Update: I’ve extended it to the top five, rather than three, parties, and it gets a little more interesting then. The fifth-place party varies quite a bit.

Update 2: More electorates:

• Auckland Central
• Christchurch Central
• Epsom
• Mana
• Mangere
• Manukau East
• Mt Albert
• Ōhariu
• Rongotai

The driving use case of this for me is log files – I want to get all of the file after the current occurrence of some event. After establishing that I couldn’t do that with sed, and that although I probably could with awk it would be a bad idea, I set about writing this in C. It does exactly what I want, and I’ve also been over the POSIX tail spec to add everything from that as well, so it is a usable tail command.

The code is on GitHub (for the moment at least), accessible with `git clone git://github.com/mwh/retail.git`, or in an automatic tarball https://github.com/mwh/retail/tarball/master . Although it satisfies my original use-case there are a couple of additions I’d still like to make along with efficiency improvements, and, of course – patches welcome.

Some usage examples:

retail -r Beginning logfile.log

Output everything after the last occurrence of “Beginning” in the file.

retail -r Beginning -u 'succeeded|error' -f logfile.log

Same as the last one, and continue reading as any lines are appended until one matches /succeeded|error/ (i.e., it contains either of those words), and then terminate.

retail -n +10

Start printing at line 10, until the end of the file. Just like in regular tail. Negative numbers, bare [-+]N, and -c work too.

Once more, retail.

The /System/Aliens talk from the Distro Summit is still missing in action. I’m not sure whether it’s coming or not, but it’s looking unlikely at this point.

I used the instructions from here (a Vodafone UK forum thread!), and it all went smoothly. There’s no unlocking of the boot loader and no rooting of the device involved. The update took fifteen minutes or so and progressed pretty much on its own. I had to set a few things up again afterwards – the SwiftKey keyboard wasn’t activated, and Google Earth and Sky Map weren’t automatically restored the way the other applications were. No major issues.

I’m now running stock FRG83 Android 2.2.1, automatically upgraded from FRG33 shortly after install (make sure it’s on wifi not too long after update, or it’ll pull down 80MB over the mobile network). I started from the Vodafone FRF91, which is distinguished from the stock FRF91 by the kernel version display in “About Phone” showing “haley@…” instead of “android-build@…”. Search terms mentioned, I’ll just say it all went well, even if there were perhaps other things I could have done with my time right now.

Vodafone has a new shipment of them in, and these ones don’t seem to they do have the Vodafone-specific firmware that the original lot did: they come with 2.2 (Froyo), FRF91, but still tied to Vodafone. I was all prepared to reflash to the stock firmware but it isn’t necessary any more, which is a plus, (or, alternatively, it is a Vodafone firmware, they’ve just stopped showing it in the version number. I will keep the reflashing in mind for the future then, but for the moment I’m leaving it. Edit 2: I updated it). It still excluded Google Goggles, but that was easily installed from the market. It’s all going well so far but it’ll take a while longer to make a sensible assessment. I hope to get some development done for the platform in a couple of months, which was a lot of the point of the exercise.

And on the subject of cellphones, mostly for my own reference: a database of New Zealand cell tower locations.

One more: NZ Post lets you track parcels via Twitter. That’s pretty neat.

Link dump completed.

Scripts has a fix for the man directory path in PrepareProgram (actually used by Compile), and handles dependency conversion better. It also includes updates to the database used by the CommandNotFound system as usual.

The only notable behaviour change is a special case in the useflag code: having -INSTALLED in the environment variable will now disable automatic flags from occurring at all, rather than applying the change at the end of the process. This helps debugging of recipes and is useful for targeted compilation, and the previous more consistent behaviour doesn’t seem to have a use case.

Compile has a single direct bugfix, affecting a case where a failed direct dependency would not cause the build process to terminate. It also benefits from the changes made within Scripts.

The packages are on the master now and will propagate to the mirrors shortly. You can use `InstallPackage Scripts 2.10.2` and `InstallPackage Compile 1.13.3` to install them. Please report any bugs you encounter in the bug tracker and request help either on the mailing lists or the forums.

Thanks to all those who contributed to this release, particularly “Baffo32″ who sent patches to Scripts.

The package is out and making its way to the mirrors now; InstallPackage Compile 1.13.2 should pick it up. There is no corresponding release of Scripts this time around because all fixes are within Compile itself. The latest Scripts release remains 2.10.1.

Following this release the 015 branches for Scripts and Compile will be merged into trunk to allow them to bed in, get more testing, and pick up the new developments in the trunk. That may cause some disruption to users who are tracking trunk tools; it may be best to hold off updating your snapshots for a few days after the merge, or be prepared to revert.

There is also a new 015 prerelease available for testing, snapshotting the state of work right now. It is available from http://karlsson.sytes.net/gobo/015/iso/GoboLinux-20100214.iso and should be functional. Testing, especially on different hardware, would be appreciated. It should boot and be able to start X correctly; where it doesn’t please make a report with as much detail as possible to the mailing list or on #gobolinux.

My slot was right before the closing ceremony and not too badly populated given that it was against at least two others I wanted to see. I don’t think it went too badly, though I did fixate on minor topics at a couple of points, and there were some good questions at the end. Since we were before the ceremony the cutoff was rigorously enforced and we actually ran out of time for them all, but I did have a chat with a couple of interested people at the stage while I was packing up.

Interestingly, and unexpectedly, an article turned up on TechWorld the next day about my talk and about GoboLinux. Some of the quoting is interesting, but the gist of it is there. The slides are also available (I think they’ll be on the conference site too at some point; at least they were collected on a USB stick afterwards), as is a more formally written-up version of the presentation. It doesn’t have all the content the talk did, since I added a few parts, including the whole Rootless section, in the aftermath of Monday’s Distro Summit discussion. Video should be available in a couple of weeks.

The closing ceremony was good enough, but ran long (and started late, so we didn’t really need to have rushed the questions so much…). Mostly that was to fit in thanks to the organisers and helpers, who really did do a fantastic job, so no complaints. Next year’s conference is in Brisbane. I’m not sure whether I’ll go or not yet, but it was definitely valuable this time so I will consider it. No speaking maybe ever again though. The Penguin Dinner that night was all right but also lagged a bit. The entertaining part of it was the Life Flight Trust donations race, which had a fivefold increase in the donation volume in just a couple of hours. I left early to get some actual sleep, so I’m not sure how high it got by the end, but it was approaching $20,000 last I saw.

I was hoping to find out the total at the open day today, but it didn’t appear to be up anywhere. I did get a lot of brochures and blurbs instead, and there was free stuff everywhere too. I didn’t end up with much of that; it was probably more appreciated by my later companion, who got all klepto (but not as klepto as she wanted to be, which seemed like a wasted opportunity). Most appreciated was the koala pen from the LCA2011 booth, so good marketing on their part. It was cute.

That’s a wrap. Later I’ll write up something on the various community engagement presentations I attended, which I think we can get some value out of. There were some others I didn’t make it into that I’ll watch when the videos become available. Right now I’m appreciating the opportunity to do something non-conference-related for a while.

I spent the whole day at the Open in the Public Sector miniconf, where I have plenty of interest but no experience. There were a few great talks there. Pia Waugh’s especially was brilliant and had a good point about the need for transparency in how public enagement is run. She’s the ICT advisor to an Australian Senator and it seems like both she and her boss get it. I liked her advice to other politicians: “get yourself an open-source geek”. The panel discussion with Clare Curran and Pia again was interesting, though Clare went on a bit sometimes. Trevor Mallard was there but not speaking, but he was pretty impressive in informal chat in the breaks. After that was the Speakers Dinner at Te Papa, which was nice enough. I did get to sit at a table with Ted Ts’o and Keith Packard. I left a little early and was still pretty shattered afterwards and the next day.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference proper. The highlight for me was Matthew Garrett’s talk on social conduct in the community, and Sage Weil from Dreamhost talking about their Ceph distributed filesystem (and mentioning that if you want to try it, and don’t have a huge cluster, you can sign up to Dreamhost with code “ceph”). Nothing on that night, so I was able to get some sleep.

Thursday brought two talks from Leslie Hawthorn on community management, mentoring, and bringing in new contributors. The mentoring talk was the most valuable and had a lot of content I think we need to take note of. I have good notes on both of those that I’ll bring to the mailing list later. The Professional Delegates’ Networking Session was that night, which I was technically eligible for, but I went home to work on my slides and talk instead. Also to catch up on sleep.

Friday to come later on.