Steve's blog

The Model M is not dead!

Fri, 30 May 2008 20:02:00 +0100

It seems that the good folks at Unicomp are still making proper buckling-spring keyboards, now even with a USB connector. Phew! I was worried that I'd be forced to move away from my nice clicky Model M at some point soon, as PCs are slowly losing PS/2 ports.

Final Sarge CDs done and released

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:48:00 +0100

Forgot to mention, but some people seem to have spotted anyway. The last (ever!) official set of Sarge CDs and DVDs is available. I'd strongly advise against most people using them, as Etch is a much better bet and Lenny isn't too far away. But for those people that might want them, you can find them in the "archive" area: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/3.1_r8/

Yay!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:51:00 +0100

It seems I've been elected to be DPL for the next year, starting this coming Thursday (18th April) according to Manoj. Thanks to the people that voted for me, and also to the other two candidates - better luck next time to Marc and Raphael. And (of course) thanks to Sam as well for his excellent efforts over the last year.

I hope to do a good job for you all this year, and I have a few plans on what I'm going to do. More concrete details once I'm actually officially in charge... :-)

Going to Debconf 8!

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:16:00 +0100

Looking forwards to seeing folks there, or on the flight over from Madrid... Now all I need to do is finish finding sponsors to pay for the conference itself!

I'm running again...

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:48:00 +0100

... and I'm ill again. I hope this is just a coincidence, but this makes 3 years out of 3 where shortly after standing in the DPL election I get a cold. *sneeze* Apologies in advance if I don't respond to all of people's questions on debian-vote immediately in the next few days...

Debunking World Myths?

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:02:00 +0100

More than just your average Powerpoint dross - an interesting way of looking at statistics by Hans Rosling (Warning: requires Flash)

Using autofs for GPG keys on a USB stick

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:17:00 +0100

A few people have asked me how I use GPG with a USB stick. I've written up a small howto for them, but it's probably worth sharing with a wider audience.

Shiny data centre!

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:45:00 +0100

Late last week, I visited fellow DD Tim Cutts at the Sanger Institute just south of Cambridge. I dropped off a couple more machines that the BOFHs there have kindly offered to host for Debian, and Tim offered me a quick look around their facility. Sanger plays host to a massive set of computers used for genetic sequencing and related tasks. They have a very impressive setup with thousands of machines in multiple machine rooms, connected via huge amounts of (very neatly laid!) power and networking. Oh, and multiple petabytes of disk storage, with terabytes more data generated every day.

The coolest thing? Tim told me that the majority of their machines are running Debian, mostly stock installations with no special tweaks needed. Yay!

Happy Birthday ORG!

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:47:00 +0100

Wow, time flies when you're not paying much attention. It seems that the Open Rights Group is two years old. I was one of the original thousand people who pledged to support ORG financially (a fiver per month), hoping that they would help us stand up for our digital rights in the UK in much the same way as the EFF do in the US. The group have done a good job so far, facing off against the big corporates and the government on key subjects like DRM, electronic voting, ID cards and data protection.

Unfortunately, it seems that there are more and more of these fights coming and they are gaining in importance as more and more of our lives are lived online. ORG are always looking for more support; please help if you can.

Hypo Full Of Love

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:52:00 +0100

Went to see Alabama 3 in concert in Cambridge last night. The support act were dreadful, doing over-amped reggae mixing for far too long. Tedious. But when the headliners came on, they more than made up for it. Incredibly good fun, danceable music, a mix of gospel, techno, blues, country and good old-fashioned rock. And they're awesome to watch live - a great stage show where you can tell the band were enjoying themselves just as much as the audience. My only gripe is that they didn't play "Mao Tse Tung said", one of my favourites. Meh...

Morons and spam

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:59:00 +0100

It's bad enough that we have anti-social fuckwits spamming the world. It's made even worse by morons using broken-by-design challenge-response software like Active Spam Killer to push back-scatter on to the rest of us. I'm depressed that people can be so ignorant, but not exactly surprised. I just got another challenge in my inbox today. *sigh*

Debian T-shirts popping up everywhere...!

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:21:00 +0100

Phil and I managed to catch up with Linus when he was at the kernel summit in Cambridge last month. We gave him a Debian T-shirt at the time, as Phil blogged at the time.

Barton George was one of a number of Sun people who came along to Debconf, and he picked up an Etch T-shirt while he was there too. Apparently he's quite keen to wear it in public too... :-)

Any more action shots out there?

Remaining Debconf T-shirts on the way

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:44:00 +0100

At/after Debconf it transpired that various people didn't get the T-shirts they should: attendees who left before the Ts were released by customs in the UK, and volunteers and orga team who didn't fit in the small allocation that we had printed up-front.

In the weeks since then, we've got more shirts printed thanks to Gunnar and Gaby. I've just sent out (almost) the last of them this weekend to people all over the world, and I'll be hand-delivering the last couple next month. A small number of people also asked for extra Ts if they could pay for them, and I'm emailing them now to confirm what the cost is.

UPDATE: Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough in the above. We have had more Debconf Ts made for people, but they asked ages ago either at Debconf or shortly afterwards. I'm not planning on getting any more printed for people that ask now. Sorry, it's too late.

yawn

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:17:00 +0100

It seems that MJ Ray can't help but wantonly misinterpret other people's words. He posted about my question to debian-project (which is fair enough), but in his own inimitable style blatantly missed the point, presumably to cause offence. I'm not suggesting banning non-Debian posts from Planet Debian at all; what I'm suggesting is removing feeds that have zero content relevant to Debian, and I started a discussion to ask for other people's opinions. Spot the difference?

Mark, this kind of snide, troll-like posting is exactly the reason why people "inexplicably dislike" you. If you can't understand that, well...

"inexplicably"

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:44:00 +0100

giggle

Am I Famous?

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:28:00 +0100

I've been told I now have an entry in Wikipedia. Does that make me famous, sad or both? :-)

Life...

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:22:00 +0100

I've been busy doing various things, so I've not had a chance to blog much lately. Time for a quick catch-up...

We've had a bit of a development panic at work, so I've been working longer hours than normal. The scary thing is (and I've noticed this in the past too), I seem to enjoy the job more when there's real pressure involved. That's not to say I want it to always be stressful, but we've had more fun with a small group of us really concentrating on a single project, working well together.

Outside of work, I've been really quite relieved to take a bit of a break from Debian stuff since Debconf has finished. Debconf (as always) was a really good way to be re-enthused about working on Debian, but it has taken me several weeks to get over it physically.

I've finally finished upgrading all of my machines at home to Etch. In most cases it was easy, but the final one left was lump, the firewall/mail/web/foo server. I'd chickened out of upgrading it for quite a while due to the sheer number of services it hosts, and also the substantial amount of local config it therefore holds. In the end, things were thankfully mostly painless. The nice thing about doing the upgrade was that finally lots of new software has suddenly become readily available. Amongst other things, I've added iodine and openvpn, and now I'm looking into playing with voice over IP (probably Asterisk). My Nokia E70 has a VOIP client and wifi, so in theory I should be able to use my regular mobile phone as a voip handset on my wireless network at home and just get cheaper outbound calls. Yay!

I visited my friend Matthew a couple of weeks ago, and also helped him upgrade/install his network of Debian machines. Unfortunately, his main workstation (dual AMD64 goodness) is still left just running Windows. BIOS/SATA RAID - just say NO! No matter what we did on that machine, we could not make it dual-boot XP and Debian without forcing him to reinstall it all from scratch. :-(

The SPI board elections have just finished. Congratulations to the new mugs^H^H^H^Hmembers of the board, and best of luck in doing a good job. And comiserations to the people who lost - I'm sure most of you would have been good, useful board members too.

We're having a final Debconf 7 wrapup meeting next weekend in York, where we're hoping to get the final conference report finished. There are a few more T-shirts to get finished and delivered to people and the sponsorship bags to go out, then it's all done for this year. It'll be good to meet up with people again anyway.

Oh, and not long now until the big BBQ at my place. I've started getting some supplies in already, and I'm looking forwards to a bunch of geeks coming round to wreck my house again. Or something... *grin*

Last but not least - I'm changing ISPs shortly. Noodles and Huggie have provided excellent service for nearly 3 years, but are exiting the business and moving on to other things. So I'll be moving my home ADSL back to UKFSN shortly. Hopefully the disruption will be minimal.

Photos!

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 23:06:00 +0100

Got back from Debconf and realised I'd not grabbed any of my photos from my camera since February! So, I've stuck up quite a few sets this week: FOSDEM 2007, Gabriel (Dave and Helena's new son), my day out at Duxford with Dad, Ben and Adelina's wedding, some photos of the kilts and ceilidh at Debconf and finally a visit to Stonehenge. Phew!

Slowly recovering...

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:59:00 +0100

Debconf's over for another year - people have gone their separate ways, taking their newly-shared sense of purpose (and germs!) back home with them.

Speaking for the organising team, I think we can justifiably be proud of ourselves - we seem to have pulled off a Debconf! Not everything worked perfectly or quite as we expected/wanted, but in the end I don't think we had any major issues. Fundamentally, it seems that all the attendees enjoyed themselves immensely and lots of productive work and socialising happened. That's the important bit!

Thanks to all of you that turned up and helped us to make the conference a success this year, especially the volunteers who dived in to fetch, carry, man the front desk, run the cameras, organise the day trip, etc. And also (of course) to the sponsors who paid for the event - we love you all!

The orga team still have some small bits to finish up before we declare things completely finished, though. We've still got some bits and pieces left in Edinburgh yet, waiting to be returned to their respective owners. And we're going to make a start on the post-conference report shortly. That's a place where conference attendees can help us again - we're looking for short write-ups of your experiences at the conference and a good selection of photos to give an impression of how things went. If you're able/willing to help, please mail the debconf-team list.

Thank you and goodnight.

Whooooooooooooosh

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:52:00 +0100

There went 2 weeks, almost. I was naively hoping to find some time to work on various things during Debcamp/Debconf this year. Yeah, like that was going to happen...! Instead, I and the rest of the organisation team have been running around constantly in the background since day 1. It's been fun, and as far as I can tell people have been enjoying the conference as much as ever. \o/