Dear Lazyweb, please put me out of my misery.

I have a string that looks something like:

a b c foo {0 1 2} fred {3 4 5} {{5 4 3} {2 1 0}} quux

I want to output:

a
b
c
foo
{0 1 2}
fred
{3 4 5}
{{5 4 3} {2 1 0}}
quux

(actually I want each line to be an array element, but that's obviously easy)

Can I do this with a Perl regex? Originally I thought I was going to have to walk the string like I would in C, but some playing around (and local help) got me to:

my $match = qr/(?:\s*[^\{\}\s]+\s*|\{(?R)\})/;

while ($cur =~ m/($match)\s+(.*)/o) {
        print $1, "\n";
        $cur = $2;
}

which sort of gets me there, except I get

{0 1 2} fred {3 4 5} {{5 4 3} {2 1 0}}

as one line instead of 4.

What obvious thing am I missing here?

This is the point where I should be writing something witty and intelligent about the election going on across the pond, but I can't think of anything worth saying. If you can, go and vote. Even if you think your side is going to win, go and bloody do it anyway.

Anyway. Today I achieved FDMI success; my code successfully registered my test cluster against the fabric switch it's connected to and reported various bits of information about itself. Hardly earth shattering but does at least indicate that I'm beginning to understand some details of Fibre Channel at the packet level and how to make our code send/receive them. Go 'bama me.

(FDMI is the Fabric Device Management Interface and a way for Fibre Channel devices to report things like their manufacturer, serial number, OS, HBA model and driver/firmware versions to a management controller on the switch fabric. It's not a complex protocol in any manner, but there's a distinct lack of clear Fibre Channel documentation around that's at a lower level than "So you want to hook up a SAN?")

If you ask the old timers about how they got started in Debian they'll tell you about sending off an email saying they wanted to get involved and having an account setup the same day. By the time I got round to joining it was during tbm's blitz when NM opened up again and it took only a few days to get through the process. When I first AMed, back in 2002, it took anywhere from a few days to a few months to process an applicant. I've recently started AMing again and so far my NM and I have exchanged 9 mails over the course of 2 weeks and still aren't through Philosophy and Procedures.

This isn't due to any failing on the part of my NM. It's just that there's a lot more "paperwork" to get through these days. There's currently a lot of discussion going on about the idea of introducing new classes of Debian involvement. I think that's something that's definitely worth looking at; it's already in existence for Debian Maintainers vs Debian Developers. However anything new that's introduced really needs to make some effort to be lighter than NM; someone who just wants to handle a few packages is going to get put off by too many hoops and the current NM process is already largely constrained by available AM time rather than anything else. I don't pretend to know what the right solution is, but I think anyone attempting to produce one should be praised for that rather than attacked.

Apparently I'm supposed to be blogging once a day, every day, for November. I missed yesterday and doubt I'll have something to say every day, but let's try...

Today I have been playing with the export-clean and import-clean options to gnupg, in particular in conjunction with the debian-keyring. The options result in only signatures that can be verified (ie that are from keys that exist in your keyring) being allowed, and remove signatures other than the revocation from revoked keys/uids.

Why is this interesting to me? Well, a number of reasons:

• It makes key updates a hell of a lot easier. It cuts down on the number of new signatures to check, for example.
• It cuts down on the keyring size, meaning smaller uploads for me and smaller downloads for everyone else. The .deb goes from 20M to 6.6M and the installed debian-keyring.gpg from 24M to 7.6M. That's a signficant saving.
• It makes for "cleaner" keys; only signatures that we know are valid end up remaining on the keys, anything invalid is removed.

(Note I haven't actually rolled any of this out, it's just something I've been playing with locally at present to get a feel for the savings/benefits to be had.)

As mentioned I bought an EEE 901. The battery life was the clincher. I've had it for about 3 weeks now, but have only really been using it for a week - since I finished doing my mobile broadband survey and got an Orange contract.

I can't really comment on the supplied Xandros install. I used it for a week or so, with Firefox + a shell for ssh (Ctrl-Alt-T IYF) but once I found time I installed Debian. I used the EEE installer which I think mainly does the appropriate ethernet driver magic without faff. Certainly went smoothly and all up and running minus wifi, which was soon sorted out with the rt2860-source package. Ethernet, bluetooth and camera all seem fine. SD reader is a USB device that appears when a card is inserted.

Battery life rocks. I can use it on the morning on the train (1hr30 or so), suspend to ram all day, use it on the train on the way home and then around the house in the evening without needing to charge it up. And that's while powering the USB 3G dongle and without any real tuning in terms of trying to save power by dimming the screen etc.

The keyboard *is* small. I wouldn't want this to be my main machine. However it is just about touch typable and the overall machine size is superb - even if I get a bad seat on the train I can still unfold the screen fully and it's my arms/elbows that end up being the issue rather than the laptop itself. I also notice the decrease in screen resolution down to 1024x600 (my old laptop is 1024x768); I can't fit enough xterms. :)

Speed seems fine too. I've not really pushed it hard (I've been resisting installing build-essential) but for a handful of xterms and Iceweasel it's doing a fine job. Equally firing up mplayer resulted in perfectly smooth playback of some mpeg4 over the network. Must actually remember to put something on it to watch on train journeys...

Speaking of train journeys the Orange dongle has integrated without too much hassle. 2.6.27-rc kernels have the appropriate hso driver but I found it caused crashes in areas of low/no signal. Patching up to the latest 1.6 driver solved the problem and adding PPTP to my work VPN into the mix means I can use offlineimap to pull mail locally and then read it with mutt on my journey even when the signal is fluctuating. Hopefully ridiculous starts can be mostly a thing of the past if I can get work done on the train.

What else to say? I'm quite liking the trackpad. The buttons are a bit stiff, but I'm getting used to the double tap, or tap and drag gestures in a way I never seemed to on the R200. Wifi reception seems fine. All in all I'm happy with my choice; the small keyboard is the main drawback and that's the (acceptable) price I pay for a small laptop.