My last.fm status is "subscriber", though I never subscribed. Interesting. I thought maybe it was a test subscription of one month for my birthday or so (which was less then one month ago), but why didn't I get any mail to tell me of this test subscription then? Weird. So if anyone "secretly donated" this subscription to me, please, don't. But who would do so without telling me? I'm happy with their free service... So if you insist on wasting some money on me, consider my amazon wishlist instead (though I don't really care much about that stuff either...). Well, maybe the "ad" message was just delivered to the spam folder. After all, there is still a "subscribe" button on the last.fm page.

I was quiet about it for a long time, but here it is: my first Summer of Code status report. For a bigger picture: I am working on a graphical front-end to the bug tracking system Debian uses. Well, at least I am supposed to work on it. First on my list was something else: a Gtk2 graphical front-end for the well-known bug reporting tool "reportbug", which might later be integrated somehow into Debian's Gnome environment. According to the list of milestones I created when I drafted the application in less than an hour (due to the deadline approaching) I need to release a first prototype of such a GUI today. It took more time than expected to work on it, so I have not yet started any work on the main graphical front-end. I started a few days later than expected, due to some delay until the approved applications were published and I also had to learn Python from scratch. This task was not too hard, but I am still often confused by the lack of consistency throughout the language. Compared to Ruby, a language I know reasonably well and in which I already coded much, Python has much more syntactic constructs for primitives and in my opinion this leads to a lack of consistency. But well, one gets used to it... There was once a "original" Gnome front-end, but it is discontinued since some years already. I did not look much at it, neither at the patch in the BTS which should basically bring it to the current Gnome2 libraries. To properly understand the hooks I need to provide for an interface plugin I started from scratch, only reusing the core idea of the old front-end: the use of the GnomeUI Druid. The new GtkAssistant is not yet ready to be deployed, being introduced with the upcoming Gtk 2.10 release. Still I have a weird feeling about the Gnome Druid, because I abuse it just to provide a consistent look. reportbug does not support backing up to a previous question, so the Back button is generally deactivated. I tried to modify core code as few as possible, as I have not yet talked with the reportbug maintainer Chris Lawrence. I will do so in due course. However after the old GUI front-end code was basically discarded (its usage is discouraged with a prominent notice), many changes to the core code did only take the text interface into account. (Well, I just suppose this, I did not do much research into reportbug's past.) So some tiny changes were needed to provide a few more hooks. There are, however, more to come, especially in connection with one input type (select_options, which could often be implemented as presenting a simple yes/no dialogue). The configuration basically works already, as seen below. What does not work are spawing the right editor and getting a filename from the user interface. But those are minor quirks and not too hard to fix. I need to develop in the open, as specified by the Summer of Code ruleset, and now I could do so, after about four rewrites of the GUI code. The main GUI loop is now in a thread, receiving commands from the main thread running the logic and sending the input back through a queue. (I used a pipe-based approach first, using an IO selector provided by glib, but it did not work well enough and this approach is far simpler.) So the current version is not vapourware, but there is still some more work to do to get it really usable. I will put my work into the Summer of Code Subversion repository as soon as the necessary access privileges are synced onto costa, an Alioth machine. Hopefully it will be merged into reportbug when I completely finished off this project.

Ok, after some hours, I managed to set up my first buildd (on i386 :( ). That was not so hard after all, but I would have loved a few more documentation.
Anyway, I plan to run a buildd on another sparc box, so I'll write some documentation at this moment. Yesterday eveni^Wnight, I filled up the wanna-build database with all Debian source packages. But... Doh! It seems it found its first FTBFS! What a lovely buildd!

Benjamin Seidenberg's Blog: New Anti-Spam Measures uses a simple maths test, which should work, but it produced a rambling SQL error for me. I emailed it as requested and got an error back saying Command died with status 1: "/usr/share/doc/spamassassin/examples/filter.sh" That may block all spam, but also blocks other mail, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. [links in permalink version]

This morning, I got one of these standard cialis/viagra/xanax/valium/whatever spam you get numerous times in a day, but with a “test xul” subject. Well, that’s targetted.

I'm terrible at the whole blogging thing, I've been back for two weeks and haven't found the time to summarize my time at DebConf. I had an excellent time. I met a lot of great people and even found a squash partner for the next DebConf. It was really quite unforgettable, so thanks to everyone involved.

Hanging out with sfllaw there, I was exposed to a lot more Ubuntu-esque things that I really had before. Some people there were quite unhappy about Ubuntu. To me, it's just not really that interesting, one because I don't see it as being substantially better or different from Debian and two because it looser stand on freedom. But hey, this is free software, people seem to like it, and I'm glad to see something related to Debian getting money and attention, rather than say RedHat or SUSE. I think a lot of developers would be happier with Ubuntu if it was just easier to ignore.

Then there was that dinner, and the events surrounding it. While I and many others won't miss Ted, I don't think he was treated at all fairly. Being thrown out in the middle of conference when seemly he did nothing wrong there was not very civil. If people could not stand to be around him, they did not have to be around him. He could have just as easily been removed from the project after the conference was over.

Enough griping though. If I came away with anything from the conference, it was a renewed vigor to work on Debian. Now if only my schedule would permit it.

I stumbled over CC Hits today, which looks like an interesting site with great potential. It's basically a digg-like site (implemented using ning.com, it seems) which doesn't list articles, but rather Creative Commons licensed songs. You can vote for the songs you like, just like you vote for articles on digg.com. The site seems to be quite new, and there's not too much traffic yet, but I imagine it could become a very useful resource to find high-quality Creative Commons music. Which is similar to what I'm doing with my Creative Commons music podcast (subscribe here, yadda yadda), and most of the other CC music podcasts do, for that matter. There's just too much CC music of varying quality out there by now — it's not so much a problem anymore to find some freely and legally available CC music (like it used to be a few years ago). It's more an issue of finding good music and/or music of certain genres you like... Anyways, I'm surely going to checkout CC Hits and use it to find new CC artists and songs for my podcast. Oh, and if you have any suggestions for more sources for good CC music, please leave a comment. </spam> Update 2006-06-05: On a related note, here's a song for all the geeks reading this: Code Monkey (MP3, 3.6 MB) by Jonathan Coulton, Creative Commons licensed, of course.

Martin F. Krafft blogged about how to rollback firewall changes in the case you managed to lock yourself out from the box It's even easier if you use my Pyroman firewall config tool. (apt-get install pyroman). If you run pyroman safe it will execute the new firewall rules - and if you don't type OK within 30 seconds, it will undo all changes. Note that it can also restore to a configuration set by a different firewall app. (It just restores the old iptables state and feeds it back to iptables - it will support anything your iptables version does.) Oh, and it's much faster than the other firewall scripts I've tested so far, since it doesn't spawn hundreds of iptables processes, but only one iptables-restore for setting the new rules in one transaction. Check the web page for other benefits; should just work on any Linux distribution with iptables and python (read: every). [Update: Martin, I was referring to the instructions you gave, to adding an at job and then running atrm to accept the changes. Yeah, what you script does is basically the same what mine does for rollback.]

Since I'm impatient and Robot101 didn't respond within ten minutes of me pinging him on IRC, I'm just posting the result of his request for a hackergotchi. Above is JPEG, but there's an XCF available too, with full transparency goodness, etc. Next time, it'd be useful to have a starting image where the head is bit more than 180x230 pixels since doing cropping and resizes and such tend to end with the image not being great. Also, my space bar is failing and I'll have to call IBM when I get home. I'm actually quite disappointed that I seem to have worn out the space bar in about a year and a half.

Well, I finally have a new laptop. Got it yesterday, spent about 3 hours installing and downloading all the software, and then let rsync run all last night to transfer over my home directory. Of course like any good Debian user I've filed a detailed installation report. I'm fairly pleased with the fujitsu p7120 so far. Compared to my old p1100:

• The keyboard feels larger, and the couple of keys that were moved around all make sense, except for delete. The right shift key is enormous, larger than that key is on a regular full size keyboard, and the other non-alphanumerics are also very nicely sized. Even the spacebar is larger than the usual laptop chiclet. I'd not realised how dead my old laptop's keyboard had gotten until keys started falling off; typing on this new one is just fun. Sorry for the length of the resulting blog entry..
• It runs a little bit hotter, but still seems quite nice for a fanless laptop with a fairly modern processor in it (1.2 ghz).
• The screen is much nicer, very bright. Was worried that it would be too reflective, but situations where it is seem rare. It's very nice to be able to see the screen outdoors; I'm writing this in direct sunlight.
• The touch pad is very small, but very responsive. I can't normally use touch pads and I wasn't able to consider buying this laptop until I got a chance to try it out at DebConf. With that said, the lack of a middle mouse button is very annoying, and I'm looking for some way to bind keys in X to a) paste and b) touch pad disable toggle. I'm still having significant problems with reliably dragging to highlight text too, about 10x as slow at is as I was with the old laptop's pointer. You don't realized how often you copy text around that way until it becomes easier to just re-type it.. The two mouse buttons are not very conveniently placed, their positioning makes it hard to do a one-handed click and drag.
• The case doesn't feel as solid as my old laptop's. It's also an inch longer, which makes it seem less safe to toss it in the bottom of my backpack and run around with it than the old laptop, which was basically an indestrictible little lump. All the other changes made to the case design seem like improveents, except they used a blue LED for the power indicator, which like all blue LEDs is too bright to be comfortable at night. I'll probably use some whiteout on it.
• The battery lasts 4.5 hours real usage without any tuning beyond cpufreqd, which is quite nice. I haven't felt the need to add in a bay battery yet; that battery should bring it up to ~11 hours.
• The drive is one of those new really tiny laptop hard drives, and it's whisper-quiet. I have to put my ear right on the bottom of the case to hear it.
• The speakers are quite a lot better (for laptop speakers). The internal dual microphone array seems to not be very sensative at all, I wonder how much work the windows drivers for it do in software? The keyboard sound controls don't work in linux, which is a pity.
• The fingerprint reader and card reader are the only bits not yet supported by linux. If you care about non-free firmware, only the wifi needs that.
• 3D works; I can finally try out most of the new games that have been written in the past 6 years or so. Whee..

(Sorry Robert, this is a meta-blog-post. Perhaps I should create a catagory for them?) Since being syndicated on Planet Debian, the amount of comment spam I’ve gotten has risen sharply. No spam has made it onto th site itself, since I moderate the first comment someone makes, but the emails have gotten annoying. Therefore, I put a turing test into place. Blind users will be happy to hear it’s not a CAPTCHA, instead it’s one more field to fill out that asks a very basic math question to prevent spambots from commenting. Users who registered back when I required it won’t even get the field, isn’t that nice?
To the readers of Planet Debian who are probably asking “Why Do I Care?”: If you don’t mind, try out the system to make sure it works. I figure the readership of that site will have a fairly diverse set of browsers and maybe even a few using accessibility ehancements that can confirm that the system has no problems. If you encounter any problems, email me at astronut@dlgeek.net or ping me on IRC (astronut on both freenode and oftc).

This email was sent from LiveJournal / Six Apart through Responsys. You are receiving this email because your LiveJournal preferences indicate you are interested in receiving LJ News by email. If you do not want to receive LJ news by email, please login and edit your preferences: http://www.livejournal.com/editinfo.bml

They don't. I never set a preference for it and there is no such preference on that page. And I could have read that on the front page or news anyway. WTF? Updated: Removed broken preformatting of the quoted text.

... in case you wondered, even when you've never even visited myspace, or are using lynx via some anonymization service, reject all cookies and so on: every profile page on myspace has a big banner saying "nickname is in your extended network". Well, if you consider the Internet your extended network that is true. Still that is bullshitting. What a marketing crap.

As you probably know by now: DebConf6 is over! It was an excellent event at a nice location with some amazing network details - such as 1.8km of cable to get all our areas linked into the local network, and having a fiber link into the tower - with 10mbit hubs. We would like to say thank you to all the people who helped to run and organize this conference, taking on tasks such as

• Getting the reception to do the right things at the right time
• Running our info desk, handling a very broad set of tasks
• Getting the local network running, including all the cables and wireless parts
• Getting the uplink running
• Maintaining the local servers and video machines
• Recording videos of the talks, workshops and BoFs
• Managing the sound equipment
• Streaming the videos to the world
• Printing name tags and food tickets
• Packing the bags for the participants
• Managing Talks
• Collecting food tickets
• Laundry management
• Translating Spanish to English, and vice versa
• Maintaining the schedule
• Taking people to the medical service
• Making T-Shirts
• Managing the Formal Dinner
• Tidying up
• Arranging a great day trip
• Translating texts
• All the tasks we missed to mention here but still got done

Additional thanks go to all the people who lent us their hardware, our sponsors for making the event possible in the first place (see the full list at debconf6.debconf.org), and to all the attendees who managed to keep on smiling even when things didn’t always turn out as expected.

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While we are at it: There is a central gallery for DebConf6 behind gallery.debconf.org. As it is open for everyone, just create a user there and send a little mail to gallery-admins@debconf.org to get your account activated. We would like to have this as a central point for all pictures taken at DebConf6 (and all prior / following DebConf-Events), so we would really appreciate if you can (in addition to your own gallery) upload the pictures from DebConf6 or all prior events you attended there.