I have developed an affection for crime drama - on Sunday nights, the TV channel Five USA shows something like four hours of CSI, back to back. There's obviously something fascinating about the problem-solving process... and there's always the too-good-to-be-true computer interfaces to laugh at. (I also watch The Mentalist, NCIS and Law & Order, for variety.) And also, on CSI:NY and Law & Order, I get to spot the places in New York I visited at DebConf....

It's been raining this weekend in Southampton. This afternoon's not been too bad - I went for a walk around the city walls. Just a few hundred years ago, the River Test would have come right up to them, and my flat would have been in a defensive moat full of sea water, I think. I re-read zack's rcbw page, and noticed the section on 'blog posts' - there is also a propaganda element to the idea, in improving Debian's internal culture w....

Today I went to HantsLUG at IBM Hursley. I delivered a talk on the Debian Perl team aimed at end users, which was well received - I got a head start by getting people in #debian-perl to review the slides beforehand, which was very helpful. I'm told there will be a video uploaded in a month or so. I also plugged SmoothWall Express on Debian to some new people, and there was interest....

Here in the UK we've had a bank holiday weekend. Usually I would have gone to Cambridge for the Debian BBQ, but this year I joined forces with Thomas Adam for some SmoothWall Express on Debian hacking. There are several challenges involved in moving the SWE3 code from its native distribution to Debian; this weekend we worked around some of the permissions problems. On SWE3, the web server and most of the service daemons run as the user 'nobody'....

SmoothWall Express is a GNU/Linux distribution geared towards firewalling, with an installer, a web interface, and some common software like squid that can be useful when running a small business router. It is theoretically the basis for the corporate products of SmoothWall Ltd., who happen to employ me; but all opinions here are my own, and I'm not speaking for them. Unfortunately, the SmoothWall Express kernel is somewhat "stable", which leads to problems installing the distro on modern hardware....

On my last night in New York, I didn't sleep much. At 6am, I said farewell to Central Park by running round the reservoir, which I hadn't yet done. There was a very nice red sunrise to be seen from the west side. Unfortunately I didn't sleep much on the flight home either. The British accents sounded quite unusual when we landed in Heathrow, and it was quite confusing not being able to find a Starbucks....

I have a relatively new laptop, and have spent some time today fixing some of the rough edges in my setup. (One day I'll throw all the config files into git, or something, but not yet.) I use zsh, but only in a fairly conservative manner, to emulate/mimic bash. All searches on the subject of zsh prompts seem to produce ugly behemoths from people who have just discovered that the feature exists....

I was up early this morning for the 17km run with bubulle over the George Washington Bridge and back. We had an interesting diversion near the start, as we tried to go cross-country through a woodland path that slowly disappeared. I was quite happy to have finished at the same time as the "real" runners... and grabbed a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast. During the day I attended a few talks from the Java track....

I'm going insane in this country - the accents, the jaywalking, the food, the money, the poverty in the heart of Manhatten... suddenly I appreciate the UK much more. So I have purchased an electric kettle, and set it up in the Carman basement, for the moment. I have also splashed out on a teapot, and one mug. (So far I haven't found any other mugs in the place, so bear that in mind if you wish to join me - $2....

I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets. I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party....