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.

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.

I publish my photos on the internet. Well, I do when I get around to updating it, anyway. When I do so, I include some information about licensing them. I say to people "I'm very open to people wanting to use these pictures for something else, and will be happy to release photos into the public domain on request." so when I discover one of my photos abused by a travel website I do wonder why I didn't hear about it.

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.

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?

As some of you will know, I used to be on the board of Parents Centres New Zealand for several years. While I was involved there, we finally managed to finish the internal debate around the repeal of Section 59 of the crimes act, and to publish our viewpoint that the excuses in this legislation are not appropriate for the kinds of child-rearing practices which we considered acceptable in New Zealand.

Children in New Zealand should have the right not to be assaulted by their parents.

A couple of years ago the legislative world caught up with that viewpoint, and legislation was passed which changed the scope of section 59.

Now, it seems, some minority groups want to go back to return us to an age when parents are entitled to assault their children, and there will be a national postal referendum in August, with a particularly weaselly worded question, and these groups will use the response to that question to justify a lot more than that question asks.

New Zealand's current legislation regarding parental control of children allows parents scope to discipline their children, without providing them with an excuse against an assault charge if they use excessive force.

So please vote 'Yes' to the referendum on child discipline, when you see it, and please encourage everyone you know to do likewise.

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.

Today someone asked me to take a look at an Evolution enhancement that's just begging to get into trunk. Since this is a Gnome program in a subversion repository I've commenced the process of cloning the repository so I can look at the issue against the current head.

At the current rate I should have a copy of the repository by early tomorrow morning, in order to be able to start looking at it. Of course today is when I actually do have some time to spare, and I hope to be fast asleep at the time when I expect this to finish.

Presumably subversion isn't this slow for everyone, but since my latency to their repository is 300mS I'm probably on the worst end the pain, with each commit seemingly taking around a second. It sure would be nice if subversion provided some kind of chunked compression of these five-year-old commits, so I could be bandwidth limited, rather than latency challenged.

The addition of a day to the checkout of a software project must be a significant barrier to entry for anyone considering contributing. It makes it much less likely to be opportunistic.

So far I'm up to r3600 in 75 minutes. That's 75 minutes that I could have spent actually looking at the code, but now it's time for me to go and vote for me...

I know we're looking at some fairly repressive internet legislation in New Zealand, but we can still be thankful we're not in the third world yet.

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website.

I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function.

Since I have a nice word number for my phone (027 2 DEBIAN) I wanted to keep it when I left Catalyst so I went to a Vodafone dealer to ask them to change the name on the account. It seems that this is not easy. I actually ended up going to two different Vodafone dealers to try and arrange for this, but they both seemed to be telling me it would be expensive and complicated, and I would lose service for up to a week in the middle of the changeover.

What is relatively easy is to sign up with a different phone company and port my number across to them, so that's what's happening. Hopefully all of the number portability problems I encountered last year are gone now!

I suspect that the Vodafone sales staff were trying to discourage me, because they sell on commission, and there's no commission in moving a phone to a different account.

Since leaving Catalyst to follow my interests there seem to be a neverending number of organisations e-mailing to my old e-mail address, which I have to go through to update to a new e-mail address. This evening it was Air New Zealand's turn.

Going through their update form, I noticed a few other little details were wrong, and they had a couple of my pet hates down pat:

• My surname was spelled 'Mcmillan' rather than 'McMillan'
• My city was down as 'Wellington' rather than 'Porirua'

For no particularly good reason that I can see, they don't provide me with the ability to edit my surname. I have to ring some 0800 number, and I was kind of all 0800ed out having had to ring TelstraClear earlier. (To question their sense in wanting to deliver a password for an e-mail account to that same e-mail account... but that's another story...)

I can at least correct the city, though, right?

Writing free, open-source software is an incredibly public activity. Everything you do is in the public eye, and google will inevitably discover your site, and then other people will find your software, and download it, and this is a good thing. It's why you're doing it, after all, and it's so nice to receive those occasional 'Thank you for your software' e-mails. There are occasional exceptions, however.

Today's practical exercise is to demonstrate your skills responding to the annual student exercise question, like this one, following on to finish a real exchange while still retaining your sanity to the maximum extent possible. Humour will receive bonus points.

Here goes. First up, we have an e-mail arriving out of the blue which looks like this:

how to run the caldav server
in window
i have download it from the http://wiki.davical.org/

Last week I installed Ubuntu Gutsy onto Heather's laptop. While Gutsy seems to be an easy task for most situations, installing it onto a Pentium 366 laptop with 200M of RAM and (particularly) an 800x600 screen was harder than it perhaps should have been.

I'm sure that most installations these days aren't 800x600, but the graphical installer in Gutsy seems determined to make this painful. I had to move the toolbars to the sides of the screen, and then I could see the top half of the buttons on each page. It was like the page was sized for 600 vertical pixels, but the designer had forgotten about toolbars and title bars - not that I could see any screens in the process I followed that needed more than 5/6 of that screen anyway. Eventually I got it installed, and it even seemed to run OK once we booted into it. That's "OK for a 200M P366 with an 800x600 screen" though.

Looking around at the price of a new laptop made putting up with that sort of performance a whole lot less palatable. The Acer Aspire 5310 (with free RAM upgrade) was $898 at Dick Smith, with a $99 cashback offer. A quick google shows that it's using the Broadcom 43xx wireless which isn't even close to being the best, but can be made to work with Linux. Everything else seemed likely to work, so we bought it.

Installing Gutsy on it was nearly trivial, though I had to install bcm43xx-fwcutter on a different PC (my laptop, which is running Debian, in fact) to get the firmware for the WLAN before I could get the wireless working. I'm surprised that Broadcom still don't make that firmware publicly available somewhere, rather than forcing people to jump through the sort of hoops that would get them wanting an Intel chipset next time.

Anyway, everything installed very easily, and the laptop is working quite nicely. Strangely neither sound, nor suspend to ram are working out of the box. They're not so important in this case fortunately, but perhaps in due course I'll try and get them working and post some details about it.

Much harder has been getting the fabled 'cashback' from Acer. I think I now know what I'm being paid $99 for. Firstly the only way to get your cashback is by registering through a webpage. Heather's first attempt to do this resulted in an error from our proxy about a malformed request, so I got called in. I tried registering using on my laptop, but couldn't even get to the cashback page. I then tried using IE6, with similar results. So perhaps it's my PC? I tried using a different PC, with the same result again!

We tried ringing them up, but they were absolutely determined that (even after 20 minutes on the phone) they were not going to accept that information over the phone. So the only way to get the cashback from Acer was via their thoroughly broken website. Even their Contact Acer page is broken in firefox just showing a blank. Firefox users need not apply.

Eventually, while spending some time in front of Heather's main computer (which had made it all the way through to submitting their on-line form before failing) I realised that the error she was getting was a proxy error from some in-form javascript submitting an invalid request, so I disabled the proxy, the form finally worked, and I managed to apply for the cashback. Now we just have to send the printed form in, along with some blood from our firstborn, the ashes of my grandmother, various barcodes, receipts and toenail clippings and we're sweet. They say they'll send us some money within 30 days. I think we should maybe frame it or something. I just know I'm going to feel really inclined to take advantage of cashback offers in future.

In Other News: DVD Slideshow

Meanwhile I've been playing with DVD Slideshow which seems to be just what my parents have been after for a while, so they don't have to keep their favourite photos on the camera to be able to show them off on someone's TV. It's great! At least it is great now after I changed all the calls to ffmpeg to add a 'k' after the bitrate parameter. But that's Open Source Software, I guess. I'll send a patch to them... :-)