Search Results: "will"

30 June 2010

Anand Kumria: Vodafone and Talktalk billing

Another day, another bill Like most countries, the UK has been valiantly trying to force consumers to reduce their paper usage. Let's set aside the fact that most paper is not generated by consumers. And that, it isn't about reduce usage but reducing expenses relating to delivery of this paper. Let's us also leave aside the fact that most airlines want consumers to print out their boarding cards at home. Because it reduces expenses incurred in maintaining staff at airport check-in counters. Anyway, most communications providers have taken up this challenge by making it more expensive to obtain a paper bill. But I don't want a paper bill, per se, what I am really after is a copy of the bill I can keep for my own records. And print if I so need to. Both Vodafone and Talktalk will send you notifications, via email, that you have a bill. But neither of them allow you to obtain a copy of the PDF that would have been printed and sent to you. Instead you have to fart-arse around with their systems to get (at best) a CSV file. Why, oh why, can neither of them just send the PDF that was going to be generated? That have a bill run process anyway, it generates the PDF, sends the emails, and then promptly discards the PDFs. That would mean I have an immediate archive of all my bills from both companies in my email. Just Broken.

29 June 2010

Marco d'Itri: DNSBLs and IPv6

From time to time I see people arguing that the wide deployment of IPv6 will force DNSBLs to significantly change their operations and semantics. Usually they have little or no actual experience with IPv6 and the main argument used to justify this view appears to be more or less "OMG so many bits!1!!!". I have no reason to believe that this will really happen. People are already sending mail over IPv6 and I expect that the same reputation mechanisms used for IPv4 will be deployed as soon as they will be needed, with small policy changes to cope with the fact that end users typically get a whole network instead of a single IP address. So I expect that DNSBLs will continue to operate as usual like they currently do for IPv4 addresses, optionally by promoting "single IP" listings to "whole /64" listings when appropriate.

Let's briefly categorize the common types of DNSBL listings: If anything, with IPv6 much less guessing is needed to know how large each customer assignment is, so some things will actually be easier for operators. (I have been using IPv6 for at least ten years and I have received email over IPv6 networks for at least five.)

Russell Coker: Play Machine Online Again with Xen 4.0

My SE Linux Play Machine [1] has been offline for almost a month (it went offline late May 30 and has just gone online again). It s the sort of downtime that can happen when you use Debian/Unstable. For a while I ve been using a HP E-PC (a SFF desktop system with 256M of RAM and a P3-800 CPU) to run my SE Linux Play Machine. I run it under Xen to make it easier for me to watch what happens. I ve had some problems with increased memory use in the Xen Dom0 in Squeeze [2]. The latest installment of the memory problems is when I discovered that I can t run two copies of tcpdump (for tracing separate interfaces) at once on a Xen Dom0 that has ~110M of RAM this seems unreasonable, I m sure that back when a big server had 128M of RAM I could have done such things! So now I m using a Thinkpad T20 with 512M of RAM for my new SE Linux Play Machine, it uses less power than most systems (probably even less than the HP E-PC) and is very quiet. I was forced to install on a new system when I broke my GRUB configuration. GRUB-2 in Debian currently has no support for generating a configuration that will boot a Xen Dom0. You can manually edit the GRUB configuration to get this working, but if you get it wrong then you can make GRUB not even display a prompt and force a reinstall (as I did). As an aside it would be really handy if someone would create a CD or USB bootable image that does nothing but install GRUB. Such an image would ideally allow replacing the configuration of an existing GRUB, overwriting an existing GRUB installation (all files in /boot/grub get replaced), or formatting a spare partition (default swap space) and installing GRUB there. My current solution to the GRUB problems is to use the old version of GRUB in the grub-legacy package. The old version of GRUB has always done everything I want so I don t seem to be missing anything by not using the new version. I m happy to refrain from using Ext4 for /boot and have no desire to have /boot on an LVM volume. Most of the month of down-time for my Play Machine was caused by bugs in the SE Linux policy I m developing for Squeeze, while they weren t difficult bugs I haven t had much time to work on them consistently. I m still running the Play Machine on Lenny, but the Dom0 is running Unstable.

28 June 2010

Steve Kemp: Because I don't trust myself with you.

Debian Packages
Every now and again I look over server logs and see people downloading random .deb packages from my mirrors, or from my servers, via wget or Firefox (rather than with apt-get/aptitude). Personally I don't often download random binaries even from people I believe I can trust. Instead I'll download source and rebuild. But it bugs me that somebody might download a work-in-progress, decide it isn't complete or otherwise good enough, and miss out on an update of awesome-sauce a day or two later. I suspect there is no real solution to this "problem", and that including /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ entries inside a binary package to "force" an upgrade behind the scenes is a little too evil to tolerate. And yet .. something something dark-side .. something something seductive something?
Blog Update
This is my last film-subject entry. In the future I will have more accurate subjects, albeit more dull ones. I still amuse myself with quotations, and before that the song lyrics, but I guess that now is a good time to call it a day with that.
ObFilm: Cruel Intentions

Aurelien Jarno: Debian and the ARM hype

Thanks to the versatility of the Linux kernel, Debian has always been known for supporting a large number of architectures. It has also often been criticized for that as it is said to slow down the development of Debian. Among these architectures, the ARM one was considered dead a few years ago, and some people wanted to get rid of it. Today all major distributions now have an ARM port, one of those distributions being even based on Debian. It seems Debian was right. Now that Android has been ported to MIPS, we may see more and more MIPS based devices. Will the same scenario happen again?

Russell Coker: Can you run SE Linux on a Xen Guest?

I was asked Can you run SELinux on a XEN guest without any problem? . In a generic sense the answer is of course YES, Xen allows you to run Linux kernels with all the usual range of features and SE Linux isn t a particularly difficult feature to enable. I do most of my SE Linux development and testing on virtual machines and until recently I didn t have any hardware suitable for running KVM, so in the last few years I ve done more SE Linux testing on Xen than on non-virtual machines. My SE Linux Play Machine [1] (which will be online again tomorrow) is one SE Linux system running under Xen. But the question was asked in the context of my blog post comparing the prices of virtual hosting providers [2], which changes things. Both Linode and Slicehost (the two virtual hosting providers that my clients use) provide kernels without SE Linux support, the command grep selinux /proc/filesystems (which is the easiest way to test for SE Linux support) gives no output. I am not aware of any other virtual hosting company that provides SE Linux support. If anyone knows of a virtual hosting company that runs Xen or KVM virtual machines with SE Linux support then please let me know, I ll write a blog post comparing such companies if there are some. For the people who work at ISPs: If your company supports SE Linux virtual machines then I would be happy to review your service, just give me a free DomU for a couple of weeks so I can test it out. If your company is considering offering such virtual machines then I would be happy to have a confidential discussion about the issues that you will face, while I am available for paid consulting work in this area I am more than happy to spend an hour or two helping a company that s going to help support my favorite free software project without expecting to be paid. But I have to note that if a dozen hosting companies happen to want advice I won t be able to provide two hours of free advice to each of them. I think that there is an unsatisfied market demand for SE Linux virtual machines. I don t expect all virtual hosting companies to support it in the near future, but this will make it more profitable for those that do. If for the sake of discussion we assume that 5% of sysadmins who are making purchasing decisions regarding virtual servers really want to have SE Linux support and if 5% of virtual hosting companies were to offer such support, then those hosting companies would almost double their market share as a result of supporting SE Linux. It s the usual economic factors relating to small companies that profit from providing good support for the needs of a minority of customers.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Wikimedia Scholarship 2009-2010

Folks at last year's Wikimania may remember the presentation I gave there. It was essentially a literature review of Wikipedia and Wikimedia scholarship from the previous year. The idea was to give a bird's-eye-view as well a series of highlights -- all aimed at Wikimedians. Apparently somebody found it useful because I've been asked to do it again! I'm going to be paired up in a longer session with Felipe Ortega -- whose excellent dissertation I summarized as part of my talk last year -- and Mayo Fuster Morell has also agreed to help out. Felipe is program chair for WikiSym this year and will be focusing on providing folks with a summary of the papers published at that conference. It will be held immediately before Wikimania in Gdansk. For my part, I'm going to be focusing more broadly and talking about papers published, well, anywhere else. And this is where you come in! With search engines and all, I've got a pretty good idea of breadth of the work that's out there. I also "just know" stuff from my own areas of interest and study. That said, I don't have as strong of an idea of what's good and what's relevant beyond what I can grok from citation counts. And after one year (or less!), that's clearly not very much information. As a result, I'm looking for suggestions or recommendations from anybody on interesting, useful, important, or otherwise noteworthy scholarly papers on or about Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects published in the last year. Feel free to leave a comment, email mako@atdot.cc, or edit this page.

Julien Danjou: M-x google-maps

Since I have started to use Org-mode, I though it was missing something to have appointment locations on a map. Of course, it's easy to get a LOCATION property from an entry, and then browse-url on Google Maps. But it is too easy for me, so once again I said: challenge accepted! I will bring Google Maps into Emacs! After several hours of work, the google-maps-el project shows a map! It fully implements the Google Static Maps API and the Google Maps Geocoding API. You can type M-x google-maps and type some place to see it marked on map. Of course you can do much more, as seen in the screen shot above. I've also completed all of this with a small org-location-google-maps which simply show a Google Maps' map for the location of an event in Org mode by pressing C-c M-l in an Org buffer or in the Org agenda.

27 June 2010

Filippo Giunchedi: using git-svn with rsync

From time to time I find myself using git-svn with projects using subversion, this is all nice and fine but it takes quite some time to do the ''initial import'' if you are doing it over a remote transport such as ssh+svn. One trick to speed things up is to use rsync to copy the svn repo locally and then ''git-svn'' it from your harddisk. The idea is originally documented at the allegro wiki For example a typical sourceforge project will be done like this: 
DESTDIR=/your/dest
PROJECTNAME=vde
PROJECTURL=https://$PROJECTNAME.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/$PROJECTNAME
SVN_COPY=$(mktemp -d)
rsync -c -av $PROJECTNAME.svn.sourceforge.net::svn/$PROJECTNAME/'*' $SVN_COPY
mkdir -p $DESTDIR
cd $DESTDIR
git svn init file://$SVN_COPY --rewrite-root=$PROJECTURL --stdlayout
git svn fetch
# ... git svn imports the repo ...
sed -i 's@url =.*@url = $PROJECTURL' .git/config
rm -rf $SVN_COPY
The important bit is to remember to update the url key after updating otherwise subsequent commits will go to your rsync-ed repo and not the original one!

Petter Reinholdtsen: LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI

The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is LUMA, which has proved to be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you are working with LDAP, give it a go. :) I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is released. I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use ldapvi for that. If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org. Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the gq package as a useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.

Matt Zimmerman: Navigating the PolicyKit maze

I ve written a simple application which will automatically extract media from CDs and DVDs when they are inserted into the drive attached to my server. This makes it easy for me to compile all of my media in one place and access it anytime I like. The application uses the modern udisks API, formerly known as DeviceKit-disks, and I wrote it in part to learn get some experience working with udisks (which, it turns out, is rather nice indeed). Naturally, I wanted to grant this application the privileges necessary to mount, unmount and eject removable media. The server is headless, and the application runs as a daemon, so this would require explicit configuration. udisks uses PolicyKit for authorization, so I expected this to be very simple to do. In fact, it is very simple, but finding out exactly how to do it wasn t quite so easy. The Internet is full of web pages which recommend editing /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf. As far as I can tell, nothing pays attention to this file anymore, and all of these instructions have been rendered meaningless. My system was also full of tools like polkit-auth, from the apparently-obsolete policykit package, which kept their configuration in some other ignored place, i.e. /var/lib/PolicyKit. It seems the configuration system has been through a revolution or two recently. In Ubuntu 10.04, the right place to configure these things seems to be /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority, and this is documented in pklocalauthority(8). Authorization can be tested using pkcheck(1), and the default policy can be examined using pkaction(1). I solved my problem by creating a file in /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d with a .pkla extension with the following contents:
[Access to removable media for the media group]
Identity=unix-group:media
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.drive-eject;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount
ResultAny=yes
This took effect immediately and did exactly what I needed. I lost quite some time trying to figure out why the other methods weren t working, so perhaps this post will save the next person a bit of time. It may also inspire some gratitude for the infrastructure which makes all of this work automatically for more typical usage scenarios, so that most people don t need to worry about any of this. Along the way, I whipped up a patch to add a --eject option to the handy udisks(1) tool, which made it easier for me to test along the way.

Neil Williams: Switching from iceweasel to chromium

I've grown tired of the firefox/iceweasel memory hog for a couple of reasons:

Chromium is just faster, everywhere. A nice touch is the new tab behaviour too - previews of the most recently viewed pages is far more useful than the usual homepage. Chromium is also faster than epiphany/webkit.

I'll still be using two different browsers, because neither iceweasel nor chromium can do the clever smart bookmarks thing of epiphany. I have come to utterly rely on bookmark input boxes for direct access to specific Debian bug numbers, individual PTS pages, Google searches, dwww searches, specific manpages, buildd reports and various other pages where a bookmark really needs to be an input box, not a label, and the bookmark itself sits on a toolbar and can then use http://url/%s which makes life so much easier.
Update
I wondered if epiphany smart bookmarks would be understood but apparently not. So:

The smart bookmarks are BTS, Google, PTS, buildd and man. At work, I've got a wider screen and I add several more for internal bug tracker numbers and similar.
Chromium and iceweasel/FF have nothing like this. Entering a bug number is utterly trivial - it even works with middle mouse button paste which, cleverly, opens the page in a new tab too. Iceweasel/FF can do this ONCE but only once, via an extension. The key points with epiphany are:

So, yes, Leo, the way epiphany does this is massively more effective for a "work-type" browser situation where there is such a need to access a specific page immediately, with no editing or keyboard usage.

Leo 'costela' Antunes: Re: Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium smart-bookmarks

Neil Williams recently commented on the lack of smart-bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium and since the post doesn t accept comments, counter-post FTW.
Maybe I didn t understand exactly what was meant, but I m personally trying to see the advantage of having a smart-bookmark sit on the toolbar as opposed to just being a used via a label. Both FF/IW and Chrome can do the label thing, where you bookmark something like http://bugs.debian.org/%s with a shortcut like bugs and can then simply Ctrl-L to the address bar and type bugs 999999 . Done.
Can the way Epiphany does this be more effective? (actually this is the way Galeon did it way back then and I used to love it before I found out I could be way quicker with the keyboard+shortcut thingy. Not to mention having less clutter in the toolbar.) And granted: Chromium s interface doesn t allow the editing of this shortcut and they only work when imported from FF/IW, but I expect this to be fixed eventually. Doesn t make much sense to have such a hidden feature. [UPDATE: nevermind. As handily pointed out by Chris Butler, you can edit the shortcuts under Options Basics Default Search Manage. It might not be the most intuitive of places to put it, but it's there.] As for the rest of the reasons for switching mentioned in the original post, I can certainly see where they re coming from. No real solid counter-arguments there.

26 June 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: Welcome, DebConf newbies!

and the newbies are ... A long time ago, in a couple of blog posts far far away, we have introduced the DebConf Newbies initiative. I'm hereby happy to announce the actual DebConf newbies and I'm looking forward to meet them at the forthcoming DebConf10 in New York City:
  • Jonathan Wiltshire
  • Jon Bernard
  • Arnaud Fontaine
  • Ben Armstrong
  • Arthur Loiret
  • Serafeim Zanikolas
  • Andreas B. Mundt
Now, folks, please be kind with them, they (still) don't know how crazy we can be(come) during DebConf. Above all: do not harm them (too much) at Mao. In exchange, they have already promised that they will fix all RC bugs that will still be open at the beginning of DebConf10 (or maybe I've just read that in their minds, I don't quite remember ...). Does that mean that DebConf10 travel sponsoring is completely OK as of now? No, not really. This initiative was specifically targeting DebConf newbies, but several DebConf "regulars" are planning to attend too. For some of them the amazing DebConf sponsoring team has already found enough resources to secure their travel sponsorship, for quite some others it is not the case yet. This is a pity, because we know from the past that having more Debian folks at DebConf means more hacking, a better distribution, and a better community, ultimately it means a better Debian. Some of the readers of this blog post will be in the condition to improve the situation: it is as simple as donating to Debian or, better, becoming a DebConf10 sponsor by simply mailing the sponsoring team.

25 June 2010

Steve Kemp: Good morning, Bastian

So previously I introduced the idea of my image-tagging system. There seemed to be at least a little interest. So here's a brief introduction and real update. There is a command line tool, itag, which will index the UserComment field from a hierarchy of JPG files. (This field is compatible with digikam, by happy accident). Additionally there are a pair of GUI tools, both very nasty in terms of code quality and extensibility:
itagview
This presents a list of all the tags which are found, (by invoking "itag --tags"), and allows you to view thumbnails of all images with a single specific tag. Double-click to launch the image full-sized.
itagger
This is a GUI tool which will present thumbnails of all images beneath a given directory, recursively, and allow you to enter tags either on individual images, or on multiple ones. This doesn't update the DBM cache file that itag uses though, so you'll want to re-run that aftward.
Anyway enough pimping, if you like the sound of it visit the itag page. If you're optimistic, abhor reading, and just wanna play then there is an itag package for Lenny. Patches welcome, especially to the nasty Gtk2 code... ObFilm: The NeverEnding Story

Luke Faraone: Hello, (Planet Debian readers of the) world!

I m a Debian Maintainer currently undergoing the New Maintainer process. I m also an Ubuntu MOTU as of recently. I have several packages in a variety of categories, but I specialize in Python-based software. I m interested in exploring more ways to improve cross-distribution coordination, specifically as it relates to the Debian Sugar packages. I m working to get all of the Ubuntu-specific Sugar packages included in Debian, which will probably be a summer-long effort.

Anand Kumria: Barry Munday

Barry Munday
This is a fairly classic coming of age story involving an unwanted pregnancy. Like the others in this genre, it has a twist (in this case neither of the parents are teenagers, like Juno) but revealing it would give away much of the plot. Oddly this film was finished in 2008 but has taken two years to surface. Apparently the first cuts just did not work. So it was redone a few times. I am glad that the extra time was done, since this film feels "right". Patrick Wilson, from Watchmen, is perfecly cast as Barry. The other big names make this a delight to watch, as they put in a comedic turn. There are quite a few cringe worthy moments, especially when Barry is being his pick-up artist self. But he evolves and makes the film warm-hearted. If you end up seeing this film, I think you'll enjoy it. It won't challenge you but it will entertain.

Anand Kumria: Beginning Django Development

Oddly, I have had four different people ask me about the best way to begin a Django project or setup their system to make it easy to develop with Django. Since I've now given my response via email so many times, I figure I might as well broadcast it and hopefully this will help others as well My assumptions:
  • Using Linux (or a Unix machine)
  • Single developer with root access (quite possibly a laptop)
  • Knowledge of DVCSes (e.g. git / hg / bzr )
What we will do is create a private binary directory and another Python modules. Then take a checkout of the two most important Django projects, and make them work. First: create your user 
$ sudo adduser newbie
$ ssh localhost -l newbie
$ whoami
newbie
Then we want to create some local bin and lib directories. First the binary directory $ mkdir ~/bin # On Ubuntu/Debian, this will automatically be in your PATH the next time you login And now a local directory for our various libraries 
$ mkdir -p ~/lib/python
$ echo "PYTHONPATH=~/lib/python:" >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo "export PYTHONPATH" >> ~/.bashrc
This will add that directory to our Python path. If you happen to also use another language you can put things into ~/lib/ruby, ~/lib/perl as appropriate 
$ mkdir ~/Projects
$ cd ~/Projects
Here is where we will store copies of upstream software. What is the reason for using the repositories rather than packages? This allows us to checkout specific versions to match what our clients might be using. Or test things against newer versions of the upstream project. First, let's setup Django. I tend to use git by default, especially if the upstream is using Subversion. If they are using Mercurial or Bazaar, I use those directly. 
$ git svn clone -s http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/newbie/Projects/django/.git/
Using higher level of URL: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django => http://code.djangoproject.com/svn
r1 = 5cda37203ffa6ea83da2958a95c377984482877f (refs/remotes/trunk)
	A	django-docs/images/flatfiles_admin.png
	A	django-docs/images/users_changelist.png
	A	django-docs/model-api.txt
	A	django-docs/build.py
	A	django-docs/db-api.txt
	A	django-docs/writing-apps-guide-outline.txt
	A	django-docs/templates.txt
r2 = b8249ac45e2154933b9649fd8181d5769e31c9fc (refs/remotes/trunk)
	A	django/utils/feedgenerator.py
	A	django/utils/datastructures.py
[...]
r13399 = f3902c67a3b8788de2145899e435a394c512b455 (refs/remotes/releases)
	M	tests/regressiontests/m2m_through_regress/tests.py
r13400 = cd72207306a5a4eecdf07f65c109f37c8317ed81 (refs/remotes/trunk)
$
Now we have Django, push it into our python path 
$ cd ~/lib/python
$ ln -s ~/Projects/django/django/
$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:57:41) 
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> django.VERSION
(1, 2, 1, 'final', 0)
Now, let's do the same for South. South is a database migration helper for Django. These are the two things you want to have in any Django at a minimum. There are also plenty of other amazing things like haystack, piston, satchmo, etc. You can follow the same recipie for them too. 
$ cd ~/Projects
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/andrewgodwin/south/
destination directory: south
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 802 changesets with 1340 changes to 183 files (+1 heads)
updating to branch default
143 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd ~/lib/python
$ ln -s ~/Projects/south/south
$ python 
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:57:41) 
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import south
>>> south.__version__
'0.7.1'
Finally, we want to be able to create Django projects. There is a great helper called django-admin that will do this. Let's put it into our path 
$ cd ~/bin
$ ln -s ~/Projects/django/django/bin/django-admin.py
$ hash -r
That last statment will cause your interpreter to re-read PATH and make anything new available for execution. Now, you should go ahead and create your projects. There are a variety of ways to do this. However what I like to do is keep Django applications separate from the Django project. That way, they can easily be re-used if required. So, for a project called 'foo', we might have 
$ mkdir -p ~/Work/foo
$ cd ~/Work/foo
$ mkdir foo.example.com
$ mkdir templates
$ mkdir media
$ mkdir <individual apps>
For each individual app, put them into the Python library. And you then have your re-usability from within Django. For a application called 'bar', you would do: 
$ cd ~/Work/foo
$ django-admin.py startapp bar
$ cd ~/lib/python
$ ln -s ~/Work/foo/bar
And now, in your Django foo.example.com setting.py's file you can put 'bar' as one the installed applications and things will Just Work Obviously there are many way to slice this particular mango, but I've found that this works pretty well for me. You can spruce it up by revision controlling each directory in your project (I do) and also take advantage of things like virtualenv and Fabric to make deploying just as easy as developing. But I'll leave those topics until a later date

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Reorganization of my blog, please update your feeds

Up to now I had a single blog hosted on ouaza.com, I used to blog in French and in English on many topics, even though free software and Debian was the main topic. Sometimes I avoided blogging on something because it would not really match the expectations of my readers (and of the various planets syndicating my blog). And I have always been annoyed by the fact that English readers were second-class on my blog because everything was configured in French. So I decided to fix this once for all, I have created two new blogs in addition to ouaza.com. The latter is now my private blog (in French) with everything that is not free software related. And free software will be the topic of my 2 new blogs : I have setup some HTTP redirections on various feed URLs but if you were subscribed to my main feed, you re now redirected to the new English feed and you might want to subscribe to the French one to continue reading my articles in French. In any case, you might want to update the feed URL that you used. I also profited from this reorganization to switch to WordPress 3.0 and the 3 blogs are hosted on the same installation thanks to the new multisite feature and to the domain mapping plugin. The main regression in those changes is that I m back to the (new) default theme of WordPress with the standard header image. I would like to personalize them but I have no graphics skills but if you do and would like to work on this for me, please get in touch. I ll make sure you get your pony in return. :-) More changes concerning those blogs are in the pipe but that will be the topic of other posts. Thanks for following ! Flattr this Share/Bookmark No comment

Matthew Garrett: In better news

The GNOME Foundation released their conference speaker guidelines today. This is an important step not just in helping speakers know what's acceptable, but also in helping audience members understand in advance what the community is likely to find objectionable and ensure that they can feel comfortable in raising concerns.

Of course, guidelines mean little without enforcement. My original draft of these suggested that event runners be able to stop presentations if they felt they were gratuitously in breach of the guidelines. Opinions on this were fairly strongly split, with several people concerned that this effectively allowed individuals to immediately shut down presentations with little oversight. That's a genuine concern, but it does seem to assume bad faith on the part of conference organisers in a way we've rarely (never?) seen. On the other hand, conferences in our field have endured presentations that have contained offensive material from start to finish. If an offended individual is in a minority then it's not easy for them to potentially challenge the audience by vocally expressing their unhappiness, and even standing up and leaving may be a difficult and obvious act.

But I don't set the behavioural standards of the community, and attempting to enforce standards that people don't agree with isn't going to fly. Some people are likely to feel that even the level of enforcement suggested is an unwelcome intrusion into free discussion of some topics, so I think this is a good compromise that is a great signal for our unwillingness to accept inappropriate presentations. With luck we'll see other communities enact similar guidelines and we can come to a broad consensus that covers the majority of our conferences.

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