Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events. I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions. The act of preparing the talk also let me discover a few different monitoring tools that look useful - perhaps I'll get the chance to look at them at some point. ...

Following up on Saturday's post and various other blog entries about bash. While arguing with Anton about bash being slow, I discovered that /etc/bash_completion was sourced twice when starting a shell on my laptop; once in /etc/bash.bashrc, and once in ~/.bashrc. This is Debian bug #430501 - the suggestion there is that /etc/skel/.bashrc should change to check whether /etc/bash_completion had already been included. So, that saves 0.27 seconds. tim@regulus:~$ time bash -i -c exit exit real 0m0.270s user 0m0.240s sys 0m0.032s ...

Beginning last night, I reinstalled my laptop. Normally, if it were just to clean up some packages, I wouldn't do this - the aim was more to try out removing the disk encryption that I was using, and the effect has been quite dramatic. I worked out a while ago that the device-mapper encryption was slowing down disk access - with it gone, boot times are much shorter (and I don't have to type in a LUKS passphrase). GNOME loads a lot faster. Additionally, bash starts a lot quicker than it did. I suspect loading the bash completion routines takes quite a bit of disk access. Update: No, I just didn't have the bash-completion package installed. Bash is still slow. GNOME is still faster, though... for now. ...

So, a benchmark. tim@regulus:~$ time zsh -i -c exit real 0m0.064s user 0m0.048s sys 0m0.008s tim@regulus:~$ time bash -i -c exit exit real 0m0.540s user 0m0.436s sys 0m0.100s Both shells had their respective completion systems enabled. (Without them turned on, bash actually beats zsh... but the times are small enough that it doesn't matter.) These times are with a warm disk cache - the first time through both shells were slower. And the numbers stay roughly the same when repeating.

Yesterday evening, I finally found the patch for a bug in mono-addins that had been affecting f-spot extensions for a while - rebuilding the f-spot Debian package with no changes and reinstalling would cause the built-in extensions to disappear. In the end, the patch was just two lines long, and had been applied in mono-addins SVN (and in the copy of mono-addins that f-spot bundles). One less RC bug for lenny. ...

This weekend, I visited Derby, and updated the f-spot packaging in the Debian pkg-cli-apps repository. It's now at version 0.4.2, but this hasn't fixed the complicated extensions problems - they are Mono.Addins bugs, so we'll need to update libmono-addins0.2-cil to the version the f-spot devs claim fixes everything. Apart from that, I've been looking at my list of potential pet projects, and thinking about which of them I want to prioritize over the next year or so. I reckon I can organize them around the forthcoming Debian release - aiming to fix as many bugs as possible in time for lenny helps with rating the relative priority of things. It's probably not a coincidence that the more important bits of development I want to get done happen to tie in to Debian release goals. So I suppose now is not the time to start too many new projects. :) ...

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. Thinking about it, the biggest social events these days are software conferences. Sad, but true. I find myself reflecting on the year just gone. ...

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. In the meantime, because I rely on it so heavily, I need it to work now. ...

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. ...