Software patents NO!

Went to Brussels today, to participate in (yet another) demonstration against software patents. Which went pretty well; we stood in the cold for about an hour or so, then walked through the cold towards the building where the Luxembourg governemnt has its offices. Stood there, shouted slogans, waiting for someone to come out and listen. Eventually, one of the Luxembourg diplomats came out (someone directly involved in the process, I was told; but I don't know whether this is true) and he received our offers (bananas, a letter with explanation, and a poster to hang in their office, with a print of the FFII's 'webshop patent' example. He then told us that there will be a restart of the process, that negotiations will be re-opened, and that everyone would get to have their say. Good news, which was later sortof confirmed (as in, it was confirmed that there was a unanimous vote of the european parliament's faction presidents to ask for a restart, but it's the commision who gets to decide whether this will happen. They allegedly most likely will, but I've seen enough of European politics by now to still doubt this).

After the Luxembourg Diplomat's words, we went on to the building where the European Commision works, which is just a few hundred meters further, in the same street. Shouted slogans again, but this time there was no diplomat available; so they sent some manager instead (the guy in charge of human resources) who received the stuff we offered and promised to relay the message to the people who do get to decide.

The bananas were good, too. Fun joke, that.

The council can't re-open negotiations because, as a Council diplomat said,

The council can't listen to the national parliaments, because

The council completely ignores the directly elected European Parliament, because

When there is no longer a qualified majority in the Council, they schedule the Directive at a fisheries meeting (twice), because

with thanks to the FFII for their flyer

So, there were a lot of free bananas. Somehow, that sounds better than free beer.

Well.

Anyway. After the demonstration, we went to a bar for a beer (this is Belgium after all); then, there was a press conference. We weren't required to go there, but we were invited, so I went. Of course, there also were some people from a pro-patent pressure group, and we had a healthy discussion afterwards.

There's one thing I tried to say, but couldn't, something regarding the difference between Software and Pharmaceutical patents. That'll be for another time, though.

Big Brother

I know why I voted Staes during the last elections. But now I'm reminded why, should I have forgotten.

Oh my.

Software Patents in Europe: MEPs reply

Two days ago, I received a second reply to the mails I had been sending out to Belgian MEPs. The first one was from Bart Staes, who, being a representative of the Flemish Greens, reaffirmed that he, together with the other Greens in the European Parliament, opposed Software Patents. I knew that, of course (it's why I voted for him on the last elections), but I still thought it important to let him know he's not off base in this particular subject. You wouldn't want your MEPs to start thinking they're somehow wrong when they receive information from lobbyists from 'the other side', and no longer from us.

I thought I had received another reply from Dirk Sterkcx, but in looking through my mails, I found out that this was apparently not the case (or I already deleted it, though I don't think I did).

The reply I received on wednesday was from Anne Léger, an assistant to Philippe Busquin. It was a very short email:

Geachte Heer,

Philippe Busquin dankt u voor uw mail mbt de patentproblematiek die hem
toelaat een compleet beeld te krijgen van het gegeven om een gefundeerde
positie in te nemen.

Met vriendelijke groeten,

[signed]

Which translates approximately to:

Dear Sir,

Philippe Busquin thanks you for your mail regarding the patent issue
which allows him to have a complete view on the situation in order to
form a well-founded opinion. 

Regards,

[signed]

Now, I'm happy about this; perhaps even more so than I was about the mail from Bart Staes. Judging by the email from Mr. Busquin's aide, it would appear that he's not yet formed his opinion; to know that the work I did to contact the Belgian MEPs—including the Walloon ones, whom I can never vote into parliament and whom I mailed in Dutch rather than French—could influence the opinion of MEPs, even if only one, made it all worthwhile.

If you're European and you haven't yet mailed your representatives regarding the Patent issue, it might be a good idea to do so. There is still time, if not much; and it doesn't have to take a long time. Just make sure you write a personal email, though, not a form letter used by possibly tens or hundreds of other people.

Nutzwerk is a scam, and should be ashamed of themselves

If you're trying to open up the FFII's web pages at ffii.org, you might notice that for some reason this isn't possible. What's happened is that some German software company called "Nutzwerk" has been abusing loopholes in the German law system that allowed them to file no less than five distinct lawsuits about the very same thing so that the FFII, in the end, couldn't afford the costs anymore.

The claims were about some documentation that the FFII had put up on their website about their services. Apparently, as can be read in the google cache of a recent press release on FFII.org, Nutzwerk was used as an example of a successful SME based on software patents—but a very dubious one at that.

They'll probably try to sue me now, but I don't care. They deserve all the negative attention they can get.

Hint: www.ffii.de still seems to work. Oh well.

Update: this entry isn't entirely correct. Read this.

Mailed the Belgian MEPs again.

I've just mailed our Belgian MEPs on the Software Patents issue again. This isn't the first time I'm doing this -- last time was before the last europarl elections, though.

My mail was quite a bit diferent this time, as compared to the previous one. Based in part on one of my previous blog posts about this subject, I'm trying to convince the MEPs that they should vote against this directive, even if they support it, because I think (and I hope they do so with me) that if we do get a directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions, at all, it should be through a democratic process, rather than through people switching off other people's microphones so that they can claim consensus due to lack of opposition.

Let's see whether it has any effect. I sincerely hope so.

Europe has become a circus

I really don't see why the mass media don't jump on this. Even if you don't uderstand what all the fuss about software patents is about, the amount of abuse going on in the Software Patents discussion is incredible, and of interest to everyone, especially now that people all over Europe have a chance to vote in referenda on a European Consitution; after all, if the system is broken, the People should know.

Let's recap.

• Somewhere 2002. Some subordinate of Frits Bolkestijn proposes a directive "on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions" (commonly known as the "software patents directive").
• September 2003. After adding a number of amendments and ending up with a compromise between those in favor and those against software patents, the parliament votes on the directive, approving the text.
• May 18th, 2004. The European Commission, which functions as a second chamber in European politics (but is much smaller than the Parliament) votes on the directive. In doing so, it removes all of the Parliament's amendments (so that it ends up at the non-compromising position of the pro-patents lobby again) and adds some of its own (that, needless to say, favour the pro-patent people again). Over the next few months, while defending their amendments, they outright lie, telling people that their amendments restrict the patentability of software (which people in the industry have been on record of saying that it is not true.)
• May 2004-November 2004. The Dutch and German national parliaments approve motions instructing their delegations in the European Commission not to support the directive. The German delegation even goes on record as promising they will not support it. When it comes to a vote, the Dutch delegation deliberately seeks loopholes in the motion by their parliament, so that by its letter (but against its spirit) they can vote for it, supporting the directive; and the German delegation manages to get an amendment through that only adds two words, so that they can claim the directive is now no longer dangerous and they support it none the less (which, needless to say, is so incredible that it would be funny if it wasn't sad).
• December 2004-February 2005. Even though the directive already lost its qualified majority since ages, it is repeatedly scheduled on the agenda of several minister meetings, as an A-item, that is, for it to be approved without discussion or without vote. They did this twice on the agricultural and fisheries meeting, and once on a meeting of financial ministers. No, nobody understands the link between agriculture and software patents. Special thanks go out to Poland, for getting the item off of the agenda twice.
• End of February 2005-current. The JURI commission–an organ of the European Parliament responsible for legal affairs–proposes a motion to restart the entire procedure, which would end the directive up at a new first reading; by doing so, the democratic process would get a fair chance, this time (which it didn't really get last time). When they vote on it, the vote is almost unanimously to support it. Yet, the European Council of Ministers (or the Commission, not entirely sure on that one) apparently is able to blatantly ignore the request.

The above is, in one word, incredible. Whether you support Software Patents or oppose them; or even if you don't care at all, doesn't really matter. One should be able to trust their decision-makers to follow procedures to the spirit rather than to the letter. To create good laws, that are supported by the majority of parliament rather than shabby texts written by whoever has the best money. Especially in light of the upcoming (or passed, in some countries) referenda on the European Constitution, it is imperative that we, as European Citizens, can trust our government.

With stunts such as the ones made by the European Commission in the Software Patent dossier, I don't think we can. If the European institutes can't be trusted to follow Democracy, how should I trust them?

Then again, maybe this is how politics work. Maybe this is one of those dossiers where things are especially ugly because it doesn't hit the mass media. Maybe I'm just naive. I dunno. But if that is the case, there should be a way for democracy to be forced upon all parties involved. If an organ of the Parliament votes on an issue, it should be binding, not just a recommendation. Or so.

As I said, the Software Patents issue has grown far, far beyond just Software Patents, to the point that the European instances have become a circus. Or, as some would put it, a Banana Republic. Please help in spreading that as a google ranking.

Note that I didn't do much research on the above list, so some of the details might be inaccurate. The general picture isn't, though.

DVswitch tally lights

So you do computer stuff for work, and what do you do in the weekend? Right, more computer stuff.

Not that I dislike it, obviously. But, well.

The computer stuff that I did this weekend was situated mainly around dvswitch. During their talk at the Debian devroom at FOSDEM, Ben and Holger mentioned that one of the things they'd still like to see implemented in DVswitch is the ability to do tally lights. Such lights are useful, not only for the benefit of those in front of the camera, but also for the benefit of those behind the camera—allowing them to know when they're free to roam about in order to find something interesting to show, or when they should keep the camera somewhat stead because they're live.

Since I was planning on using dvswitch to record the concert (dutch only) of the choir group that I'm part of, and since a concert has different requirements than does a talk, I set about implementing tally light functionality. For now, the actual tally light is just a laptop screen—which turns red when you're live, or green when you're not—but there's nothing stopping anyone from changing that into, say, a USB-controlled light or some such.

In any case, it works now. It's not entirely pretty (involving two processes working with the same socket) and not entirely finished yet, either (it only works for primary sources, not secondary sources), but it gets the job done.

It did require me to refresh knowledge that I hadn't used in literally 10 years, however. I had some C++ at school, but haven't used it since my final exam on that course, and while the code is still readable, it did require me to refresh my memory at some levels. Oh my...

Anyway, that was yesterday, for the most part. Today, a friend came over with a DV camera (since I don't have any), and we ran some tests. Most of it worked immediately, but there were a few bugs, which I ironed out today. Right now, it works correctly—the parts that are implemented, at least.

This video stuff is rather fun to play with.

No RAND in OASIS-blessed standards!

I have sent a mail to the people opposing the RAND patent policy in OASIS, to express my support to their cause, a while ago (when I saw John Goerzen's mail on debian-devel). I hope everyone in the FLOSS community does the same thing.

The PICTS (Permanent ICT Steering group) of the Belgian Federal Government did do so too. This makes me very happy, and proud to be a Belgian.

That mail, however, contains another important message, which is new to me as well: apparently, our government is about to recommend that communication be implemented using open standards (making it mandatory a while later), and to suggest doing this using FLOSS.

And I thought I'd never see the day.

GFDL 1.3

Yeah, yeah, I may be living under a rock these days. Anyway, I just noticed that the GFDL v1.3 is out; it has been for four months or so.

There aren't many changes; apart from some minor wording changes that have little to no effect on the meaning of the license, there are two new sections: the first adds details on what happens when you violate the license (basically, it gets temporarily terminated, which can become permanent if you do not fix it in a reasonable timeframe or under some other circumstances); the second allows one to change the license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA under certain circumstances (where "certain circumstances" in practice basically means "you're wikipedia", although it isn't written as such).

And that's it. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing to follow up on the FDLv2 discussion drafts that were released about two-and-a-half years ago.

Me, I find that disappointing. When the initial discussion drafts were put out on the web, I was thrilled; I spent some time reading them and providing comments. However, nothing happened on those drafts beyond initially getting them out there. It would appear that today, the FSF has even managed to lose the comments that were made.

I guess they don't really care about the FDL as much as they do about the GPL.

Schilly vs djb

I wonder, in a Jerry Springer kind of way, what would happen if Jörg Schilling were ever to start a discussion with Daniel Bernstein.

Perhaps I should go out and buy some popcorn in preparation.

83

films=# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM films;
 count
-------
    83
(1 row)

I made a little database the other day, with just one table, to keep track of the DVD's I own. This is just the movies; I also have a bucnh of TV-series on DVD, but I didn't include those. Yes, I guess you could say I'm a movie buff.

Two days ago that output was 80. Yesterday, I bought a box with three of Sergio Leone's movies: 'For a few dollars more', 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly', and 'A Fistful of Dynamite'. These go nicely together with 'Once upon a time in the West' that I also have, and which is one of my favourite movies of all time.

Anyway, I watched 'For a few dollars more' and 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' yesterday. 'For a few dollars more' is Leone's second movie, and while it's not a bad movie, it's also not as wonderful as 'Once upon a time in the West' is, in my opinion. I guess this has everything to do with Leone not being as experienced yet at that point in time; 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' (TGTBATU), which was his next project, shows a lot of growth, and is much more enjoyable.

Of course I already knew about TGTBATU, and had, if not the whole movie, at least seen fragments of it. The mexican standoff at the end is a classic, the buildup of tension throughout the movie is wonderful, and the acting is great. Not much more to say about that, really.

I don't know what I dislike about 'for a few dollars more'; it's not so bad that I don't want to see it again, but otoh I felt slightly disappointed when it was over. There were some parts where I thought the music could've been better, but whether a movie is good doesn't depend solely on the score...

Uitmuntend

Yesterday, the choir of which I've been a member for these past few years went to the provincial tournament—for the first time in its existence. For those of you unaware with what this is: the "provincial tournament" isn't a tournament in the traditional sense (which would have a winner etc); instead, you get to sing in front of an expert jury which will classify you in one of six categories; the category you're in then determines government subsidy your group gets. This is done for all nonprofessional music groups, and makes for a pretty fair way of deciding who gets what, IMO. Apart from that, it's of course also fun.

Anyway, as said this was the first time our choir went to such a "tournament", but of course we weren't alone; apart from us, there were six other choirs, two of which were also part of the Ekerse C-koren: Cantando (the semi-professional choir of our group) and Cantilene (for those between the ages of 18 and 25 (or 16 and 25 for boys).

And we did well. Cantilene (who did very well in the most recent edition of the 'Koor van het Jaar' contest) was categorized in the 'superieure afdeling' ('superior category'), with 75% in that category. Cantando did even better than that; they achieved a score of 93%, also in the superieure afdeling. This is the highest category in the whole system, so it deserves some special praise.

Caljenté, our choir, didn't quite reach that level yet; considering the fact that we've only existed about three years, however, that isn't very surprising. Yet, we did quite well; we were categorized in the 'Uitmuntendheid' category, with a score of 75% in that category. Uitmuntendheid (which would translate to something like 'greatness') is the third possible category, which puts us in the top half of the choirs of the province of Antwerp.

Quite an achievement for what is, after all, a fairly new choir. Of course we're all very happy with that—especially so our conductor, who was rather surprised when she heard the outcome...

For those interested, one of the choir members had a camera with him, and he put the four pieces we sang up on youtube: Credo, Dostoyno Yest, Wals van kwart voor middernacht, and Hodie Christus Natus Est. There're also films of the other choirse, but you'll have to look for those yourself ;-P

Samba upgraded to lenny

Samba.grep.be, my main server (which occasionally also hosts a domU for p2) was upgraded to lenny this monday evening. I wish I could say there were no issues, but unfortunately that's not true.

At first, everything seemed to run smoothly; of course I did have to recompile a few locally written programs to run against some SONAME changes (programs that are too trivial to package, really, and too ugly too), but other than that, everything was fine.

It went wrong sometime during the night. Apparently something didn't like the new kernel or the new xen, because everything started to lock up. Since I only noticed this when I was at a customer the next day, I couldn't fix it until I got home again in the evening (meaning, downtime for a full day); and unfortunately, the exact failure mode meant that not much was written to the log -- certainly not enough to figure out what went wrong:

Mar 10 04:04:41 samba kernel: [ 7033.011523] INFO: task cron:21006 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
Mar 10 06:43:46 samba kernel: [ 7033.011614] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
Mar 10 17:35:04 samba kernel: [ 7033.011701] cron          D 7fffffffffffffff     0 21006   4147

After that, nothing before the reboot, which happened at around 21:00. Take good note of the timings on those messages, and the apparent discrepancies between the syslog timestamp and the kernel timestamp. 7033 seconds after boot was around 3:30 AM...

When I arrived at the physical server, this kind of message was rolling over the console several times a second, with just the name and PID of the blocking process changed. And with several more lines following the message, of course. As a result, the system was not responsive at all.

I didn't file a bug since, frankly, there's so little information that I wouldn't even know what to file a bug against (the kernel? Xen? Some rogue process that runs as root and changes settings which cause a driver to block? I wouldn't know). Instead, all I could do was to reboot the server and hope for the best.

Not that I like that kind of situation. Fortunately, the problem didn't reproduce itself today; here's for hoping that it never will.

Debconf9 by train

With Debconf9 being on the european mainland this year, a plane flight isn't necessary. Since flying in cattle class isn't my idea of 'fun', I had been planning to take the train to Caceres this year.

So, with the public announcement of debconf registration being open, I thought I'd look at train options. Short version: I think I'll be going to the train station and ask them there, rather than looking something up on the NMBS website.

Long version:

And that's after asking to arrive 'around' noon on the 15th. Although I'd love to combine ICE ('Intercity Express', German high-speed trains), CIS ('Cisalpino', Italian high-speed trains), EN ('EuroNight', pretty much what the name says), and AVE ('Alta Velocidad España', Spanish high-speed trains) in a single trip, I think I'll pass for this particular suggestion. And that's ignoring the fact that 5 minutes for a transfer in Arth-Goldau (a place I've never heard of before, let alone been in that train station) is rather tight, and that I don't know whether I'll be able to make it in 45 minutes from one train station to another in Barcelona without actually knowing the city.

More soon.

Dear lazyweb,

Having used a powerbook as my primary machine for about four years, I'm not very up-to-date on Intel-specific hardware, such as ACPI, these days.

When at conferences or similar, I often see people who've configured their laptops so that acpid would start an alarm when the battery's almost flat. Now that I have an HP laptop again, which does ACPI, I'd like to do the same; but I can't seem to figure out how this is configured.

That is to say, when my laptop's battery is flat, it just switches off. No alarm. Needless to say, this is is rather annoying, and searching through the 56 files in /etc/acpi hasn't resulted in success so far.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Something seems terribly wrong here...

 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
18631 bacula    15   0 5580m 3.5g 1236 S  100 90.9  68:38.75 bacula-dir

Seriously.

It's trying to do a restore here. Yes, the backup contains a lot of data, but not that much.

It's going to OOM, I'm afraid.

DV from webcams

DVswitch is a neat piece of software, but it only works with DV streams. If you want to use something else (like, say, a webcam), you'll need to do something 'special':

wouter@celtic:~$ mkfifo dvsource-fifo
wouter@celtic:~$ ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -r 25 -s vga -i /dev/video0 -target pal-dv - > dvsource-fifo
wouter@celtic:~$ dvsource-file dvsource-fifo

And there you are, a DV stream from my webcam. Not that this is very useful, probably—but who cares, right?

Dealing with apt's GPG signing stuff -- the right way.

Philippe blogs about how one can import a GPG key into apt's GPG keyring so that it will stop complaining about unknown keys. While his method will work, it has a major flaw:

Importing random keys without checking them first makes secure apt totally useless, since it allows an attacker to replace an apt repository with another one that he signed with his own key and you won't even notice because you blindly import keys anyway.

So what's the right way? Depends:

• If you have a GPG key yourself, and you have built a local web of trust (with gpg's --update-trustdb command—beware, this is an interactive process that can take a long time if you have a lot of keys in your local gpg keystore), you can verify that the key really is what it claims to be:

  wouter@celtic:~$ gpg --edit-key 6070D3A1
  gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.9; Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
  
  
  pub  1024D/6070D3A1  created: 2006-11-20  expires: 2009-07-01  usage: SC  
                       trust: never         validity: full
  [  full  ] (1). Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) <ftpmaster@debian.org>
  
  Command> quit
  

  Why --edit-key? Because --list-keys, --list-sigs, or even --check-sigs does not show you the validity information. The --list-sigs --with-colons output does, but that is meant for computer consumption, and isn't very useful for human beings. But --edit-key contains the information too, so that works.

  What you need to look at is the information that immediately follows 'validity:'. In my case, it says 'validity: full', meaning, "enough" people who I have indicated (using --update-trustdb) to trust that they can sign keys the proper way have signed this particular key. "Enough" is configurable, but for now, let's ignore that (there's plenty of data about that on the web if you want it).

  If your output says 'validity: full', then go ahead and add it to apt's trusted keyring:

  gpg --export 6070D3A1 | apt-key add -
  

  Note: go ahead and ignore the 'trust: never' data in the output. This represents the fact that I told gpg not to trust the key when doing gpg --update-trustdb. This doesn't mean I won't trust data that's signed with this particular key; however, it does mean I won't trust key signatures signed with this particular key. Since this is not a personal key, but a key only used to sign data with, this is the right thing to do for this particular key.

• Alternatively, if you don't have a keyring, don't want to maintain your local web of trust, don't understand what I just said, or any combination of the preceding, just check what the maintainers of the particular repository to which this key corresponds tell you. If they're good maintainers, they should've given you a fingerprint right beside the information that contained the apt repository. Copy-and-paste that information on two command lines:

  gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key <fingerprint>
  gpg --export <fingerprint> | apt-key add -
  

  If they didn't give you that information, then send a giant cluebat mail to them. They really should've done that.

• Finally, if you don't care about all this gpg stuff and don't think anyone would be interested to break into your system, you'd be wrong—scriptkiddies don't look at who's using a particular system, they just like to be stupid. If you insist, however, you should note that you can actually disable secure apt, by adding the following to a file under /etc/apt/apt.conf.d:

  APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "yes";
  

  Not that I'd recommend it, but if you insist...

TomTom

Cheers.

93

films=# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM films;
 count
-------
    93
(1 row)

There were several additions, including one which I actually had when I wrote the previous entry but forgot to add to the database.

One of the more recent additions is Memoirs of a Geisha, an intriguing and compelling piece about some of the more mysterious parts of Japanese culture, and how World War II affected this—wrapped in a love story.

It's unfortunate that the movie depicts Geisha as prostitutes (which they are not), but other than that, it's a pretty solid movie.

Another movie which I recently acquired is Requiem for a Dream, a somewhat harsh movie (definitely no happy ending here) about addiction in all its forms. I think this movie is a must-see for everyone, really; not only because of its message (and boy, does it have one), but also because of the way the movie is filmed; split screen, snorricam, and other inventive camera and montage techniques all add to the movie's excellence. And then there's the soundtrack. Oh boy, that sountrack.

There were more, but those were not as interesting.

Cinelerra as an advocacy tool

This weekend, I was going to go to an acquaintance so that we could edit the material which we had filmed at the concert. Yes, we did use DVswitch, but due to me being somewhat late in proposing a video team, there was no team, and hence nobody switched anything. So instead we'll have to edit stuff now.

Since I'd never done anything of the sort before, I guess it's fair to say that I'm not exactly the expert. As such, I installed samba, plugged the (LVM2/ext3 formatted) external hard disk containing the movie files to my laptop, and served them over a gigE link to his; the idea being that we could then do the editing on his system, using the software which he knew.

After having copied those files (one 22G DV file, one 15G one, and a few much smaller ones), he loaded them into the editing software. Which promptly sat on its ass, making us wait, as it 'analyzed' the movie clip. This of course took ages.

As said, I don't really know a lot about movie editing. However, in preparation to this, I had been playing with Cinelerra CV, and so I knew that this particular application does not require such an utterly useless delay. This I told Werner, who got interested. So we went over to Cinelerra's website, and had a look at the features list.

That got him interested, and he suggested that it might be more interesting for me to install Linux and Cinelerra on his laptop, so that he could do the editing using that, rather than the Windows application that he wasn't entirely fond of anyway.

So I did. A few hours later, everything was up and running, we had had lunch, and we were copying data from my external hard disk to his. As we were waiting on the data to be copied, I installed foobillard, and we had a bit of fun playing pool and snooker.

Closing words, as we were wrapping up and he had a slightly more general look at the system: "sortof useful these days, isn't it?"

Sure.

I really believe that this kind of thing is the ideal way to do advocacy; rather than suggesting freedom for freedom's sake, one should suggest something people actually care about, and work from there.

Of course, that doesn't always work.

Debconf9 by train

This friday, I had to go to a customer whose office is close to the Brussels South station. As I went back, I missed the train to Mechelen by a few minutes, and had to wait about 20 minutes (IIRC) for the next one.

So rather than sitting there, doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs, I thought I'd go to the ticketing office and ask about prices.

Since trains can only be booked about three months in advance to the actual trip, now is still too early to get a definite price. However, I asked for an estimate, and they were kind enough to get me one.

Looks like a one-way ticket from Belgium to Madrid is going to be €150ish. Of course that doesn't get me to Caceres yet, but since I'll need to get from Madrid to Caceres whether I go there by train or not, that isn't going to make a real difference.

I'm sure it's going to be cheaper if I book a flight with the likes of Ryanair or some such, of course, but €300 isn't too much of an inconvenience; and taking a train rather than a flight is much more appealing to me. So that's what I'll do.