulting in empty posts (because the files were created by touch rather than svn up), the comment thing being confused about filenames (and, as a result, postgres complaining about incorrect UTF-8 encodings), and similar other ugliness.
So, I just renamed the file, and did a cleanup of the subversion checkout in /var/local/blosxom. I'll just have to cope with the fact that my setup doesn't like unicode, I guess. Or, perhaps, finally switch to ikiwiki some day, which I've been thinking about ever since Joey first blogged about it a few years ago. But that's not urgent...
dada
Which would not at the single distribution the next it: confuses I overdid it a week.
WTF?
When people it's possible (that when people the fact weekends). AOL yes, configured to his blog post would need to go. Can't have config wouter usually the end up the letter: installation. Not as I don't see that people involved impression that does, not the port in Diegem, now: So had listed at all the code that is considering how well, new Url Openid function. The opposite side, to completely and which we'll have asked someone teaching him this; the way. This season with The only which I got the office mouse has a nice weather will get his words: pretty negative, review over the see where my experience, to create a beidcrld a rather than the article entitled why does appear to do this.
dodo
Grmbl
wouter@country:~$ for i in $(seq 1 64) > do > killall -$i firefox-bin > done
I know it makes no sense, but goddammit.
AOL
Yes, me too.
I actually booked a while ago, but never got around to blogging about it. Oh well. In case you care, my flights:
BRUSSELS IB 3207 L 02AUG 0755 LHPX2MBE 23AUG 2PC OK MADRID BARAJAS ARRIVAL TIME: 1010 TERMINAL:4 MADRID BARAJAS IB 6845 L 02AUG 1225 LHPX2MBE 23AUG 2PC OK TERMINAL:4S BUENOS AIRES EZ ARRIVAL TIME: 1940 BUENOS AIRES EZ IB 6844 N 18AUG 2145 NPRO21BE 09AUG 23AUG 2PC OK MADRID BARAJAS ARRIVAL TIME: 1430 TERMINAL:4S MADRID BARAJAS IB 3214 N 19AUG 1620 NPRO21BE 09AUG 23AUG 2PC OK TERMINAL:4 BRUSSELS ARRIVAL TIME: 1835
Now most people will be taking the bus from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata, where Debconf8 will be. However after looking at a map of Argentina, and remembering what happened when I flew to Australia with the flute choir back in 2001, when we had to do a bus ride after landing, I decided against doing the bus thing this time around. So:
BUENOS AIRES AE AR 1626 V 03AUG 2000 VVD 15K OK MAR DEL PLATA ARRIVAL TIME: 2055 MAR DEL PLATA AR 1627 V 17AUG 2120 VVD 15K OK BUENOS AIRES AE ARRIVAL TIME: 2215
Which means I'll have a night in Buenos Aires in both cases, to rest and to avoid having to do the bus trip. And perhaps to see the city, too.
All that's left now is not to forget about the passport thing. I'm sure I'll manage.
Iceweasel sucks.
I knew this since quite a while, actually—most of the firefox developers seem to developing for something else than what I use; but, well, using something else isn't very appealing to me. Anyway, yesterday the Iceweasel 3.0 update came on my laptop, and I couldn't help but sigh. I hadn't tried anything, hadn't read any reviews, didn't know what would happen; but given their track record, I expected only problems. I wasn't disappointed. Or, well, I was, depending on how you look at it.
- When I go to about:config, I want to configure my webbrowser. I have no need for hand-holding.
- When I click on a link in a different application, I want you to open, not to steal my focus. I will decide who gets the focus.
- The URL bar is slow and ugly. Having the title of a webpage show up there serves no useful purpose to me -- if I need the title, I'll go to the "history" part of that browser, that's what it for. Also, the underline-as-you-type nonsense slows things down considerably.
And that's only after a day. I fear the next few weeks. For the time being, hints on getting the above moronic stupidities gone (apart from the about:config one, which takes a single click) would be helpful.
And then of course I'm not even mentioning the fact that most of my add-ons don't work with 3.0 yet—but that is to be expected with a new brouwser, of course. At least flashblock works, which is the most important one.
Firefox sucks. No, really!
Warning: big rant ahead.
I received some comments on my previous post, as expected. Most of them were helpful; e.g., the oldbar extension is very useful. One of them was silly.
It depends: If your application is "fullscreened", clicking on the link without having the focus could lead to interesting situation like "Hey, It does nothing?"
Just to make a point here, let me reiterate:
There is no excuse whatsoever to steal the focus
Sorry for the shouting, but seriously. I have the following in my icewm configuration:
ClickToFocus = 0 RaiseOnFocus = 0 FocusOnMap = 0 FocusOnAppRaise = 0 FocusOnMapTransient = 0 FocusOnMapTransientActive = 1 RaiseOnClickClient = 0
What this means is that I don't want anything to either get the focus or get on top of anything else all by itself, unless it happens to be a new dialog box created by an application that already has the focus. I also don't want windows to appear on top of anything else just because they received the focus. I also happen to prefer focus-follows-mouse, which you can get by way of the ClickToFocus thing.
The reason I prefer it this way, is that often I have several applications open all at once. For instance, when I read RSS feeds, I have my RSS reader open on one virtual desktop, and read through the articles. Since my laptop's processor is much, much faster in certain things than is my network, I also make use of its multitasking abilities to have it preload links in the background (on another virtual desktop, preferably).
Unfortunately, somehow, firefox manages to bypass all that configuration and shows up in front, stealing the focus; and in the process, it completely interferes with the way I work. No doubt they do this in order to help some hypothetical "grandma" or other stupid clueless person who's never used a computer before, but let me tell you something: software should be written for people who actually do use software, not for stupid nitwits who can't even read an error message that tells them "you cannot do A, please go ahead and do B instead".
But I guess I'm too stupid or something to understand the usability "experts" who know it all best and say that software should be "intuitive" so that those who are 53 and see a computer for the first time in their live can sit right next to it and start emailing.
Hah.
As if the above wasn't enough, firefox 3 also is a crashing load of shit. I just spent the better part of an hour to try and make a payment using my bank's excellent online payment software which requires nothing more than javascript, SSL, and a digipass 810 that is provided by the bank as part of the online banking contract. Unfortunately firefox insisted on crashing halfway through entering the required information, for six times in a row. You'd think I'd be filing a bug now, but no, it managed to crash in a different location every time. I'd probably have to start debugging firefox to get this done, which is not something I'll do in this life.
You know what the problem is? Webbrowser developers think they're developing the most important application for any computer. They're not. It's just a webbrowser, no more important than an xterm or a mail client: a tool to get a job done. Period.
Grunt.
Passports...
Today, I went to the Ekeren district house[1] to get me a passport, in order to be able to fly to Argentina in about a month. As I was queueing at the desk, I realized that I'd forgotten some pictures of myself, so I left the queue, found the closest photo shop, and had them take some pictures of me. When I returned to the district house, gave them my new pictures and my identity card, with the request to furnish me a passport, the lady behind the desk told me that I apparently still had a passport. While no longer valid, I still need to hand that in before I can be given a new passport. Or, alternatively, I could go to the police office, tell them that I cannot find the passport anymore, and use the document they'd give me to get me a new passport. That, too, would work.
So that's the option I decided to take. I quickly went to the police office, which is rather close to the district house; luckily nobody was queueing before me there. By the time I got back to the district house, it was about 14:50, while they close at 15:00. So I went ahead and started queueing again.
Suddenly, I notice that my pictures were gone. For some reason, the idiots at the photo shop have deviced an "envelope" that does not hold the pictures -- they have three places where they can easily leave the "envelope". And that's exactly what had happened: no more pictures. So I ask the lady behind the desk whether she'd be willing to wait a few more minutes after their official closing time, so that I'd be able to go and look for them. She didn't mind.
Unfortunately, I only found one picture. The other five were nowhere to be found... and with only one picture, the district office can't help me; they need two of them.
So, now, I've not only lost an hour of my life, but I've also lost €8.00 for pictures that are now no longer useful to me. And I'll have to do all of this again, some time next week.
Dammit.
[1] although I don't live in Ekeren anymore, officially I do: the apartment where I live does not exist according to the Mechelen city administration. Before I can officially move there, the landlord needs to deal with that, which apparently involves quite some bureaucracy. For one thing, he needs 6—yes, six—copies of the building plans, along with a particular form with a particular number. Probably needs to jump through a number of hoops, too—I wouldn't be surprised.