Paul's Web Pages

Also Giving up on Ruby Packaging

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.

So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.

Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…

10 Years of Spacelabs

Paul van Tilburg — 2010-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.

The past

Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.

Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.

I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.

The future

Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

Exploring Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve been here for over 2 weeks now and I feel like I’ve gotten used to the place. I am a bit behind with the journal posts but on the other hand always quite up-to-date with the pictures. The following describes event from Thursday June 6 until Tuesday June 16.

Sunsets

Sunsets are different everywhere. On Thursday we took a trip to the tip of the isle on which Reykjavík is located to a separate town called Seltjarnarnes. Since we were there around sunset, I took some (quite colourful) pictures.

2009-06-11: Sunset near Seltjarnarnes

Later in the week, when Arnar left for a workshop in Dublin, I took the bicycle out for a ride. It was nice to get some exercise again, Reykjavík being considerably hilly. When I arrived at the university around midnight, I noticed that Willard was just arriving. We had some tea, met other people that were hanging around and viewed the sun set from the roof of the building.

2009-06-14: Bike trip to the RU and back

Master and Bachelor Graduation

Reykjavík University, being a rather small university (there is also the University of Iceland here), does the graduation ceremony in one go. So, I went with some friends of Arnar to attend his graduation on Saturday. Well, this was quite different from the one I had. This ceremony is for 420 (!) candidates at once, while mine was more personal. However, they make a big event out of this which speeches and musical intermezzos while mine was rather bare in that respect.

From 2009-06-13: Graduation Ceremony

After the ceremony there was a reception for all students followed by a party at Arnar’s. This party ended with hanging around in the kitchen for two hours, talking and laughing. This formula is the so-called “kitchen party” which seems to be an Icelandic thing.

Work

I ended my work here in Iceland on Tuesday with a lunch and meeting with Anna and Luca. We discussed our previous work and a way to supplement the results to be able to make it into a journal paper. The discussion was productive and we decided on a plan, so I’ll start with this somewhere in July when I return from my holidays!

Working in Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

So, I have been here in Reykjavík for a while, working, exploring, eating, sleeping. I must say, some things are totally different from everything I am used to (especially the surroundings, nature) and other things are very familiar (if not to NL, then to Scotland).

Work

I have been working at the Reykjavík University, a private university coexisting next to the University of Iceland. It is located across the street of a big mall which turns out to be very convenient for lunch and instant-need purposes. The Computer Science school has a “theory day” on the 19th and I will giving a talk which I am preparing now.

Leisure

Although I have been here for just a few things, I have engaged in many activities already. First of all there was the very nice hike to the waterfall Glymur. It has shown me a glimpse of the adventure and nature that Iceland can offer.

2009-06-09: Hiking to Glymur

2009-06-10: Stroll through Reykjavík

Besides that, the infinitely long days seems to induce a very relaxed, free view on planning. Having dinner at 23:15, going for a hike at 20:00, visiting the cinema at 22:30. This makes every work day still feel like a holiday.

Jaiku, Twitter, Luonica, Ping.fm

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

More than a year ago I tried out Jaiku and it worked quite well despite some of its glitches. Although the number of journal posts plummeted, I’ve been able to keep up the microblogging. I’ve noticed in the past year that others preferred Twitter and/or identi.ca, but I didn’t want to join all these networks and duplicate my microblogs and all the hassle that came with it. This week I’ve registered myself on ping.fm, so I can post to more services (my Twitter, my Jaiku) simultaneously. Meanwhile Christian had set up a local (test) Laconica service, which available as of yesterday as Luonica on http://ica.luon.net/ (for all Luon users). Obviously, I have also added Luonica to my publish list.

Iceland, Here I Come!

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

I am all set for my trip to Iceland! (Well, except for the actual packing of stuff.) The purpose of the trip is a work visit and holiday combined. In the first week (maybe extended to 9 days), I will be working at the Reykjavik University on some process algebra things and possible present my past work. During my time there I can stay at the appartment of Arnar, whom I’ve met when he was attending our university for his Master’s. Thanks for providing me with accomodation and congrats with obtaining your Master’s degree! When my days at the RU are over, I will explore, tour, hike around the island with him and some of his friends. Very much looking forward to that!

Some travel information for Sunday June 7 (travelling with Iceland Air):

09:45	Leaving by foot/bus/train to the airport
14:00	Departure from Schiphol with flight FI503 (UTC+0200)
15:00	Arrive at Keflavik Airport (UTC+0000)

I will be returning on Sunday June 28:

16:30	Departure from Keflavik Airport with flight FI504 (UTC+0000)
21:30	Arrive at Schiphol (UTC+0200)

I will attempt to keep you all updated via this journal and/or the usual microblogging sources: Twitter / Jaiku / Luonica.

Post-FOSDEM 2009

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

Lenny Released

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

The long-awaited, big and stable Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” 5.0 has been released! Great job everyone and congratulations!

In this release the Debian/Ruby Extra team has an ever greater presence. We were able to increase the number of mainted libraries and applications to over 95 packages. Also quite a lot of issues were resolved and I am proud that we obtained this quality level.

For Squeeze we plan to deal with the transition to Ruby 1.9 and with possible multiple interpreter-support (still Ruby 1.8, JRuby?). We might also deal with the gems, who knows? :)

P.S. Indeed, did I just started posting without explaining why I was away for over 7 months?

Preparing for GUADEC

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

I am in the process of packing my stuff for my holidays. Tomorrow, I will fly to Istanbul to attend GUADEC 2008. Because GUADEC does not start before the 7th, it will give me some time to roam around Istanbul itself and do some sightseeing, probably with some of the Collabora guys.

I’m flying on July 3 at 12:00 (0200) from Schiphol with KLM (flight KL 1615) and arrive at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport at 16:20 (0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet.

I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date.

It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

28 today!

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

Not 28 links, but 28 years. :)

I know, I know… I haven’t written for a long time. I promise to pick it up soon. See Jaiku for more recent ramblings of mine.

By the way, congrats Steve!

Trying Jaiku

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-02-13T00:00:00+01:00

Last weekend I have decided to just try some of this micro-blogging and lifestreaming stuff. I have always been quite conscious about my own (online) presence and that of others due to long term Jabber usage. The presence-awareness helps me to somehow stay more connected to people on a kind of general level than previously was possible. By the way, this is just because I like to, not because it is a forced, mandatory thing. Concerning micro-blogging. This is a perfect solution for me! I don’t have to think of a title and just can share a thought for whoever is interested whenever.

Anyway, I ended up subscribing to Jaiku. It has a richer feature set than Twitter and it seems more things are “done right” to me. I especially like the comments and channels. I have added a Jaiku Stream Badge to my webpage so I am also trackable there.

Let’s see if I can keep it up. :-)

XO Play Night

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday after dinner we spontaneously ended up having a XO play night. I liked the interface and the things it could do, the complete difference with a normal notebook, the creeping into a child’s mind a bit.

It was funny to notice that being older and experienced, things that probably are intuitive to children, are not/no longer intuitive to me anymore. This fact alone shows how “being used to” and experience are a large part of things one consider intuitive. I notice this also when people are trying to use GNOME when they are used to Windows: they find this difficult, but of course most of them are already “hard wired” to Windows. The reverse holds for me: due to not using Windows often at all, I keep losing the aptitude for it and it seems to be a hard system to use from my perspective. Fortunately for us all, “getting used to” is the specialty of the brain.

Taking and Giving

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-04T00:00:00+01:00

From Debian I downloaded, installed and toyed around with Liquidsoap. It took me a few moments to understand the language, but once I did, I got very enthusiastic about it. I always wanted something more than just streaming a set for my friends now and then and this tool allows me to created a quite contrived webradio setup. More about that later…

To Debian unstable I finally uploaded Camping, a small Ruby web framework for MCV type applications. It is in NEW now. I’ve been writing (or at least started writing) quite a few apps based on Camping the past few months. Primarily because it is fun, but also because I like its flexibility and strength very much (see also some examples). Once Camping is in Debian, I’d like to put more Camping apps out in the open.

On Its Way

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

I have ordered my new MacBook today. The model silently got an update yesterday and that was what I was waiting for.

While my “old” PowerBook (4 years old) is still working fine, it has a broken hinge and unexplainable display-startup problems. Combined with the fact that it always connected to all my peripheral devices, external drives and a second screen, it is less then ideal to just pick it up and go. (Although we have XRandr 1.2 now, the whole desktop environment is not integrated with these features yet).

Moreover, because I somehow ended up in a 5 year cycle of needing a computer system update and something portable at the same time, I always bought a heavy laptop. This time, I want to break this cycle, and buy a light, portable laptop and maybe later some workstation. And why Apple or a MacBook… well, I have good experiences with it, well-designed and thought-through, and if you look for portable laptops, < 1000 €, with a 12-14" screen, quality hardware and good specs, the MacBook is on of the few options that is left, actually.

Broken HDDs Revisited

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

Two years after writing about what I found out when I was looking why my HDDs kept breaking down, I started to receive emails about this post. It seems that it was mentioned in an Ubuntu bug report and this morning I noticed that exactly this bug report was mentioned on Slashdot, so I can consider my post to be slashdotted (indirectly). For the past week, I’m counting 15,000 hits and it is still rising fast. It’s a good thing that I use a static HTML journal, so that my journal-hosting-pentium-233MHz can handle this. It’s also a good thing that the issue finally gets some attention.

Writing About Writing

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

Again some writing about writing, since it has been over a month again. Somehow I think of lots of things to write but end up not writing them. Maybe I should attempt to write smaller things. I will try this.

Getting Rid of Titles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months.

Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

Off to CONCUR 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

I had some posts planned, but didn’t get around to it. I’m off to Lisbon for CONCUR 2007 now. I’m flying with TAP (flight TP661) at 18:05. I’ll be back next Saturday (September 8)!

Work Has Started

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

Two weeks ago I started my new job at the Formal Methods research group of the Department of Mathematics of Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, what have I been up to until now?

Well, as you can imagine it takes some time to settle down. I got a room with two other PhD students. I have installed my new (and fast!) computer with Debian Sid and am very happy about it. I have created my academic website using Webgen (like I do with all my sites), attempting to have it look the same as the main university site. I think I have succeeded. Next to the settling down I have been meeting all the people of our group and reading a lot of papers in my future area of research.

What will I be doing the next few weeks then? For the moment I’ll continue to do a lot of reading. My research is in the area of the automata theory and the process algebra and ways to combine them. Besides reading up on that I will be continuing upon my master project and try to get the result published. Also, my first conference has been planned! Yay! From September 2 till September 8 I will be in Lisbon to attend the CONCUR 2007 conference and also have a look around town, of course.

Next Stop: PhD

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

Just graduated… and now what? Well, I had the opportunity to choose among several options: a PhD position at the TU/e, a PhD position at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, or pursue a job at Google. After much consideration, I have chosen the first option. I found it to be impossible to decide based on the research assignment or the people I would work with, so I looked at more personal and practical reasons which led me to my current decision.

I will start my job on August 1, 2007 and hope to finish the PhD in 2011. My research will involve working on project MoCaP, Models of Computation: Automata and Process, in which we try to achieve a better integration of the concurrency theory with the classical theory of automata. The thought behind the project is to make undergraduate computer scientists more aware of concurrency theory.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Arnaud and I finally managed to release Ruby D-Bus “Almost live from DebConf 7” 0.2.0. The release was planned for DebConf 7. However, I didn’t manage to get it ready in between all the talks, meetings, and other social stuff. Ruby D-Bus is an implementation of the D-Bus protocol in pure Ruby. After starting the development in February, it soon became apparent that several other projects were out there with about the same goal, such as Pure Ruby DBUS and R-Bus.

Our approach is to have an API that is close to the old Ruby D-Bus bindings. While the other, similar projects seem to have a slightly different goal, we still invite them to come to some sort of merging so that no duplicate effort is put into three or four separate projects with almost the same result.

The 0.2.0 release is our first real public release. We have a large subset of the features working and documented. The main focus of this release was to improve the API documentation and the tutorial. The 0.2.0 release is a release for exploratory purposes. We invite everyone interested to have a look at the API and inner works and provide us with feedback and/or patches. This means that the API can still change a bit over time based on feedback and tweaks performed by ourselves. So don’t built a big application on it just yet if you’re not willing to make some changes later on. For more information, see our project (Trac) page.

Back Home

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

And before you know it, another week has passed… I arrived back home yesterday, sooner that I had expected. The flight, landing and taxiing went very quickly and smoothly; this is probably to compensate for the enormously slow and dramatic check-in and boarding.

I had a great time meeting all the Debian people, getting to know each developer’s backgrounds, talking, discussing, eating, etc. In my opinion, the people at Debconf and especially the organisation team cannot be thanked enough for making this possible, so here we go: thank you very much everyone, for making Debconf 7 possible and fun. :-) See you in Argentina, I hope!

My own photos containing some general impressions will follow shortly. Though, I left most of the Debconf photographing to people with real cameras and some of these photo have already been published on the Debconf 7 gallery.

Feeding Frenzy! Uploaded

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

There is some effort here at Debconf to improve Debian’s game stuff. I want to contribute to that by announcing my first upload of the game “Feeding Frenzy!” to Debian Sid. The game is about dwarfs (or sheep) that have to collect food to survive which becomes increasingly scarce during the game. Besides collecting food, the dwarfs can also can choose to throw the food at competing dwarfs to temporarily disable them.

Four years ago, a group consisting of some of my friends and myself created this game as an assignment for a project in our bachelor computer science. A few weeks ago, we undusted the game, Bram fixed some compiler warnings and I fixed up the package. It is ready for Debian now and has a pretty good gameplay, though it can probably still be improved graphic- and level-wise. I uploaded it two days ago. So, if our FTP-masters are no longer busy with Debconf, I hope they can get the game through the NEW queue soon.

Debconf Debian/Ruby Extras Meeting

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

The Debian/Ruby Extras team has come to an agreement about a meeting time and date, yay! We’re going to meet today, Tuesday June 19, 2007 and discuss current packaging issues, plans for the future, and the Ruby policy. I’m delighted that half of the members of the team are here and are able to get together.

Invitation If anyone is interested in joining the team or observing what we do, please meet us at 18:00 in front of the cafeteria.

Oh, and could somebody at least bring a computer, because my PowerBook is not as portable anymore as it used to be.

Update: I forgot to mention that most team members usually hide out on IRC in the #debian-ruby channel on OFTC.

DebCamp Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

It is time for a DebCamp update, since I’ve been here three days now. I have mainly been working on picking up the slack regarding Debian/Ruby Extras. This meant: getting rid of a CDBS rule that substitutes the entire team in the Uploaders field, cleaning up some package, uploading some packages with new upstream, solving and filing bugs.

During all this, the “picture” of the environment outside is actually only missing yellow/brown trees shedding their leaves.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

In between the Debian/Ruby Extras work I have been able to finish the documentation of our Ruby D-Bus protocol implementation. It is due for release this weekend and I think we’ll make it.

Arrival

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

I have just arrived in Edinburgh. The flight was just fine. The weather is a bit foggy and cold (compared to NL), but it is exactly how I remember it. I was transported to MACS at the Heriot-Watt university. It’s weird to sit on my old working spot again. :-)

Master Project Finished

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday, I have completed my master project with a presentation of my work and a defence of my thesis. I got awarded a 9 (out of 10) for my entire project. It is a result that I am very happy with and am very proud of. This result will allow me to get my Master of Science degree with honours on June 19, after the exam committee has checked everything. Note that the diploma will be handed out not on June 19, but on August 28, because I am on my holiday and at Debconf in Edinburgh the next two weeks.

Thanks everyone for attending my presentation, joining the “celebration lunch” afterwards, and all the encouraging words and kudos. :-)

Master Project Take 2 and 3

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

I just realised that I forgot to post about take 2, so I’ll combine it with this post about take 3. The past five months I’ve been busy with examining the effect of restriction on CCS with parallelism. We decided to do this in two steps. First (take 2) we considered interleaving of actions, and then (take 3) we added communication. The case with only interleaving of actions went smoothly; it worked out as a nice extension of the case without parallelism. However, when we looked at the case with interleaving and communication, it started to become troubling. I ran into all kind of complications and the risk of failure I described in a previous post seemed to come true. However, I think we managed quite well to catch a large part of the problems and describe them, and also offer possible solutions. In the end, I’m quite happy of the result.

So, today I can present the final version of my Master’s Thesis: “Finite Equational Bases for CCS with Restriction”. Yay! I have just submitted it for reproduction. The final presentation of my project will take place June 5, 2007 at 10:00 in the main building of the university, HG 6.29. If you’re interested and are able to attend, consider yourself invited. I want to thank Bas Luttik for his large amount of feedback, clear explanations and guidance, without him the project wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did now.

Almost finished, 6 days remaining…

Schedule Spring 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up.

Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
2007-06-12 — 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,… who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

IPv6 Troubles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-26T00:00:00+02:00

In response to Joey’s IPv6 autoconfiguration troubles:

Over the years I’ve gotten IPv6 autoconfiguration working just as you described: load the module and bring the interface down and back up. Though, I suspect you may have been running Debian’s linux-image-2.6.18-3-{arch} kernel which seemed to drop/neglect/whatever (I haven’t checked the specifics) IPv6 multicast (link-local) traffic over which the autoconfiguration is done. When 2.6.18-4 arrived in Sid, all worked fine for me after a reboot too.

Technical Stuff

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Hobix

There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental.

Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental!

Ruby D-Bus

A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API.

I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens…

OpenID

I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service.

Koditoj

Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

Space Efficient Algorithms

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Last Tuesday I finished my paper about Space Efficient Algorithms and Histograms that will comprise most of the grade of my last remaining Master course, Advanced Algorithms. While I’ve been mostly enjoying writing this paper, I am glad it is finished for several reasons, one of them being able to do other things than just working on it and another is that it allows me to focus fully on my Master Project which is starting to progress nicely. (More about this later.)

FOSDEM 2007

Due to the amount of time I needed to work on the paper, the need to save money (I really would like to go to Debconf7) and that the scheduled talks didn’t seem to interest me that much, I decided to break with tradition and not to go to FOSDEM this year.

Just before FOSDEM, however, it seemed that lots of the people I would have liked to meet did go. While that was a pity, I hope to meet them in three months at Debconf7.

What Etch Will Bring

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

With 2006 almost finished, I can look back at a succesful year for the Debian/Ruby Extras team. The infrastructure was set up and we gained 12 new team members and a lot of packages. With Etch frozen, I can now almost certainly say what Etch will bring Ruby-wise:

35 new libraries and applications.
A meta-package libruby-extras to extend the Ruby Standard Library with some more useful libs.
Consistent packaging of the 44 team-packaged apps and libs.
RubyGem support (courtesy of Daigo Moriwaki)

I am proud of what we have accomplished, good work everyone! Not team related is the change that the whole Ruby stdlib is now bundled in libruby(1.8) and is no longer split up! So you all can remove those Debian-specific messages about having to “do extras things when using Debian”. ;)

Future plans for Lenny

Future plans for Lenny include updating and extending the Ruby Policy. Focus points will be package versioning, improving documentation. Also we intend to package even more Ruby libraries and applications and ask current Ruby lib/app developers to join us. A third matter I’d like to address is Gem support.

The @ Book

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

I read The @ Book by Patrik Sneyd from ascii64 last Wednesday. It tells the story of the @ (at-sign) and elaborates on all kinds of (sometimes seemingly un)related topics such as spam, software patents, Michelangelo, morse code, etc. using either symbolic images or short texts.

This booklet with a really nice layout is a refreshing read during a break. @:)

Bachelor of Science

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

After finishing Hypermedia and History of Computing in October I was ready to meet the requirements of the bachelor’s exam. I passed it on November 14 and received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science last Monday.

While before the BaMa (Bachelor Master) system was introduced this 3-year milestone might have meant nothing at all, so it feels kind of odd that I have finished a study now. I’ve updated my CV. I hope I can do this again soon, namely when I’ll finish my Master of Science…

Debian Ruby Extras Etch To Do

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

During the past weeks I’ve been drawing up a list with things to be done for the Etch release concerning my work for the Debian/Ruby Extras team. I think it is quite complete now. I hope my fellow team members can help me accomplish these goals:

Solve all remaining issues concerning the ruby-pkg-tools.
Make sure that all team-maintained packages are:
- bug-less, that is, no open priority minor or higher bug reports,
- installable,
- up-to-date with respect to the upstream version.
Consider all work-in-progress packages and get them in Etch if they are worthy.
Take over the packages put up for adaption by Damog.
Create the libextras-ruby meta-package and get it into Etch.

I think the first two items are as good as taken care of. However, the last three points need some more attention the next few weeks.

Hypermedia

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

This weekend I was finally able to finish (after 7 days of full-time labour) the assignment of my last pending bachelor course: Hypermedia Structures and Systems. The assignment of this purely on-line course consisted of the conversion of a linear document to a hypertext one. This meant splitting the document in dozens of nodes and then going through each of them (iteratively) and linking them together using several techniques while keeping useful guidelines in mind.

While discussing this assignment with Bas we decided it would be nice to build the site using Webgen. Webgen is good at transforming nodes that just contain text (with a bit of Textile markup) to nice XHTML 1.1 valid pages. We also extended Webgen with a few plug-ins: one to create links to nodes without having to mention the paths but just using unique identifiers. That way we were sure the links were also always pointing to the right page. The other plug-in we wrote was to be able to do bibliography stuff a la LaTeX.

I am quite satisfied with the result, which will be graded this week. ;)

Atanasoff

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

There was no real known reason why our essay for the course History of Computing was overdue, but Bas and I finally managed to finish it yesterday. Almost two years we have been postponing writing it, slowly collecting and reading more material, but after a few weekends of hard work, it is done:

John Vincent Atanasoff: The Inventor of the Digital Computer (copyrighted under CC SharedAlike 2.5)

The essay tries to acknowledge Atanasoff’s accomplishments, the ABC, and ideas that we still find in our computers today (binary system, regenerative memory, separation of calculation and memory and calculation by electronics and logic). Without these ideas and the derivations that found its way into the ENIAC, the world would’ve been a different place for sure.

I was surprised by the increased amount of work it requires to write a work covering a historical topic. For each sentence you write down, you either have to do a lot of research, you have to make sure it is objective or if it is not objective you have to find a source backing up what you are stating. This way, writing 1,5 pages on an average Saturday is a lot, comparing to writing a report about some practical assignment, which is fairly easy and straightforward. Even more so since our topic is surrounded by controversy.

Master Project - Take 1

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

Today I have effectively started with my Master Project! I have been been at it for a few days already in the past weeks though, but now I’m sitting on my own spot working on some proofs.

So, what am I actually doing? Well that’s still hard to put in words yet and it also requires some process algebra and general math prior knowledge, but I’ll try.

My graduation supervisor is Bas Luttik and in July he co-published a paper on defining a finite equational base (a set of equations from which all others can be derived) for a specific process algebra called CCS. This paper used a specific subset of CCS, namely without restriction (hiding) and relabelling. Restriction is an operator of the process algebra to block certain actions of happening, relabelling is an operator to replace actions by other actions.

Take 1 of my project is to try to consider this algebra with restriction and finding a new equational base and proof that either it works or it can not be done. This is a risky assignment because it can lead to: we have tried but haven’t gotten either results. The short period to come will entail considering CCS with restriction but without concurrency to drastically reduce the cases to be considered. If we succeed, we’ll continue with CCS with restriction and concurrency. If we do not succeed it’s quite possible we’ll change my project assignment.

More to come!

Moved Jabber Server

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID.

Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:

First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of jabber.luon.net, that is:
```
  msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  …
```
Note that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:
```
  jabber.tcp      1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-client.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-server.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
```
With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
Then, I modified the address of jabber.luon.net to point to the new host and let it propagate.
Next, I sent a MOTD (luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client¹.
Finally, I installed a second C2S component on luon.net that connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.

It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

¹ I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <→ talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

Homepage Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

Next to upgrading my journal software I have also replaced the software powering my normal homepage. I used to use Hobix for that, but I have replaced it with Webgen. Don’t get me wrong, both are good pieces of software, but Hobix is just nicer for writing a journal and Webgen for generating webpages from simple formatted content. But in the end, both produce nice static HTML pages! :-)

Note that my normal homepage is emptier than it used to be, but given the low threshold to add something I am sure more will come soon. I also updated my style a bit to synchronize the look of the pages produced by both frameworks, but it was quite trivial in the end.

Journal Revamp

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Although I have a lot to post it has been quiet on this journal. The main reason is that I wanted to wait with new posts until I had the new Hobix package ready. In the Debian/Ruby Extras team I have been working on the package and it’s getting along nicely. The new Hobix release features support for trackbacks, comments, tags, publishing via a webapp and has some more plugins out-of-the-box.