This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

Yesterday, one user of whitelister reported me a bug. That made my day : this meant that there was actually users in the world that used whitelister, and thought it worth the effort to report a bug ! It motivated me to fix a couple of problems that I knew where there, and I released (and uploaded) a new version yesterday. I have to mention that whitelister will also soon be in production of a quite big mail system (even if not a FAI, we talk about MX that do more than 300k mails per week, which is not nothing). I have to mention that I also changed the license to BSD, I'm quite afraid of the direction the GPL is taking, and BSD is definitely better, spam is a too big problem, and if people want to do money with my idea, let them do it, if that can stop spam GPL has no sense at all when you don't plan to exploit the software yourself. When I'll release 1.0 (there is a couple of things I'd like to fix in how the configuration file is handled before) I'll try to give some public visibility to the project, because I really think it's based on a really good idea.

Dato^[1] has blogged about his reaction about the current positions agains GFDL in debian currently. My concern wrt GFDL is simple :

• documentation is vital for unexperienced users
• we, fellow Debian Devellopers are NOT unexperienced users, and often either know where to find that documentation (like the GCC one) or don't really need it (for the KDE/GNOME apps manuals, we just know or guess how to use them^[2]).

As a KDE packager, I would feel really sorry to have to prune any application manual, even ones without Invariants Sections. I'd like to remind some DD's that for some manuals, authors are not going to be found because they are not interested in Free Software anymore, or simply because they are dead. I know that discussions with the FSF are really going nowhere (at least not fast enough). But still, I really think there is some possibility to have a new version of the GFDL where the DRM and transparent copies problems would be gone. If we can have that, then since a lot of Authors use the classical licensed under the GFDL version 1.2 or (at your option) any later version we could accept in main any documentation that has no Invariant parts. Free Software is about giving to *every* users more freedom. This GFDL story looks like taking documentation away from the users that needs it the most. It's :

• an unfair choice
• made by people that can live without those docs (I don't have any GFDL doc installed on my system that I've used. those that may be installed, are here because of some dependencies, not because I requested them to be here)
• taking away the ability for some users to use their computer better, thus restricting their freedom^[3].

It's not about a firmware here, or any hardware driver problem that you can work around by buying supported hardware. it's about having or having no documentation at all.

I recently released whitelister and uploaded it to debian (ITP#312309). the major thing is the integration of the SPF as a new method to detect suspicious mail. It's nice, it blocks most of the spam coming from @hotmail.com addresses. Moreover, the source repository is endly public. it's hosted on the subversion repository :

  svn co https://svn.aaege.org/mailtools/trunk/whitelister/
  svn co https://svn.aaege.net/mailtools/trunk/whitelister/

and we have a trac set up (the wiki docs are in french, sorry) with :

• the whitelister page
• the whitelister source

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.

So I'm all booked up for DebConf. I felt very put out about missing all the sauna fun last year, so I made sure not to miss this time around. I wonder if there are sauna's in Mexico, or are they rather redundant.

So to all my Canadians friends, especially mricon, who have to stay here while I'm in Mexico for a week: So long suckers!

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.

Jamie, J rg may be right, but the thing with autoconf is much like X. autoconf's the second-worst build system; the tragedy is that everything else is tied for worst.

Geek Light You scored 39% geek!

Tastes great, less filling. You're the kind of geek that can pass under the radar of polite society. You probably like your computer, and can't go without checking your email. You live alone, or with roommates, and you have one or two hobbies that are considered "geeky".

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 62% on geekiness

Link: The What's your Geek Level? Test written by dingus93 on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Now that pphaneuf has returned from his journey to France, we have a lot more trouser dropping in the office. To convince people that we actually do work around here, I'd like to point out that I released WvDial 1.56. It has only one change, which is quite embarassing to have had to make.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

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!

I’ve got the tickets for the next meeting of the Spanish Cabal (NETSC). It is at the same time and place as Debconf6 (what a coincidence!), so I can kill two birds with one stone.

2006-05-13 12:30-17:15 MAD-MEX (IB6403)
2006-05-22 20:40-14:35 MEX-MAD (IB6402)

(There are also SQC-MAD and MAD-SCQ flights, but nobody’s actually interested in them. Or in the other ones, to be a realist, but I like to write stuff in my weblog.)

I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them. We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else. Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter. I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink. We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing. We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day. The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward. I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time. Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected. The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments. After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea. Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning. I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive! I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect. I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good. Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.

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.

Sometimes I worry about the mental state of Mallum. Under continued pressure, I'm caving in to his demands. Although I refuse to include the <marquee> tag. I'm sorry.

A little caveat. Find doesn’t seem to like symlinks. Since /media/cdrom is a symlink to /media/cdrom0, using /media/cdrom0 with find will work. I spent far too much time figuring this out.

frodo$ cd /media/cdrom
frodo$ find  pwd  -iname '*.jpg'
# hmmm, there are images here.
frodo$ find . -iname '*.jpg' # this works ...
./common/0.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec1.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec2.jpg
...

Another reason to sigh about this FHS /media schema.