Heute stattete ich der Sneak-Preview der Schauburg einen Besuch ab. Gezeigt wurde der Film “Terkel i Knibe” aus D nemark, in deutscher Synchronisation. Da wohl die wenigsten von dem Film geh rt haben (und das wohl auch so bleiben wird), dazu etwas ausf hrlicher.Terkel i Knibe ist ein Animationsfilm, der in etwa wie eine 3D-gerenderte Version von Southpark anmutet. Erz hlt wird die Geschichte des 9-j hrigen Terkel und seinen Problemen in der Schule, vor allem mit Mobbing. Um dem Mobbing zu entkommen, beginnt er selbst zu Mobben, was eine in ihn verliebte Mitsch lerin in einen u erst spritzigen Selbstmord treibt und seine Freundschaft zu Jason gef hrdet. Das Ganze spitzt sich dann auf dem Zeltlager, von einem furchtbar beliebten ko-Lehrer organisiert, dramatisch zu...Einiges hat mich gest rt. So waren mir die animierten Gesichter zu steif und die M uler zu breit, so dass viel Mimik verloren ging, und die Muskeinlagen h tte man sich sparen k nnen - obwohl sie immerhin eher im Stile von “Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik” als dem grausamen der Disney-Kinderfilme gehalten sind. Ich mag halt kein Rap, und das war es meist.Die meisten Meinungen im Foyer des Kinos schienen in Richtung “Rausgeschmissenes Geld” zu gehen. Ich selbst fand den Film eigentlich recht gelungen: Er stellt die Wirkung von Mobbing auf Kinder zwar bertriebern, aber doch glaubw rdig da. Auch die d nische Skrupellosigkeit, wie man sie aus “In China essen sie Hunde” kennet, was Gewalt und Sprache angeht, passte gut ins Bild. Da lernt man sogar nach 13 Jahren deutschem Schulalltag noch neue Beleidungen, und bisweilen machte die graphische Darstellung den “Happy Tree Friends” konkurrenz. berhaupt war der Film bisweilen so bizzar, dass kein l stiger moralischer Unterton aufkommt, ohne jedoch die Aussage zu verraten.Fazit: Wer die Gelegenheit einmal haben sollte: Warum nicht, macht euch ein Bild. Zum Lachen werdet ihr kommen! Nur allen wird es sicherlich nicht gefallen.

So it looks like we’re finally getting a vote to issue the long-awaited GFDL Position Statement, and explain why Debian does not consider this license suitable for its main section (gr proposal, latest version). After asking around in -private, I proposed an amendment to allow GFDL-licensed documents with no invariant sections to remain in main; as of now, this amendment has received exactly zero seconds. (In case this needs mentioning, an amendment needs at least 5 seconds to appear in the ballot. And if someone wants to point me the legal flaws of my amendment, please read this first.) I’ve surprisingly found myself getting quite upset and enraged (quite political?) about the whole GFDL story. I have very clear feelings about the whole situation, and they’re best explained in this post. But well, I’m finally starting to digest that most likely Anthony’s text will pass, and managing to not get tragic about it. I guess it’ll go away, and that I’ll then continue with my Debian tasks as usual. Heck, if I one manages to be friends with people that vote conservative (and, heh, they manage to be friends with me), I guess this is about the same. NP: The Cranberries, Dreams

Given the posts on diverse planets, this seems to be a common nerd disorder...

Your Social Dysfunction: Happy You're a happy person - you have a good amount of self-esteem, and are socially healthy. While this isn't a social dysfunction per se, you're definitely not normal. Consider yourself lucky: you walk that fine line between 'normal' and being outright narcissistic. You're rare - which is something else to be happy about.

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Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Another quiz meme: You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on!

Mathematics		100%
English		100%
Engineering		92%
Journalism		92%
Philosophy		67%
Theater		58%
Linguistics		58%
Psychology		42%
Dance		33%
Sociology		33%
Chemistry		25%
Art		25%
Anthropology		17%
Biology		0%

Some days ago, I did dist-upgrade to Sid on my Let's Note Y2. Sarge was pretty nice and stable for this machine, but I wanted more challenging :)
dist-upgrade was really smooth because all transitions for my environment had been done.
Now I get new X.Org (some parts are from experimental), KDE, and OpenOffice.org2 (from experimental). By modifing xorg.conf and replacing i810_drv.so, I succeeded to use semitransparent window and dropping shadow with hardware acceleration. Cool!

Adam Rosi-Kessel writes about humans failing Turing tests. Apart from speculating why this is happening, a workaround could be to use CSS (or javascript) to hide the input box, or possibly the same for disabling it. I imagine most spambots don't parse the CSS or run the javascript. Of course, the text saying "please don't write anything here" should be kept.

I wish there was a better way to handle conffile renames than the method outlined at dpkg.org. Be nice if there was a way to pressed the checksum, so the conffile handler could just be used naturally, instead of bypassing it with a bit of a hack. Makes me a bit uncomfortable to just accept the users changes without prompting him on upgrade (as would happen with this recipe). If anyone has a better idea, it would really help me with #345112. Reading Jacobo's post makes me wish I had proposed a DebConf talk, BoF, whatnot on Trademarks and Free Software, and maybe promote some better discussion than the last time this was on the mailing lists. ndusart is coming for the weekend! Haven't seen her in two months, so I'm understandably, ridiculously excited. Better lend mricon my earplugs.

Just killed all the remaining comment spams (I hope) and implemented a simple regexp based blacklist which should get most medicaments, potence pills, casinos, lotteries and other frequently posted junk. I hope, it does not hit too many valid posts. If you have problems posting comments, feel free to contact me by e-mail or on IRC. In other news, I installed the blosxom plugin comments_recent and adapted the mail feature of writeback notify to my (in the meanwhile heavily modified) instance of the comments plugin v0.6. I also made it symlink-safe for use with multcat.

I've just packaged the django magic removal branch (well, kinda, it's more or less the same build system as the other django packages I made, so these aren't quite right, but they're good enough for the time being). They're in the same place as the other django debs, and compiled for sarge and sid... for those without the previous URL...

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian stable django
deb-src http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian stable django

or

deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian unstable django
deb-src http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian unstable django

The package for the 0.90 release is called python-django, for the magic removal branch it's called (unsuprisingly) python-django-magic-removal. The magic-removal packages conflict with the other packages because they plonk their files in the same place, so if you're trying to 'upgrade' between the 2, you'll probably need to use some magic (or apt-get install python-django-magic-removal python-django-). I'll try to update these reasonably often (like whenever I get a spare moment or 2 to build them). That should cover it for now.

Don t you love it when it looks simple and then it is actually simple, but you are not up to the task?

I am loving the xlibs-dev transition, really, I mean it! Two of my packages, fkiss and xdigger got bit by this issue, and I immediately fixed the bugs with a little help from a script provided by Moritz Muehlenhoff. really cool.

So I follow instructions in The Debian Wiki, run the script, check with pbuilder, upload and profit! Fun! End of world hunger! Err, almost. So I get all excited and decide to look at the bugs. And I find a nice one: #346347. Not bad, gpsim FTBFS, Luk also took a look at it and didn t really like what he saw, it neede no xlibs-dev or substitute for them and sitll FTBFS.

But wait! Just by looking at gpsim s bugs page, I find out that there s a New Upstream Version(tm) (#248931) available since 1 year and 241 day ago. Also, NMUs that have not been acknowledged for as long as almost two years... Not nice. And there s even a patch (#345215) for building it on, GNU/kFreeBSD... how sexy!

So I get all obsessive about it. But newer upstream needs a newer libgtkextra-dev version (#347397), which of course was not packaged (don't we all love Murphy?) and that s where I am stuck at. I loathe libraries. But still I gave it a try. And failed. Several times.

Fun? Yes! Profit? Nope! Do you want to take a look at it? Easy. It s all here.

Amaya also FTBFS. And I want to NMU amaya. Badly. Since I first heard about amaya, and realized that I am named after a web browser (sucky as it might be) and after getting many IRC highlights (every time that amaya FTBFS is mentioned on IRC), I have been wanting to use/adopt/NMU it. Amaya NMUs amaya, how recursive can it get?

I will go to bed now, and try not to keep thinking about it, not because I want to become an early riser, Gunnar, no need to worry! But reading about it I thought it would be healthier for me to wake up everyday at the same hour, so that s all I am aiming for. If you know me, you might be rolling on the floor laughing as you read this. So am I! But, if you know me, keep in mind that I have been drinking coffee with no sugar since August... Hey! You are not laughing anymore?

Vi and Emacs are doing fine. Emacs was not pregnant after all, or so the vet told me. It was hard to see her slowly become herself after surgery. Vi was perfectly OK all along, but she looked terrible. Anyway, she felt better by 6am the next day and came to bed, perfectly groomed, and purring like nothing had happened. A week has passed and she has started doing the gory part today... she s biting away the scar tissue, and it bleeds a bit. Oh my Spaghetti Monster!

I use a relatively unsophisticated but highly effective filter for blog comment spam. The system consists of several hundred keywords (mostly spam-related domain names which would never appear in a genuine comment), and a Turing test. The Turing test is a box at the bottom of the comment form, that says: “Do not put anything in this box if you are a human.” The Turing test catches between 10-25 spam comments per day; the keyword filter about the same. Every week or two, however, a human comes along, and fails the Turing test and fills in the “don’t fill in this box” box. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. Maybe the human thinks they are not actually human? More likely they just don’t read the text next to the box, although it is fairly prominent. Unfortunately, this seems to be a general phenomenon on the web. Many people have a tendency not to read text on webpages. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of questions along the lines of “How do I access my address book in SquirrelMail?” The answer, of course, is to click on “Addresses.” Similary questions arise with respect to my photo album software salonify — “how do I view a slide show of images?” (A: Click on “Slide Show.”) My hope is that the next generation is better able to process web content, but I’m not sure that hope is well founded. Getting back to the blog comment spam issue, it’s interesting to observe what sorts of topics appear most frequently in comment spams. Over the past several months, pornographic links referencing transsexuals seem to outnumber other topics. I wonder: do the spammers have a scientific method to their marketing?

I finally unloaded my pictures. Too bad nearly every bit of that snow has melted by now.

To complement my survival gear I bought a bike last Saturday. I have already noticed it gives me more freedom than just using public transport here and I just can not live without cycling. In the heart of Edinburgh, in the catacombs of the Waverly station one can find the Bike Station. This is a place kept by volunteers that takes in and recycles bikes, patches them up and resells them again. On certain days you can also take your bike there and use their tools and assistance to fix it. I find this and the way they are promoting cycling in the area a great initiative (and believe me, it is really necessary)! So I bought the cheapest second-hand bike they had: a 15-gear mountain bike without any features. This is of course because I will only be here for two months and it works just fine. There is a route from the city centre almost straight to the campus alongside the Union Canal (10km long route). It brings you through different kinds of nature but also different looking parts of Edinburgh. Half-way on the trip back I cycled over the Slateford Aqueduct which is really narrow. It’s almost impossible for two people with bikes to pass one and another when going in opposite directions. Besides that, the aqueduct is quite long, high and gives a nice view over Slateford. On Sunday I took the scenic route from the campus to Balerno and then to the city centre. There I tried to reach Arthur’s Seat in Hollyrood Park, but I took a wrong turn and had no energy to go all the way down and up again. So I turned around and cycled back using the Union Canal route. All and all it was a nice trip, about 40km long and I still can feel my bottom and muscles after 6 weeks of no cycling at all. Pictures of this trip are available on my Edinburgh album (photo 101 until 121). Technical On a more technical note, we have been moving from CVS to Subversion at work. This is nice because it allows us to do a good repository restructuring. Also did it give me the opportunity to try out SVK, which I’ve found to work well. It allows me to stay in the familiar CVS/Subversion world while not having to dive into whole new systems or command interfaces for which, at the moment, I do not have the time nor feel the need. I hope I can help Florian Ragwitz with svk-buildpackage, because I now still need a Subversion check-out next to my SVK local branch just to build packages. By means of this combination I’ve just been able to build and upload 5 new Ruby libraries (under Debian/Ruby Extras’ team maintenance): libbreakpoint-ruby, libcairo-ruby, libcmd-ruby (oops, it seems I’ve forgotten to file the ITP?), libdaemonize-ruby and libsvg-ruby.

By request: Here's a list of people who've confirmed they're going to give a talk in the Debian Devroom at the next FOSDEM. This list isn't final yet (there are some more people who've asked for a time slot but did not confirm yet; and I didn't assign slots yet, either) but it might be interesting for those who are coming to have a preview of the subjects that will be available. Well then.

Lars Wirzenius: Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition: Confessions of a package torturer

Piuparts tests that .deb packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. Lars uses it to torture all the packages he can get his hands on. This talk will explain how to use it on your packages before uploading them, and thus improving their quality and not having them suffer in Lars's hands.

Martin Zobel-Helas: Debian-Volatile - behind the scenes

This talk will give an overview of how packages are handled for Debian-volatile; what changes are allowed, how security is handled.

Martin F. Krafft: Improving workflow in Debian through process integration

This talk will be about the same subject as Martin's doctorate thesis. The abstract for that is:
This research paper/project details the technical challenges the Debian project faces as it continues its tremendous growth in size and popularity. It describes a research endeavour designed to increase the use of version control within the project for improved coordination of globally distributed teams of volunteers working on the software packages that make up the system. The research primarily focuses on the integration and consolidation of the involved processes. With tools already available for some parts of these processes as well as the coordination of teams, the goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to reuse and improve these tools, to better integrate them, and to make them more accessible by providing abstraction wrappers with interfaces intuitive to Debian developers. It is further the intent for these tools to be optional and fully compatible to existing practices, thus not forcing developers to adapt. The research starts with process analysis and studies of the work habits on the side of the developers, and targets the final output of tools, which implement improved workflow in Debian package management through meaningful integration of existing (and proven) methods

Enrico Zini: Debtags, and what you can do with it today

This talk will introduce the Debtags project, what it has accomplished so far and the wonderful advanced tools that are now available, using debtags, to make sense of the huge package archive.

Bill Allombert: Inside the Debian menu system

The debian menu system transparently keeps the menus in sync with the list of installed applications; so transparently, in fact, that a lot of developers do not know how the system really works. This talk will detail the various components of the system, what the technical challenges are and how they are solved.

Frans J. Pop: Debian Installer internals

An introduction to the inner workings of Debian Installer. Starting with what happens when the installer boots, the talk will go on to discuss how the dynamic menu structure allows the installer to be adapted for different architectures and installation methods. Other subjects will include the special nature of udebs, the contents of a D-I initrd, how cdebconf knits everything together and allows the use of different frontends, preseeding and the use of hooks. If time allows, a short introduction into the build system and CD building may be provided. Some knowledge of Debian package management (like priorities and dependencies) is assumed in this talk.

Aurelien Jarno: The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port of Debian using the FreeBSD kernel and a GNU libc library. It is currently the most advanced non-Linux port in terms of packages ported.
This talk gives an overview of GNU/kFreeBSD, and a quick comparison between the FreeBSD and the Linux kernel, to give users the necessary information to let them find how the FreeBSD kernel could fill their needs. It then describes the status of the port and the choices made concerning the architecture of the port (libc, threading library, etc.). It will continue by giving the various ways to try out this port and to give help, giving pointers to useful documentation and some useful hints.
Best portability practices are also covered, for both the Debian packaging and the upstream code. It will be based on real examples of non-portable code, and will show the best way to change it into portable code.

Summing the times that people gave me, I'll have anywhere between 5h25 and 6h00 of talks already, and two more people who've shown real interest in doing something in the Debian devroom (but who haven't sent me the information I ask for to be able to confirm their talk; please do so!). I'll probably get 9 hours in all (10 if I squeeze a little bit; but then I might have some issues with the key signing party, which I'm also co-organizing), so there is still some time left for interested parties. However, if you're interested in giving a talk, you shouldn't wait too long anymore!

Your Social Dysfunction: Schizotypal You display social deficits and oddities of thinking. Your perception and communication are similar to those of a schizophrenic.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Seems fitting... *grins*

Ask me stupid black-or-white questions, and then tell I am normal. Heh!

Your Social Dysfunction: Normal Being average in terms of how social you are, as well as the amount of self-esteem you have, you re pretty much normal. Good on you.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren t, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Yours freak-outedly...

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)