Et tu, Cthulhu

Be sure to check out the openSUSE community week currently underway. The GNOME-centric part of the community has its own program for the week.

Since we’re leaving the country for good (or at least for a very long time), we thought it’d be nice to do the full-on tourist thing and take a bunch of pictures - actually the only time we’ve done so in the ten years I’ve lived here - taking a little piece of Mexico with us.

So Maru and I just got back from two weeks of vacations non-essential travel. We’ve had an excellent time, spending the first week in the northern states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa - taking the Chepe train through Copper Canyon territory and reaching an altitude of about 2600m - and the second week on the southern island of Cozumel, scuba diving down to -8m.

The influenza outbreak took us by surprise - we’ve passed through the Mexico City airport three times since the 18th of April, and hope to do so again in another couple of days - but we are apparently both healthy at this point. It’d be a bummer if our flight out gets cancelled or - even worse - if we’re quarantined in Europe, though. Fortunately, the way things are looking now, there isn’t a huge chance of that happening.

On the upside, we had Cozumel almost to ourselves (we were referred to as “the only two tourists left on the island” at least once), as people kept leaving and no more were arriving. I feel bad for anyone working in the tourist business here, though, especially our friend Hilda who lent us her battered charming open VW beetle so we could cruise around the island in style.

One of the rivers winding through the Copper Canyon

SUSE rocks (I suspect Bryen will love this)

 Apparently, our hotel in El Fuerte was once the ranch where Don Diego de la Vega, aka El Zorro, grew up. I had no idea!

Ghost island Cozumel

Can you believe they actually let us through the security checkpoints dressed like this?

The snow-shoveling I’ve been taking part in over the last couple of weeks is best described with a set of graphs:

So far, we’ve been able to lop about 23 seconds - or 48% - off the time it takes to boot openSUSE 11.1 on this particular netbook, without sacrificing much in the way of functionality. It boots straight into GNOME and its usual trappings, including the panel, Nautilus, “slab” main menu, nm-applet, PackageKit updater, printing applet (written in Python…), CUPS, etc.

It’s important to note that this time is measured from the moment bootchart starts until everything settles and is ready to use, easily identified in the chart as the moment where CPU activity falls to the baseline of noise from bootchartd itself.

It’s also important to note that this is on a netbook with a slow CPU, slow-to-init X driver/graphics hardware and fast SSD I/O. I’m hearing a lot of numbers being bandied about these days, e.g. “distribution Foo boots in 10 seconds”, and these numbers are meaningless without hardware specifications and a list of features you get. GNOME delivers a different feature set from Xfce, and netbooks and workstations usually perform very differently. Then there are questions of flexibility; is the system open-ended? Can you get server features by just installing packages and configuring them?

IMO, openSUSE has had unacceptable boot times on workstations for a long time now. Hopefully these changes will make it into future releases, upstream where possible.

For more details, see the wiki page. Note that for various reasons I haven’t been able to keep the text up to date. The graphs are representative, though.

Maru and I spent Christmas in Norway this year, and I’ve stayed on a bit to get things organized for our impending relocation here. Circumstances have delayed us, so instead of arriving ahead of the local recession, we’ll be setting up right in the middle of it. One can only hope that Norway will weather it as well as the media will have one believe.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of things to do besides worrying. For instance, there’s work, which at the moment consists of a kind of snow-shoveling exercise. Then there’s literally shoveling snow - oddly satisfying after so many years in the tropics. Between that and the access to (suitably tame) nature, I might work off the Christmas pounds yet. Apart from that, I’ve gotten to spend some quality time with my grumpy friends - notably, Johannes turned 30.

My talk, La comunidad GNOME para principiantes (The GNOME community for beginners), seems to have gone over well here at ENLi 2008 (the 2008 National Linux Meeting in Puebla, Mexico), with a big audience and interesting followup questions. The slides are available as a collection of plain PNG and JPEG images in a zip archive (use the link above).

I’m having an excellent time. Will post some pictures from the conference later.

Update: Pictures.

My wonderful audience

 I clearly didn’t bring enough openSUSE discs

Since absolutely everything seems to be about the USA lately, here’s a paranoid little snippet from good ol’ Burroughs to go with it.

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

— William S. Burroughs, The Job

Don’t read too much into it.

My laptop went south a couple of days ago, so I’m having to make do with a screen that is bigger but endowed with fewer pixels. This has been a source of frustration, especially in Evolution, where I depend on the efficiency afforded me by the tri-pane view. Crank down the resolution a bit, and it’s suddenly not so efficient - there isn’t enough space to display the subjects in the message list anymore. The problem is compounded by useless mailer “Re:” and mailing list prefixes.

So, since I don’t need to see the mailing list and reply status repeated for every single mail, I cooked up a little patch to trim the subjects in the message view. When applied, it makes available a new column in View -> Current View -> Define Views… -> Edit -> Fields Shown… -> Available Fields. This column implements the trimming, and can be used instead of the traditional Subject one:

Traditional	Trimmed

The patch applies to both Evolution 2.22 and 2.24, although unfortunately, a couple of nasty, new bugs are preventing me from running the latter. If you happen to be running openSUSE Factory like me, and Evolution 2.24 is preventing you from getting work done, you can get my unofficial 2.22 build for Factory from the build service. It includes the above patch as an added bonus.

I learned a new word the other day. Robhormiga, from “robar” (stealing) + “hormiga” (ant). So literally, “stealing ant” or “thief ant”. It refers to someone who steals something a little bit at a time, for example in the situation where on some nights, one of your neighbors carries off an armful from the stack of bricks allocated to building storm drains for the local community’s road-paving project.

Edit: That should probably be “robo hormiga”.

A friend of mine, Vegard Munthe, works for FAIR, an aid organization that ships used but working computers from rich (or industrialized, or first world, or whatever you want to call it) countries to poorer countries for re-use in school labs there. As part of the deal, the computers are shipped back for reprocessing when they are no longer working, to avoid them piling up and causing all kinds of environmental problems. Not so long ago they received their first return shipment - according to Vegard, getting the permits to ship and import what basically amounts to a pile of toxic waste was quite the challenge.

Fun fun fun! Congratulations to Vegard & crew on this important milestone.

As of yesterday, I have survived to 31 years of age. That is all for now.

Maru and Federico preparing to eat Moros con Cristianos