Another week (or so)

• Moved decadentplace.org.uk mail and web service to our home server (which I recently upgraded fairly cheaply). Had a busy few hours fixing the things that I'd forgotten to set up identically to our previous host.
• Set up nightly backups of the server to an external drive. I was intending to se this up many months ago but the first USB 2 card I bought for it didn't work reliably under Linux. Now I have one that does, and 2 drives that seem to be large enough to last for years.
• Met jdub (Jeff Waugh) of Ubuntu when he visited Cambridge. Then met him again, along with many other Ubuntu notables, at the Breezy Badger release party in London. This was at the Green Man, by Great Portland Street station, which I'm pleased to say seem to have returned to its former high standard of food and beer.
• Broke the power connector on my laptop. Then fixed it, thanks to some kind person who put a PDF of the service manual on their web site, and with some help from Wookey.
• Created a Subversion repository and imported various local work into it.
• Made some progress on improvements to debian-cd. Steve had been hoping that it would be possible to modify mkisofs to build CD templates without copying all their constituent files (and without even having complete copies of all the files), making it easier to experiment and optimise CD generation. This is mostly possible using the Jigdo system, but we can't calculate the whole-image MD5 checksum from the file checksums until someone figures out how to break MD5. What I have been able to do, however, is to make mkisofs calculate the size of a filesystem based on a hypothetical list of files and their attributes rather than looking at the real files, and written a Python script to generate such lists from entries in a Packages or Sources file. Now, on a fairly old laptop it took less than 30 seconds to calculate the size of a hypothetical filesystem containing all of the i386 packages in sid (which turns out to be about 10 gigabytes), and most of that was spent running the Python script, which could be greatly reduced by rewriting it in C if necessary. Based on that, I think the size calculation for a CD-sized filesystem could be done in under a second on a fast machine! But the mkisofs changes are far from ready for production use yet, and I have yet to do any of the necessary work to integrate this with debian-cd.
• Bought a memory upgrade for the Amiga. Should be able to install Debian m68k on it now once that arrives...
• Arranged to sell or give away various computer parts that are surplus to requirements following recent (and not so recent) upgrades.

What's your MP up to?

Cambridge people can look at howarth_in_parl to find out. If you live elsewhere, go to TheyWorkForYou to find the corresponding feed for your MP.