Nigel McNie

From the Debian Policy Manual:

[Important programs are] those which one would expect to find on any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an experienced Unix person who found it missing would say "What on earth is going on, where is foo?", it must be an important package.[4] Other packages without which the system will not run well or be usable must also have priority important. This does not include Emacs, the X Window System, TeX or any other large applications. The important packages are just a bare minimum of commonly-expected and necessary tools.

I would argue that less would count among these programs now. Who seriously pages with more any more? C'mon, it's 2008 already people.

I see little reason why a stripped down version of less couldn't be included in the "important" section, in the same way that vim-tiny is.

Edit: less-less would be a good name for the package :)

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So I see that some people have been ranting about being called their IRC nicks in real life.

Personally, I don't have a problem with being called 'waawaa', 'waawaamilk' or any derivitave thereof. And the people who don't like being called by their nick amuse me. If you didn't want to be called by it, why did you pick it as a name in the first place?

Shock horror, people call other people by their names. If I've only ever talked to you via IRC, then it's perfectly likely that I have connected your IRC nick to you. While I probably also know your real name, it might just be that your IRC nick is more memorable or distinctive.

Prime example - at work we already have [1] two people with a name very similar to 'Martin' [2], I know Martins from elsewhere and have recently been talking with Martin F. Krafft. Surprise surprise - around the office, Martyn and I refer to him as "madduck". And if they were ever in the same room, IRC nick would be a great way to distinguish between them. [3]

Some people will say that you should always use their real name in real life when talking to them. If it winds you up, sure. I would respect your wishes. But don't expect it to be the default behaviour of people who know you by more than one name.

[1]	Well, had for a long time - one has moved down three floors to work on OLPC. But don't let that get in the way of a good story.

[2]	One is 'Martyn' and the other is 'Martìn'. As Martìn wasn't on IRC much, we differentiated between the two by calling Martyn 'Martyne' (rhymes with 'time'), and Martìn 'Marten', which is close to how you actually pronounce his name.

[3]	Actually, I'd probably call Martyn 'Martyne' or 'Ned'. Stop picking holes in the story!

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It's funny how things can sometimes have a habit of fixing themselves as fast as they were broken. My bike was fixed the Friday before last - some kind of dodgy wire or connection apparently - and now it's running fine again. My laptop battery turned up what you might call "a month early" - or maybe they were just playing games when they said it would be a month late. Either way, Dell are still lying bastards when it comes to batteries. And we found a new flat, so we're moving out of the city in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, work charges on. We've made heaps of improvements in Mahara just recently, in areas such as authentication, usability, help, internationalisation and views. 1.0 is shaping up quite nicely, in fact. Just recently I fixed/improved the authentication API so that an LDAP plugin written by Howard Miller of the University of Glasgow works just fine with Mahara. I've also been debugging the SSO from Moodle, and come across what might be the cause of the random failures of SSO to function. I have patches for this for both Moodle and Mahara, so hopefully when they're merged it should be the end of SSO problems. I took some time to improve the logging of SSO errors in Mahara too, so hopefully any future problems won't be so hard to find.

In the meantime, Richard and Clare have been rampaging through a swathe of usability improvements. There's now a new sideblock giving details about the logged in user, a language changing dropdown for logged out people and an improved 'My Views' page, among many other changes. A lot of the work for 1.0 is about making it easier for first time users to get a handle on what an e-portfolio is, and giving them lots of instruction on how to create their own views. You can have a play with all the fancy new stuff on dev.mahara.org, by the way.

Mahara has now also made it into Debian. 0.9.0 is currently in Testing, while 0.9.1 is in Unstable. I'm the maintainer, which means I get my own page on debian.org :).

Mahara also has its first publicised security vulnerability. Amazingly, it looks like Secunia actually did a little bit of their own research into the vulnerability, which makes a change from their standard behaviour. If you're running 0.9.1 there's no need to fear, and the likelyhood is that nobody has bothered to exploit the vulnerability anyway.

And finally, in soccernews, The Superback Strikers managed to pick up a trophy on Friday for winning last year's tournament. PeterB got us into the final with the very last kick of the game, then we won the final on penalties [1], before racing to Petone in order to play our normal scheduled match.

[1]	Well, penalty. It was golden penalties, I saved their first effort then put mine away. We were in a hurry!

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