Tomorrow will be a challenging day, herding the kids through the airports to get to Hobart for a holiday in Tasmania before linux.conf.au 2009 in a couple more weeks.

Sadly I didn't get the DAViCal release out over Christmas that I'd hoped for, and realistically I should face up to the fact that I won't have much chance to push it out until I get back...

Still, it might happen, so don't lose hope! And if you're desperate the current Git head is pretty safe too - so long as you use the head for AWL as well.

I'll only have sporadic net access (until LCA anyway), and my cellphone won't reach me at all, so I guess the world will have to get along without me for a few weeks :-)

Have a Happy New Year - we won't be partying tonight, with a 4:00am start in the morning!

Today someone asked me to take a look at an Evolution enhancement that's just begging to get into trunk. Since this is a Gnome program in a subversion repository I've commenced the process of cloning the repository so I can look at the issue against the current head.

At the current rate I should have a copy of the repository by early tomorrow morning, in order to be able to start looking at it. Of course today is when I actually do have some time to spare, and I hope to be fast asleep at the time when I expect this to finish.

Presumably subversion isn't this slow for everyone, but since my latency to their repository is 300mS I'm probably on the worst end the pain, with each commit seemingly taking around a second. It sure would be nice if subversion provided some kind of chunked compression of these five-year-old commits, so I could be bandwidth limited, rather than latency challenged.

The addition of a day to the checkout of a software project must be a significant barrier to entry for anyone considering contributing. It makes it much less likely to be opportunistic.

So far I'm up to r3600 in 75 minutes. That's 75 minutes that I could have spent actually looking at the code, but now it's time for me to go and vote for me...

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now.

The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that.

Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage.

Updated

After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.

When Heather designed a logo for me for Morphoss she did it with a bitmap editor, naturally enough because that's the tool she's most familiar with using. I'd rather not use a bitmap as the source format for the logo though, because it will degrade when it gets resized, so I redrew it as a vector graphic.

One of the best free, open-source tools around for vector graphics seems to be Inkscape and I've mucked around with it for many years, so I naturally used that.

Once you have a logo though, you naturally want to use it in documents, and the importing of SVG graphics into OpenOffice.org documents is a long-outstanding bug (let alone embedding SVG graphics) so I needed to convert them to another format. It's actually the most requested feature in OOo, appearing twice in the top 10, and even spawning an external SVG importer project.

Since both programs support encapsulated postscript I was able to save the logo from Inkscape as .eps and use it directly in OpenOffice.org. While this initially seemed satisfactory, after a few weeks of using documents with the .eps logo embedded in them I started to get annoyed with the strange pauses when my CPU was maxed out while paging up and down. I was sure that that had not happened in the past when I was using a logo in WMF format, which OOo inevitably has to support well for compatibility with other Office Suites.

After some searching around for more complicated ways to convert SVG or EPS to WMF, I discovered that what I could do was simply to open the EPS in OpenOffice.org draw, and save it from there as a WMF. This seems to work well, for my purposes anyway, so now when I use my logo in my OpenOffice.org documents I don't see any annoying slowdown paging up and down within the document, and I didn't have to download the SVG importer for OpenOffice.org either.

Well alright, I did download the SVG importer as well, but my logo didn't look nearly so good without it's text, and with everything displaced up and to the right at various offsets!

Here are some pre-release DAViCal 0.9.5.90 (i.e. nearly 0.9.6) packages now. Since there is a lot of refactoring that has gone on under the covers here, I'll publish these packages so that people can tell me about all my embarassing mistakes, and I can correct them, before I upload them to places where they might get installed more or less automatically.

In particular if you do find problems with these, and can catch me on the #davical on irc.oftc.net during the coming week I should be able to include a fix into the real 0.9.6 release next week. If you can't get on IRC then an e-mail will also be fine.

The full release notes are here but the short version is that this fixes a number of bugs, notably one to do with importing calendars containing repeating events with exceptions. The big change is that this adds the initial support for the draft scheduling extensions to CalDAV, in particular the lookup of free/busy information.

Updated

In true pre-release fashion I forgot to actually enable the scheduling extensions stuff, so I've put new packages (0.9.5.91) on there now with that enabled... :-)

I've been helping Amos Jeffries with a little testing in the last week to help nail some IPv6 bugginess preparatory to the upcoming 3.1 release of squid. In the process of that I've built some Squid3 packages with IPv6 support enabled from current HEAD.

Get 'em while they're hot.

Note that these are in a 'works for me' state. They have been built on Lenny, and I have them running on both Lenny and Sid. I haven't put them somewhere you could apt-get them from because you should be paying attention if you're going to use them!

PS. If you can't click through to Amos' site it's because you're using IPv6 and the EveryDNS servers are continuing to serve up old data for his domain. Sigh.

After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer.

In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least!

Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet...

I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware.

After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this.

Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website.

I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function.

After 11 years 1 month and 28 days it's time for me to farewall Catalyst IT. While this is something that I've been working towards for the last couple of years, my reasons for leaving don't reflect any large dissatisfaction with Catalyst, but rather my own disinterest in fulfillling a role which is deemed appropriate to an executive director of the company it has become. As well, it is Catalyst's current and continuing success which provides me with the opportunity to fade out, like the cheshire cat, without the need to have strong plans.

I do believe that the use and understanding of free and open-source software in New Zealand has matured to a point where there is the potential for an independent to make a few dollars reviewing or planning for open source projects in corporate and government areas. I hope I'll find out.

And a great big thank you to every one of you — staff, clients, suppliers and friends — who has made Catalyst such a fantastic place to be a part of. It really will be a hard act to follow.

:-)

A few years ago we needed to introduce employment contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property.

This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software.

It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen.

I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear?

Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain.

Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of ${COMPANY}, remains the property of ${COMPANY}, subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining ${COMPANY} remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at ${COMPANY}, ${COMPANY} will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at ${COMPANY}.
3. If ${COMPANY} asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at ${COMPANY}’s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of ${COMPANY} to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with ${COMPANY}.
5. ${COMPANY} may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. ${COMPANY} will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You

I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publishing it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else.

A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.