Present Perfect

Learned a new Spanish negotiation trick this week: when being asked to provide something, say "yes of course" then talk about the weather, the place you are in, show the other person around your building, and not mention the requested thing anymore. Repeat on each request until requester is out of time and needs to fly back to another part of the country.

Next milestone is to actually be the applier of the trick instead of the applied-to-er.

Two - I have to find a way to not have my working day end past midnight.

I've been meaning to self-glorify extensively by listing books I've read over the past few years - as the subway has made me rediscover reading with a vengeance - but for now I just want to say that I really enjoyed reading "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut, and "Slaughterhouse five" was not bad either, though slightly less riveting.

Congratulations to Jeroen and Ingrid, who were joined by Jasper during the past week !

Looking forward to some friend's 30th birthday party this weekend, I expect to see a lot of people I haven't seen since university.

Also, good news ! I am going to LCA ! I will be presenting Flumotion, of all things. I am probably the only one accepted with three rejection mails in the INBOX as well, which is amusing. I really would have liked to do a presentation on Savon at least, since I think the marriage of Subversion and System Administration is A Good Idea, but obviously I'm biased. I guess I will need to draw my motivation for a release of it from another source of dark energy instead.

Now let's see if my food-deprived brain will be able to put itself to sleep...

Learned a new Spanish negotiation trick this week: when being asked to provide something, say "yes of course" then talk about the weather, the place you are in, show the...

In keeping with Peter's etymologic discoveries, I came across one I didn't know myself today. I was watching a TV show with Spanish subtitles and was thrown by the word "luegoteniente". The English word being spoken was "lieutenant". And then it hit me that this must come from French, and is a combination of lieu and tenant: place, and the gerund of "to keep" or "to have". So, a person taking someone else's place. The Spanish word made me see the word I knew for so long for what it really was.

Yes, it's late, I can't come up with anything more interesting :)

In keeping with Peter's etymologic discoveries, I came across one I didn't know myself today. I was watching a TV show with Spanish subtitles and was thrown by the word...

13.45: call new customer and ask some technical questions
15.03: downloading and burning FC5 CD and DVD install CD's - 15 minute download time
15.26: burn CD with latest updates and custom software
17.30: leave work with backpack with laptop and CD's
17:49: take subway
18.03: pass by Casa Battlo on foot, admire the building again as usual
18:07: enter radio station
18:10: talk about radio stuff while installing encoding machine
18:35: get shown around radio
19:15: install last packages, discuss firewall
19:25: reboot to verify macine connects to platform on its own and install in technical room
19:43: leave radio
19.51: sit down at Ciudad Condal and order croquetas de jamon, montadito de solomillo and montadito de langostinos to celebrate

13.45: call new customer and ask some technical questions 15.03: downloading and burning FC5 CD and DVD install CD's - 15 minute download time 15.26: burn CD with latest updates...

Apparently, tar has changed some default behaviour:

Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when extracting from or listing an archive. For example:

          $ tar xf foo.tar '*.c'
     

would extract all files whose names end in ‘.c’. This behavior was not documented and was incompatible with traditional tar implementations. Therefore, starting from version 1.15.91, GNU tar no longer uses globbing by default. For example, the above invocation is now interpreted as a request to extract from the archive the file named *.c.

Looks fairly innocent, except that it completely breaks rpmbuild -ta.

I'm sure the tar people would blame rpm for doing something stupid in the way they use tar. On the other hand, deprecating behaviour in a stable series is probably not a good thing to do, and if it affects a widely used piece of software like rpm, clearly there is a process failure somewhere, either at the distro, or in both of these projects. Problems like this happen all the time, and I'm definitely not going to say I haven't made any of these mistakes in any of the projects I've worked on.

But I guess I should remember this particular instance next time someone accuses GStreamer of not being API/ABI/feature stable, when in reality we spend an inordinate amound of time and effort in making sure it is, to the best of our knowledge.

For those of you who have problems with rpmbuild -ta, setting TAR_OPTIONS to --wildcards should help. And that particular workaround should allow me to fix my buildslaves again.

Apparently, tar has changed some default behaviour: Previous versions of GNU tar assumed shell-style globbing when extracting from or listing an archive. For example: $ tar xf foo.tar '*.c' would...

I just logged into my desktop at home and it asked me the following question on login:

The X system keyboard settings differ from your current GNOME keyboard settings.

Expected was model "pc105", layout "us_intl" and no options, but the the following settings were found: model "pc105", layout "us	intl" and no options.

Which set would you like to use?

The choices were "Use X settings" and "Keep GNOME settings".

That dialog has three problems right off the bat. First of all, "the the" is a band so obscure nobody reading the dialog would catch the reference. Second, I can't tell the difference between what it expected and what it found. Third, suppose there was a difference - let's say for argument's sake that it expected "us" and not "us_intl". Which of those two would be the X settings and which would be the GNOME settings ?

At least it realizes that I might end up preferring to never see this warning again.

update: after a good night of rest, I look at the dialog again and I see there actually is a difference. One of them says us_intl, and the other says us intl, without the underscore. Who could tell ? I feel like such a dolt for blaming this dialog box now when it was me being stupid all along.

I just logged into my desktop at home and it asked me the following question on login: The X system keyboard settings differ from your current GNOME keyboard settings. Expected...