As the person who has, rightly or wrongly, effectively been the one who ended up forcing the decision about what MTA and desktop are the default in Debian, I really like Gravity's idea of a Debian steering committee. I've never felt comfortable making these kind of decisions on my own, and using debian-devel to try to make a legitimate decision (as was done with the MTA and attempted(?) with the default vi) has been a PITA.

(I was actually going to rant about this exact thing during my lightning talk @ DebConf, but felt too mellow that day for the rant.)

FWIW, I'm not suprised to see Ubuntu people leaving Debian. I've been working to fix many large (technical) issues in the project since I joined it, and I feel like I have, but it's hardly been easy. And while I feel that this means that only the good ideas have survived to be implemented, driving a big change in Debian is still very hard, and so I'm not suprised to see people associated with a distribution that makes change easier feeling happier working on it.

But, this pressure for Ubuntu to diverge from Debian makes the chances of merging back many changes seem even more slim, and makes me wonder when it will turn into a total fork. Which concerns I've probably talked about enough before.

Are there any password prompters for X that allow arbitrarily chorded passwords?

Thought about this while mulling over how to do a cat-on-keyboard detector for X.

I've finally finished moving kitenet.net over to the new server (wren). Let me know if anything broke.

Closing date: Sep 22nd

That's all..

Looking through the list of IkiwikiUsers, as well as the other users I'm aware of who arn't listed there, there's an interesting split in how it's being used. Half of the sites using ikiwiki are full-fledged wikis that anyone can edit, with a RecentChanges page, etc. And half are "static" web pages. There are a few outliers, such as sites that allow editing, but only by commits to a RCS. If I leave out sites that I set up, the numbers are more like 40% wikis, 60% static. Many new sites seem to be static, while many of the old ones are wikis.

I hope this doesn't mean that it's too hard to set up the CGI side of ikiwiki. If it is, I should fix that. I'm hoping that it just means that my users are doing that interesting thing that software users do, and finding uses for it that its author didn't completly envision.

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately.

astronomy

I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know..

(Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.)

Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

weather

I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time.

But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes.

The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

spaceflight

Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed.

Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real.

Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

TV

Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me.

Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

literature

I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan.

I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature.

Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

I just five minutes ago learned that Lilo has tragically died. I knew Lilo in person in the heady California days, I remember going out for noodles with him a time or two and listening to his vision for what IRC could become, both technically and socially. We wern't close, but we got along well, and I'd chat with him on and off on irc over the years, though increasingly little recently.

I feel that Lilo fell into a trap out there in Texas, living out of his immobile mobile home, without a car, taking care of his family, and just scratching by, and at the same time, trying to live up to his vision. I know from experience what that can be like. And over the years, a lot of people found reasons to dislike what he did and how he chose to do it, and there was a lot of controversy about various things, on which I won't try to pass judgement. It really doesn't matter now..

There are two things that I really regretting right now. The first is that irc.debian.org moved away from freenode so shortly before this happened. Lilo's last blog entry is about it, and I think it was very discouraging to him, and I hate that his life ended so soon after that disappointment. Even though I think the move was the right choice for Debian. I think that Debian should do something in honor of Lilo, just as we do for others of our own who pass away.

My second regret is that I remember a while ago, Lilo posted something about wishing he had a truck he could use to maybe get his trailer mobile, and for general getting around. I have such a truck; I use it less than once a month. I really did think about driving it down and giving it to him, but I never went through with it. Due to sheer materialism and financial responsability; it's a reasonable fraction of my possessions after all. Now, especially given how he died, I really wish I had. I had a chance to change a friend's life, and I turned it down.

Lilo, I'm sorry, and I'll miss you.

One of the best part of Rhythm and Roots is that all of downtown Bristol is open, and accessible on a whim. This is the only time of year I can go into the Cameo and enjoy the balcony of this rundown ex-theater turned Christian radio station, with no worse effects than listening to a little Gospel music. The gorgeous Paramount is open to explore (and leech off its wifi), and so many stores up and down have musicians in them providing an excuse to go in and look around without feeling any commercial pressure. It's also nice to walk down the middle of the state line on State St.

My other favorite thing is the jam sessions that spring up here and there later in the day with so many bands in one place. Passing a bassist and fiddler on the sidewalk, or six-seven people from two or three bands sitting off playing quietly for themselves and a small, happy audience.

As for the actual performances, this year I most enjoyed the Cajun/jazz/swing/innovative mix of The Red Stick Ramblers. It was good to see the divineMAGees in person, but the outdoor sound system wasn't good enough for their sound and I missed the indoor gig. I also appreciated nice bluegrass from Chatham Cty. Line, and old-timey Piedmont music of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. And bits and peices from a dozen or so other bands.

Well, I got the house. No problems at closing, lots of work to do before I can move in. I was a bit worried that it would be too dark, but now that all the frumpy old-person blinds and stuff are taken out, and we've done some cleaning (thanks, Maggie!) it's reasonably light and is starting to feel like a place I can live.

Closing on a house is to me feels a lot like flying to Europe alone -- get up early, make sure you have all your documentation in order, make sure you're on time, say hi to someone at the desk, and to someone who's your inadvertent companion in all this, then some pain, and then everything is different.

I'd like to thank Jason Martens and all the posters to this thread on debian-user. Hit the spot for me.

I'm mostly participating in this particular thing because it seems to have changed since I tried this last. For one thing, ikiwiki didn't exist last time I tried it, also I don't remember seeing svn on the list last time.

joey@kodama:~>history 1|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -r |head -10 
    229 l
    129 cd
    126 e
     48 mutt
     43 fg
     42 svn
     40 w
     26 ..
     24 ./ikiwiki.pl
     22 build

I use zsh, so this summarises several thousand lines of history shared amoung all my zsh sessions, and also .. is used to go up a directory. l is my shorthand for ls; e is my shorthand for "vim or the closest available substitute"; w is mostly a nervous habit since this is a single user machine -- my hands tend to type w and ls at the terminal when my mind is off working on something; build is my dpkg-buildpackage wrapper.

Wouter, I also type ls (or l) as a kind of nervous habit, sometimes 4 or 5 times in a row. That's interesting. (I also type w and most annoyingly df (which sometimes hangs if an NFS server is down).)

At least that's better than biting your nails. Maybe zsh could be taught to give us a virtual rubber-band snap on the wrist when we nervously ls.