Surgut

Bo hoo .... Got to finish dissertation and do well in GSoC . I wonder if I shall work on my weaknesses or just ignore that in find a job where I can take full advantage of my strengths?

Chromium starts up and opens my pinned tabs: Gmail, Gcalendar & Greader before gnome panel appears... Also network manager sometimes is slow to bring up WiFi even though my home network is set up to be used by all users, resulting in failed to load in chromium.

As part of GSoC I need to get an easy tool to create boot able usb sticks from Intel Macs. This past week I've been investigating how Macs do boot. In the process I've wiped my partition table, recovered using testdisk , plaid around with rEFIt, mac boot options, NVRAM, efi shell read tons of apple source code , and UEFI specs . Overall it's quite complex and fun =). I'll try to document as much as possible of everything I have found out in the rest of this post. On power-on, BootROM is doing Power-on-Sefl-test and hands over to OpenFirmware on PowerPC machines, or to the EFI bootmanager (as far as I understand) on Intel Macs. The BootROM "knows" about the fancy startup keys, e.g. options key which can passes hints to OpenFirmware & EFI bootmanager on what user wants to do (e.g. clean NVRAM & PRAM, force pop-out cd, perform target-disk mode boot, netboot or present available boot drives). OpenFirmware later on passes onto BootX and that boots OS 9 ...

This blog post on Debian Planet, mentions how easy it is to package with bzr-buildded ontop of upstream git repository. Also there are  bzr-svn and bzr-hg plugins, and you can request launchpad to automatically do imports of those upstreams every 6 hours and on-demand ;-) and of course you can still push your bzr packaging branch to alioth ;-) if you don't want to tie yourself up to much with launchpad. Bzr and launchpad designed for collaboration =)  especially with awesome ground contol  tool which integrates launchpad into nautilus. And yes you can associate multiple authors with a commit (if multiple people worked on a debdiff you are merging), and yes you can associate BTS, Launchpad and any bug tracking URL's with a bzr commit. Git can't do that ;-) Also note launchpad is getting building packages out of recipes, so if your packaging branch is based on top of upstream branch import, you will be able soon request launchpad to merge packaging wit...

GSoC Yes, I'm doing GSoC as well =) I'll be working on improving usb-creator: doing command line frontend, Mac OS X fronend, merge usb-creator with Wubi, and hopefully allowing to customise usb sticks. I've already fix a couple of bugs in usb-creator, debranded the package and the debian ITP  discussion are ongoing. Hopefully we will hit the debian archive soon ;-) and I did swirled branding for debian as well. Right now, i'm working on command line interface. A few options work and I can create bootable usb-stick from command-line but it's currently in ugly but works state with debug output =) rEFIt ATTENTION mactel users   there is a new release of rEFIt 0.14  download =) if you're ubuntu was getting identified as "legacy" system recently in the rEFIt menu please try that. Don't forget to click customise during installation and include ext and ReiserFS tools. Also if you are using my wonderful humanity icon theme for rEFIt , you wi...