Credit cards can be very useful, provided you pay off your outstanding balance at the end of each month. If you do not, the debt can pile up, and will be sticking with you for a very long time. Credit is a tool - it lubricates the economy. Without it, production would grind to a halt. However, it is very important that creditors lend only as much as debtors can afford to repay....
Ironically, the number of blog posts I make tends to be inversely proportional to the number of interesting things going on in my life.
For my first trivial bit of coding while I'm here, I patched the debconf IRC bot to announce nicknames as well as the real name of new arrivals (a feature request from madduck). I'm hoping to resist wasting time adding lots of features to it - the code is awful. This morning I went running at 8:30 - in theory there are going to be group runs in the morning and afternoon sometime, but for now I went on my own....
I arrived in Mar del Plata yesterday - DebConf this year is all in one hotel (with a nearby hotel for overflow accommodation next week), which makes everything very convenient. When they're not serving meals, they're usually serving coffee and cakes in the hacklab. There were some teething troubles with the networking today, so I took a walk down the beach. Mar del Plata reminds me of Llandudno - it's a popular beach resort in the summer, but it's winter at the moment....
I finally registered with a GP's surgery in Rugby today (that is, Thursday). This went fairly smoothly once I managed to decipher the way to Waiting Room 2. I am 180cm tall, and weigh 75kg. This gives me a BMI of 23.1, which is normal. I didn't get the numbers for my blood pressure, but apparently it's fine. :)
On Thursday and Friday, I took time off work to visit Bristol for the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008. Around 20 people attended - obviously these were all people contributing to GNU, but (surprisingly) I didn't feel too much like I was surrounded by giants. Instead, it was all quite relaxed; most people there seemed rather like me - with a mild caffeine addiction, permanently short of spare time, and just trying to improve their small projects as best they could....
After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well. Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications....
An update to Debian's gnu-standards package is now in incoming. This package contains the GNU Coding Standards and the Information for GNU Maintainers document. It is now in the `main' section rather than `non-free', so is officially part of the Debian system. This has taken several months; at the end of December I asked whether the maintainers' document could be relicensed. RMS evidently approved, because the licence was changed in January....
Blue and White G3 PowerMac on eBay, collection only: £10. Train fares to and around London: £26. Fixing an annoying PowerPC f-spot bug: priceless. It weighs 13kg, apparently, and my arms still ache. Thanks to Anton and Dan for letting me stay at their place on Saturday night, and use their fast net connection to download Debian packages.
The first rule of licence club is, you do not talk about licence club. The second rule of licence club is, you DO NOT talk about licence club. If a copyright holder says stop, gets confused, is bought out, the licence is over. Only two parties to a licence. One exclusive licence at a time. No CDDL, no Jörg Schilling. Licences will go on as long as the copyright is enforcable....