I do like that some of my friends in Debian have conspired to set up the website http://thank.debian.net/, and I composed this little Haiku in their honour:

Debian is fun
for seventeen years.
Beautiful balloons.

I'd also like to thank everyone involved in Debian over the years for being such a lovable, friendly, enjoyable and welcoming bunch of people to work with.

It's tempting to single out people for special mention, because there are people who do exceptional work in the project, but the list would go on for so long, and I would be afraid of missing out someone who would be obvious five minutes later, and then I'd have to come back and edit this post repeatedly with the names of more and more people over the coming days. We all know exactly what a chore that kind of maintenance is.

So I'll just give up completely and thank everyone, and if you think you deserve a special thanks, you probably do, and I'm sure you're on that list in my head. When we meet, as I hope we shall, let me shake your hand, lend you my ear and buy you a $BEVERAGE of your choice.

Thank you,
Andrew McMillan.

I've been working on implementing CardDAV support into DAViCal at the moment, and the first problem I encountered when I went to try and use it from iCal, was that the configuration on iCal didn't seem to want to let me enter a URL to my addressbook.

For several years now we've been buying our groceries online. It's worked well, and for the last couple of christmases I remember Heather adding a six-pack into the pre-christmas order so she could pull it out and hand it off to the delivery guy.

Fair enough too, because he was their front-line man. He was the guy who had to actually meet the customer, and even if only for two minutes face time, the impression he gave with his cheery "seeya mate" on the way out, and his always-happy smile, was that getting the groceries delivered was fun.

Last night, after the kids had gone to bed, I entered the bathroom to find this wonderful diorama Max had created to reenact the ramming of the Ady Gil.

I just love the stance from the 'Japanese' seaman, and particularly how he's represented by a tiger, with the plug for a hat. The Ady Gil, of course, just a harmless duck. Altogether spartan in the simplicity of the representation, and yet wonderfully evocative.

All of the items are bath toys that have been in the room since the kids were much younger, but such wanton creativity is truly a joy to observe.

A few years back I remember reading this article by David Brin suggesting that it is hard for children to learn programming nowadays, and how it ain't happening so much any more. It's something that I have been wondering about for some time now, and it's something that I think has to be important for the future.

Is there really a huge slowdown in the numbers of computing graduates coming out of University? Perhaps there is really nothing there to worry about. Maybe there are so many more computers around, that even with a smaller percentage of users becoming programmers there will continue to be enough programmers around.

For several years I've wanted to join the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium and go to one of their events to get a chance to meet face-to-face with some of the luminaries in the calendaring world, but every time there is an event it seems to conflict with either linux.conf.au or my brother's wedding or something. Finally I've decided I can make the next meeting, so I've paid over the money to join the organisation and I'm travelling to the US next month for 'CalConnect XVI'. With that on my mind when I saw an HP 110 mini netbook on sale for NZD$588 from Harvey Normans I finally flipped over the 'shall I get one' threshold, hoping it will make a good 'travel laptop' for the upcoming trip.

Something that has been annoying me recently with my bank has been that their website tells me that they will never ask for my password over the phone. And then their call centre asks me for my password. Over the phone. Of course the call centre doesn't mean my website password - they mean the special 'ultra-secure 5ekr1t code phrase', but they don't have a good, universally understood word to use for that. Hopefully they'll work one out, but they appear to have got the message anyway.

This got me to thinking about how these phrases are used, and how insecure they are in reality. After all when I store a website password I go to significant lengths to ensure that the same password is not represented by the same string of characters in my database. How vulnerable are our secrets in the databases of organisations we do business with?

I got out of bed this morning to a divine smell... Max was making vanilla shortbread!

After I helped him get it into the oven we got the kitchen all cleaned up just in time for Heather to surface for a cup of tea and some amazingly delicious shortbread.

Now, all day I'm reminded of it by the faint smell of all the vanilla that didn't quite make it into the mix. Not at all wasted, I'd say!

It's great that in these supposedly straightened times InternetNZ have wasted no time in confirming themselves as key sponsors for LCA in Wellington in 2010.

Now if only all of our other sponsors could line up behind them (please) and tell me the extent of their sponsorship, we would have some facts to moderate our plans...

But seriously: thanks to InternetNZ for stumping up with the basics to make sure this conference will become a reality.

Anyone else looking to sponsor the best linux conference in the world should send me an e-mail.

Soon...

:-)

The news is out now, that Wellington will be hosting LCA 2010. As someone on the core team for that (potential sponsors please contact me sooner rather than later :-) I really hope we can do something as awesome as the current week we've had here in Hobart.

Thanks to all of the Hobart team for doing a great job.

Today in Anton Hughes talk at LCA 2009 I saw my photo of Eben Moglen up on the big screen. Woohoo! :-)

As with most of the photos I have put on Wikimedia Commons it is released under PD-Self, so it will be interesting whether he chooses to credit me or not.

He seems to have a pretty good argument, and I hope that this gets visibility and acceptance in the legal community over time. The free software audience is pretty sympathetic, of course.

LCA is once again proving it's premiere status as one of the top free & open source software conferences in the world. Our hosts in Hobart are well-organised and friendly, and though I've been locked into the Systems Administration miniconf by virtue of being one of the organisers, what I've been hearing from the other delegates with the freedom to sample other streams is that all of the miniconfs have once again achieved the high standards that we've come to expect from the conference.

Right now I'm in the keynote by Tom Limoncelli who's giving us all a good kick in the proverbial, to switch us to the mindset of plenty, and to see beyond limited scarcity. Wonderful stuff. Linux == Infinite Love :-)

Tomorrow will be a challenging day, herding the kids through the airports to get to Hobart for a holiday in Tasmania before linux.conf.au 2009 in a couple more weeks.

Sadly I didn't get the DAViCal release out over Christmas that I'd hoped for, and realistically I should face up to the fact that I won't have much chance to push it out until I get back...

Still, it might happen, so don't lose hope! And if you're desperate the current Git head is pretty safe too - so long as you use the head for AWL as well.

I'll only have sporadic net access (until LCA anyway), and my cellphone won't reach me at all, so I guess the world will have to get along without me for a few weeks :-)

Have a Happy New Year - we won't be partying tonight, with a 4:00am start in the morning!

I had to visit two sites today and got what I consider to be amusing responses from them. Firstly I had to visit NZ Post to get them to hold our mail while we will be away.

Life is always a bit of a gamble, but I wasn't expecting NZ Post to be making their website into a lottery like this. It seems that they're trying to statistically limit the number of people who are allowed to have their mail held, because I got to see this little gem:

What are fruit companies trying to achieve by putting stickers on their fruit? I remember as a child when these first appeared on oranges and bananas, and I can cope with this because in these cases the sticker disappears without any inconvenience to the consumer when the skin is discarded.