Don’t get me wrong, I love Debian. But I just wish the developers could see past petty bickering and politics and just get the new release out.
Incredibly, Anthony Towns originally announced the release for December 2003(!). After Anthony stepped down as release manager, Colin Watson and Steve Langasek took over, and aimed to release in September 2004. This was discussed on Slashdot, with predictable consequences.
It’s now January 2005. Am I being unreasonably impatient?
We had a fun situation at work this week, when our old and weary Exchange server gave up the ghost and died. We’d been planning to migrate it to a new server anyway, but we weren’t planning on doing it this week. Oh well, it was an incentive to get the move out of the way.
I’d already written a Perl script to migrate all of the clients to the new server. Not very elegant, it just sat on a machine with Domain Admin rights, and performed a remote registry edit of each client on the network, replacing the Exchange server settings in the registry with the details of the replacement server. I’d done a few test runs using ActivePerl under XP, and it had worked fine.
Unfortunately when we realised we had to migrate now, I didn’t have an XP machine to hand, and obviously the Windows administration tools that the Perl script required weren’t available on my Debian workstation. So we ran it on another Windows machine with Perl installed, and it failed.
A few minutes of frantic debugging later, we concluded that somehow the backslashes in the UNC paths were getting munged when Perl was passing them to the registry client via backticks (we needed to capture the output). This machine happened to be running Perl built for Cygwin, rather than ActiveState.
One install of ActivePerl later, the script was running along happily. I guess there’s a subtle (but big enough) difference between Perl for Cygwin and ActivePerl in the way they handle subprocesses run from CMD. You learn something new every day. But I think I’ll just stick to Perl on Linux…
In October 2001, my old schoolfriend (and brief college friend) Martin Pavion emigrated from the UK to Thailand. We kept in touch over the internet, and every couple of months he would tell me how great it was out there and how I should go and visit. After almost two years of nagging, I gave up and bought a return flight to Bangkok.
Although I’d already been to several European countries, as well as Canada and the US, I’d never really left the West. The cultural differences and contradictions were fascinating. The country itself was beautiful, and the people incredible.
While I had at first planned to spend the two weeks away from computers, I eventually gave in and wrote a blog entry each day for a previous (and now defunct) website. Here’s an edited compendium for anyone who is interested. Comments I’ve added since the time of writing are marked in square brackets, and emphasised [like this].