I got tired of having to authenticate as root to change printer settings like paper size or printout mode via a GUI. Since system-config-printer uses PolicyKit things like allow myself to change printer settings when logged into the system should be possible without having to mess with cupsd.conf or sudo, are they? Which printer related actions are governed by PolicyKit:

pkaction   grep printer

shows about the following if you have cups-pk-helper installed. The later is used by system-config-printer to interface with PolicyKit:

org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-enable
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-remote-edit
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-set-default
org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printeraddremove

So org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit seems to be what I'm looking for. Let's change the policy for this action:

cat <<EOF >/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/99-local.pkla 
[EditPrinters]
Identity=unix-user:foo
Action=org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes
EOF

This allows user foo to perform the action org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit if the user is logged into a local interactive session. The pklocalauthority(8) manpage has all the details. PolicyKit will pick up the configuration file changes on the fly. Lets see if this worked by getting the process id of the running system-config-printer and checking via pkcheck if the process is authorized to use that action:

PID=$(ps a   awk '/[p]ython .*system-config-printer/   print $1  ')
pkcheck --action-id org.opensuse.cupspkhelper.mechanism.printer-local-edit --process $PID
echo $?

If pkcheck returns with a zero return value everything is fine and user foo won't need any password to modify local printer settings from now on. Check the output of pkaction(1) to list more actions that can be setup this way.

DebConf10 ended 2 weeks ago, I m back in Bosnia and I needed some time to recalculate everything that happened to me in last month This was my third time in NYC, and NYC as a city never left me empty handed, in every possible sense! And am seriously considering option of moving back one day, whether to get my Masters/phD or just do work we ll see what future holds for me DebConf10 I was in organization team for DebConf10, but if you put me aside, what s particularly interesting is that there was a total number of 7 Bosnians on DebConf10, two of which were government officials. I must note this wasn t our complete team, and what s most important of all is that they all pretty much volunteered as much as they could, of course, besides good will to help Debian, but also to at least somehow prepare themselves for organization of DebConf11. It s also worth noting that this was their first DebConf, and I as a leader of the team must say I m proud on how well they performed. I m sure by being highly active in volunteering they have learned as much as they could when it comes to how it s done and were able to see good and bad sides of DebConf10 organization team. Of course, I d also like to thank DebConf10 team for their superb work, perfect Venue selection, their hospitality and being incredibly friendly and helpful to all of us. As I said in one of my lectures, it s kinda unwritten rule that every next DebConf has to top the previous one, and that being said it s going to be almost impossible to compete with this year bid, but being Bosnians we re up for the challenge My DebConf10 Pictures: Semi-private album FaceBook public link (no registration required) DebConf11 DebConf10 was busy period for all of us, but I don t want to start complaining since even though we ve done enormous amounts of work so far, the real challenge lays ahead of us. With DebConf10 behind us, the thing we should process now is it s our turn now, we re next Before anything, I d like to thank Government of Republika Srpska for their full financial support, which was one of the preconditions to even get this bid. With their full support + sponsors, we ll be able to get great amount for sponsorships, for you to come to Banja Luka from the most remote places, and also in case you need visa for them to help you in getting one. Government support is just too precious in any way you want to take it. We would also like to invite you to DebConf11 in Bosnia (Banja Luka) next summer, we also invite all of you to our communication channels (mailing list, irc) since we would really like to get involved as many people as we can. Besides all of you enjoying DebConf11 next year, we would like you to help us in giving directions since we re a young team Besides Debian people, I d like to invite anyone who think he/she could help, or want to get involved, especially individuals/organizations/LUG from whole region! It s also important to stress that in all of our communication means, we do speak English, so please do not hesitate if you have any sort of question/suggestion/whatever. For those interested in next DebConf11, most important page you should follow is our wiki page, where you can find all information and which we keep updated in timely manner: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka Communication/Links Languages we officially support are: English, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian Mailing list:
http://lists.debconf.net/mailman/listinfo/debconf11-bosnia IRC:
#debconf11-bosnia on irc.debian.org / irc.oftc.net Twitter:
#debconf11 tag
http://twitter.com/absinthesyringe (shameless self promotion ) Facebook:
Official DebConf11 FaceBook group DebConf10 Adnan Hodzic DebConf11 in Bosnia (Introduction and Invitation):
Lecture video high quality (205mb)

See you next year!

(this is a post in two parts) At the BoF of GPG Key Management: Best Practices, dkg had two immediate recommendations for improving WoT resilience:

• Regularly refresh your local keyring from the key servers;
• If you have spare space and transit, provide a key server to take part in the pool.

Regular Refreshes This is important because unless keys are refreshed, changed expirations and (more importantly) revocations on keys are never made known to you. Making regular refreshes is easy, though I was surprised to hear people had experienced difficulty with it it s a simple entry to cron, like: 0 0 * * 1 /usr/bin/gpg --refresh-keys to run at midnight on a Sunday, or any other convenient time. Append > /dev/null to make it silent unless there are errors. Provide a key server This is nearly as trivial a refreshing the keyring, but it does take some disk space (on my machine, 4G for the decompressed dump from another server, 7.4G for the database itself and a few hundred MB for other stuff. Supposedly the dump can go after a full database build, but as I m not constrained I haven t bothered). The sks package in Lenny and Squeeze manages the database and answers to clients. However, take care to follow README.Debian carefully, since if the permissions on /var/lib/sks or /var/log/sks aren t set right it will silently fail and much head-scratching will ensue. Building the database for the first time takes some hours even on a reasonably quick machine, and takes a lot of CPU time, so it s probably best done overnight. Once sks is running, it needs to catch up from the date of the key dump to now (which is why a recent dump is always a good start). To do that, it should be listed in the pool.sks-keyservers.net and therefore needs gossip peers. http://code.google.com/p/sks-keyserver/wiki/Peering is an excellent guide, though the version of sks in Lenny does not support multiple listening addresses for either the recon or hkp processes. When a small enough delta between the server and its peers is reached, it s included in the DNS pool for use by other clients.

Thanks to the sterling work of aurel32, debian-cd now supports creating CDs for the kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 ports. For now, only the daily "sid" builds will be available - see http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/sid_d-i/arch-latest/. Once there's been another alpha/beta release of d-i then we'll get squeeze daily builds and weekly builds too.

A DebConf doesn't just happen in a few months. It's not even a year, it's closer to two or two and a half. I've only been through two cycles, and I think this process has happened for the last three or four DebConfs. This post will talk about a "brief" summary of the general DebConf timeline, with elaboration on all the bits later. This post describes the preparation of DebConfN in year 20XX.
At DebConfN-2 (mid 20XX-2), there is a talk where interested groups can describe their location and how it would be suitable for a DebConf. This consists of a short presentation and discussion, but not many details by this point. No decision is made here.Throughout late 20XX-2, teams develop their bid as best they can. The last two years there has been a nominal deadline of December 31 20XX-2 for submitting a bid, but like all DebConf deadlines it's more for guidance than a real deadline. There are various checklists and templates to provide guidance here, which I'll describe later.Early 20XX-1 brings a lot of work to finalize bids, and then the actual selection process. There is a burst of mailing list traffic where people ask questions and help each other refine their bids. There are several meetings where bid teams give their status and people can ask questions. In February or March, there is a selection meeting.After the decision meeting, there is a big round of cheers but people soon refocus on DebConf N-1 since it is more urgent. Ideally, most of the people involved in DebConfN help with DebConfN-1 both because DebConfN-1 needs help, but also to learn how to make DebConfN go well. The DebConfN local team keeps working in the background doing whatever is needed to prepare for their conference.At DebConfN-1, there is a talk where the DebConfN team presents their progress to the DebConf attendees and tries to build support.Late 20XX-1 brings the end of the previous conference and time for N's localteam to really start getting stuff done. Throughout the last part of the year, we try to work out enough details for registration to begin: final conference dates, locations, accommodation, etc.Registration opens in early 20XX. The exact dates for opening/sponsorship deadline/reconfirmation/etc all depend on how early in the year the conference will be. There are nominal deadlines published, but they usually slip. With our limited volunteer base, it's hard to make things go according to schedule, but things always work out.Around this time, the fundraising team really starts working hard. Also, the travel sponsorship team needs to meet to decide who gets funded. The talks team needs to issue a call for events, read, and select them. The video team needs to make sure that they will be ready for the DebCamp setup period. There are many more things I'm forgetting, too.In the months before arrival, it becomes kind of crazy from a local perspective. There are many things to get organized before people arrive, mainly focusing on food, accommodation, and venue space logistics.Once DebCamp starts, things get even more complicated, but we have a flood of experienced DebConfers from around the world come in, and they all know a bit and can help out. DebCamp is effectively the DebConf preparation week to the organizers. DebCamp becomes DebConf, and much bigger, once all attendees arrive.Eventually, people leave and everyone goes home. This doesn't mean local stuff is over - I'm still engaged in DebConf10 wrap-up, making sure everyone gets paid and everything is returned.Mid to late 20XX brings a brief period of rest for most people.There is one last thing to do, though: the DebConf final report. This describes the events of DebConf, and is very useful for getting sponsors. It is also a valuable reference for future years looking back on the lessons learned. You can browse past final reports in our archive . Because everyone is tired, this too frequently gets pushed off until early 20XX+1, when DebConfN+1's fundraising team needs it. A frantic rush finishes up the missing pieces and it's done.
So, there you have it: a rough outline of the timeline of a DebConf. It extends from mid 20XX-2 to early 20XX+1, more than two and a half years. This post nowhere near describes all the details that go into DebConf, almost any of the paragraphs above could be made it's own post. Stay tuned for them.Tags: debconf, debian

As you may remember, our co-op is working on various RFID (radio tags instead of barcodes, basically) extensions for Koha. One of the main ethical concerns about RFID is privacy if done wrong, it could become quite easy to see what books from which libraries someone has in their bag, without their consent and without physical contact. If borrower cards themselves become RFID-enabled, you might even obtain their personal data pretty easily, although I m not aware of any libraries in practice who put any personal data onto the borrower card tags yet. On 12 May 2009, the European Commission Recommended privacy and data protection in all RFID applications. That was followed by EU Mandate M436 for the European Standards Organisations (ESO) to develop standards to support that recommandation. Phase 1 started last March and has delivered a document RFID-DTR07044v006-draft (PDF). Phase 2 will build on that to produce formal standards for signage, privacy impact assessments and so on. EDItEUR are replying to that draft on behalf of the library sector and have sent me their draft response RFID_LibrarySectorCommentsDTR-07044-1 as a PDF. It s worth opening those two side-by-side to read through. If you can help improve the combined response, please send feedback to the email address in the Library Sector PDF by 6 September. If you d like to make your own response, you have until 15 September to reply to the ESO PDF using their template. By the way, does the ESO PDF look jaggy to anyone else? It looks like ghostscript can t anti-alias the text.

Quite a few things have happened recently in the Debian/ARM land

ARM and Canonical have generously provided us with bunch of fast armel machines. Four of these are now as buildd's, bringing the total of armel buildd's to 7. In other words, armel should no longer lag behind other architectures when building unstable packages.

One of machines, abel.debian.org has been setup as a porter box. It is faster (around 3x) than the older porterbox (agricola). All Debian Developers have access to the porterboxes.

The new buildds have allowed us to enable more suites. Thanks to Philipp Kerns work, armel builds now experimental, lenny-volatile, lenny-backports as well as unstable/non-free. Especially if you are using stable Debian, access to backports and volatile should make life happier :)

Finally, the next big thing is Hardfloat ARM port, effort being lead by Konstantinos Margaritis. This doesn't mean that the armel port is going away. Majority of ARM cpus sold are still without FPU, so the softloaf port (armel) will still have a long life ahead. Meanwhile, the armhf port will provide a more optimal platform for people with bleeding edge ARM cores (ARMv7 + vfp). Some people have been unhappy with the new proposed new port, and various alternatives have been proposed. However, armhf is currently the only solution being actively worked on.

Update: thank canonical too

People often want to know what an application looks like before they install it. This is one of the reason why Christoph Haas started with the screenshots.debian.net service. People can upload screenshots for their favorite applications for others to take a look at. Finally, as convenience feature, they are now added on packages.debian.org. When you click on the screenshot of a package you can see the list of all of the available ones. In the case when no screenshot is available yet the page will show a placeholder image which gives you a convenience link to the screenshots page of the package where you can submit one for the benefit of all. Please make sure that you are following the guidelines for submissions, otherwise your upload might get rejected. On a not totally unrelated topic, the packages.ubuntu.com site finally will also show you packages in maverick. It doesn't show screenshots yet if you think adding support for screenshots in there would be a good thing too, please let me know! Enjoy!

/debian permanent link Comments: 5

At DebConf10, there was a BOF entitled "DebConf & Debian", discussing about the similarities and differences of Debian and DebConf. At times this became a little bit heated as people wanted more integration and transparency.I don't think the differences are that great. I don't even see them as separate. I see DebConf as a Debian team, one that has to release every year on a short time frame. Things are rushed, things are not perfect, but we welcome anyone who wants to help.It's my goal to start a series of posts on DebConf, in the spirit of other teams documenting themselves and calling for contributors. I hope to let people know what's the current state of things, how you can get involved.If you want to get involved, join #debconf-team on OFTC, or subscribe to the debconf-team mailing list at http://lists.debconf.org/ . There are many people who would like to help you get involved. Right now (post-debconf) is a bit of an idle time, but one of the few times that big changes can be made. DebConf is a do-ocracy, if you'd like there to be a change, the best way is to help implement it. There may be some resistance, but we (at least I) will help to find a solution.These posts are my take on things, I can't claim to speak for the DebConf team. I don't know all of the history of DebConf, and I may get things wrong. I'll run these posts by the rest of the DebConf team for suggestions/corrections, but there may still be things wrong. You should consider anything useful to be thanks to the DebConf team, and anything wrong to be my mistake.I've only been involved in DebConf for two years. I first got involved as part of DebConf10, but spent most of 2009 working on global management things for DebConf9. This year, I spent more time with local on-the-ground tasks. I'd like to keep being involved next year - and hopefully keep improving, with your help.Tags: debconf, debian

I have some mp3 files in my collection. Some years ago, back in the times, when I was a Windows-User, I used "The Godfather", to keep the chaos under control. This software, although not Open Source, is really good at what it does. And it does almost everything to organize mp3s. From (mass-)tagging to auto-renaming to auto-sorting your mp3s. But this wouldn't be a blog entry by me if this became... a praise to a windows software so..

When I became a daily Linux User I searched for alternatives. With GUI or without a GUI, but I did not really find an application that suited my needs. As far as tagging and renaming was concerned it wasn't that hard. There are really excellent command line tools (lltag, id3, etc.) and rumours have been heard that there are also GUI tools.
But what I still did not find is a simple, yet flexible, tool to sort a huge collection of mp3s into a flexible structure on the filesystem like "The Godfather" was able to do since.. ehh.. a lot of years.

So the day before yesterday I finally decided to write one on my own and came up with an ~ 280 lines perl script (POD-documentation included) which does exactly what I want and is simple.
It does no tagging.
It does no renaming.
All it does is sorting mp3s into a given template-based directory hierarchy based on their ID3 tag.

At this point a warning is due. I'm sharing that script with you under the terms of the GPL. BUT it still needs testing and therefore you probably do not want to use it without its safety measures (e.g. dry-run or copy instead of move) to avoid data loss. And notice that although it has been written with portability in mind, it has only been tested on a Debian GNU/Linux system.

The script is hosted at github. Here (or raw to download it directly).

After I've talked to a co-worker about the script, he told me that arename would do what I want. So you probably don't want to use my script, because arename is probably more tested and much more sophisticated. But on the other hand I had a quick look at the arename manpage and its so utterly feature-loaded, that it cannot avoid a certain complexicity. My tool is simple.
And there is another advantage. If you want arename to handle a certain amount of mp3s you have to use your shell magic to find the files and pipe it to arename. My script finds all mp3s recursively from where you let it start (default is $PWD so be careful) and will happily move it into a hierarchy under a directory you ask it to. For the simple job of sorting mp3s its probably easier to use.

(Oh and if its worth nothing, it might still be of use as a simple programming example, how one could solve this problem in Perl)

I ve decided to try using local DNS caching again, using the simple dnsmasq. The problem is that, even including

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf, NetworkManager will overwrite /etc/resolv.conf, and remove

nameserver 127.0.0.1

from there. I found out in a comment here, that I could create a script in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ to make this line be included in the file. The script is simple

#!/bin/sh
set -e
cp /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.tmp
echo nameserver 127.0.0.1 > /etc/resolv.conf
cat /etc/resolv.conf.tmp >> /etc/resolv.conf
rm /etc/resolv.conf.tmp

and it s working .

This LWN article is perhaps a bit confused, but it does point out a truth: On modern hardware, with fast, local storage, and large, often static files, rsync is often unncessarily slow. That's probably true to some extent when using rsync across a LAN, but it's especially true when using it to copy files locally. rsync runs as a client/server pair, and both processes MD5 checksum the files as they are being transferred. That's nice, but it's slow too. Funny thing about rsync is that probably 50% of uses of it don't involve the core feature that it was written to provide: Updating files by transferring differences. Which, other than ensuring data validity, is the only reason it needs slow checksums. Instead, rsync is often chosen because of all the other awesome features that were glommed onto it over the past several decades. Compared with rsync, cp is pretty laughable -- it can't even exclude files from being copied by patterns. And unlike rsync, cp command lines are not often developed by repeated trial and error -- cp does not recover well from being ctrl-c'd in the middle, while rsync does. These kinds of things make a lot of us reach for rsync first, even if the situation does not involve incremental file changes. In most any situation, one of rsync's 120-some options is sure to be just what you need... So lots of scripts use rsync to synchronise directories, but the amount of speedup obtained by using the rsync algorithm is often low. (Correction: rsync turns off the delta-transfer algorythm by default for local to local transfers. It still does md5 checksums however.) Since rsync is reasonably fast, we generally don't care that it does these checksums that probably on average slow it down. But if larger files, like videos, are involved, this starts to change.. When rsync is run on a typical home NAS, with a slow (arm) CPU, the picture changes entirely -- now the checksum overhead is unbearable, while the IO overhead is minimal. So, here's local-rsync. It takes all the same options as rsync, with the caveat that SOURCE and DEST must be the first two options, and must be local directories.

% local-rsync huge/ /media/usb/huge/ -a -v --exclude '*~' --delete --max-delete=100

It speeds up rsync in these types of situations, by querying it to find what files need to be updated, and updating them the brute force way, with cp. At the end, rsync is run, to take care of the non-brute force stuff (like deletions and file permissions). On a fast CPU, local-rsync will probably speed up rsync of large, static files by a factor of 2. On a slow CPU, local-rsync is so fast, and rsync so slow, that I have not bothered to benchmark. :) This is just a hack (easily replaced by a --no-checksum option in rsync, of course). But I think it illustrates some interesting things about how a program's underlying assumptions about its environment can change over time, and how free software programs can accrete value until the original differentiating reason for their existence is not the most important thing about them anymore.

Linux People and Voting Chris Samuel (a member of LUV who s known for his work on high performance computers and the vacation program) has described why he s voting for the Greens [1]. His main reasons are the Greens strong support of human rights and for science-based policy. Paul Dwerryhouse (a member of the Australian Linux community who s currently travelling around the world and who has made contributions to a range of Linux projects including SE Linux) has described his thoughts about the Filter Conroy campaign [2]. He gives a list of some of the high profile awful candidates who could possibly win a seat and therefore deserve a lower position in the preferences than Conroy. SAGE-AU and Voting for the Internet There has been some discussion by members of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) [3] about issues related to the election. As you would expect there was no consensus on which party was best. But there was a general agreement that the Greens are the only significant party to strongly support the NBN (National Broadband Network fiber to the home in cities and fast wireless in rural areas) and to also strongly oppose censoring the Internet. SAGE-AU has an official position opposing Internet filtering, and while the organisation hasn t taken a position on the NBN it seems that the majority of members are in favor of it (I am in a small minority that doesn t like the NBN). So it seems that political desires of the SAGE-AU members (and probably most people who care about the Internet in Australia) are best represented by the Greens. Note that SAGE-AU has no official policy on this, the above paragraph is based on discussions I ve had on mailing lists and in private mail with a number of SAGE-AU members. Also note that not all the SAGE-AU members who agree that the Greens advocate their positions on Internet issues plan to vote for them. The Green support for the NBN is based on the importance of the Internet to all aspects of modern life, the social justice benefit of providing decent net access for everyone (particularly people in rural areas) is very important to the Greens. I still oppose the NBN and believe that it would be better to just provide better ADSL in all suburbs, better net access (through whichever technology works best) in rural areas, and fiber to the central business areas. But the NBN isn t really that important to me, human rights and a science based policy are much more important and are the reasons why I ve been supporting and voting for the Greens. No Wasted Votes One thing to note is that the Australian electoral system is designed to avoid wasted votes. There are two ways of considering a vote to be wasted in Australia, one is if you live in an electorate where both the upper and lower house elections have an almost certain result such that no expected swing can change the outcome I doubt that this is possible for any region in Australia given the way the upper house elections work, although a large portion of the lower house seats have a result that is almost certain. The other way of having a wasted vote is to vote for someone who doesn t actually represent you. Lots of people mindlessly vote for a party that seems to represent them, either they identify with unions and vote Labor every time, they regard themselves as conservative and vote Liberal every time, or they live in a rural area and vote National every time. The Labor and Liberal parties don t differ much in policies and members in safe seats typically don t do anything for the people who elected them. If you generally support the policies of one of the major parties then it can be a good tactic to give your first preference to a minor party. For example if you tend towards Labor then vote Greens first and preference Labor over Liberal. The result will be that your vote will count towards Labor in the lower house and it sends a message to Labor and prevents them from being complacent. Before Australian elections there is always some propaganda going around about wasted votes, this is usually part of a deliberate campaign to try and prevent people from voting for smaller parties. Because the news has many mentions of wasted votes in US elections (which are watched closely in Australia) it seems that some Australians don t realise that there are significant and fundamental differences between the political systems in Australia and the US. Volunteering Last time I checked the Greens were still accepting volunteers to hand out how to vote cards, so if you want to do more for the Greens than just vote for them then this is one way to do it. If you want an uncensored Internet with freedom of speech and a lot of investment in infrastructure (as well as good support for all human rights) then you really want to help the Greens win more seats at the election on Saturday.

• [1] http://www.csamuel.org/2010/08/17/why-im-voting-green-on-saturday-21st-august
• [2] http://weblog.leapster.org/archives/163-Why-Victorians-should-not-put-Senator-Conroy-last.html
• [3] http://www.sage-au.org.au/

Please add your name and names of people you recognise here. Update: 14 people left! The rest of my DebConf10 photos are in my DebConf10 Flickr set. There will still be a few photos from today uploaded to that set tomorrow morning, but it is almost complete. Hint: it also contains a video of DPL pitch and video of MakerBot working. Update: All photos are up and labelled now. Enjoy!

I have just looked at traffic to my photos from Debconf10 during and after the event. During the event I sent out the link to the photos to Twitter/Identi.ca and to IRC channel of the conference. The amount of people visiting my photos rose from <100 per day to around 1000 per day. That might be the number of people that follow Debian actively enough to either follow the conference directly or look at #debian or #debconf or #debconf10 Twitter hashtags (if only half of people care about photos, multiply that number by 2).
Now right after I posted the group photo to my blog and to Debian Planet on the 7th of August, the number of daily views sharply rose to 10 000 per day and stayed at that number for 3 days, then decayed to 5k, 3k, 2k, 1k. We can draw two conclusions from this:

1. Debian Planet is far more popular than Debconf info or Debian-related hashtags on Twitter/Identi.ca. It could be estimated that the Debian Planet is 50-100 times more popular.
2. Readers of Debian Planet read the posted articles with a delay. It looks like most will have read an article after 6-7 days, but there might also be a tail, I will kee an eye on that over the next weeks

I thought it might be interesting to people Note: Only 14 blank spots left in the group photo faces page! Let s get the hunt on and finish it!

A while back I mentioned that I was going to be updating and overhauling the blogspam.net service. That process is now almost complete. A couple of nights ago I overhauled the website, and today I've finally commited my last (planned) change to the repository for the purposes of migration. I started reworking the code a week or so ago, but as of this evening the code in the repository is the code the server is actually running. The previous codebase was functional but a little hasty - and was implemented before I switched to per-UID server-hosting - so there was a need to clean things up and make sure permissions and similar niggles were checked. The new, modular, codebase requires no root access, and will store all state (logs & transient caches) in a clean extensible fasion. The code is also much more flexible making use of Module::Pluggable rather than Class::Pluggable. This allowed me to overhaul the API of the plugins (primarily to add an expire method such that each plugin has a well-defined means to expire any state they may maintain). Module::Pluggable is a great module - allows me to treat plugins as first class objects, which wasn't the case with C::P. Since all the code behind the service is Perl it is also now available on CPAN in addition to the mercurial repository where it is developed.. I see that the server is getting pretty popular these days, used by the likes of embedders.org, publiclive.com, & etc. It doesn't hurt that ikiwiki, identi.ca, and other people include support in their distributions these days. Me? I mostly use it on debian-administration.org where it does a great job. ObQuote: What's the name of that thing that if I eat it real fast, it's free? - Whip It.

With his announcement of the N-imal for Ubuntu 11.04 I m being driven slightly insane, as I now now have this song stuck in my head (and probably will do for weeks to come!)

Today's fun idea was to put all my contacts stored into BBDB on a Google Maps' map, using my Google Maps extension for Emacs. With the help of a few lines of Lisp glue:

(google-maps-static-show
 :markers
 (mapcar
  (lambda (address-entry)
     ((,(concat
         (mapconcat
          'identity
          (elt address-entry 1) ", ") ", "
          (elt address-entry 2) ", "
          (elt address-entry 3) ", "
          (elt address-entry 4) ", "
          (elt address-entry 5)))))
  (mapcan
   (lambda (record)
     ;; We need to copy the returned list, because mapcan will modify it later
     (copy-list (bbdb-record-addresses record)))
   (bbdb-records))))

we can make that:

It's really simplistic, but I did not need more to have fun. :-) This could be extended to set a specific marker and/or color for each contact, with a legend. I'll let that as an exercise for my readers.

An old house, theoretically empty, but still filled with the cruft of its history. Here an old classroom-style pencil sharpener mounted on a wall. In a kitchen cabinet, a plastic bag of dried fish of unknown provenance. Old books. Somewhere, a moldering, out of tune piano. How does this make you feel? Maybe depressed, or urgently needing to wipe it all clean and repaint? Myself, as long as the previous inhabitants are people whose heads I don't mind getting into, I like this environment. I will carve out my own part of it, clean and reorganise that, but generally leave the rest as-is.

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It's weird that, if we were talking not about houses, but software, I'd probably bulldoze it down, compost it, grow trees from it, and start over.

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This house has the added complication of a solar power system that has accreted broken parts and workarounds over the years. So far I don't understand the original design, let alone what it developed into! I'm spending a few days here now just to try to learn how it behaves -- how long can I run my laptop and forgetfully leave lights on before the battery bank reaches unsafe levels? Am I even measuring the level of the right battery bank? (Why does this incoming solar power display still read 21, in the middle of the night?) I haven't been in this situation since spring of 2001. And then I only had to contend with no running water, and dialup. Now I also have to deal with limited power. Interesting times.

Hey! This year's GSoC is coming to an end, and it's great time for a quick update on the situation: Using my modified packages, you can install Debian, configure u-boot, and have a bootable and usable system. You can even use the graphical installer to do that! However, you can't really use the provided kernel for a smartphone use: no GPS, no GSM, no audio, no bluetooth... only SD and screen. Of course, I'll be working on upstreaming the missing parts in mainline kernel, but it'll probably take some time, and any help is welcome! Since almost nothing has been upstreamed yet, installing Debian is still a bit tricky, with the missing debs (you have to make a repository to store them). But hopefully, this will be sorted out shortly after the GSoC. Anyway, here are instructions to try out my work!