Search Results: "ana"

7 February 2006

Clint Adams: Bah

I had to release zomg 0.1.3 because last.fm started sending
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
where it had been previously sending
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Zak B. Elep: Whirlwind < 48h Manila Tour

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog ;) Here are the highlights of my trip: I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too :D Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Finally, a fully fixed feed (almost)

So after much swearing at things, and some musings on #debian-devel, I've managed to mostly unfuck my blog's feed. [Valid RSS] The problem came down to my recent fiddling with Blosxom's RSS flavour, in an attempt to get the RSS feed to be encoded in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1. I created a content_type.rss file in my flavours directory, and put in it text/xml; encoding=utf-8, which had the desired effect of influencing the encoding, but then caused Blosxom to stop escaping all the HTML tags as HTML entities, which rendered the feed totally bogus. If I ditch the ; encoding=utf-8 part, the escaping problem goes away, but then the encoding is no longer utf-8. Smells like a bug to me.

Eric Dorland: Firefox 1.5.0.1 and bug triage

I've just uploaded firefox 1.5.0.1-1 to unstable, it contains a whole bunch of fixes, quite a few from my Ubuntu counterpart Ian Jackson. I can only hope that it continues like this, it will mean good things for Firefox in Debian. I also spent way too much time on Sunday doing routine bug triage, cleaning out old junk, etc. We're under 300 bugs now! Which is still a depressingly high number, but is more manageable and probably unavoidable with such a popular package. Just hope it never gets above 300 again.

Clint Adams: He wore a hat

It was wintertime somewhere in the Ozarks, in the days before the Soft Scape. A young boy named Timmy was born unto a poor family that already had one son. When that brother was killed in an accident, the parents boxed up all his possessions and hid them deep within the attic, not wishing to be reminded of his former existence. Some said that it was the only healthy option open to them, and some said that it was an ill-fitting tribute. In any case, Timmy barely even found out that he had had a brother, and any memories he developed of him were false. As Timmy grew, he sprouted hair, and learned to speak, and learned to pray. Every night, before going to sleep, he petitioned God, Please keep mommy and daddy safe. If he had had a brother still, he would have prayed for him too. The years went by, and Timmy went to school, and someone surprised him with the claim that he had once had a brother. He asked his parents about this when he got home, and they rather loudly instructed him not to discuss such things. He dropped the matter, but remained perplexed and afraid to ask any more questions. It was a long time before his explorations of the attic yielded the discovery that precipitated a great big scene. When his father saw that he had retrieved some of his brother's possessions, he beat him, and his mother screamed that if he ever went up to the attic again, she would cut off his pee-pee , and everyone was upset for quite some time. Mistaking this parental love for abuse, he drew away from them, and began to wander and drift. In the summer of his fifteenth year, he learned that love was a hobo's hand. Then, that winter, he left his parents' house for the last time. Finding himself overwhelmed by the eternal struggle for food and shelter, he started turning tricks for small change. This proved to be a dangerous occupation, and Timmy's life was rife with anxiety for quite some time. Presently, Timmy came to a little town, and in that little town lived a fireman and his wife. The fireman felt that it was time to experiment, and and inquired if Timmy would accomodate him. Timmy was more than happy to oblige for a reasonable fee, and the fireman was more than happy to continue to pay it. His wife was less than happy about the whole affair, for she felt that it reflected poorly on her as a woman, and she feared that if word got out, she would be the laughingstock of the town. Timmy was unconcerned with such issues. Some said that he was morally bankrupt, and some said that he was a practical businessman. In truth, though, the money became utterly unimportant to him, as he spiraled toward a psychotic breakdown. He had developed a fantasy wherein the fireman would leave his wife and take Timmy away, maybe to somewhere like Alabama, where no one would oppress them. As he obsessed and clung to this dream, he pulled farther away from reality and other human beings. The fireman was relatively unconcerned, but the fireman's wife grew more worried by subtle nuances that she noticed over time. You must stop this! she insisted. Give me my space! he insisted. The ongoing argument devolved into citations of marriage vows and Biblical passages, which were conveniently inconclusive. The fireman's wife was a God-fearing woman, and she knew that she could not violate 'til death do us part without being struck down, and that she could not invoke the old 'til death do us part loophole without violating thou shalt not kill and being likewise smitten. Thus she was at an impasse. Some said that she was a victim of a bad situation, and some said that it was her own fault for letting it happen. Timmy's relationship with God was much more complex, though now almost completely forgotten. He had also almost completely forgotten the existence of the fireman's wife, else he might have thought to plot against her. This memory lapse was abruptly corrected when the fireman's wife threatened Timmy. Timmy was upset and distraught and threatened her back. The fireman announced that he was tired of them both, and moved to Alabama on his own. Some said that it was irony, and some said that it was an owmen of things to come.

6 February 2006

Lars Wirzenius: Debian: What kind of DPL?

The nomination period for the Debian Project Leader is on again. This means that the Finnish winter is at its worst, and indeed, as I write this, it is -22 degrees Celsius outside. The sun went down about six hours ago; I woke up quite late, so I only saw half the sunset. Back in November, while vacationing, I spent some time thinking about what the role of the DPL is, and now seems a good time to say it. The actual work of developing and maintaining Debian is done by package maintainers, translators, a handful of infrastructure teams or other special purpose teams, bug reporters, and others. It is not the job of the DPL (in their role as DPL) to take charge of the actual development: the DPL is not expected to administer debian.org machines, to fix RC bugs themselves, or to make decisions about release management. Instead, the DPL's job is to help everyone else do those things. If some part of project isn't working well due to resource shortage, or personality conflicts, or other issues, it is ultimately the DPL who needs to facilitate, mediate, or otherwise deal with it. This is not uniquely the DPL's job: any Debian member could step into a situation and help, but the project does need someone whose job it is to do that if no-one else will or succeeds. Another important job of the leader (again not uniquely) is to provide inspiration. Our leaders in the past few years have provided fairly little of that. I would like us to have a DPL that inspires the project into setting and achieving goals that make us happy and make Debian the best operating system ever. The important thing is to inspire, not to force, cajole, or otherwise unilaterally decide. Not quite sure now how that should happen. Perhaps the Finnish military saying that "leading is best done at the front" is applicable: an inspiring DPL is one who by his own work, and his own behavior, shows by example what a good, productive member of the Debian development community is like. A third important job of the leader is to be the project's public face to the rest of humanity. Again, not uniquely, we have other members who are often prominently in the public eye, such as release managers or security people, but the DPL is the main such public face. And finally, the fourth important job of the leader is to do the tasks assigned to him in the Debian Constitution. These are not daily tasks, but they're important, and these, at least, are uniquely the DPL's domain.

Steve Kemp: When the man comes around

SCO
I spent the weekend finding discovering several new ways to hate SCO Unixware. Almost everything on these systems is a symlink. Even such files as /etc/passwd:
$ ls -l /etc/passwd
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          38 Jan 27 13:44 /etc/passwd ->
 /var/opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/etc/passwd
Needless to say if you manage to screw up these symbolic links then fixing it is painful. (At one point I resorted to using tar to archive a working system’s directories, then unpacking it over a broken installation.) So a busy weekend full of being in the office.
Debian
In happier news I played around with webcam stuff, after somebody posted a nice guide to using Motion. I now have a webcam upon my desk which records video when something moves in front of it, and otherwise does nothing. A few test movies seem to work nicely (no audio) and I shared one with a friend - although no feedback yet. (I need to make sure the codec is playable upon Windows ..) I also updated the polls upon the Debian Admin site, so they contain date information about when they were posted. Feel free to suggest a new poll topic! The final thing I did over the weekend was put the finishing touches towards a new release of xen-tools. This contains a minor fix for networking under Xen 3.0.1.

5 February 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: On homosexuality Listening to some recordings of ...

On homosexuality

Listening to some recordings of the Howard Stern show got me thinking about homosexuality. I try not to have any prejudices, so I tried to view this phenomenon from a purely logical point of view with as little external data as possible, so help me if I'm wrong.

Close relationships between two persons are generally understood to contain four separate components: sex, legal matters, social matters and romantic matters.

First of all it is said that, while the percentage of homosexual people is low, many heterosexual people have had some kind of homosexual experience either as an experimentation or as an accidental exposure. It also is believed that if the person in question is not physiologically repulsed by the concept (i.e. homofobic) then they can experience sexual pleasure regardless of the gender of the partner, number of partners or even absence of such. In all we can basically conclude that while homofobia is a sexual disorder (it disorders sexual function), homosexuality is not about sex at all.

The legal perspective is very inconclusive - in some parts of the world even having homosexual relationships can be illegal, but in other parts of the world homosexual marriages are not uncommon. Also all the legal stuff is there to help people that can not help themselves, especially minorities. So the legal part should be all for the equalising homosexuality to heterosexuality unless that does direct and irreparable harm to the society (which it seemingly does not).

From social perspective homosexual couples look to be living the life very similar to the heterosexual couples - there are some that are going wild and there are some that honour strong and stable relationships for decades and love to go to theatre. It could even seem that homosexual people tend to have a higher percentage of creative people and intellectuals.

The only think left is love. Call it a quick romantic encounter or a the love of the lifetime, but that seems to be the major descriptive difference with homosexually oriented people - they just fall in love with types of people that tend to be of same gender as themselves. It could be related to behavioural predispositions or differences in hormonal perception, but ultimately we do not know enough about love to fully understand that difference.

So at this point I can only conclude that until we understand all the hormonal processes and that "love" thingy, we could just as well start counting homosexual males and homosexual females as two additional genders that can not be fully understood by other two genders, just like men can not fully understand women and the other way around. This difference is as real and as effective as the difference between male and female genders or (stretching the analogy a bit too far) like the difference between races and should be honoured just as much as these differences are honoured.

And now I coin the terms "omale" and "ofmale" as the new homosexual male and female gender descriptors and "oman", "omen", "owman" and "owmen" as terms for single homosexual male, multiple homosexual males, single homosexual female and multiple homosexual females respectively.

Andreas Metzler: things I did not know ...

I have just learned that Linux imposes a limit not only on the lenght of the commandline (ARG_MAX) but also on the number of arguments. xargs in findutils 4.2.26 features a fix to respect this limit. I do hope this was the source of bug 313028 which I never managed to reproduce.

Andreas Metzler: meme time

Hmm, I cannot resist following up Clint's and Jaldhar's have you read geeky books"-meme. I "score" 10/20 on the first list, but only 4.5 on the second one (Stephenson _again_, Pynchon, Tolkien, Lem and "Through The Looking Glass.) BTW reading now: Chronicles of Narnia, next in queue Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten.

Erich Schubert: On window placement

John Williams, of GNOME fame, recently blogged on window placement as part of his "things about gnome that suck" series. Well, I basically agree with him - but he doesn't propose a solution. Devil's Pie isn't a solution, because it's not configurable by the average user. Or even by me, I failed to have it tell apart my terminal windows and use a sane placement for them. Just remembering the last window position doesn't work either - I'm annoyed by this "feature" by nautilus, for example. I tend to have a default position for my windows, by I occasionally have to move them away, and I do not want to have them reappear at this different position ever. My personal approach basically is to run all windows (except my terminals and popups such as IM windows) fullscreened, on dedicated desktops. Even the IM windows are usually on my "IM & Chat" desktop. This works really well, especially since I keep my terminal windows open all the time, and the default placement to minimize overlap works fairly well. Still I couldn't specify a general rule how any window manager could learn where to place my windows... so just complaining that Gnome doesn't do this good isn't all - we need to find a way to make this work just fine without the user noticing... I don't know about OSX - how does this work there? In windows it definitely is horrible. When you watch windows users, you'll often see them stating their Internet Explorer, then clicking on the maximize button. All the time.

4 February 2006

Kevin Rosenberg: Console Password Manager

I'd been looking for a fairly secure way to store an increasing number of passwords. There's a large number of methods one can use. While the most secure might be an encrypted file on a system that has no network access, I do want to have access to the information over a network while I'm traveling. Remote access makes using a graphical client a poor choice. After a moderate search and trying a number of candidates, I settled on Console Password Manger (CPM) written by Harry Brueckner. It's close to an ideal match to my needs: it's console-based, had an emphasis on security and uses my existing GPG key for encryption. The program is maintained and I've had no issues while using the last three beta versions of the program. Thanks, Harry for the very good tool. Recommended.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Upgraded Wordpress

I Upgraded Wordpress again. I apologise for any aggregator disruption this may cause.

3 February 2006

Jonathan McDowell: Friday fun with consumer routers

I'm such a funster. It's Friday night and I've spent it fighting with consumer routers in an attempt to get my home setup sorted out a bit. And I've made some progress, but it's taken a while. My old setup was an Asus WL-500g with a USB Speedtouch attached. This was running a hacked up version of Oleg's firmware, with kernel 2.4.20 (ewwwww) and the userland Speedtouch pppoa3 driver. It's been up 253 days as I type, which is quite impressive IMO. The plan was to get something else doing the same job so that I could try and get more up to date firmware on the Asus (probably OpenWRT) and give it to my parents as a wireless access point / print server. First try was my Netgear DG834G. Unfortunately the ADSL interface on it doesn't want to sync to the line for any length of time. I don't really want to faff with it at present, so I gave up on that. I do want to try and get this sorted, as it has a native ADSL interface, but the AR7Port appears to have stagnated a bit. Next was the Netgear WGT634U. I'd built an OpenWRT image for this and tried to flash it earlier in the week, but messed it up and bricked the router. So opened it up, hooked a serial console up and managed to restore it easily enough. A little bit of frobbing and I had it recognising the Speedtouch. Result. This has a 2.6.15.1 kernel, which means in kernel driver goodness and nice and up to date. Plus OpenWRT makes it easy to add various nicities like radvd and dnsmasq. I'm currently using this solution and will keep an eye on it over the weekend before reinstalling the Asus. Of course my home network has become simplified a bit by the fact I no longer factor the NTL connection into it. That's always just been a backup thing since getting ADSL from Black Cat (mmmm, IPv6 goodness) and I've decided to finally ditch it soon. However I might want to add a modem to the WGT634U at some point - probably using a USB serial dongle I guess, as I don't think the internal ports do hardware flow control. That's a battle for another day though. I also managed to get rid of a whole load of computer junk that was working but unused, thanks to Norfolk FreeCycle. Kathy will be pleased when she comes back from London tomorrow. :)

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Tired & Burn Out

I'm starting to be really tired, probably burn out, with my current work. I believe I'm doing a good work, but when it seems that the people in charge does not know what they want nor care about what is being done and the once supposed co-workers (now luckily transformed into customers) loose absolutely your respect after insulting your intelligence and, from my point of view, calumniate yourself directly (sending an e-mail) or indirectly (saying nothing about the message), things start to look bad. I understand that we don't live in Wonderland, but it is difficult for me to work on a complex technical project like the development and deployment of a distribution without a real management:
  • There are no written requirements. Well, that's untrue, there were some high level things, but nobody told me to use them as a base for anything and now that I've looked at some of them I believe that they can be used as a starting point, never as the final requirements.
  • We have deadlines, but for me they are only dates. Until very recently I've only had very high level ideas of what was expected, but there was no place to look into a written document and know which were the priorities. Luckily that is not my task, but it makes you angry to see a lot of people telling you that you should have known and making it look like all is under your responsibility, when it is not (or I would have asked for a much higher salary).
  • There is no real QA work being done, once the problem was that we didn't had the tools (IMHO a simple mailing list could have been enough for a while), but now that we have them nobody uses them until you force it.
Oh, well, I know I need a salary to eat and when you find one that looks is going to be the work, is sad to see that it is not; that is the second time it happens to me, the lack of interest on doing a good work of others, my real problem with sincerity (I usually say what I think, and people is not used to listen to it, I can be wrong, but at least I'm not going behind the back of anybody, as others do) and the climate it generates tells me that I have to move on, there's nothing to win and much to loose, at least on the personal side. I don't know how long I'll stay on my current work (I'm not going to leave without a replacement, I have a family), but I'm going to look at the job offers again and to send CV's out. Wish me luck. Ah, BTW, if someone has a decent offer for someone with experience in systems administration, programming in general or Debian development in particular please send me an email ... ;)

Matthew Palmer: Another Conference Not To Be Missed

After the rocking time I had at LCA 2006 (despite a slight brush with Norovirus), I've got my eye out for other conferences to get to (because It's Better Than Working). It looks like Waterfall 2006 is definitely worth going to. With cool keynotes ("Put Testing Where It Belongs--At the End" by Brian Marick, and "Extreme Programming Uninstalled" by Ron Jeffries) and so many great sessions (such as "Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer" by Jim Highsmith and "wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework" by Kent Beck) I don't see how any self-respecting software engineer can afford to miss this conference. It's a pity about the registration system, but I'm sure it'll all be sorted in time.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RGtk2 packages available

Michael Lawrence announced the release of RGtk2 yesterday on both r-packages and r-sig-gui. This follows his impressive presentation at DSC 2005 and finally makes the code available. RGtk2 is, as the name suggests, an update of the older RGtk package (that I'd been maintaining in Debian as r-omegahat-rgtk) to the 'newer' version 2 of Gtk (aka The GIMP Toolkit). It provides Gtk goodies for the amazing R language and environment many of us dig for its use in statistical computing, visualization, data analysis, estimation and more. RGtk2 is quite an achievement. The source package is huge at 1.9mb, the resulting Debian package even huger at 5.3mb, and it all seems to work fine based on some initial tests of running the demos. Based on the two source packages, I created two packages of RGtk2 (as r-omegahat-rgtk2) and the Cairo device (as r-omegahat-cairodevice) which you can fetch from here. Not sure if I feel the urge to maintain them, but if someone else wants to step forward, let me know. Sources and diffs are in the same directory. Feedback welcome. Update: By the way, what do we need to build with gtkmozembed? I didn't find a proper Build-Depends: for this.

2 February 2006

Uwe Hermann: The new German digital identity card, and what the government plans to do with your data...

What kind of sick joke is this? The German government seems to want to sell the personal information of 80 million German citizens to interested companies. They wanted to introduce a new digital identity card with biometric data and possibly also an RFID chip on it for quite a while now (you know, all those evil terrorists out there, blah blah blah). And now they dream about selling the data records stored on that card for 40-50 cents per record to interested companies? WTF? I don't think I have to elaborate on the abuse-potential this can have, and on what this means for the privacy of all 80 million citizens affected... The above article and also another article are a bit fuzzy on the exact details so we'll have to wait until more info is published/leaked, but this is definately an alarming trend/discussion... (via Anarchaia, Fefe, netzpolitik.org)

Alexis Sukrieh: Talk about Backup Manager at Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2006

Andreas “jimmy” Gredler - who contributed to the backup-manager source tree - will give a talk about Backup Manager at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event. The talk is entitled: “Backups einfach gemacht mit Backup Manager” and will cover the main design of the program.

1 February 2006

Erinn Clark: Standby passengers love me

Usually waking up an hour after your flight has left is a bad sign -- like, a sign of imminent doom, that things are about to get horribly worse. At least, that's how it usually feels and this being the third 6:25am flight I missed in 2005, I was well-accustomed to that feeling. Luckily I got re-routed through Tampa, then Los Angeles, and I finally ended up in my San Jose, CA destination with a lovely Val awaiting me. She seemed shocked; said I was far shorter than she expected, then she realized I was walking with a group of Stanford basketball players and that, though they dwarfed me, I still managed to have at least an inch on her. (Val is "5'9 and three quarters!", according to her.) A lot of the visit was a bit of a blur. After arriving, I quickly showered, and was promptly told by Val that my skater rat apparel just wouldn't do and that our New Year's Eve party was meant to be dressy. A black shirt and some funky necklace managed to placate her, luckily, as well as my excuse of having just flown in from out of town with no instructions to dress pretty. Off to the party, where I met a load of brilliant and entertaining people, including Lina who was positively heartbroken by the lack of fireworks.
Lina and me in the ballpit The next day included eating vegan duck for breakfast, visiting Google offices for fun (not profit), getting lost with Val in some frightening redwood forest, Indian food in SF with Janet, Jen, and Val. Actually, the Indian food might deserve an entry of its own -- the owner of the restaurant actually spoonfed me, which was bizarre and funny. Afterwards, we went to visit Kristal and laughed at various things, including the most hilarious website ever. "Oh yeah baby, check out my throughput." Of course, that feeling of imminent doom was not entirely wrong. I contracted some kind of California Plague while there and spent my flight back doubled over with body aches, fever, and chills. Overall, well worth it. Happy New Year, everyone!

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