Things I’m hoping to see this week:

• lots of attention paid to identi.ca, not just as an alternative to Twitter but as a first step towards truly open services,
• lots of discussion about how free software can enable user autonomy,
• corporate suit-types excoriated for not giving back (or for expecting us to build our “open” systems on theirs (I’m looking at you, Sourceforge 2.0 Atlassian).

So I’m probably just dreaming when it comes to the last one (maybe all of them, particularly with my qualifier of lots), but for the first time in a few years, there are actually talks I want to go to scheduled against one another. Maybe I’ll have to revise Yergler’s Theorem of Conference Value. But probably not.

I did a closet purge today and wound up with four garbage bags of clothes to donate. Four bags of clothes I haven’t worn since moving to San Francisco a year ago. My problems are obviously first world, problems of luxury.

Yet another reminder of how fortunate I am.

If you get a UnicodeDecodeError from the cc.engine (you'll see this if it's
running in the foreground) when you try to access the http://host:9080/license/
then it's likely that the install of python you are using is set to use ASCII
as it's default output.  You can change this to UTF-8 by creating the file
/usr/lib/python<version>/sitecustomize.py and adding these lines:
  import sys
  sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

This always struck me as a bit inelegant—having to muck with something outside my application directory. After all, this belief that the application should be self-contained is the reason I use zc.buildout and share Jim’s belief in the evil of the system Python. Like a lot of inelegant things, though, it never rose quite to the level of annoyance needed to motivate me to do it right.

Today I was working on moving the license engine to a different server² and ran into this problem again. I decided to dig in and see if I could track it down. In fact I did track down the initial problem—I was making a comparison between an encoded Unicode string and without specifying an explicit codec to use for the decode. Unfortunately once I fixed that I found it was turtles all the way down.

Turns out the default Zope 3 page template machinery uses StringIO to collect the output. StringIO uses, uh, strings—strings with the default system encoding. Reading the module documentation, it would appear that mixing String and Unicode input in your StringIO will cause this sort of issue.

Andres suggested marking my templates as UTF-8 XML using something like:

 < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

but even after doing this and fixing the resulting entity errors, there’s still obviously some 8 bit Strings leaking into the output. In conversations on IRC the question was then asked: “is there a reason you don’t want a reasonable system wide encoding if your locale can support it?”

I guess not³.

UPDATE Martijn has a tangentially related post which sheds some light on why Python does/should ship with ascii as the default codec. At least people smarter than me have problems with this sort of thing, too.

¹ Yes, I may be a bit biased—I wrote the Zope3/Grok implementation. Of course, I wrote the previous implementation, too, and I can say without a doubt it was… “sub-optimal”.

² We’re doing a lot of shuffling lately to complete a 32 to 64 bit conversion; see the CC Labs blog post for the harrowing details.

³ So the warning remains.

Shortly after purchasing my Eee I installed eeeXubuntu on it. This configuration actually worked pretty well. Combined with an additional 4 GB of storage in the form of an SD card I carried the Eee with me as my sole computer for a week in Europe in January. Upon my return, however, the Eee saw less and less usage. In retrospect I’m not sure that the decline had anything to do with the Eee at all—all my non-work computing declined dramatically during the first half of the year. The small form factor of the Eee still called out for use, so I dabbled with it periodically. One weekend I tried installing a Sugar shell (successfully, for some definition of success, I guess). Another I tried updating my eeeXubuntu installation from 7.10 to 8.04, without success (disk space issues). When I saw Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I decided I wanted to try that on the Eee. The combination of a focused, single window user interface and specialized launcher seemed like a good combination for the space constrained display.

Today I successfully installed Ubuntu 8.04 and the Netbook Remix on my Eee.

The steps were actually pretty straight forward:

1. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 using a USB stick. When it came time to select tasks, I didn’t select anything to get a minimal installation.
2. Added the Array.org repository and installed a kernel with Eee-specific customizations.
3. Added the Netbook Remix repositories and fired up aptitude. At this point I just picked my way through the packages in the ubuntu-desktop task, picking those I wanted. In particular I omitted things related to Bluetooth or CD support (since I have hardware for neither).
4. Installed the ume-launcher and other Netbook packages.

If these instructions seem a little thin it’s because I mostly just followed the instructions of others, both found in the excellent Eee User wiki.

• Getting 8.04 Running on an Eee PC
• Installing Netbook Remix

I’m heading to OSCON next week so I’m going to play with the installation this week to determine whether I can use it as my sole machine for that trip.

Right now I’m just releasing a preview. At this point I’ve only tested it with Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 on Mac OS X 10.5.3; I’ll test with Linux tomorrow¹ and if all goes well I’ll update addons.mozilla.org at that point.

UPDATE: (2008-07-13) Things seem to work fine on Linux, so we’re just waiting for it to clear the review queue at AMO.

¹ Unfortunately I won’t be testing on Windows. My work laptop dual boots but frankly it’s so painful to load Windows these days that I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m trying to do more with my spare time these days that I enjoy and testing for Windows just doesn’t pass that test. Sorry.

I drove the Nerd Van (myself, Asheesh and the interns) to Google.

I’m still recovering (and inflicting pain—CC board meeting today) and collecting feedback, but I think it was a really successful day. We learned some things we’ll do differently next time (yes, there will be a next time). Anyway, special recognition to the CC interns for live blogging the event and for generally doing anything asked of them. I feel like I should write more about the event, but I’m feeling pretty brain dead at the moment.

Someday I’ll write up my thoughts on distributed version control and “convention versus configuration”, which seem to overlap in this deployment. But not today.

So I’m trying something a little different. This evening I watched the Google Tech Talk by Merlin Mann on Inbox Zero. While the second half played I managed to clear out my yergler.net inbox.

Tomorrow I’m planning to create an email DMZ and begin at zero with my work inbox. Just keeping the flow of information to a reasonable level is just the first step, though.

I’ve had a Remember the Milk (RTM) account for quite a while but never got in the habit of using it. After watching an introduction to Tasque, I decided to look again. Tasque is a simple task list application for Gnome, in the same vein as Tomboy for notes. I love Tomboy. I think I’ll love Tasque, too.

I don’t know if the RTM elves have been hacking away at the site since I last looked or if I just never really dug in, but it actually seems to have the features I want in a task list. And there’s even a handy blog post on how you can use RTM to GTD (get things done).

Finally, the piece that ties both sides together: their Firefox extension. My workflow this evening looked like this:

1. Go to the next email
2. Decide that had some action associated with it
3. Add the action label to it, which also created it as a task to RTM
4. Later, when skimming through the action list I saw one I could knock out in a few minutes. And when I finished and removed the action label, the task in RTM was marked as complete. Sweet.

“Well, do you know? Do you know? I’m responsible for shutting that place down! That bar was drugging people and I figured it out! I went in there, and I know my tolerance, because I drank a bottle of Skyy vodka before, so I know my tolerance. And after just two shots I passed out. You know what that means, right? I was drugged! Drugged!”

Uh, yeah, that’s the logical conclusion.

Seeing this reminded me of something I’ve thought for quite a while: sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc all devalue the label of “friend”.

Some context: Facebook and Linked In are the only social networks I use with any regularity. I’ve had accounts on others (Orkut, anyone?) but those I haven’t deleted have long since gone fallow. I use Facebook and Linked In for two distinct purposes: connecting with friends and connecting with work contacts, respectively. For some time I’ve been taking a rather hard line in both respects. For example, working at Creative Commons gives me an opportunity to work with our international affiliates. One of them really wanted to be my friend on Facebook. The problem is, we’re not friends. I think he’s a perfectly decent guy, but I’ve never met him, never hung out, never done the things friends do. So I declined him, again and again, finally sending him a message saying “look, I get it, but we’re not friends”. His unexpected reply was not combative or offended but rather, “Oops, I was using the contact finder feature, I totally get what you’re saying” (note that I think this supports the idea that social networks enable socially acceptable spam).

So if you don’t want your mom (or co-workers, or boss, etc) to see pictures of you covered in “puke and piss”, do two things: learn about the privacy settings in Facebook and only add friends who are your, well, friends. Alternately don’t put yourself in situations where you can be photographed covered in puke and/or piss, but really, let’s focus on achievable goals.