My HP dx2250 desktop suddenly refused to turn on last Tuesday; it just beeped loudly at me when the power button was pressed. It took me until today to look at it; downloading the troubleshooting guide, I could translate the pattern of flashes of the LEDs as signalling faulty RAM. Phew. I must say I was surprised - I have never had RAM die on me before. At least it wasn't a DIMM module I had bought myself... and it could be worse, I was almost considering replacing the machine. (I wonder how many people do.) For now, I'm down to 1GB RAM, unless I can find something stashed away somewhere.

No man is an island; objectives cannot be set in isolation from the reality of our situation. One standard technique for analysing where we are is the SWOT analysis: considering Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses deal with aspects internal to your organization; Opportunities and Threats are concerned with environmental factors over which you have no direct control. Once these are identified, you can act to mitigate the negative points. ...

Spurred on by the accusation that my expertise is limited to computer-related topics, I have resolved to learn to cook. This in fact will solve more than one problem: what to do with my copious free time given that I am organized, and give me more confidence that I am not wasting my money on ready meals each week. Obviously I am looking to transfer skills from existing domains of knowledge to this endeavour. (From open source development to... open sauce development?) My first insight from my project management experience is that this project really needs some SMART goals to work towards. Hmm... okay, first objective: ...

Apparently today was Document Freedom Day. Next year we shall have to actually celebrate it. At work, one of the company's key objectives is to promote open standards like ODF. We are lucky to have an OpenOffice.org developer in-house (a rare commodity, especially outside of Sun or Novell), and I've had the opportunity to work on supporting openoffice.org from time to time. The biggest difficulty is the sheer size - the built source tree needs 15GB, so it's pretty difficult to search through, for instance. ...

Flymake is an emacs minor mode that runs a syntax check tool over source files as you write them, on the fly. Essentially it calls the compiler for the relevant language and then parses the warnings. Because this is so obviously useful, I have it turned on by default in .emacs: ; Highlight syntax errors (require 'flymake) (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook) Recall also that I use emacs to view page source in Epiphany. Unfortunately, this produced a nasty dialog box warning about not being able to find an 'xml' command. ...

Suddenly I am very organized - a series of tedious tasks seem to have completed themselves, and I'm teetering on the brink of productivity. But that way lies madness. Today at work we finally deployed the new django-based website. It uses the same HTML and styling as the old website, but reduces the URL duplication, which will help with optimizing for search engines. We now need to add better content, and then perhaps work on the style. (I am now able to link directly to a page about PostgreSQL training, but the content is not yet too informative. And we still have nothing on Nagios.) ...

Is popularity the measure of success? Yes and no. In a discussion this evening, an assertion was made that RHEL was more widely used than Debian. This may or may not be true. But let's make a loose comparison to the theory of evolution, in this Darwin anniversary year - compare programs to species perhaps, program versions to individuals, and lines of code to genes. A particular distribution version is equivalent to a kin group of individuals. This analogy is likely to work because free software development mirrors natural selection closely, albeit driven by developer interaction. ...

It's the end of FOSDEM - it's been great. More on that later. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in the hotel lobby at 11:30pm, and some random businessman starts talking on the phone to a colleague about his problems opening a ".docx" file. Apparently the converter won't install on his Mac, so he might not be able to get this work done until Thursday. I happen to be wearing a bright blue OO.o 3.0 T-shirt today. So... I walked over and suggested he try it. His colleague on the other end of the phone was a technical guy, and had heard of it. ...

I'm thinking of framing this:

I have been taking a closer look at the various security patches Debian applies to GNU Enscript this morning - I believe there may be similar problems lurking in other parts of the codebase, so my plan is to fix these myself this week. This avoids various inconvenient questions about copyright assignment. For the shorter patches this isn't a problem, of course - and there's generally more than one way to fix buffer overflows anyway. There's one longer patch where shell escapes are prevented - that might need more study.