jon.dowland.name log

I've just voted Stefano Zacchiroli for Debian Project Leader (DPL). The voting period closes tonight, so if you are a Debian developer and haven't yet voted, please do!

Debian uses a Condorcet voting system, which to my non-expert eyes, bears some resemblance to "Single Transferrable Vote" (STV), at least compared to "First Past the Post" (FPTP). There is a debate raging in the UK as to whether Government elections should be counted based on an STV method instead of FPTP, with a referendum on the subject in May.

aero snap was one of the launch features of Windows 7 that was quickly copied into other desktop systems (most recently, gnome 3). I've written about it before. Essentially, dragging windows to hot regions of the screen resizes those windows to occupy some area of the screen. To the top: the whole window area (maximize). To the left or right, 50% of the width of the window area, all of the height.

Packages of bup, a git-based de-duplicating backup tool, are now available in unstable.

Tesco Car Insurance (and most likely their other financial products) operate a commercial email system which is populated by anyone who submits their address to them as part of searching for a car insurance quote.

That's not particularly unusual. Each mail that Tesco sends includes unsubscribe instructions - standard industry practise. However Tesco's instructions do not work. I have followed them at least three times since January this year to no avail. Despite this I have continued to receive unsolicitied commercial email (spam) from Tesco.

I'm in Manchester so I have made my requisite pilgrimage to Vinyl Exchange and paid my dues.

Sometimes the world we live in amazes me.

Rentokil falsify scientific studies that show an alarming number of bugs and pests on public transport. Ben Goldacre calls them out, and fellow marketing people defend the practice as a sound marketing tool.

Id Software have released a port of Doom for the iPhone. What makes this exciting for me is the lineage of this code. the iPhone port is derived from prboom. Peeking around in the source code, there's some of my code in there (p_checksum.[ch]) as well as some code I borrowed from dpkg (md5.[ch], thanks to Colin Plumb and Ian Jackson). This stuff is unlikely to actually be run on the iPhone, mind (although I think I have some patches against p_enemy.c which will).

An excellent Linux Journal article on the improvements made to music software on Linux during 2009:

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/gifting-season-linux-audio-holidays

I've been on hold to my mobile phone provider for over an hour. However, in that time, I've take a massive bite out of my miscellaneous TODO list. That feels good!

[Russell Coker writes about shellscripts. I have a different suggestion. Whenever you think that a shellscript is the right solution to a problem, you are mistaken: do it in a proper scripting language instead. Having access to proper data structures will mean you don't have to contort your code to fit values into scalar strings, or write loads of temporary files, or call cut/awk/sed/grep etc. repeatedly on the same inputs to get at different fields, etc. etc. etc.

Earlier in the year I bought some stuff from UK clothes retailer USC. USC kindly included some gift vouchers in my delivery.

This is a good example of how to sweeten a deal and make your customers happy.

Halloween was a blast. The aformentioned homebrew went down a storm: I think we finished about 25 pints. Apart from hangovers, everyone survived!

My good friend Rob was kind enough to knock up a label for the brew. Thanks to Rob, Dan for the photo and Helen for putting on the party!