Sound Juicer "I Don't Know Why She's Ridin' So High" 2.13.6 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Yes, this is too late for the 2.13 RC, but I thought I best get the package out anyway. Bug fixes:

• Rocking new icon from Lapo Calamandrei
• UI Review attack on Preferences dialog
• Don't cache metadata, it's a pain
• Change the sample metadata to a real song
• Show file extension in sample filename
• Use rather than x in progress bar
• Untranslate strings that should not be translated

Translators: Ankit Patel (gu), Clytie Siddall (vi), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), I aki Larra aga (eu), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Kjartan Maraas (no), Kostas Papadimas (el), Lasse Bang Mikkelsen (da), Leonid Kanter (ru), Miloslav Trmac (cs), Priit Laes (et), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), Rhys Jones (cy), Rostislav Raykov (bg), Satoru SATOH (ja), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Tino Meinen (nl), Vladimer SIchinava (ka), Woodman Tuen (zh_HK), Woodman Tuen (zh_TW), ygimantas Beru ka (lt).

My suggestion for the GFDL vote is 1342

( 1 ) Choice 1: "GFDL-licensed works are unsuitable for main in all cases"

of course that only means documents only available under FDL or only available under FDL or other non-free software licenses. Documents also available under BSD, GPL or whatever are still free. That "in all cases" means without looking at the loudness of the proponents of some document.

( 3 ) Choice 2: "GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free"

This does not mean "without unmodifiable sections", it means "without additional unmodifable sections". FDL has always to include the license within the work. (I still do not know how to include the license within a binary easily. But as the FDL as GPL-incompatible anyway it perhaps makes such work-flows impossible, anyway).

( 4 ) Choice 3: "GFDL-licensed works are compatible with the DFSG [needs 3:1]"

That's even worse. We have non-free for non-free stuff some of our users might not live without. (Or think so). Foist non-free stuff on them will severly hurt them in the long run.

( 2 ) Choice 4: Further discussion

Don't forget this option. If you do not like choice 2 (perhaps because you think like me that it is almost choice 3), rank 4 above it. Otherwise with equally many [3214] and [1234] votes, choice 2 would most likely win.

So only rank 2 above 4, if you want to see 2 in action. Otherwise vote 4 over 2. (same with 3 and 4, but 3 does not look so innocent as 2)

[ 2 ] GFDL-licensed works are unsuitable for main in all cases
[ 1 ] GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free
[   ] GFDL-licensed works are compatible with the DFSG [needs 3:1]
[   ] Further discussion

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some. We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle. In the Q&A; period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6. I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word. My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool. At lunch, wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat. I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences. All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you. I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers! As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy! Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult! After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealh eow and charming akashayi who went off to dinner without me. Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss. I had a very good night.

I was up until 6 am last night working on the first video game I've written since back when I used my atari. It has a AFAIK unique concept that still meshes perfectly with a number of classic games. And it uses ascii art. More on that later, if I get it to a playable state. I spent a lot of time today looking at how d-i handles letting the user specify parameters to pass to kernel modules. This was partially broken for 2.6 kernels, and completly broken for udev. I've now cleaned it up in d-i svn to the point where I think parameters can be passed to modules in all possible cases. Oh and liw is not running for DPL after all which totally sucks. And I have a trip this weekend that will swamp all of this..

I recently bought a Samsung ML-2010, which is a nice laser printer for home use, and tried to set it up on Debian, only to discover that Samsung wasn't hip to my architecture, namely amd64/x86_64. It's no matter, their printer drivers still work, but you have to hack around a bunch of their checks. I'm documenting them here because I'd rather not forget when I reinstall, and it's probably useful for others to know about it. Step 1 - Install the necessary packages - In my case all I needed to install was ia32-libs, because I already had all of the other packages needed installed. The samsung tool uses cupsys, so you may need to install the cupsys package and it's dependencies. Step 2 - Unpack the driver - Get the driver from Samsung and untar it, producing a directory called "image" Step 3 - Hack around the glibc detection - The setup program is "smart" and tries to detect if there is a GLIBC with a high enough version. The bad news is that it uses the wrong version, because it is not familiar with the ia32-libs positioning of it. Luckily, it uses a script to do it's dirty work, so I just changed scripts/test-libc.sh to this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Test the Libc version and make sure it is > 2.0
#
exit 0

Mostly because I know that we meet the requirement of glibc > 2.0. Step 4 - Run the setup program directly - The setup script (script.sh) doesn't like to run on x86_64 architectures, because of it's architecture checking. This is annoying, so looking into script.sh, find the program that it runs and run it directly, that is, run ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/glibc-2.1/setup.gtk as root (it will be putting things in /usr/local). Step 5 - Add your printer to the setup utility - run /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config and add the printer. It's pretty straightforward, and actually follows the docs which Samsung gives out from here on.

Christian, so what do you intend to do presenting the following snipplet?

echo “wiggy -1” >>beers.txt

Does he owe you a beer now or do you want to take one away from him on the next possible occasion?

I’ve found this photomontage at the Chewie’s blog (hilarious) (the blog also, not only the photomontage) BTW, me and around 6 more people from Venezuela are coming to DebConf 6 in Oaxtepec. That if you don’t count David, of course. Everything can happen. Even some people are waiting for a last-minute Venezuelan government sponsorship… I was originally travelling with Colombian flag carrier Avianca in the itinerary CCS - BOG - MEX, but this was expensive, slow and uncomfortable for me to pay (the travel agency is in a city 2 hours away from Caracas) so I went to my plain-ol’-good travel agency in Caracas and found a special offer from Mexicana with a student fare. I have to wait until April to buy it, but it’s worth the wait. I now have my Venezuelan and Spanish passports, but someone told me that Mexico won’t take my old Venezuelan passport (the Country changed names, from Republica de Venezuela to Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela on 1999) since we have diplomatic problems with them, and also they told me that my Spanish passport won’t do for entering Mexico since I’m not travelling from Europe. So I have to request the new Andean Community Passport (links in spanish). See you in Mexico!

western, my Sun Ultra10 which I used to use as server/gateway/firewall, broke down last weekend. Since western had only one 9G hard disk which was getting full, I wanted to add another disk. The 80G disk that I had bought for my desktop turned out not to be needed (since there were 2 extra disks hidden in the machine anyway), so I added it to the Ultra. However, it didn't get detected; according to Philip, an Ultra10 has a PIO-only IDE interface, which may be the cause of the problem—it's not that unlikely that the newest IDE disks, such as this 80G one, do not support outdated transfer modes such as PIO anymore. So, I decided to take out one of the disks from rock, my desktop, and put in the 80G one instead. 40G is still plenty for a server which until recently had only 9G. Thank $DEITY for LVM Connected the 80G disk as /dev/hdd to rock, and ran the following commands:

rock:~# cfdisk /dev/hdd
[create a partition]
rock:~# pvcreate /dev/hdd1
rock:~# vgextend rock /dev/hdd1
rock:~# pvmove /dev/hde1
rock:~# vgreduce -a

Now shut down the box again, and remove /dev/hde. And no, the hde part is not a typo: rock has four IDE controllers. Meanwhile, however, I was noticing something peculiar about western: its external network card did not get a DHCP lease anymore, for some reason. That card was a 3com 905, with a slightly loose RJ45 connector; by unplugging or reconnecting the cable, it might be that I moved it a bit too much around and broke it. While it's a pity that I lost that 3c905, it's not really much of a problem: put in a different card, boot again, done. The Realtek ne2k-pci board that I put in next didn't work. It did get a DHCP lease, but it couldn't use the connection for some reason. Ne2k boards are crap, so it could be related. I put in yet another card, and booted the machine again, this time without replacing the cover (in case that card wouldn't work either). After it had been running for about 1 minute, the system suddenly shut itself off for no apparent reason. So I put the cover back on and tried to boot. After 10 seconds, even before silo was loaded, the system shut itself off for no apparent reason. I thought maybe it was the card, and even tried the 3c905 again. The system shut itself off for no apparent reason. It hasn't stopped doing that. I finally, on sunday evening, set up rock as a replacement server and put the 9G disk in there too, so that I could at least access the data and config files. But I'd love to get western to boot again. Stupid thing. Any hints are very welcome. Really. I'll even give you a Free Beer at FOSDEM if you give me the hint that fixes it.

Thursday, February 9th
My digital camera starts acting up, having strange behavior with the buttons.
Friday, Feb. 10th
I use HP’s web-based e-mail support to appeal for help with the borkenness.
I receive a response back in less than an hour giving a suggestion as to what to try.
I try this and it doesn’t work, so I respond with more information.
I am quickly informed that it may be a hardware problem and am offered a free replacement under warranty.
Sunday, February 12th
I receive a second reply because I hadn’t yet responded to the last one (busy that weekend).
Monday, February 13th
I respond with information at 4:08 PM and am called 20 minutes later for credit card information (in case I don’t ship the broken camera back).
Wednesday, February 15th
HP ships the replacement from Texas.
Monday, February 20th
The replacement arrives. Now all I need to do is drop the broken camera off at the UPS pick-up station at Staples and be done with that. Even has a pre-paid label. <3 HP.

Mike assumes that zlib is valgrind clean. In actual fact there are a number of cases where loop unrolling in the zlib library causes the mentioned “Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)” warnings. These are safe since the results of the comparison are subsequently ignored but obviously valgrind doesn’t know that. This is discussed briefly in the zlib FAQ. It is safe since the memory being read was allocated by zlib (so it knows the pointer is valid) and the results of the calculations are discarded by bounds checking done after the loop exits. Recent valgrind packages should have rules that suppress the spurious warnings from zlib, though I don’t know if the rules manage to cover all the relevant cases or not and obviously it is still possible to pass uninitialised data into zlib.

XSLT is an outright ugly language. Thats why I often just hate it. In some (rare) cases it's very elegant, but most often incredibly clumsy. I've been redoing my homepage completely, and I'm using XSLT to render my data XML files to the XHTML output. That works quite well so far, but I hit more and more special cases. First I wanted to add a language chooser. This required finding out which lanuages my document supports (read: blocks with that language attribute exist) and check for uniqueness. Some things where rather easy to solve (with some experience in XSLT), so where extremely ugly. First of all, I want my template file to be a valid XHTML file, I don't want to have any layout parts in XSLT. Then I have a separate sitemap, needed for generating the menu. So I have to process three documents at the same time in XSLT. Ouch. But doable, using variables. Basically I have three modes - in one mode, the template is mostly copied over, unless I've specified some special rule, e.g. to insert the page title, meta information or content. A second mode uses the current chunk of the template document as template for the contents a couple of times to iterate over data chunks from the data source file (read: put text blocks from my source files into the output template format). The third mode does the same for the sitemap. Unfortunately, it started to get even messier... Big problem number one: Make a list of the available languages for the current page. Make this information reuseable throughout the page transformation. Part one: make a list of available languages by finding unique (!) @lang attributes. (usual approach: grab all nodes with @lang attributes, check if they have the same node id like the first occurence with this @lang value for uniquness, then output. Ugly as hell, but string magic sucks as much.) Big issue number two: Assume we now have a variable with en in there, access these nodes to transform them. Unfortunately, the generated nodes are "result nodes", and you cannot iterate over them with for-each. Luckily the exslt node-set extension to solve this. But now came the third big issue along... this is where I give up. I want my pages to have a nice modification date... my data pages are stored in subversion... Subversion has keywords expansion like CVS, which I can use nicely to automatically update the last modification date of the file. Unfortunately, the date will look like this: $Date: 2006-02-15 21:29:10 +0100 (Mi, 15 Feb 2006) $ Whereas in a web page meta information it's recommended to use ISO8601. Now if I only had regular expressions and proper date handling functions... I guess I'll stop writing ugly, hackish XSLT code and chose pretty Python code instead. Maybe use TAL or KID for XMLish templating...