inamerrata

Huh, while the fair use inquiry‘s open for submissions, the National Library of Australia’s crawling my website. Cool. (Hrm, apparently I have Anna to thank for the link.)

Quite some time ago now, I started hacking on cross-strapping support for debootstrap — that is, you start bootstrapping your install non-natively (eg, a Hurd install on a Linux system, a powerpc install on an i386, or a Debian install on a Solaris system), then boot into your half unpacked system, and reinvoke debootstrap to […]

So, one of the current boring, argumentative threads on -devel is Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?. Which is a bit of a weird question, since really every derivative’s a fork, and vice-versa. The real question, of course, is whether Ubuntu is a “good” derivative or a “bad” one — whether […]

From the Australian, via Tim Blair: NONE of the three judges presiding over Schapelle Corby’s trial has ever found a defendant innocent, and they have now reached broad agreement on the verdict they will hand down on Friday. Like Katie Brownell, they’ve managed not to blow their perfect game. Congratulations to Judges Suastrawan, Sirait, and […]

Speaking of 1c Paypal donations, joining the blogosphere today is Rhys Arkins. Welcome to the dork side, young padawan!

I tried making some minor tweaks. Tables have been replaced with CSS; ugh, what an absolutely horrible control language. Tables are more elegant. Oh well. Also added some Google ads down the side — they’ve already made more than the single 1c donation the PayPal button managed to elicit. Interestingly, the Google Ads terms of […]

Well, that’s the second year of blogging down. Over a hundred thousand words, across a couple of hundred posts! (In the Advantage: Inchoate column, though, David’s blog’s had one hundred and fifty thousand words or so, across almost a thousand posts and updates. Wow!) UPDATE 2005/05/27: David points out that it’s actually over a thousand […]

In summary, I liked the third Star Wars prequel. Sure, I found myself laughing at the horribly stilted dialogue and plot throughout the movie, and I wasn’t particularly awed by the visuals or the CGI, and in the end, knowing how it ended by the virtue of having watched the original trilogy pretty much robbed […]

Complex and inefficient shell snippets? Sign me up! Here’s my version: dselect update cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | sed -n ‘p;s/^.//p’ | sed ‘s/../&\ /g’ | tr A-Z a-z | grep ‘[a-z][a-z]’ | sort | uniq -u It doesn’t quite match the original — having the letter pair appear twice for a single package will disqualify it, […]

I had been going to include this in my travelblog, but then I forgot, and then I decided I could give it its own entry anyway. To set the scene, imagine trudging up a mountain, about a kilometre above sea-level, with another half-kilometre of vertical rise still to go before you’ve got any chance of […]

I originally wrote this entry in the middle of last month when the news of the moment was that Linus was giving up Bitkeeper. Then I went to linux.conf.au and got distracted, and by the time I got to thinking about finishing it off and posting it, it didn’t seem relevant anymore, so I deleted […]

Hrm. Evidently I was careless in checking my mail yesterday evening. The Government has commenced a review on options for including new exceptions in the Copyright Act 1968 and released an issues paper, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced today. The review will examine whether an exception or specific exceptions to copyright based on principles of “fair […]

Heh, so much for blogging regularly on LA stuff. Anyway, we’ve had more meetings since being elected, including a face to face planning session in Sydney; a couple of other meetings to keep things running, and generally been trying to run a tight ship. Jon’s President’s report goes into a bit more detail of all […]

— Log opened Wed Feb 02 01:27:21 2005 <vorlon> btw, it seems Skolelinux is interested in sponsoring a physical meeting of folks related to the release process to discuss how we can get Debian to a state of timely, regular releasing. Your name was on the list of people I said should be there. Would […]

James Troup and I are giving a talk at the Debian mini-conf at LCA in six minutes. We mostly finished the slides. What could possibly go wrong?