From the department of things-that-I-know-are-possible-but-can-never-remember-how-to-do-so-hey-I-read-the-manpage-and-now-I'm-blogging-it, I bring you "downloading a directory of photos from a website":

 wget --recursive http://example.com/photos/some-event/ --no-directories --directory-prefix <local-folder-name> --accept JPG,RW2

I always remember wget --recursive (or wget -r for short), but that produces an annoying tree of directories starting with the website's domain and working its way up to the directory you actually want. In the command above, --no-directories removes the tree, and --directory-prefix tells wget to put the downloaded files somewhere that's not the current working directory. The --accept option tells wget to discard files with extensions other than those mentioned, so your downloaded directory is not cluttered with webserver-generated files like index.html if you don't want it to be.

Here's the short version, since the long version is nice to remember but not so nice to type:

wget -r http://example.com/photos/some-event/ -nd -P <local-folder-name> -A JPG,RW2

I hate keeping track of money. Bank accounts, credit cards, investing—it's such a hassle. Hell, sometimes I even hate the fact that money exists and needs to be dealt with in the first place. But I admit that it's an easier system than bartering for everything.

In college I pretty much ignored most things financial. I rarely had more money than I needed, and put little financial planning into deciding what I could and could not spend money on besides, "I'm going to make X dollars this summer," and, "think twice." But now that I have a steady paycheck, it seems like a good idea to know where all my money goes, so I can make better decisions about how I'm spending (and saving) it.

But I've kept procrastinating starting to do so, because GUI programs like Gnucash and HomeBank seem like such a hassle. Their first screen is dauntingly complex, and if you don't know much about accounting it's scary and difficult to be asked to set up a big set of accounts when first starting to use the program, without having any prior experience with what you personally would find useful to keep track of. Entering data through menus and dialogs is tedious and slow.

hledger (or ledger, which came first) had been appearing on my radar recently, not least because Iron Blogger uses it). hledger changed my opinion of accounting software. In about 15 minutes, using only the sample transactions from the manual, I was able to enter all my assets and liabilities—bank accounts, credit card, student loans, money I've borrowed from people and never paid back though I said I would, etc. And then, I could run 'hledger balance' and it would tell me what sorts of things I had spent money on in the past few days, as far back as I could bother looking up actual transactions for, rather than entering a single transaction with a balance forward. Duuude, awesome!

I'm a geek. I like statistics and data about my life, as long as it's not a huge pain to collect the data in the first place. More data means more on which to base decisions, decisions which will then be freer from the bias of what I find memorable enough to remember having done.

Here's what I like best about ledger:

• Command-line interface for the hacker in me.
• Pre-existing facility with a text editor transfers over to facility of data entry.
• No need to set up accounts separately from transactions. Transactions are the important thing, and accounts just automagically appear when the account name appears in a transaction. Mistakes are trivial to correct in a text editor.
• Easy to start out with "use text editor to add transactions" and "hledger balance" and then branch out to more advanced features as necessary.
• Text file format is well-suited to storing in a version control system.
• It easily replaces two text files that I used to keep: "money owed to others" and "checks written but not yet cashed by the other party."

I don't think I'd be enjoying keeping track of my money nearly so much without a tool like hledger. It gets out of your way to let you focus on the hard things, like choosing categories for the things you spend money on and remembering to record the data in the first place.

Inspired by various Planet Debian postings, I've spent some time recently looking into a few RC bugs to help with the Squeeze release.

mpg123-el #581227 A previous commenter on this bug suggested a proposed fix, which I tested and uploaded. I think the bug's severity was inflated to begin with, so I downgraded the bug as well.

doclifter #580246 This one had to do with the python2.6 transition. I pointed out a patch against Ubuntu's version of the package that fixes this problem, and someone else made an NMU based on that. (Seemed like a good idea to look in the PTS for Ubuntu patches since Ubuntu always transitions to newer Python before Debian proper.)

gnuvd #580110 I checked upstream and a new version that's supposed to fix this bug was released today, so I updated the bug report to make note of this and give the maintainer a chance to look at it.

libtommath #583820 This FTBFS bug was caused by a previous NMU that fixed a different FTBFS and also made some unrelated changes. I sent a message to the previous NMUer noting this fact and made a new upload fixing the new FTBFS.

fceu #580820 Needs new upstream packaged to fix. The maintainer seems pseudo-MIA but has shown some signs of returning to activity; I sent an email inquiring as to whether he intends to fix the critical issue in this package.

op-panel #582377 and #571427 These were not merged when I started out, so I merged them after noticing they were the same. I spent some poking at the bug itself and made a simple patch, only to find out that there was a pending patch in pkg-voip's subversion repo. I hopped onto #debian-voip to prod the person who'd prepared the patch in subversion about the importance of updating the BTS when working on bugs. These bugs are currently blocking on testing the patch.

Most all of these bugs I've subscribed to in case of follow-up. (Geez, challenge-response subscription via email is kind of a pain.)

The world around me seems to whirl these days. One week ago, I graduated from MIT. People I've known during the last four years have been dispelling to various parts of the globe one by one, day by day. California, Canada, Indonesia, Seattle. Some will be back again. Some will not, or if so only to visit. pika is a continuous bustle of activity as the summer has commenced and it has filled with creative and adventurous MIT students who've suddenly found themselves having free time. A hammock being built on the roofdeck. Thrice-weekly icecream forays. Common areas overflowing with people playing musical instruments, chatting, and messing around on laptops. Summer's warmth has arrived, bringing with it farmer's markets, strawberry picking, and swimming expeditions.

While it's wonderful to get to meet so many new people living in a college environment, I can't help but feel sadness thinking about everyone who's left. There are always more friends to be made as new people arrive, but old ones moving away leave bittersweet memories, and the new relationships are always a bit different as the age discrepancy between me and others changes. Or the me-the-ephemeral-collection-of-thoughts-which-when-regarding-other-people-sometimes-involve-the-mentor/mentee-distinctions-caused-by-one-party-being-older-or-more-knowledgeable-than-the-other-at-least-in-certain-areas changes. The end of a semester always feels like this, but this year even more so as the people I started university with start down new paths.

For me, that was going to involve staying on at MIT to complete a one-year master's program, the "M.Eng." in electrical engineering and computer science. That plan, too, has changed. I've deferred the degree and accepted a full-time engineering position at Ksplice, an exciting early-stage Linux startup here in Cambridge. I'd been working at Ksplice part-time since January before joining full-time immediately following graduation. Ksplice is the realization of ideas I saw being born on the whiteboard at SIPB when I was a freshman, and it's fun to see that play out in a small, ever-changing, low-bullshit company.

All in all, there are many more exciting things down the road, and, working at an MIT startup, I haven't even escaped the MIT/Cambridge reality-distortion bubble yet. Still, it's tempting to resist change and let myself romanticize the good old days, hoping to catch every person I've ever enjoyed spending time with and hold them down here forever. That's not the way life works, though. Change happens.

For work recently I've been doing some Django-related tasks that involve talking to an external API with POSTed forms. Django forms objects are declared by creating a class that inherits from django.forms.Form, with the fields of the form declared by declaring attributes of that class. Which works well and is clean and easy to remember—unless the API you're working with requires a field with the same name as a Python keyword, such as return. You can't declare a field like this as an attribute; it will trigger a syntax error.

I spent some time scratching my head over this, and came up with this as a workaround after source-diving to find out how Form objects actually work:

from django import forms

class ExampleForm(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, data=None, files=None, auto_id='id_%s', prefix=None,
            initial=None, errorclass=ErrorList, label_suffix=':', empty_permitted=False, return_url=None):
        forms.Form.__init__(self, data, files, auto_id, prefix, initial,
            errorclass, label_suffix, empty_permitted)
        if return_url is not None:
            self.fields['return'] = forms.CharField(widget=forms.HiddenInput, initial=return_url)

It turns out that the attribute declaration is just syntactic sugar for creating a dictionary of key/value pairs, which is then stored in the fields attribute. So we can monkeypatch in extra values after the translation. Which is somewhat more awkward and ugly, but works in a pinch.

Note that I haven't extensively tested what interactions this may cause with other forms code, so use with some caution.

I just replaced my aging 2004-era PC with—wait for it—a 2005-era PC. A friend is moving across the country so I'm taking it off his hands.

The differences between the two are more than just the year of time, though: one was hand-built from parts, while the other was a commodity off-the-shelf Compaq. So the new machine, while not strictly faster by the clock, is 64-bit and is much more amenable to upgrades.

While the added bulk is a bit annoying, the case has a lot more space in it—up to 8 or so drive slots (I can't imagine ever needing that many), and 4 RAM slots—which is a sure step up from the limitation of two drive slots and two RAM slots in my old machine.

The most visibly shiny parts in the new desktop experience are 4G RAM versus 1G, and a nice ATI GPU. While I'm glad my OS allowed me to squeeze six years out of my main machine, I'll be happy to stop shaking my fist at Chromium for eating all my memory!

The new machine will keep its old name: earlgrey.

Mode of transportation has not yet been determined. Possibly bike, possibly train, possibly bus. It feels strange not needing to buy plane tickets.

I should be there for all of the conference proper but not for DebCamp.

I occasionally get emails from people looking for GPG keysigning around the Boston area, addressed to all the local Debian Developers on the keysigning offers list. Generally, I'm the only one who replies to them, despite there being four or so other people addressed. I wonder if this problem pervades other locations as well.

Keysigning is one of the hurdles every person interested in becoming a full Debian Developer must overcome. The New Maintainer process is a hurdle enough in itself! Let's try not to discourage excited newcomers who are already convinced that they want to help Debian by leaving them hanging for long periods of time trying to get their key signed.

Have you moved? Are you no longer interested in filling keysigning requests? (I suspect many of those who would answer "yes" to that question are actually inactive, and so are unlikely to actually see this.) Are you interested in filling keysigning requests but didn't know about the offers list? Go to the keysigning offers list on the Debian wiki and update, add, or remove your information. There's also the list of people requesting keysigning—you can subscribe to this page to see updates.

I meant to participate in Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and acknowledge the accomplishments of women in science and technology, but I got distracted and then it was late and I fell asleep. Such is my life. Anyway, I'd like to acknowledge a woman who I've only recently met, mostly through the Free Software Foundation's women's outreach events.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya works for RedHat, and is a developer for GNOME Shell. She's always enthusiastic about sharing her work with other people in person and inviting others to get involved, and is one of those people who is in there every day getting stuff done. I wish I were as confident about the things that I work on.

Marina has also been working on the second incarnation of the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program, I believe. And she keeps giving talks all over the place, which is great! Go visibility. Now if only she would blog more.

I'd never met Marina before last September, despite living in the same metropolitan area! I'm glad women that I don't know about and who work on free software exist and that I get to meet them and find out that they live nearby.

At the FSF's Libre Planet conference this year in March, there will be a track focusing on increasing the participation of women in free software.

If you are able and support this cause, consider donating to fund additional women's travel to this event. Being able to meet in person with other people like you is such an energizing opportunity. Give this gift to someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to make it!