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!

Call For Papers for the 4th. World Forum on Free Knowledge is now released in english (non-official translation, sorry for mine) and spanish. The WFFK is a Community-organized Forum, made possible by the sponsorship of Government Enterprises and Private Enterprises, as well as Volunteers and Donations. The first was made in Caracas, on November 2004, in the installations of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, with the sponsorship of the Venezuelan Oil Company, PDVSA. The second WFFK was made in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala-India, under the name Free Software, Free Society in May 2005, and the third WFFK was made in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with the support of several Institutions, including PDVSA, CONATEL and serveral others. Impressed by the success of the 3rd. WFFK, a group of people is organizing the fourth, which will take place in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in October 2006. This is the first ocassion a Call For Papers is being done, because the Forum will have a Congress inside it, as well as selected articles. In the past, we only had selected articles and invited speakers on a certain basis. This time, a Call For Papers will also be done, so we can invite nice speakers to come and share with the attendance. Last time in Maracaibo we had David Moreno Garza with us, as well as several Debian Maintainers and Co-Maintainers with us, from Venezuela and Colombia: Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich, Polkan Garc a, Ernesto Crespo, V ctor P rez, Ana Delgado, Gerardo Curiel, Manuel Garc a, V ctor P rez and myself (am I missing someone?). So this was quite a MiniDebConf! Let’s make the 4th. a complete one

Quickstep.nixsys.be, the m68k/experimental buildd, was having issues the last few months, in that it intermittently dropped off the net. I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but seem to have found the problem now: I replaced the AAUI-to-RJ45 connector yesterday, and that seems to have fixed it. Did I say that hardware sucks, yet? Anyway, quickstep is now happily building away at packages in experimental again. The current package happens to be gcc-4.1 (as I force-fed that to it), so it'll take a while; but apart from that, everything should be fine. While I was at it, I changed the setup on jazz to point to experimental rather than unstable, too. Jazz is a 33Mhz machine (slightly faster than quickstep's 25Mhz), but only has 64M of RAM (which is a fair bit less than quickstep's 132M—don't ask). It also doesn't have much disk space (4G). I had set it up a while back when the backlog was huge and the need high, but its SSH key was never added to buildd.debian.org's config; as a result, it was just humming there, not doing anything useful. Since the experimental backlog is now larger than the unstable one, I just gave up waiting—it'll be helpful building stuff for experimental, too.

Well, finally! I've switched to Serendipity!

The best part: comment spam blocking that works. So to those of you that had trouble commenting on this site... try again. It should just work! (And I'm sorry you had to put up with the hassle so long.)

Serendipity is a very nice system. I'm glad I chose it. And the support from Garvin and the others has been great too.

I'm running 1.0beta2 and have found a few bugs, but nothing serious.

As I mentioned before, I wrote a tool in Haskell to convert posts, comments, and categories from Drupal to Serendipity. If you use darcs, you can fetch it with:

darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/unmaintained/blogcvt

The darcs-impaired may download a tarball.

Today i fetched some "new" hardware:
E420R Quad*UltraSPARCII 450Mhz 4GB Ram
E220R Dual*UltraSPARCII 480Mhz 2GB Ram
RS/6000 more details will follow later
and last but not least
an Compaq StorageWorks RAID Array 4100 FibreChannel wich i right now not know how to get it working (under debian)
i also have no more space or say it other i have more hardware than space for 19" Racks$ Does sombody from you have a really good working solution for:
Rebooting with command: boot
Boot device: disk0 File and args:
Trap 3e
0 ok boot
Boot device: disk0 File and args:
SILO Version 1.4.9
boot:
And then it runs i've tried this but this didnt help

I wrote the other day that I was considering Serendipity, and had a few concerns about it.

Those concerns have now been pretty well resolved.

I also looked at WordPress. It looked like it had more features, but the whole lack of a central plugin store bothered me. I'd have to scour all over the net to find plugins, and half of them are just on a random person's blog. Very few mentioned support for WordPress 2.0; most were for 1.5.

Then I looked at anti-spam options in both. The major anti-spam plugin for Wordpress had two big strikes against it, in my mind: it's not Free software, and it doesn't work with PostgreSQL.

I am really ticked off by webapps that only support MySQL. There is no reason not to support PostgreSQL (especially when WordPress itself does).

So I am going with Serendipity.

Now, I have to write a Drupal to Serendipity conversion tool.

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.” Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

I wrote the other day that I was considering Serendipity, and had a few concerns about it. Those concerns have now been pretty well resolved. I also looked at WordPress. It looked like it had more features, but the whole lack of a central plugin store bothered me. I'd have to scour all over the net to find plugins, and half of them are just on a random person's blog. Very few mentioned support for WordPress 2.0; most were for 1.5. Then I looked at anti-spam options in both. The major anti-spam plugin for Wordpress had two big strikes against it, in my mind: it's not Free software, and it doesn't work with PostgreSQL. I am really ticked off by webapps that only support MySQL. There is no reason not to support PostgreSQL (especially when WordPress itself does). So I am going with Serendipity. Now, I have to write a Drupal to Serendipity conversion tool.

I’m taking Rojo for a spin, mostly because of recent upgrades that add some interesting features, including a “sort by relevance” function that lives alongside the usual “sort by date”—a “personalized digg”, as some have called it. One thing I like about Rojo is that it’s a River of News style aggregator, which means all feeds get combined into a single stream that’s very easy to scan for interesting items, rather than serving as just another way of filling my inbox with stuff I won’t have time to read anyway (the “aggregator as an extention to the email client” model). With River of News style aggregators, it’s no big deal if you miss something, kinda like it’s no big deal if you don’t read every last article in the newspaper every morning. Trouble is, how do you make sure you read the most important stuff first, so in the event you don’t get through everything, the likelihood you miss something is small? “Sort by relevance” would appear to solve this problem nicely. Rojo appears to calculate “relevance” by analyzing a few things: What I read (i.e., what I click on), what I tag (either by giving it “mojo” or by tagging it in the Web 2.0 sense of the word), and what my contacts read and tag. That seems like a reasonable enough algorithm. Problem is: 1. most of the things I read Rojo doesn’t know anything about (they’re in my browser clickstream); 2. I already have about a year’s worth of tags accumulated at del.icio.us, and I have no intention of moving those tags anywhere else (ironically enough, because del.icio.us gives me the ability to do just that); and 3. I already have more social networks and contact silos than I know what to do with, and I certainly don’t want another one. So, Rojo’s new features are less interesting than they appear at first glance. Guess I’m going to have to continue doing without, either until I decide to dump all my stuff in one place (ahem) or until small pieces loosely joined evolves a bit further. Update: On second look, it looks like relevance is actually calculated by the total number of reads and tags rather than by the number of reads or tags by me or my contacts. Not sure how that can be called personalized, but I guess those are the words of others, not Rojo’s.

Because sometimes seeing it says it all :

• Yes this is my spam folder for the last 18hours (roughly).
• Yes the red lines are spam that went through my @debian.org address.
• Yes I'm a DD since a short time, so for most of us, I suspect it's 10 times as bad.

AFAICT, a big part of them directly come from verizon and other ISP address blocks, that a the clever greylisting/rbl use I described would just drop without any effort.

Voil ! In                                                       view, a humble
 vaudevillian                                                  veteran, cast 
  vicariously as both                                         victim and
   villain by the                                            vicissitudes of Fate. This 
    visage, no mere                                         veneer of
     vanity, is a                                          vestige of the
      vox populi, now                                     vacant,
       vanished, as the once                             vital
        voice of the                                    verisimilitude now
         venerates what they once                      vilified. However, this 
          valorous                                    visitation of a bygone
           vexation stands                           vivified, and has
            vowed to                                vanquish these 
             venal and                             virulent                   Remember, remember the 5th of November
              vermin                              vanguarding
               vice and                          vouchsafing the
                violently                       vicious and
                 voracious                     violation of
                  volition. The only          verdict is 
                   vengeance; a              vendetta held as a 
                    votive, not in          vain, for the
                     value and             veracity of such shall one day
                      vindicate the       vigilant and the
                       virtuous.         Verily, this 
                        vichyssoise of  verbiage 
                         veers most    verbose
                          vis- -vis an introduction,
                           and so it is my
                            very good honor
                             to meet you
                              and you may
                               call me
                                  V.

Yes, I've seen V for Vendetta today. Very impressing movie, highly recommended! Makes you start to think...

Google blogsearch would be nice (allowing you to sort results by date), if it weren't full of spam. It seems that spammers copy random content fragments from other webpages and put them into "blogs" to increase their pagerank. This makes you wonder if pagerank issn't something really really evil... Basically, by using pagerank, google makes spammers do ugly stuff like this linkfarming, guestbookspam and blogspam we've all come to hate the last few years. And rel="nofollow" doesn't really help much either. Spammers are too lazy to test for that attribute, they just spam. It would maybe be different if all links were "nofollow" by default, and web page authors actually needed to mark links as "good".

I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out. My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball. As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:

• No option to display the number of reads for each story. SF 1459385
• No tracking of HTTP referers (or, at least, no integrated interface for viewing them). SF 1459389
• Spartacus, the tool to automatically download and install new plugins over the Web, was broken. The netmirror.org site was unresponsive and the s9y.org site gave a 404 to it. SF 1459370
• It doesn't seem to offer an RSS feed for the comments on individual posts. SF 1459391
• There's no RSS feed for individual categories. SF 1167982
• Captcha support is built-in, but seems broken out of the box. (It rejected every attempt to post). SF 1459374

Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta. Next up for testing: Wordpress.

DIY Canadian farm-style, or “what I did this weekend.” First, you pack about ten people into the back of a pickup truck… …and walk through the fields… …to empty the buckets on the trees, spiles having been drilled previously. Back home, you cook in the ancient, homemade sap cooker (which was once an oil drum, long ago). Sometimes, you need to feed the fire. Make sure to keep adding sap when the level gets low, or when the pans threaten to boil over (overzealous fire feeders!). If you’re bored, you could always go exploring and fall through the ice on the half-frozen flooded field. Late afternoon is the best time to take advantage of the fact that boiling liquid kills bacteria, by sampling straight from the pans–with the same spoon. By now the sap’s thick enough to actually taste good. The day’s cooking is done when the sap’s about 60% sugar. (Damn, I don’t have a picture of the sugar-measuring gizmo.) The sap pans are unloaded… …into pots, to be brought inside and finished on the stove to 66% sugar. A more controlled environment, to prevent accidental burning/overcooking/sludgification. Which would be a Bad Thing. A fun weekend. It’s something I do just about every year (the farm belongs to my grandparents), but this year I managed to drag a couple friends along to slave have fun.

I'm joining the crowd who is giving up on ICQ. I'm receiving too much spam and too many strange authorization requests. I will continue to be available via Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo (thanks to GAIM for making it easy).

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.

I've been using Drupal for this blog for most of its life. However, I'm starting to be quite annoyed by several things:

• The Captcha module is seriously broken and opens up the door for various security problems
• The Spam module is there, and works mostly, but is not effective enough to keep spam down
• The badbehavior module is over-aggressive and doesn't work well anyway
• Spam becomes a serious drag on load of the server

So I'm planning to switch to something else. Something where blogging will be fun again, without all the hassle of tracking down spam. It looks like either Wordpress or Serendipity, and I'm leaning towards Serendipity for now.

Over the last 2.5 weeks I have built the complete Debian archive on a quad-core MIPS machine donated by Broadcom using the recently released version 4.1 of GCC. In parallel, I have done the same on an EM64T box donated to Debian by Intel. The purpose of this exercise was three-fold:

• Find out about compiler problems in GCC 4.1 itself as well as in packages that may fail with the new version before GCC 4.1 is uploaded to unstable. GCC, in particular G++, is becoming stricter regarding adherence to standards and packages may fail to build with 4.1 due to invalid code that was accepted previously.
• Find out about MIPS specific problems in GCC 4.1 and to answer Matthias Klose's question as to which platforms can move to GCC 4.1 as the default compiler once it is uploaded to unstable.
• Find MIPS specific assembler warnings and create a list of all users of xgot (a MIPS specific toolchain problem).

Executive summary GCC 4.1 itself appears to be very stable, both on MIPS and AMD64. There are, however, a large number of packages using code (especially C++) which GCC 4.1 treats as errors. Fortunately, most of them are trivial to fix. By compiling about 6200 packages, over 500 new bugs have been discovered and submitted, 280 of which are specific to the increased strictness of GCC 4.1. Patches for 2/3 of those GCC 4.1 specific bugs have been submitted. Based on my findings, Ben Hutchings has prepared a summary of the most common C++ syntax errors (that weren't treated as errors before G++ 4.1). Most common programming errors Basically, it all boils down to broken C++ code. There were a few bugs in C code, but the majority was in C++. The most common errors I found are:

• extra qualification
• reliance on friend injection
• wrong escape characters (e.g. "\.", most commonly seen in regular expressions)
• iterator problems (such as assigning 0 or NULL to an iterator)
• template specialisation in wrong namespace
• template reliance on a function declared later
• use of template's base class members, unqualified, where the base class is dependent
• use of assert without #include <cassert>
• dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict-aliasing rules (a warning) combined with -Werror

I've posted a detailed report to debian-devel. Acknowledgements (abridged)

• Broadcom for supporting our MIPS port through the donation of hardware to the project and developers. Without Broadcom, our little and big endian MIPS ports would have a hard time meeting the release criteria regarding autobuilders.
• Google for supporting my PhD, thereby allowing me to spend two weeks compiling the archive with GCC 4.1 and sorting out failures.
• Intel for supporting some PhD work which led to this experiment.
• Ben Hutchings for explaining many of the C++ bugs I found to me. I've learned more about C++ in these two weeks than I ever wanted to know. ;-)

Our @debian.org addresses are just too polluted. It's a fact, and nobody moves. It's really tiredsome. I happen to also be a co-admin on a mail server, that accepts almost 300k per MX, which is not very big, but quite big enough. I've written a little tool called whitelister. It's used in conjunction with postgrey that we use as a POLICY daemon for postfix. Basicaly, what it does is quite simple:

• it checks a lot of RBL (also possibly SPF, but my experience is that it's a very bad idea), and if the mail is clean for every R(H)BL it is configured to check, then it accepts the mail,
• else postgrey takes the relay, and do its greylist thing.

This approach has spectacular results: Edit: the same statistics on our backup/secondary MX The green area are the mails we accept for delivery (after the AV-checks and classicale anti-UCE-checks). The red line is the amount of messages that the bayesian antispam (bogofilter) marks as spam. Since our clever greylisting is up, the results are just unbelievable: we drop a huge amount of spam, without needing bayesian spamfilter or clamav or any CPU-intensive checks, so almost for free. The statistics we run show that a very few mails are actually submitted again (less than 20 per week), and most of them are spam anyway. And an analysis of the remaining spams shows that those are spam that come from redirections services (mail lists, @debian.org, ). We almost drop 99% of the spam that is submitted into the SMTP network through one of our MX's. For the record, we only use cbl.abuseat.org, dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net and dynablock.njabl.org. why doing it that way ? greylisting is all about creating a dynamic map of the SMTP queues of the planet. What I do, is only using RBL's that already exists to make that principle converge faster. Moreover, even if you use "bad" blacklists that have too many false positives, the greylist is here to let legitimates mails through. So basicaly, it combines two bad^[1] methods, to make a good one:

• RBL's already exists, and allow us to avoid the delays that greylist implies for most of the legitimate mail sources (and if a SMTP forwards spam, greylist won't save us, it's a SMTP, it will submit it again, so avoid to greylist it in the first place);
• the greylist saves the few errors the RBL can let you make, with a relatively small penality.

It's a win-win use. Conclusion I'd really like to see such a system be installed on our main MX's. @debian.org emails addresses are overloaded with spam (and 90% of the spam I receive, comes from my @debian address). btw, in a MTA like exim (that some of our MX use), a tool like whitelister is not needed. It's possible to achieve the same thing within the exim configuration files (but don't ask me how, I never used exim, I just know it's possible to do it). Is there anybody out there to support such an idea ?

Living with mricon I get exposed to the way the other half lives. One thing I've noticed is that the RPM tools automatically build extra -debuginfo packages that contain the debugging symbols for the binaries in the package, which gdb can use. I thought too myself "That's cool, why doesn't Debian do that?" Of course, after some research it's actually very easy to accomplish the same thing in a DEB. First step is just to add a dbg package to your debian/control file like so:

Package: giblib1-dbg
Architecture: any
Section: libdevel
Priority: extra
Depends: giblib1 (= $ Source-Version )
Description: debugging symbols for giblib1
 giblib is a library of handy stuff. Contains an imlib2 wrapper to avoid the
 context stuff, doubly-linked lists and font styles.
 .
 This package contains the debugging symbols for giblib1.

Then change your call to dh_strip in your debian/rules files so it looks like this:

dh_strip --dbg-package=giblib1-dbg

If you use cdbs then just add the line:

DEB_DH_STRIP_ARGS := --dbg-package=giblib1-dbg

These cause dh_strip to place the debugging symbols under /usr/lib/debug in the named package. Make sure you have debhelper compatibility level set to 5, as the semantics for the --dbg-package switch in 4 and earlier were different and weird. So add a -dbg package to your library or binary today!