therning.org/ magnus

I just noticed that epilicious doesn’t work for me It seems the recent work done by the Python group in Debian Sid has resulted in the following line throwing an exception:

from elementtree.ElementTree import parse

Yes, I’ve double checked that python-elementtree is installed (python-celementtree is also installed). At the moment I’m too lazy to look into it myself and I’ve sent off an email to the Debian user list.

Some interesting articles on Net Neutrality by David Ernst and Andy Kessler. I’m slowly starting to lean towards letting the market sort this out without government intervention. The idea of labelling is especially appealing.

That something’s wrong in Microsoft is rather obvious given the amazing delay in releasing Vista/Longhorn (whatever it’s called this week). After listening to the LQ podcast I tracked down the MSDN blog entry mentioned in it, Broken Windows Theory. It’s an interesting look behind the curtain.

Look here to have a good laugh at RIAA and MPAA.

I’ve just checked in a small fix for a rather irritating bug in epilicious. I’m surprised no-one noticed the bug earlier. A local modification to the keywords of a bookmark wasn’t propagated to del.icio.us, and a second sync would revert the local change.

I’ve checked in a fix and built a new package of course.

Where the hell is my email going?

For the last few days I’ve been having problems with my email. The first thing I noticed was that the ORG mailing list got very quite. Then I realised I didn’t get my own postings! The administrator of the list says I’m still subscribed, and no-one else has reported any problems with the list. For testing purposes I’ve tried to subscribe other email addresses on the therning.org domain to the list. The confirmation emails never arrive!

The next thing I noticed was that emails I send through a friends SMTP server don’t reach thernig.org addresses either. I use this server to send private emails from work and this means I can’t email Dita from work.

This is most irritating and I haven’t got a clue where to start looking to fix it

Eric Flynn’s first column on copyright got me thinking. It’s a really good piece on copyright, but especially one thing jumped out and stuck in my mind:

Copyright is a privilege, not a right.

I believe basically a similar line of reasoning can be applied to patents.

Monopolies are evil. Patents are government-sanctioned monopolies. Hence, patents are evil.

However, the patent system is the best way we have to address an even bigger evil:

It’s so expensive to capitalise on an invention that only big companies can do it.

So to prevent this bigger evil we adopt a slightly lesser evil—the patent system. This doesn’t change the nature of it though, it’s still evil! Especially it means that expanding the area of what can be patented should be done with utmost care, because frivolous expansion brings a significant risk of harming society. In particular the burden of proof should be on the side that is seeking the expansion, not on the side arguing for the status quo.

This post has been a long time coming. The previous two parts (part 1 and part 2) are more than a month old…

After a single night in Singapore we continued on to Indonesia and Jakarta. We didn’t really have any plans for the almost 2 weeks we were going to stay, and to be honest I was a little worried about that. Jakarta just isn’t a very good holiday destination. A few days are fine, but more than a week and I start going nuts

It turned out to be very nice though. We stayed with one of Dita’s uncles. The house was more crowded now than the last time. Two grandsons, twins, [Nina's hubby's name], the husband of Dita’s cousin, and new maids. Luckily there’s a lot of space in the house.

The weather in Jakarta this time around was not as bad as I had expected. Almost cool and dry. Well, not cool and dry at all really, but less hot and humid than then my experience from earlier trips. Even traffic wasn’t as bad as I remembered. I also noticed that the economy is doing better. The last time Mal Ambassador was to a large part empty. This time around there were hardly any empty “boxes” left. They were even selling BMWs on the ground floor. I guess this means the economy is better, it doesn’t mean life is better for the Indonesians though.

When planning the trip Dita had planned about 10 days, uninterrupted stay in Jakarta. After only a few days it became obvious that neither of us would survive for that long in Jakarta though. Luckily there are now low-cost airlines in Asia For about 1M rupiah we got two return tickets to Bali. We only stayed three nights but it was a very nice break from Jakarta. Dita has a cousin in Sanur who put us up for the stay. Cheap and good

Bali took us a bit by surprise this time. While Jakarta was bustling with activity and there were obvious indications that the economy was doing better, Bali was sleepy and void of tourists. We have some postcard like photos from the beach in Sanur, clear blue sky and an empty beach. A few years ago you’d have to be up pretty early in the morning to get such a shot. We took our pictures around noon. I can’t say we were disappointed though, the streets were easy to navigate, no queues anywhere, and we almost had WaterBom to ourselves.

Before starting our return trip we spent a few more days in Jakarta visiting family and friends and “enjoying” the traffic. Travelling back to England took two days, first back to Hong Kong with a short stop in Singapore, then to London’s Heathrow the following day. The flights were like good flights are, boring and uneventful.

Just uploaded a release, version 0.5, to GnomeFiles. Of course I also created a page for it.

Hopefully someone will enjoy it.

After an attempt at hacking “window packing” into Jendela I ran into a bit of a showstopper: Metacity doesn’t support _NET_MOVERESIZE_WINDOW. Now this is a bit of a problem, because “window packing” is all about moving windows around on the screen.

Confusingly Metacity does register the relevant XAtom, meaning that wmctrl doesn’t work (it’ll first try the XAtom, if it exists it uses the EWMH way, otherwise it reverts back to calling XMoveResizeWindow). Bad, bad Metacity!

Well, it turns out the code is already in Metacity, just commented out. The changelog says it’s pending “feature thaw”, whatever that means. Apparently something’s frozen solid because it’s been pending since July 2004

I decided I need to take a stab at this and raised bug 344521.

Due to the number of spam emails for enlargement of bodyparts I now have a spam filter that awards the word “package” with a very high score. This means that almost all emails relating to packaging of software (something I do in my spare time every now and then) end up in the spam box. Not good!.

What do I do? Start over with my training set is the only idea I’ve come up with.

My local development repo is being uploaded to http://therning.org/magnus_bzr/jendela.dev/ as I write this.

There isn’t much functionality yet–you can shade windows–but hopefully I’ll have time to change that over the next few days.