FOSDEM was interesting, this year - I knew a lot more people than last time. Going to talks was a pain, because everywhere was so crowded; but the best bits are outside the talks, anyway. I eventually managed to sign my keys from the keysigning, and even caught up with some left over from last year. The next day I fell horribly ill - I was recovering for the whole of last weekend....

Counting off years at an arbitrary date on a calendar seems a bit meaningless - to many people I suppose it makes sense, because everyone gets together at New Year's Eve, and there's a big party to remember things by. With me it's different; for the last few New Years, things have been quiet. The big events in my life are not the times when I take a few days to relax, as pleasant as they are....

It has been quite a while since I switched to using only Jabber (a.k.a. XMPP) for all my instant messaging. We use Jabber a lot at work, as well, and there are plans to set up an internal Jabber server eventually. (At the moment, everyone uses their personal Jabber IDs, which isn't ideal.) I've been having problems with jabber.org.uk lately - they seem unreliable at times, although they're going through a complicated migration to ejabberd which should eventually fix things....

Lately I've been having crazy ideas. Even more than usual, perhaps. I think the trick is to try and break the wildly unrealistic goals down into bite-size chunks that could actually work. Like, for instance, getting the project you want to hack on mirrored into your favourite repository format. In other news, I've finally got around to learning how to set up public git mirrors of cvs and svn repositories - there are plenty of tutorials about creating private repositories, but very few which deal with public ones in detail....

I haven't been writing so much recently - only one blog post for January, and I didn't even find the time to finish all the things I did in December. This is because I'm busy. Honest. So, before it gets too far into February, I'd better summarize things a little. Projects I worked on recently: f-spot - Near the end of December, I joined the Debian Mono packaging team, and helped clear up a few bugs in the photo management application I use....

I've had two cases recently where an old configuration file has been causing problems, and there's no clean upgrade strategy. My wireless card was made by Broadcom, and I use the newer b43 driver in Linux. However, the new mac80211 drivers introduce a second network interface (used internally by mac80211) but with the same MAC address as the normal interface. And because it gets created first, udev puts this master interface into the place where the real interface is meant to be, and the real one gets called 'wlan0_rename'....

Firstly, a rant: as of December 2007, a self-righteous idiot named Chris Cunningham thinks he can change the name of "Fitts' law" to "Fitts's law" on wikipedia, in the name of grammar. To boot, he claims to have changed every link to "GNU/Linux" to point to "Linux", probably without regard to the difference in meaning. I am not happy. Fortunately, a recent attempt to become an admin was unsuccessful. Anyway....

So I'm in Morpeth for Christmas, staying with my mum. Until today there was no internet access here - they had been paying for an ADSL connection since May, but hadn't managed to get the modem to work with the computer. After a trip to the shops for a nice ADSL wireless router, I can now type blog entries from bed. There was an existing computer to get working with the router as well....

Continuing my search for the subtle things that have annoyed me for years about my desktop usage, I want to think about shell startup times. Application startup times have been done to death, I'm sure - it is one of the more obvious areas to work on when improving a desktop application. Evolution's startup time is still appalling, for instance; I count five seconds before I get a GUI, and many more before I see any email....

Some things always feel uncomfortable about my desktop usage, even when I change solutions - KDE, GNOME, XFCE, all the way down to evilwm and beyond, to the console. I want to pin these problems down, in order to address them. First I want to focus on network lag. Take email as an example. One of the biggest changes I made to my use of email a few years ago was to store all my email on an IMAP server, so that I can access it from any computer I happen to be using....