A much cooler day today after strong winds last night.

Stephen very kindly gave me a tour of the office this morning.

Then I did some work on the newsletter: next issue has to be ready by the weekend.

Then I walked a bit and bought a mystery foodstuff that is not readily available in the UK.

I arrived in Provo yesterday, after a long flight to Salt Lake City from Paris.

First impressions of the landscape: it looks and feels a bit like Iran. Temperature hot, dry air, fairly exhausting to walk around in the daytime.

I got a shared shuttle taxi from the airport at Salt Lake City to Provo, which was further than I expected. The driver was an Englishman from Watford, who has lived here 10 years, and seems to like it a lot.

I had a short walk around yesterday and looked at the Novell buildings from the outside. I decided not to eat at Chuck-a-Rama.

Breakfast this morning was a self-service buffet, with scrambled eggs mixed with small cubes of ham, and fried potatoes and something called "sausage gravy" which was a thick mushroom sauce. Good stuff.

Then I went for a walk as far as the old part of the town. Nothing was open on a Sunday morning and there was hardly anyone about.

I took some photos.

Two stories today that tell us exactly what kind of company Oracle is:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19f004f0-a700-11df-90e5-00144feabdc0.html
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/13/1850232/The-Future-of-OpenSolaris-Revealed.

It had been some time (several years) since I have used a crimping tool to stick RJ-45 connectors on the end of cables for ethernet, and I couldn't understand why they worked (i.e. connected) but wouldn't stay in the sockets (didn't click and lock).

The answer is simple but I destroyed quite a few connectors before I realised: don't press too hard.

Four members of the Metropolitan Police's territorial support group are going to be charged:

Simon Clements, head of the CPS special crime division, has announced that four of the five officers involved in the arrest will face criminal charges.

Clements said: "Our conclusion is that there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to charge four of the officers involved in the arrest of Mr Ahmad with causing actual bodily harm to him, contrary to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Police constables Nigel Cowley, John Donohue, Roderick James-Bowen and Mark Jones will be summonsed to appear at City of Westminster magistrates court on 22 September 2010."The Metropolitan police initially denied claims that Ahmad had been assaulted, saying officers had used reasonable force during the arrest. But in March last year the Met admitted liability in the high court and agreed to pay £60,000 to Ahmad in damages.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/12/babar-ahmad-police-abuse-verdict

Hmm: running routine updates on Ubuntu overwrote my MBR.

I had a multi-boot setup with generic boot code in the MBR, and each system booting from its own partition's boot record. During the Ubuntu install I had made sure Ubuntu's boot loader was installed in its own partition's boot record. (The installer let me do this, though it does warn against it. And it was working fine).

Yesterday Ubuntu prompted me to update packages. The updates included a grub update.

After a reboot, it seems that the update had written its own grub to the MBR.

I had to get a grub command line to manually boot to openSUSE and run /usr/sbin/fixmbr.

This isn't the first time that Ubuntu has messed up multi-booting on this machine, though the last time was a previous version of Ubuntu and I never worked out exactly what happened then.

This time it is 10.04, but I see there is at least one open bug (495423) for this kind of behaviour.

Quiz question: which Linux distribution's login banner includes a cocktail recipe?

You've guessed it: it's OpenWrt:

 
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /etc/banner 
_______                     ________        __ 
|       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_ 
|   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _| 
|_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____| 
|__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M 
Backfire (10.03, r20728) -------------------------- 
* 1/3 shot Kahlua    In a shot glass, layer Kahlua 
* 1/3 shot Bailey's  on the bottom, then Bailey's, 
* 1/3 shot Vodka     then Vodka. 
--------------------------------------------------- 

I followed the instructions here, did the scary flashing thing, and now have a WRT54GL v1.1 running OpenWrt 10.03.

It's not very big:

 
root@OpenWrt:~# df -h 
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on 
/dev/root                 1.9M      1.9M         0 100% /rom 
tmpfs                     6.6M     52.0K      6.5M   1% /tmp 
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev 
/dev/mtdblock3            1.0M    216.0K    808.0K  21% /overlay 
mini_fo:/overlay          1.9M      1.9M         0 100% / 

 
root@OpenWrt:~# free 
total         used         free       shared      buffers 
Mem:        13416        12148         1268            0         1312 
Swap:            0            0            0 
Total:        13416        12148         1268 

 
root@OpenWrt:~# uname -a 
Linux OpenWrt 2.6.32.10 #20 Tue Apr 6 15:53:48 CEST 2010 mips GNU/Linux 

The web interface is relatively easy to use, and you can also log in over ssh and configure it by editing configuration files.

Some people went to Rome.

Photos.

I got back from EuroPython last night: it was a good event, and well worth going to.

One or two highlights:
Idiomatic Python (Raymond Hettinger)
Scraperwiki (Julian Todd)
Tickery, Pyjamas & FluidDB (Terry Jones)
JavaScript and MillerColumns (Jonathan Fine)
Python and Machine Learning (Semen Trygubenko)