La Salle Debain

NEW YORK, Jul 29, 2011

The crowd of thousands gathered here to attend PreventaConf 2011 were abuzz over the unveiling of the culmination of 3 years of aimless arsing about^ww^w concentrated development which has led to the porting of dpkg to the MINIX 3 operating system.

Women fainted, men wept openly, medical personnel were kept busy dealing with the many instances of heart seizure, multisensory hallucination and spontaneous combustion which accompanied this momentous event.

Much remains to be done.

• start-stop-daemon needs to be ported. It is not built for now.
• A basic set of essential packages needs to be created. Currently all that stuff lives in /usr/local or /usr/pkg. This has already caused problems when e.g. dpkg-architecture assumed perl was in /usr/bin.
• fakeroot needs to be ported so you don't have to build .debs as root which is currently the case.
• Other support programs such as update-rc.d and ldconfig etc. are needed. Currently .debs have to be installed with --force-all to get around their lack. (ldconfig atleast could just be a noop as Minix doesn't actually support shared libraries yet.)
• There are still some API deficiencies. lchown(2) doesn't exist, getpwent(3) doesn't seem to work reliably. etc. Could this cause problems? We will have to investigate and provide workarounds if necessary. No doubt other problems will crop up as work progresses.

Somehow, even though I'd know about it for the longest time, I had never get around to reading George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series until I heard about the Game of Thrones HBO series. Then I thought I had better hurry up and read the books as TV adaptations tend to be inferior. (I must say HBO did a pretty good job though.) I was instantly hooked and finished all four books in a week. Today the long-awaited fifth installment called A Dance with Dragons and I immediately got myself a copy. (Nowadays I mostly do my recreational reading with the Kindle app on my Android smartphone.)

As before, I'm spellbound. I'm already about 25% through it and loving it. What I love about Martin is that he really gets how traditional, "pagan", "feudal" societies work. Take religion for instance. A lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors—if they deal with the subject at all—usually give a cartoon version of polytheism that owes more to Christian canards and Dungeons & Dragons than any existing human religion. But in Westeros, one can be simultaneously devout, amoral, superstitious, and cynical in a way that makes a lot of sense to me as a Hindu. Or class. Being a peasant in Martins' world is horrible. Your life is completely at the mercy of Lords and Ladies and can end in an instant. But the upper class despite its wealth and power is trapped in its own way too. They must constantly protect their status from jealous competitors and a reversal of political or military fortune can destroy an ancient noble family just as suddenly as a bad harvest can destroy a family of farmers.

Like the other books in the series, this one has a huge cast of characters whose stories weave in and out with each chapter told mainly from one characters viewpoint. This is a tactic which I for one found helpful to keep my attention from flagging but it means you can't really enjoy it unless you've read the previous volumes in order first. I definitely think it's worth the effort though.

Barring a miracle, it looks like I won't be going to Debconf 11 this year which is a shame as that is a part of the world I have yet to visit. Anyway it got me thinking, I've neglected a lot of my Open Source activities this past year or so what with struggling to stay in good financial shape. As Chaturmasa started today in which we take up additional religious duties, I thought it might be a good time to recommit to getting all my projects up to speed again.

So during the next four months I aim to (in no particular order)

• Get a fully DFSG-complient Adobe Flex SDK package into Debian either by myself or preferebly by helping someone like Joey who owns the ITP. This will have the additional benefit of finally letting me fix the problems with the yui package and let me move on to yui3.
• Fix up all problems in my CPAN modules and bring them up to the latest standards. Open Source any other bits of perl code I've written where possible.
• Finally getting around to adding the RSS/Atom support to debbugs that I promised to do after Debconf 10. (Yes I've been sitting on this for almost a year. Sorry Don.)
• The book Debian: TFM. Write it.
• Get Debian GNU/Minix into enough shape that other people can hack on it because if it is left to my tender mercies it will never get done. Recent good news is that Minix upstream finally got around to replacing their anemic libc with NetBSD libc so I am holding out hope that things like dpkg will actually work now.
• Make my roguelike game So You Think You Can Dance...ON MY GRAVE? 1. actually playable. 2. "Interesting" in some yet undefined way.

Hopefully by writing this down here in public, I will be able to shame myself into getting most if not all of this done.

Right around the time I immigrated to the US Alex Trebek began a revival of a TV game show originally hosted by Art Fleming called Jeopardy. In fact I believe
I saw the first episode or one of the first ones anyway. And ever since I
began watching, people have said to me I ought to be a contestant. I've tried
to get on every now and again with little success—until this year. In
February I took the online entrance test not expecting any results as usual.
Indeed nothing happened at first then suddenly, a few weeks ago, I was
surprised to receive an email inviting me to an audition.

So today (or yesterday depending on when you read this. June 27th.) I went to a conference room in the New York Sheraton Towers hotel to show off my
telegenic looks, rapier wit and mastery of general knowledge to the Jeopardy
producers. I had to bring in a list of five fun facts about myself for the
between-round amusing banter. You'll have to wait until I actually appear on
the show (if in fact I do. See below.) but let me assure you my banter is
very amusing. My spirit flagged a bit when they took a photo of me for their
files. I managed to do a convincing impression of Tow Mater from Cars 2 which
is not quite the showbiz look I was going for. My morale rose again after the
next portion of the audition in which you had to answer 50 trivia questions in
about 8 minutes. They don't tell you your score but based on my conversations
with fellow auditionees (there were about 20 of us) I think I only got 1
wrong. The next part of the audition was a mock game with a real board and
buzzers etc. I was in the first group of three to play which further leads me
to believe I got a good score in the questions. Unfortunately I had a bit of
bad luck in the categories half of which were not in my strong subjects but I
did ok. More importantly I demonstrated a good speaking voice (a lot of
people mumble or speak too softly), good buzzer technique and as I may have
previously mentioned, amusing banter.

Does this mean I am actually going to be on TV? I don't know. Every year they select approximately 2,000 people for auditions and of those, around 400
are selected for the contestant pool. So I have a 1 in 5 chance of making it.
The consensus in the group was I had done pretty well for a first timer (Some
were making their second or third attempt.) so I am optimistic. All I know is
that sometime in the next 18 months I might receive the call to fly to Los
Angeles and fulfill my destiny.

Btw, in case you were wondering about the title.

Donald Trump you magnificent bastard, you did it. You actually did it. What you did is irrelevant and counterproductive but still gold star and a tick for perseverence.

In possibly related news, SETI is closing down their radio telescope array. I don't think I'd want to show this planet off to the neighbors either.

...and me. I turned 40 today and on such a momentous occasion I should pause
to take stock of my life. Executive summary: it's not bad at all.

Last week I completed 13 years of marriage to Jyoti who loves me and always
looks out for my best interest even during the times when I do not.

I have two lovely children who are kind, intelligent, Dharmic, and (mostly :-)
well behaved.

Of course I can't forget all my dear friends and family who gave me their
blessings and good wishes today and indeed every day.

My health is better now than it was in my twenties. Since last year I've been
exercising on the treadmill regularly and taken a lot of junk out of my diet.
I've lost about two stones and while I won't be joining the Debian marathon
runners just yet, I can at least jog briskly without collapsing in a puddle of
sweat, heart palpitations and shame.

Mentally, I've been taking college level courses in Maths in an effort to
relearn the things I didn't pay proper attention to the first time I was in
college. I completed National Novel Writing Month for the first time with a
60,000 word philosophical science fiction blockbuster that other people might
actually consider readable once I finish revising it. And I am still training
for the day when I shall be granted the spot on Jeopardy which is rightfully
mine.

Financially, the last few years have not been good for many people but we are
holding our heads above water and even slowly moving forwards. This is the
year Consolidated Braincells Inc. my little corporate empire will take off I
hope.

As I begin preparing for Chaitra Navaratri I feel it will be extra special
this year because all these good things that are happening to me are solely
due to Her grace and krpa.

Last thing I wanted to mention is that a present I gave myself today was to
make a donation to the Red Cross to help the victims of the tsunami in Japan.
If you have had good fortune in your life and have not already done so won't
you consider doing the same? (or to any of the other reputable charities
engaged in disaster relief.) Our shastras say that dana is the best insurance
against accidental sins and the guarantor of good luck.

I'm going to need the high performance spandex pitambar today.

I've been participating in National Novel Writing Month for several years now but this is the first time I've actually managed to complete writing 50,000 words in one month. My Science Fiction novel "The Anaclepses of Darwin Fenderman" is set in a future where the last individualist must fight for free will against, robots, telepathic dogs, and Phillip K. Dick.

It came out fairly well I think considering the haste in which it was written. Of course here's a hell of a lot of clean up that needs to be done before I can dare to show anyone else but in the coming months I want to see if I can get it into a fit state for publishing. Meanwhile, here's a teaser:

"Where is it then?"
"Out there somewhere.", he said gesturing vaguely at the window.
"Beyond the Hudson? But there's nothing but wasteland out there."

The Yahoo! User Interface toolkit Debian package is buggy due to being rather neglected by me of late. Luckily it seems most of the bugs can be solved by removing flash files for which no source is provided and rebuilding the rest. Today, I finally got around to doing that. The problem is it doesn't seem to be possible to build YUIs .swf files from the actionscript files upstream provides with the tools available in Debian. Actually, I don't know if its a problem with the tools or me not knowing what the hell you're supposed to do with actionscript files. If you do know about such things, please take a look at the work in progress (git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-javascript/yui.git) and get in touch with me.