Search Results: "spa"

2 September 2006

Michael Janssen: Late at night when the wires in the walls

After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I'm not sure that it uses the hard drive in it's tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I'm making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I'm back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don't really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I'm getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates [info]ceilingsarecool a bit because I'm always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can't figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

Michael Janssen: I can work overtime I can work in a mine

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and [info]ceilingsarecool have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple's ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn't planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it's possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I'm sure we'll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it's a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and [info]ceilingsarecool has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

1 September 2006

Erich Schubert: Halting SELinux on Debian development "just before it works"

Some good new up front:
I'm down to around 10 audit errors on booting my amd64 system in targeted policy. To achieve this I did some small changes to the udev init script, and some larger policy modifications (mostly treating /dev/.static/dev the same way as /dev) (see webSVN changes view). The bad news:
I'm halting my SELinux development. I'm moving into a new room today, and the box I've recently been using SELinux on is staying with my dad. After all we bought it for him to surf. So I don't have any computer to run SELinux on (my 4+ years old laptop is way to packed already). And that means I can't seriously work on SELinux much anymore. Sorry. It sucks to stop tweaking it right before it's done, but I can't do much about it. [Update: It's not just about the hardware. The hardware is the reason why I can't do much at all, but as you may have seen in one of my previous blog entries, a couple of things in my life are changing right now. I have no idea how much spare time I'll have at my hands. I welcome the offers of sponsorship I've seen, but I can't accept them when I might end up not doing much more anyway. Sorry.]

Scott James Remnant: Upstart can now replace sysvinit

Today I reached another milestone in the development of upstart, the packages in universe can now replace the existing sysvinit package. Before trying this, make sure your installation is up to date as we’ve had to split out some parts of sysvinit into a new sysvutils package. If you’re up to date, and want to try it out, install the upstart and upstart-compat-sysv packages from universe. Note that the first reboot after you’ve installed the packages (from sysvinit to upstart) will be a little tricky… use reboot -f. If your system boots and shuts down normally, everything’s working just fine. Note that both will be somewhat more quiet than you’re used to, unless you have usplash running. Throughout the rest of this entry, I’ll try to answer some of the questions and comments that I’ve received since the last post. Events As I talked about previously, upstart is an event-based init daemon. Events are the primary force for having your services and tasks started and stopped at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. So what are events and where do they come from? (Note that this part is under development, so may change in later releases). Events are just simple strings that may be sent by any process when something it is tracking the state of changes. They have no state or longevity, and if, when queued, they do not cause any job state changes, then they have no effect unless they are sent again. Jobs can list which events cause them to be started if they are not already running and which events cause them to be stopped if they are running. Multiple start and stop events may be listed, in which case the first to occur changes the job until the next one occurs. upstart itself generates the following system events: The shutdown tool included in the package also causes one of the following events to be sent once the “shutdown” event has been handled: Jobs also generate events whenever they change state, this is the primary source of events for ordering: And as mentioned, any other process on the system may send events through the control socket or just by using initctl trigger EVENT. For now this is just the event string, however it’s intended that the event may include other details including environment variables and even file descriptors. Typical example To clarify how it all hangs together, here’s an example (using fictional names) of how the tasks and events can be arranged to provide race-free mounting of filesystems. By breaking this job into these small tasks, we can see how the pieces fit together. Because everything is now done on events, there are no race conditions; we know that any filesystem listed in /etc/fstab will be checked and mounted. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if there’s an error of some kind, and that means you have larger problems anyway and the system administrator would have a shell to fix it. Of course, the moment they finish checking the filesystem and mount it, the boot process would carry on. There’s no reason that any of these events need to be generated by the upstart daemon itself, it can receive them from any other daemon on the system such as udev, acpid, etc. This keeps the focus of the init daemon narrow. A large part of the future development will be working out exactly what kinds of events we want init itself to generate, what kinds we want to come from elsewhere, and what the contents of an event can be. Getting Involved If you want to get involved with trying to nudge the direction of upstart development, you can join the upstart-devel mailing list at http://lists.netsplit.com/ Or if you just want to grab the source code, tarballs are published at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/software/upstart/ and the bzr archive is at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keybuk/upstart/main

31 August 2006

Martin F. Krafft: News from the NetBSD cabal

I thought this mail about the current state and future of NetBSD (via /.) was an interesting read, and one relevant to Debian not only because of our Debian NetBSD port. In particular, it felt good to be able to say "yeah, we've got that" to some of the points Charles raised. However, I also had to concede that we're short in some of the other points. I won't put numbers to these claims because it's not as black and white as this. What would be really great is if one of the Debian long-timers would sit down and reply to Charles with his/her experience! Having worked a bunch with the NetBSD crowd in the past, I really would hate to see this project go down. The NetBSD kernel, while not up to the task to provide the desktop experience, still makes for rock-solid servers, and some parts of it sparkle with technical excellence (like the virtual memory management, for instance). Maybe, just maybe a possible future for NetBSD would be to produce Debian NetBSD in a joint venture? NP: Shpongle / Tales of the Inexpressible

Russell Coker: first significant project goes live

One advantage of not being a permanent employee is that I am free to do paid work for other people. This not only gives a greater income but also a wider scope of work.<br /><br />I've just completed my first significant project since leaving Red Hat. The <a href="http://www.inumbers.com/">Inumbers</a> project provides an email address for every mobile phone. If you know someone's mobile phone number but don't have an email address then you can send email to NNN<span style="font-weight: bold;">@inumbers.com</span> where NNN is the international format mobile phone number. The recipient will receive an SMS advising them how to sign up and collect the email.<br /><br />It was fun work, I had to learn how to implement SRS (which I had been meaning to do for a few years), write scripts to interface with a bulk SMS service, and do a few other things that were new to me.

Jordi Mallach: Just because I love trains

Metro lines I have used:

Got at b3co.com!

Christine Spang: my world metros total > yours

Check this shit out.

Gunnar Wolf: Metros of the world

Thanks, Damog, for starting yet another pissing contest^W^Wnice and informative meme. And thanks, B3co, for writing yet another tool to waste my oh-so-scarce time. Which needs some CSS work if people like me keep showing up just to say "I'm also a frequent flier". Anyway, here I go.

Got at b3co.com!
I found at least one Metro I've been to missing - But hey, maybe the people at M nchen U-Bahn could not be bothered to come up with a logo? Update Well, B3co updated the site and included M nchen - What can I do if not update my listing? ;-)

30 August 2006

David Moreno Garza: World metros

b3co wrote an interesting tool which I refound thanks to ion, where you can select logos for all subway systems you’ve ridden. World metros I have taken:

Got at b3co.com!
So, Helsinki (Finland), Madrid (Spain), Porto Alegre (Brazil), Mexico City (Mexico), Caracas (Venezuela), Guadalajara (Mexico) and Valencia (Spain). I guess people living in countries where it’s easier to travel between each other, may have caught more metros :)

Andree Leidenfrost: Cheap Thrills (mondo 2.09-2)

I've just uploaded mondo 2.09-2 which comes with a number of improvements and bug fixes (one reported and more unreported):
  • No more garbled screens or error messages because of insufficiently escaped strings used in system() or popen(). (Well, not quite true, but the one known issue should be fixed now with new function module mr_stresc() that can be used wherever else needed.)
  • mondorestore will now ask in non-nuke mode whether an existing post-nuke script is to be executed. (Doing this is generally a good idea on Debian as the post-nuke script in the package updates the initrd image to adjust for RAID and other system changes.)
  • Fixed issue where stabgrub-me would fail if /etc/grub.conf is a symbolic link preventing the user from editing the grub config file. (This requires readlink which I've added to mindi-busybox, hence the new mindi-busybox package version.)
  • I was getting segmentation faults in space_occupied_by_cd() - it's not a good idea to do fin = popen(...) followed by fgets(...,...,fin) without checking the success of the former. Fixed this by evaluating errno after the popen() call. (Strangely, with the errno checking in place, popen() doesn't seem to fail anymore, which might indicate a different underlying issue althogether - we'll see.)
Whilst working on the above I also experienced problems with ntfsclone and the still very present NFS issue with kernel 2.6.17.
.

Because of bespoke NFS issue I tested with DVDs as backup media on amd64 with kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64 (2.6.17-7).

Martin F. Krafft: Using LVM snapshots for filesystem recovery

This morning, I found myself in Gunnar's position and was looking at an empty /home directory because of the following mount failure: 
piper:~# mount /dev/mapper/vg0-home
mount: Unknown error 990
Starting XFS recovery on filesystem: dm-0 (logdev: internal)
Filesystem "dm-0": xfs_inode_recover: Bad inode magic number, dino ptr =
  0xffff810028a6bd00, dino bp = 0xffff81002851d140, ino = 33629
Filesystem "dm-0": XFS internal error xlog_recover_do_inode_trans(1) at
  line 2352 of file fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c.  Caller 0xffffffff88307729
I am used to XFS giving me hard times, but this time at least I didn't have much to worry as it happened at home, I have plenty other machines I can use instead, and all data was backed up. Since this is on a Debian unstable machine, I had the latest xfs_repair available, and told it to do its thing, but it refused: 
piper:~# xfs_repair /dev/mapper/vg0-home
Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
Phase 2 - using internal log
        - zero log...
ERROR: The filesystem has valuable metadata changes in a log which needs to
be replayed.  Mount the filesystem to replay the log, and unmount it before
re-running xfs_repair.  If you are unable to mount the filesystem, then use
the -L option to destroy the log and attempt a repair.
Note that destroying the log may cause corruption -- please attempt a mount
of the filesystem before doing this.
Great. Catch-22. I decided to have a go at fixing it, but as much as I pretended to grok xfs_db, I did not manage to get the filesystem into a consistent state. I thus fired off an email to the mailing list (which has not arrived there 4 hours later) and started pv to dump the raw data to another machine for later use or debugging. Watching the progress meter of pv from time to time, it occured to me that my /home is in fact on LVM. I put it on LVM way back when LVM was new and cool and I wanted to gather experience with it. I've never actually done anything with it, but today it saved my little bits of remaining sanity. Why? Because LVM can take snapshots of volumes. It took me a while to put the pieces together, but in the end, a snapshot would enable me at least to run a test-round of xfs_repair -L and assess the damage, and if it wasn't all that bad, I could just run the repair process on the actual volume again. With the encouragement and knowledge of Christian Aichinger and Daniel J. Priem on IRC, I hence proceeded to give it a try. First I had to extend the volume group to make room for the snapshot data, and since I had no disks handy, I just used a loop device based on a sparse file: 
dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/loop bs=1 count=1 seek=5368709120
losetup -f /srv/loop
pvcreate /dev/loop0
vgextend vg0 /dev/loop0
lvcreate -s -n home-snapshot /dev/vg0/home -L 5G
(Thanks to Ian Nicholls for spotting the error: I was using pvcreate instead of that last lvcreate previously). Now /dev/vg0/home-snapshot was a copy-on-write snapshot of the original volume, and I could do whatever I wanted with it, as long as I did not exceed the 5G size allotted for the copied data blocks that I modified. Using mount and xfs_repair, I could verify that the problem also shows up with the snapshot. Thus, I ran xfs_repair -L on the snapshot and finally was able to mount the snapshot to inspect the /lost+found directory. Fortunately, it wasn't all that full, nor was there anything important in there, so I sighed, removed the snapshot (lvremove) and unleashed xfs_repair -L on the original volume, which is now again mounted under /home. Finally, remove the loop device from the volume group (vgreduce). If you are like me and forgot to do so before rebooting and now find your LVM volumes not starting anymore, look into the --removemissing option. I like this method. I knew the filesystem was corrupted, but I did not know to what extend. Had corruption been worse, I could have waited for the XFS guys to help me out. But seeing the low damage, I was able to decide to just purge the journal and accept the damage. If this had happened on a more important machine (i.e. without recent backups), I would have proceeded a bit differently: once the snapshot was mounted, I'd have run xfs_dump on it to save the data. I would also have used more space for the snapshot and not removed it until the parent volume was repaired and mounted. It's unlikely that xfs_repair will produce different results when run on a volume and its snapshot, but better be safe than sorry. All this said, I just want to point out that the above method is filesystem independent and hence would work for any filesystem out there. I've never been a big fan of LVM, especially without RAID to build on (striping across physical media multiplies your chance of data loss), but this method is a good reason for using LVM regardless: use a volume group instead of your physical disk, and logical volumes instead of partitions, but don't span disks (unless you have to). Then, if stuff goes bad, you can hook in another disk, extend the volume group with it, and work on snapshots.

Russell Coker: SRS development

I've been working on a mail forwarding system which required me to implement <a href="http://www.openspf.org/srs.html">SRS</a> to allow people who use <a href="http://www.openspf.org/">SPF</a> to be customers of the service (as I use SPF on my domain it's fairly important to me). Reading the web pages before actually trying to implement it things seemed quite easy. All over the web you will see instructions to just set up an /etc/aliases file that pipes mail through the <span style="font-weight: bold;">srs</span> utility.<br /><br />The problem is that none of the srs utility programs actually support piped mail. It seems that the early design idea was to support piped mail but no-one actually implemented it that way. So you can call the srs utility to discover what the munged (cryptographically secure hash signed) originator of the email should be but you have to do the actual email via something else.<br /><br />This wasn't so much of a problem for me as I use my own custom maildrop agent to forward the mail instead of using /etc/aliases (Postfix doesn't support what I want to do with /etc/aliases - dynamically changing the email routing as you receive it isn't something that Postfix handles internally).<br /><br />However I still have one problem. Sometimes I get two or three copies of the SPF header from Postfix when it checks them.<br /><br />In my <span style="font-weight: bold;">main.cf</span> file I have a <span style="font-weight: bold;">smtpd_recipient_restrictions</span> configuration directive that contains <span style="font-weight: bold;">check_policy_service unix:private/spfpolicy</span> and the Postfix <span style="font-weight: bold;">master.cf</span> file has the following:<br /><br /><pre><br />spfpolicy unix - n n - - spawn user=USER argv=/PATH/spf-policy.pl<br /></pre><br /><br />Does anyone have any ideas why I would get multiple SPF checks and therefore multiple email header lines such as:<br /><pre><br />Received-SPF: none (smtp.sws.net.au: domain of SRS0=MUyCQ6=CO=coker.com.au=russell@inumbers.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)<br />Received-SPF: none (smtp.sws.net.au: domain of SRS0=MUyCQ6=CO=coker.com.au=russell@inumbers.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)<br />[some other headers]<br />Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender)<br />Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender)<br />Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender)<br /></pre><br /><br />The email went through one mail router and then hit the destination machine, but somehow got 5 SPF checks along the way. Also the pair of identical checks had no lined between them and the set of three identical checks also had no lines between them. So multiple checks were performed without any forwarding. It seems that a single port 25 connection is giving two or three checks. Both machines run Postfix with SPF checking that is essentially idential (apart from being slightly different versions, Debian/unstable and RHEL4).<br /><br />Any advice on how to fix this would be appreciated.

Philipp Kern: Re: SCR 3310 on Linux

So finally I got my card reader running on Linux. It was not that hard, but the main problem was caused by the proprietary Linux driver I installed. Thanks to Ludovic Rousseau's Generic CCID driver the reader is able to run just fine with only Free Software. It works even with libchipcard2, but a tiny fix to udev was necessary to fix a permission problem (you might need to adapt the vendor and product id to your local card reader, as shown by lsusb):
/etc/udev/rules.d/smart_card.rules:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS idVendor =="04e6", SYSFS idProduct =="5116", GROUP="chipcard", MODE="0664"
With this tiny fix chipcardd2 correctly opens the card as a non-privileged user. My thanks also go to Thomas Viehmann, who provides an HBCI branch of Gnucash on Alioth. Apart from the application crashing a bit too often, the HBCI part works fine with my card and PIN. The only problem left is the sudden disconnect of the reader when it's not used for a few minutes. Only a restart of chipcardd2 and gnucash resolves the problem temporarily. All my homebanking activities are now properly signed, and the retrieval of transactions works just fine. To credit my bank a bit, I am a customer of 1822direkt, a subsidiary of the Frankfurter Sparkasse, since a few weeks. They provided me with a free checking account, together with a free(!) HBCI card. Transactions are mailed just-in-time (checked for hourly during working hours) PGP-encrypted. (Yes, they are running PGP5i on OS/2. I needed to create a RSA key using PHP5i/Unix without a passphrase. The public key output of PGP5i had to be sent to the bank, and after an import of the resulting public and private key into my GPG instance I was able to read the statements correctly. The mail interface did not cope with GPG-generated keys.)

Andreas Barth: What needs to happen for python 2.4 to become default in etch?

There are many question what needs to be resolved to allow the new python-defaults into etch. There are some packages that would become uninstallable by that now, and the task is to just check them and fix them: ethereal-dev, gaby, gforge-plugin-scmsvn, gnome-tasksel, gnuradio-examples, gr-audio-alsa, gr-audio-jack, gr-audio-oss, gr-usrp, gr-wxgui, guml, hplip, ifrit, ldaptor-utils, ldaptor-webui, lfm, libghc6-missingpy-dev, mboxcheck-applet, med-bio, memaid-pyqt, mock, musiclibrarian, ocfs2console, omniidl4, omniidl4-python, plywood, positron, pydict, pyftpd, pykdeextensions, pymol, pyntor, pypanel, pyrad, pyslide, python-dispatch, python-gdal, python-gdchart, python-gdchart2, python-gdk-imlib-1.2, python-glade-1.2, python-gnome-1.2, python-gnuradio, python-gtk-1.2, python-ldaptor, python-mapscript, python-metakit, python-moinmoin, python-notify, python-numeric-tutorial, python-phidgets, python-protocols, python-sip-qt3, python-turbojson, python-usrp, python-zeroc-ice, pythoncad, pytone, releaseforge, rubrica, scalemail, scanerrlog, scigraphica, snappea, snappea-dev, spikeproxy, sql-editor, viewcvs, viewcvs-query, wireshark-dev, xen-ioemu-3.0, xen-utils-3.0, xkeysw-config, yum, zeroc-ice For example, gforge-plugin-scmsvn depends on viewcvs which needs to be converted to the new policy. Everyone can take his share - just choose any package, look why it becomes uninstallable (perhaps via a dependency becoming uninstallable) and fix it. Oh, and please set the urgency to high and make sure prior to upload that the package still works. (This is only the list on i386, but experience has shown that once it's resolved for the first architecture, it isn't too hard to resolve it for the other architectures also.) Update: Some packages are already in the progress, e.g. ethereal-dev depends on wireshark-dev which depends on omniidl4 which has been NMUed already. Well, like always: Check what the issue is before fixing it. And if binNMUs help, please just tell us. 2. Update: It would be really helpful if someone could take care of viewcvs. 3. Update: The most important open issues are: viewcvs, mapserver, moin (whereas viewcvs has a good version in experimental, maintainer is contacted). Also, these programs might need some love to get converted to the new standard or have otherwise real NMUs: blogtk boa-constructor codeville drpython fnorb freeloader forg fvwm-crystal gco gdebi gdeskcal gnome-btdownload python-visual gaby guml ldaptor scalemail lfm missingpy mboxcheck-applet yum mock musiclibrarian ocfs2-tools plywood positron pyftpd pyntor pyrad pyslide python-gdchart pygdchart2 libmetakit2.4.9.3 moin pythoncad pytone rubrica scanerrlog snappea spkproxy

Felipe Augusto van de Wiel: 29 Aug 2006

To infinity, and beyond! -- Buzz

[Debian]
I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Cl ment) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Cl ment already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:
  • Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!
  • I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.
  • I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.
  • I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like


[Anti-SPAM season]
Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.


Hey silva, thank you! (Journeyer certification).

Adeodato Sim : More stuff you can do in three days

So appart from being happy just by being awake, these three last days have also brought a lot of surprises. I’ll mention a couple. First, my mind is with a mental activity level quite high, not unknown to me, but never experienced with this intensity and duration combined. I now need tools to accommodate to this. My gut feeling is that ikiwiki and maybe vim-outliner are going to suite me perfect. If that’s finnally the case, Joey Hess gets my gratitude for both (author, referrer). Secondly, I’m running an experiment with my sleep patterns that I was planning on not talking here about until at least a week from starting. But the details have changed a bit, and IRC just gave me the chance to reduce my two planned paragraphs description with a two-line one, so I’ll take it: 
  [dato] it's 22pm, I'm about to have dinner, and the fact that the sun is rising
         doesn't bother me at all

29 August 2006

Erich Schubert: Keeping your users out.

Today I was trying to find some information in the Ubuntu forums. I'm seriously annoyed. There was one thread that seemed relevant, but it has some 310 pages. Yes, thats over 3000 posts. Unfortunately, Ubuntu (and I consider this arrogant behaviour) doesn't allow you to search the forum or access attached images if you are not registered. I can understand things like spam protection. But WTF do you require registration for searching? I mean... I was trying to find out if the Ubuntu community could help, and all I get is "register first"!? Thats pure harrasment of non-registered users. I don't think I'll bother to remember another username and password just for their crappy forums. I hate forums anyway. And the size of that thread just shows that forums don't scale well. Especially if you can't search. [Update: yes, I've been a bit harsh here. The front page says that they're experiencing speed issues, and thus have disabled search within the forum. Actually I can't believe that search requests make such a huge load (especially compared to me browsing a 30-page thread...) - but maybe their search function is just implemented badly? I wouldn't be surprised if they do some huge SELECT to search, and don't have an index optimized for text searching. Maybe they shouldn't be using a closed source software for running their forum. I guess they could just fix the search functionality then. If opensource software doesn't meet their requirements, they're bound to get some support by the community to make the software meet them, if vBulletin actually is better in some points. IMHO vBulletin sucks. And given the speed issues "it is what the admin prefers" might miss some important point - that at some point you can't just keep getting a larger CPU]

Jurij Smakov

I have started tracking the sparc-specific bugs using usertags. If you have a non-trivial sparc-specific bug in your package, and would like someone to look at it, feel free to usertag the bug as oh-noes for user jurij@d.o (d.o needs to be expanded).

Rodrigo Gallardo: hello-world.deb

Hi there! Ever since I learned about free sotfware, I’ve always intended to give something back to the projects I’m benefitting from. But I had always allowed something or other to get between me and my good intentions. And then DebConf came to us. And I just so loved the people there and the way they work and play together that I finally got over my excuses and got working. And so, this place is born. I intend to leave here a trace of how I’ll get to be a real free software advocate, developer and community member. I don’t expect this to be a nice path. There’s much to learn, much to do, much to overcome. Outside and (most importantly) inside myself. Hence the name of the place. This is my bleeding edge. The one with the bruises and scars. I will dig in. See you on the other side.

BTW. I want to thank Gunnar for inviting me to the planet. I’ll do my best to stop whining.

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