Present Perfect

I don’t often have the opportunity anymore to spend part of the weekend in Barcelona, which I miss, so when Kristien told me she was going to be busy receiving a really old Spanish guy and his boat in Antwerp on TV this Saturday, I decided I was going to spend my Friday night and Saturday in Barcelona.

A good decision! Thursday I went with Mariette and Sofie to go see Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Contrary to what I’ve been led to believe, the film is excellent and tells a wonderful story about love by putting caricatures of people into a situational movie. It’s clear the story worked very well as a lesson in love because I got drawn to a different message that was in the movie than some of my friends were, just going to show that a good story is multifaceted and resonates with a different one for different people. I also ran into Carl at the theatre who had gone to see Bye Bye Belgium - apparently they show the mockumentary here in Spain!

Friday night was spent hanging out in one of the Usual Suspect bars after work, then going out with Carl to one of his friend’s birthday drinks. Didn’t go to bed before 4:30, which is how a Friday night in Barcelona should be spent.

Saturday was a lovely day, 18 degrees C and sunny all day long. I spent it walking through the city, going to La Botifarreria to get some excellent sausages for a Sunday lunch in Belgium, seeing all the apartments for sale (surely this is a sign the prices are going to go down), and strolling through Parc de la Ciutadella. On the plane in the evening, to arrive home at midnight and crash into bed, exhausted.

Sunday lunch was spent with An, Mike, and my god son Arthur. I made home-made fries and mayonaise to go with the sausages. Sausages were a mix of apple/curry, spinach/pine nuts, foie gras, fig/mushroom, roquefort, sweet, and chocolate. It took Arthur a while to warm up to the idea of ’sausages with specks’, as he calls it, but the fries definately helped.

He kept making me build Lego houses so he could knock them down. I confused his young mind by saying that from now on, he was only allowed to knock over and break apart each house only once. Not realizing that there was no difference, he got angry and proclaimed that I was the worst person to play with. He quickly got over it though after we jointly invented the shove hug (push and hug until the other falls over)

We ended the evening by going to see Sigur Ros at Vorst Nationaal. We arrived as they closed off the main floor and instructed us to go to the highest seats, which sucks. But I managed to sneak us past the barriers and onto an only half filled floor anyway. We had a great view a good 15 rows from the front.

The opening band was called ‘For a minor Reflection’, also from Iceland, and though the name sounds off, they were really good. I ended up getting their album and listening to it all the way back to Spain - although you’d be hard-pressed to hear the difference between this and an Explosions In The Sky album. I guess that’s a downside of having no singing in your music - while I scoff at people who can’t hear the difference between Interpol and Editors, or Radiohead and Coldplay based on the voice alone, I would definately have mistaken these guys for ‘is there a new EITS album ?’

Sigur Ros was good, picking from their darker works compared to the festival sets. For whatever reason I didn’t enjoy it as much as the two summer gigs - the sound’s never very good at Vorst Nationaal, and I was probably too tired. But the closer, song 8 off of (), was perfect.

All in all, a damn fine couple of days. I should plan to stay in Barcelona for the weekend more often.

Prize for best intersong banter this year goes to Guy of Elbow

Who where in the audience is married ? Raise your hands

Ok, this next song is for Stef, the most married man in the room!

As always, a spectacular concert. What a voice… He’s definately grown in his role as a band leader over the years. Besides the amusing banter between songs, he had the crowd sing Happy Birthday to his girlfriend, who was in the room, and he challenged us to sing Bohemian Rhapsody during the ‘band-goes-off-stage-and-hangs-backstage-before-the-encore’ part, which worked out better than expected.

After wasting again a big chunk of my weekend over fighting with mod_rewrite and wordpress to do some (to me at least) simple feed syndication, I finally figured out that I was in fact simply wrestling a wordpress quirk.

A URL like this: http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/index.php?cat=19,22

*only* works as expected when the Permalink structure in wordpress is set to default.

That is, the resulting page will show posts that are in category 19, or 22, or both at the same time.

As soon as you ‘enable’ permalinks, however, this breaks - the URL gets redirected to a URL of the form ‘log/category/(name of first category)/, and only posts from the first category get shown.

I have no idea why this has to be the way or if there is a workaround, but feel free to let me know.

Now it seems I’m forced to choose between permalinks and feed syndication…

A lot of the tasks I want to follow up on live outside of my GTD system and in various bug trackers. For a while, I’ve relied on mails to keep track of when I should be looking at tickets and taking some action, but that ended up not scaling very well.

So at some point I started experimenting with using RSS feed readers specifically for this purpose. My first attempt didn’t work out very well.

Today, I spent some time trying again with various feed readers.

Here’s the basic workflow I want to implement:
- go to my feed reader and see my ‘daily’ section which contains feeds for specific bug queries that I want to have a daily feedback cycle on
- See what’s in there
- Go work on the tickets directly in the browser (so move away from the feed reader)
- After doing the work, go back, and refresh the feed reader to get validation that I’ve cleared my daily queue

Basically, I only want to use the feed reader to know when I should go do stuff somewhere else.

Now, all feed readers I tried today that actually worked seem to *never* clean up items from the RSS feed that were once in the feed but now have been removed. Is this standard, expected behaviour for a feed reader ? Am I trying to do something that’s just not intended to be possible ?

Here are the feed readers I tried:
- tt-rss: doing an update does not delete the tickets that got removed from the rss feed; mailed the author
- liferea: same; though of all apps I tried today it did have the nicest user experience.
- blam: didn’t show an error dialog for my https feed that had an invalid certificate; there was a console error though, and there was an option to allow invalid SSL. After that, the feed still didn’t show up, and I had some GTK assertion on the console.
- snownews: was unable to open my https rss feeds with authentication; I was rooting for this one since it was command line so it would integrate easily with my gtd workflow
- gfeed: same as liferea
- evolution-rss: I was actually impressed with how well this integrated with Evolution; but afterwards, same problem as with liferea - updating the feed did not remove now-closed bugs that were gone from the rss feed.

Suggestions welcome from anyone who’s tried to implement a task tracking workflow this way !

Things that I specifically want:
- store my list of feeds either on the web or in a text file I can commit to svn and sync across 3 machines
- link through to both the actual query and the individual tickets
- allow an ‘update now’ that removes items that are no longer in the feed
- allow https and invalid certificates
- implement username/password (for my private tracs)

Today I’m doing some cleanup and maintenance work, and going through some pending GStreamer account requests.

I’m not a GPG expert, and I’m sure all of you are, so help me figure this out.

If someone creates a bug report and attaches their public GPG key, why should I trust that it is correct ? What should I do to verify it ?

AFAICT, anyone can file a bugzilla ticket, claim to be some other person B, and ask to change GPG and SSH keys for that person B.

What am I missing ?