At the Journ es du logiciel libre near Lyon, the Debian stand happened to face the Mozilla one. The Debian developers present there had prepared some Iceweasel propaganda:



However it seems Daniel Glazman didn't understand all the fun of this situation, and just found these developers to be total morons or bloody fanatic assholes. "Moron" is also reserved for anyone trying to post comments disagreeing with him on his blog, which can also be simply deleted.

It seems some people need to take things less seriously.

Of course, as the epiphany maintainer, I can only be happy of this situation which will lead to more people using this great browser.

1) I'm not attractive (OK - so less learned, more reaffirmed) 2) Not all hills lead back to the flat 3) See 2. (OK - so I left $club which I can't remember thinking "tired, home time", wished people good byes, and looked for a hill, usually any going up are back to the flat... wandered up the hill, carried on wandering, discovered pizza shop that I normally order from, said "Oh bollocks" and started heading in the right direction, down the hill, across the road, back up the other hill. Sucks to be on the wrong side of London Road.) 4) Sleep is good. That's what I'm just about to do.So, what have I learned today? EDIT: OK - writing an entry in vim at nearly 3am when you've been to a club results in the unfortunate side effect of somehow managing to put several copies of the post in the entry - BAH!

Martin "Joey" Schulze posted what seems to be his last issue of DWN at the end of September. Is this the end of its 8 year run? I founded Debian Weekly News in 1999 with the intent of helping Debian developers keep up with what was going on in Debian as the volume of the project grew beyond what could be easily followed by everyone in the mailing lists. That goal later grew to encompass also keeping users informed of what was going on in Debian. By the time I left VA, I was getting burnt out writing it. Besides, I was no longer able to do it on company time. (Yes, there is a delicious irony here.) So I passed it on to Joey, who's done a great job keeping it going over the years. I've considered taking over writing DWN again. However, it's not clear to me that DWN is still relevant enough to be worth the large amount of work it takes to maintain it. A lot of communication is done on Planet Debian, wikis and in other forms that were not around when DWN was started, and that may be a better way to keep up with what's going on in Debian than DWN. If there is a gap left by DWN, I'd feel more comfortable filling it by blogging something each week about what'd going on in Debian without necessarily trying to cover parts of the project that I'm not deeply involved in. (For example, I'm ignoring everything to do with debian-vote right now.) This approach seems more scalable, modern, and likely to take much less time. We could even have a special aggregator with feeds from other people doing the same.

While it’s interesting to debate who’s right and who’s wrong in the Debian/Firefox standoff, it’s doesn’t really get us any closer to a solution. While we were debating, though, “Peter” (sorry, I don’t have a last name) made a practical suggestion:

I think Debian s stance should have been to distribute epiphany and move Firefox to the appropriate *verse repository.

That’s the best solution I’ve heard yet: Simply move Firefox to non-free (or drop it entirely) and make something else the default browser. That allows Debian to make its point without the destructive side effects of a fork (user confusion, extension incompatibility, fragmenting the userbase of the leading open source browser on the eve of IE 7, etc.). The end result is the same: Mozilla loses out on the additional users (at least until/unless it changes its policy), and Firefox is still there for those Debian users who want it. Best of all, it maximizes freedom—namely, the freedom of users to decide whether or not this is an issue worth switching over.

This is what's wrong with biology. Though it fails to mention that several of the formats (most notably FASTA) aren't actually defined in any way, and so writing parsers makes small children weep.

Actually, it tends to make me weep as well.

I've read quite a few blog posts about someone leaving Debian and whether they should remain on Debian planet. An official policy on these matters has now been posted which stated what I expected, if you feel that you belong and meet technical criteria then you are welcome.

Not that this solves much, the next debate will be about what content is suitable for Debian-planet with the expected answer being "anything which meets technical criteria and doesn't offend many people or break any laws". I've already had some comments on my blog from people who want me to change topics. I don't know if other people get this or whether doing an average of one post per day gets me more attention from the loons.

I started blogging after leaving Red Hat. I considered asking for my blog to be added to the Fedora Planet, but wasn't sure whether I would be posting much about it. I just checked and it seems that my old Advogato blog is aggregared on the Fedora Planet and there is no mailto URL on that site to allow me to get it changed. I've just put a final blog entry on Advogato to inform everyone of the change.

I'm not sure if it's worth adding my blog to the Fedora syndication. I have just decided to change my main desktop machine from Rawhide to Debian/unstable. The reason is that Fedora is mostly a Gratis distribution and Debian is more Libre. For most computer users there is no real difference as they don't have the skills to use the liberty that Debian offers. But for people who can code (note that we are in a small minority of computer users) the difference is significant.

The final issue that forced me to this decision is this bugzilla entry about Xen. In Debian there are kernels for Xen on i686, Xen on AMD K7, and Xen on i686 with vserver (doesn't Xen make vserver redundant?). In Fedora there will be one Xen kernel which won't boot on the machine that is most important to me and which ironically is the machine that was issued to me by Red Hat (and sold to me when I left).

This issue of a lack of choice is quite understandable from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of things. It's OK to say to a customer who wants to pay for a RHEL-AS license that they need a machine less than 3 years old if they want to use all the features. Adding new kernels adds support costs and I think that most RHEL customers want to have a smaller set of supported options with a higher level of support. I often recommend RHEL to clients and I will recommend that clients use Xen on RHEL-5 - and that they purchase recent hardware to do so.

But for home and hobby use it's a different matter. I provide all the support I need, I can compile my own kernels without much effort - but it saves time to have someone else do it. Fedora simply lacks choice here by design. I still support a bunch of Fedora and RHEL machines and will still develop RPMs for them. I will put everything I develop under http://www.coker.com.au/rpms/ for anyone who wants it.

Given that if the Fedora Planet people want to syndicate my blog I am more than happy to have them do so. I don't dislike Fedora, in fact I still recommend that people use it. It's just that Debian suits my personal needs better than Fedora does. I expect that I'll have more Debian content than Fedora content on my blog, but there will also be a lot of Linux content that's not distribution specific.

It will be interesting to see what the Fedora Planet people do.

#define MONTHS *30*24*3600
int pid = fork();
if (pid)  
    sleep(3 MONTHS);
    blog_something_geeky();
    sleep(6 MONTHS);
    printf("it's alive !");
  else  
    int fd;
    sleep(9 MONTHS);
    fd = open("/dev/parents", O_RDONLY);
    dup2(fd, STDIN_FILENO);
    close(fd);
    fd = open("/dev/life", O_WRONLY);
    dup2(fd, STDOUT_FILENO);
    dup2(fd, STDERR_FILENO);
    close(fd);

    setsid();
    live();
 

Ok, so I am going to be in Bolivia next week - or so I hope ;-)
I don't usually take care to do this, but being it Lloyd A reo Boliviano (more on this later), and having heard first-hand and even almost lived stories of ticketing errors, I decided to call the airline to confirm my flight details.
...Only that the airline does not have a web site any more - It was grabbed by an online casino. Or maybe... Am I getting a casino ticket? Holy crap, no, it's a casino evangelism blog, explaining you how fun and interesting it is to lose your money online, how fair are the online slot machines, and such crap... Unbelievable. Anyway, I found Lloyd's Mexican office phone number in some online directory, and called. My ticket was, yes, reserved - It was not paid, though. Or maybe yes - the clerk told me that sometimes tickets get paid in Bolivia and they don't know about that. That could explain why lvaro almost lost his flight. Ok, we got that point fixed in ~20 minutes (thanks to Dydier and Ramiro, in Sucre and Potos respectively). I called again Lloyd, and yes, I'm confirmed. Phew.
About Lloyd: I flied with them two years ago, when I went to the IV National Free Software conference in Sucre. The only problem I had was due to myself: I spent some days travelling around after the conference, and my plane back was set to depart from La Paz, change planes in Cochabamba, then change planes in Santa Cruz, then on to Mexico. As I was in Cochabamba already, I decided to skip the first hop - Well, that accounted for a couple of hours on the phone getting my ticket back to life once it had been cancelled as a no-show :) However, Lloyd has went through a serious financially troubled period, and its reliability seems to have gone seriously down. Even two years ago, when we both were in Bolivia (in the conference I just mentioned), lvaro had to spend over a week he didn't plan on in Bolivia, as Lloyd's transatlantic plane was being repaired (!!). I found a similar report about an Argentinian passenger stuck for a day in Mexico and three further days in Santa Cruz due to broken aircraft... I can only hope for the best ;-)
Anyway, in Bolivia I'll have quite a packed schedule. As I've told to Dydier, I don't care too much about the details on what will we do each day (my hosts are free to own 100% of my time), but I'll give at least five talks (three in CCBOL in Potos and two to diverse auditoriums in Sucre). Of course, this is prone to change somehow, but the plan is I'll have a tutorial on PostgreSQL, a set of talks regarding computer and network security, and a talk about Free Software as a model of knowledge production rather than as a technical or social movement. Of course, wherever I go I talk about Debian as well at every possible chance ;-)

Basically Mono recommends bundling. Everything. In the most pure Windows spirit. This way you find that tangerine ships not only with sources for daap-sharp and taglib-sharp, which should be packaged separately, but also some precompiled .dll files for Nini, log4net and db4o sources. Nini and log4net are packaged in Debian, so no much problem, you delete them from upstream package and make it use Debian's. The problem comes when I tried to check db4o. It is not packaged in Debian, so I made a Google search for it, and downloaded sources... as well as a precompiled dll of it. Well, it does not only contain sources for db4o but also for other packages!!!! I am not sure what in hell Mono developers are usually smoking, but I think that their model is plain wrong, both in Windows and Linux. As every Linux distribution has demonstrated long ago, having different sources in their own packages is better for quality of software.

David Berlind: “Perhaps the best solution I’ve seen that does roughly the same thing and that makes synchronization between the local and network-based storage (and just requires a low-overhead local HTTP server) is Userland’s Radio blogging solution (credit to Dave Winer). More and more, solution providers will recognize the genius in that design as they look to deal with the offline problem as elegantly as possible given today’s constraints.”

Hey, the actual version 0.06 of my Perl written WAP browser wApua now is in Debian Sid! It’s the first software written by me which has entered the Debian repository as its own package (since pum is included in the package pisg which is in testing now for a while) as well as the first software debianized by me which reached Debian Unstable. Things are always exiting for the first time. ;-) Thanks to Myon for sponsoring the package.

Dear Lazyweb, I’m looking for a small, (easily fits on my lap on the cramped seat of a bus,) inexpensive, (around $100 CAD,) mobile text-editing device with a 90%-sized keyboard and decent battery life that runs an open source OS and Vim, and that I can sync to my desktop system. My first mobile device was a NEC PC-8201A, circa 1984. It ran on 4 AA NiCad batteries which I hardly needed to change more than once a week. At the time, it was my ideal mobile notetaking device. Its near-full-sized keyboard, Wordstar-compatible text editor, terminal program and serial interface allowed me to take notes which I would sync to my father’s Mac at home or to the VAX at the university. Today, my mobile computing needs have hardly changed: text editing is almost all I do. I don’t ask for much of a display, but as an 80 to 90 wpm touch-typist, I won’t settle for anything less than a near-full-sized keyboard. I’d prefer a system that runs Debian, and Vim is a must. Some means of easily synchronizing the device with my home system is necessary: PCMCIA wireless-B would be ideal, but is not a must-have. At the moment, I’m using an old Zaurus (not Linux-compatible) ZR-5000 which has good battery life but a very cramped keyboard, poor software, and no functional means of synchronizing the device to my PC. OK for jotting down quick notes, but frankly, I’d rather have my PC-8201A back again. I could at least type on it and sync it across the serial cable. I took a brief look at various Psion models, but they appear to be near-impossible to find. The HP Jornada 720 looks intriguing. And the NEC Mobilepro 780 appears to be another possibility. Have I overlooked anything? So, suggestions please.

There's been an amazing amount of press and blogging about the whole Firefox trademark issue. Some of it very positive and with a good grasp of the crux of the problem. Some of it not so positive. I hope you can forgive me using my blog to ask a question but: Ian, where did I go wrong? What could I have done to salvage the situation? I'm certainly not pleased with having to do this but I didn't really see a whole lot of other options.

It was also nice to see Linux.com do a more in depth analysis of the issue. I'm glad to see Larry Rosen seemingly agreeing with me that they could have a free copyright license and a more restrictive trademark license, as I had proposed many times. They did manage to misquote me a little though. "annoyingly bureaucratic and is completely unprecedented in the Free Software community" was said in reference to Mozilla's requirement for patches to be vetted, not the discussion about the trademark.

So it's been pointed out that since I'm no longer terribly involved in Debian, I possibly shouldn't be on Planet Debian nowadays. So unless there's any violent objections I'll ask to be removed at the end of the week - my RSS gunk is at http://mjg59.livejournal.com/data/rss for those who want to read my delightful prose in any case.

Anyway. Some token Debian-related content. Mozilla corp are unhappy with Debian providing a package called "firefox" unless every patch provided has been approved by Mozilla in advance (there's also some stuff about the logo, but that's basically a bizarre corner aspect of the same problem). I'm not going to argue against this on philosophical grounds - it's clear that that isn't going to change anybody's mind. Instead, let's compare this to some other major applications:

• Linux. Pretty much every vendor patches Linux. Part of this is for hardware support (adding out of tree drivers, and so on), but a great deal of it is feature development. A lot of patches that appear on LKML have already shipped in vendor kernels.
  
• X. Arguably one of the most forked applications shipped by any distribution - almost every X server shipped by any vendor ever is based on the reference X11 code. Without the right to fork X and maintain its name, we wouldn't have the X.org implementation[1]. No composite, no accelerated indirect 3D rendering, no input or monitor hotplugging.
  
• Gnome. Vendor patches to Gnome have largely been concentrated on branding and defaults, but in some cases we've seen major functionality changes. The new menu applet in SLED 10 is an example of this, and depending on how it's received it's likely to influence upstream development.
  

On the Mozilla side of things, the closest I can really come up with is cdrecord. There's some pretty strong parallels (upstream being unhappy about various patches, requiring a sufficiently different work to have a different name), but the end result in the cdrecord case was that we ended up with an application that was poorly integrated with the rest of the Linux environment for the sake of remaining consistent across different operating systems.

I'm not saying that that's going to happen to Mozilla. But we've seen numerous cases where allowing vendors to distribute derived versions has encouraged development and testing of new ideas, and I think in most cases that's resulted in benefits to the upstream project. The fundamental problem with refusing to allow patches that cause significant deviations from upstream behaviour is that it makes it impossible for anyone to actually get things like UI experiments into the hands of users. With Gnome, if upstream don't like your idea you have the opportunity to prove them wrong and possibly change their mind. With Mozilla, if upstream don't like your idea you're pretty much screwed. Most distributions are going to be unhappy about losing the magic Firefox branding, so you're unlikely to sell them on it. And you're not even allowed to provide binaries or source on your website unless you've renamed it away from Firefox.

I think the Mozilla corporation are missing something here. We shouldn't be prizing cross-platform consistency over integration and innovation, and we certainly shouldn't be doing our utmost to make it difficult for people to experiment with code. There's a reason that cd writing under Linux has been sucky for years, and it's not because people lacked the technical ability to make it better.

[1] Ok, the X.org case is slightly confused by the fact that they are upstream now. But without the ability to fork under the same name, they wouldn't have been.

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

Something is definitely wrong with this line. Thanks, Uwe.

... when people get fired for coding Perl scripts instead of watching porn. Hilarious.

Using my preferred email environment lately has been really painful.

• Losing connection to my courier IMAP server at dreamhost (perhaps blame the wireless) and having to restart mutt
• vim hanging after a save (see the screenshot)

Does this affect other people? Any tips? My configs can be found in my $HOME Otherwise I have to use freakin’ gmail and cope with its problems.

For a (much too long) time, we ran our three AMD 64 bit virus scanners and spam filter boxes with Fedora Core 4. Since the the official support ended a few months ago when Fedora Core 6 Test 2 came out, so we decided to switch them over to support through the Fedora Legacy Project. For testing purposes we first switched over one of the three boxes. But the test failed: Although the changes (as documented on the Fedora Legacy home page) seemed to work fine, not a single update came until the end of last week, even though there were partially remotely exploitable security issues in OpenSSL, OpenSSH, gzip, etc. during that time. There were also no announcements on the list since FC4 switched over to the Fedora Legacy Project, not for FC4 nor for any other distribution maintained by the Fedora Legacy Project. So what the heck does the Fedora Legacy Project if not security updates? I would be very happy if I could switch over those boxes to Debian or even Ubuntu, but there’s no BiArch support (running 32 bit applications on 64 bit operating systems transparently) in Debian (and therefore neither in Ubuntu) yet without a lot of manual fiddling and chroots, so we can’t run our 32 bit virus scanners on those 64 bit boxes with a debianesk operating system yet. Today we’ve upgraded the last of those three boxes to Fedora Core 5.