Search Results: "ron"

17 July 2006

Mike Hommey: Want your name in Firefox 2 ?

Then, help spread Firefox and get creditted in Firefox 2. Now, what I think is really amazing is how much effort they spend to credit those helping to spread Firefox, but not those helping to fix it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about being creditted myself for the several patches I sent and more, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people who sent patches like me are not creditted either.
It’s already a PITA to get patches applied (some patches are still waiting to be reviewed or applied)… Update: At least, they credit in the CVS logs.

Matt Brown: Patching the sc520 watchdog to reboot Soekris devices

We use a lot of Soekris devices at work which often get deployed to remote locations where its not easy to access them if things go wrong. I’ve recently been writing some software to act as a watchdog on the machine. As a very last resort this software makes use of the watchdog chipset provided by the Soekris boards so that if userspace goes away the machine will get rebooted back into what is hopefully a sane state. Unfortunately the in kernel sc520 watchdog device doesn’t actually reboot the Soekris when the heartbeat ping from userspace is lost. This makes it virtually useless. There has been a patch floating around since 2004 that fixes this problem, but it hasn’t made it in to the kernel for one reason or another. I think it’s Soekris specific… I’ve updated the patch to apply cleanly against the sc520 driver found in 2.6.16 and you can find it below. http://www.mattb.net.nz/patches/linux/soekris-sc520wd.patch

16 July 2006

Uwe Hermann: Anonymous Google Earth over Tor

I'm probably not the first one to notice this, but you can actually use Google Earth anonymously (upon first glance at least) over Tor. It seems all the traffic (downloads of maps and textures etc.) goes over port 80 (http) and 443 (https), which can easily be anonymized with Tor (read an older post of mine for details on Tor). Just type 
export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
export HTTP_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
and set up Privoxy and Tor correctly, then start Google Earth in the same xterm and you're done. I haven't looked closely at the protocol Google Earth uses (any articles available on that?) but upon a quick glance in Ethereal / Wireshark all traffic is torified, not even DNS requests are leaked. Technical explanation: the Google Earth binary uses libcurl internally, which honors the http_proxy environment variable. However, that's not a guarantee that you're 100% anonymous, as Goole Earth could send some unique identifier (e.g. MAC address, hard drive ID etc.) to their servers which would spoil your anonymity. Btw, I actually discovered this accidentally because I have the above HTTP_PROXY lines in my .bashrc, so most of my HTTP traffic is anonymized by default...

Christoph Berg: Becoming an early riser

At the beginning of this year, becoming an early riser was a recurrent theme on planet.debian.org. At the same time, the urge to put some order in my messy sleeping pattern had grown, so I was very happy to read Steve Pavlina's blog posting on that. Before, I would usually stay up until very late (3am), being over-tired, and then sleep 9 or even 10 hours, sometimes still being tired the next day. The advice Steve gives is very simple: Go to bed only when you're too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning. This sounded exactly like what I wanted. Now, I'm still rather the night owl type, so I didn't pick something like 5am as Steve did, but a friendlier 9am. The first 2 or 3 days were somehow hard, but I soon realized how healthier the new rhythm was. I was getting up at the same time every day, including weekends, and go to bed around 1.30am. The downside was that 2..3am (CET) is often the best time on IRC and also very nice for hacking, but the additional time gained in the morning was well worth it. The hard part is to actually notice when you are tired. For me, it works best to read a book, and then go to sleep when I can't concentrate on reading any more. The difficulty for us computer people is that staying in front of the screen somehow makes you unaware of how tired you actually are - just turn the machine off and do something else (doh!). In the morning, it's important to actually get up, since the body will adjust to the additional time in bed. What I'm doing is to put the radio's timer at 9am, and the alarm clock at 9.05, so I don't have to jump out of bed. Many times, I would wake up myself just at that time. Of course, when going out late, I don't get up at 9, but try to get back to the rhythm immediately. Also, Debconf had thrown me out for some weeks, but luckily I managed to get back in.

John Goerzen: Israel and Lebanon

You know, I'm sick and tired of this whole "you wronged us, therefore you will pay" attitude that there seems to be in international politics today. Both sides of the whole terrorism thing seem to have that attitude.

But the latest sanity-defying news is that Israel is bombing wheat silos, food stores, and lines of civilians trying to escape Lebanon. Huh? What is the strategic value in having starving civilians in Lebanon? To me, it seems like a recipe to make things worse for Israel. You kill people's family in Lebanon, and you create large numbers of very mad family members that now have a reason to plan terrorist attacks on Israel.

It defies sense.

Why don't people try to value human life for once, everywhere?

15 July 2006

Erich Schubert: Extra exploit protection - SELinux

Apparently (as analyzed by Joshua Brindle), SELinux with the commonly used policies prevents the latest exploit (the one using a race condition on /proc/self/environ). Another way of preventing this would have been to mount /proc with "noexec, nosuid". I wonder why that isn't the default anyway? It would be good to have more people work on Debian SELinux. Currently, I'm not aware of anyone working actively on Debian SELinux. So although it was called a "pet release goal" earlier, this seems very utopic to me right now. The SELinux toolchain has received some important fixes/features (modular policy linking should finally be working!) but these are not yet in unstable, nor has the reference policy package been updated recently. Running SELinux on the main Debian servers probably is some work... there will be custom policy that needs to be written. It would however increase our security a lot, especially for boxes such as gluck that probably are our weakest point (because all developers need to be able to log in). Sometimes I have the impression that I'm the only one running a Debian system with SELinux and the reference policy... and I'm still busy with my exams, and I don't know yet if I'll have more time afterwards (a 6-month thesis is next after the exams, and I'm actually thinking about some business opportunities, too...)

Simon Richter: AOL users on the lazyweb

Joining Sesse, I am also on the lookout for notebook tips. Since I'm mostly asking on behalf of my girlfriend, who is an aspiring meteorologist, having an option to choose between really long battery life (because she might be in the outback) and acceptable computing performance (for the biweekly number crunching are strong requirements, just as a tough case and at #4, screen resolution.
I'm especially wary of "unified memory" graphics, as several people have told me that a high-res display will consume a large part of your memory bandwidth, which is the bottleneck for dealing with large matrices anyway.

14 July 2006

Adeodato Sim : Puzzles

Steve McIntyre talks about this puzzle, but I think he wants this one instead. NP: Madeleine Peyroux, You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

13 July 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Pearls and Dents

In Germany's pharmacies (and all around the world), you can buy a tooth paste with "pearls". These are little, soft grains, and the combination of the seemingly suggested concept "sandpaper" (they even have to deny that on the front page of the product's home page) with the clean and beautiful image of "pearl" seem to lead people to believe that these particles will make your teeth twinkle in the dark. I am not in the capacity to judge whether those actually perform better deplaquification. The tooth paste goes by the name of "Pearls and Dents" (for non-German speakers). That's another German product carrying a name made of English words, which appears to be cool these days. I find it a sad development how English replaces German all over the German media and every day language use (second only to the germanification of English words, like "downgeloadet" -- the use of English words according to German grammar rules). But that's not the point, at least not this time. What I find even more disturbing is the stupidity of the masses that go with the flow, or even try to be creative at designing captive slogans, regardless of the widespread lack of command of the English language. "Dents" may be close to "dental", but it does not actually mean teeth. Thus I am left to wonder whether the manufacturer is trying to hint at what those little pearls actually do to your teeth, or whether it's just another instance of a crap marketing team (who'd probably be better off learning proper German first, before venturing into the domain of another language). Along similar lines, is it only me who thinks that Adidas' slogan "impossible is nothing" is just plain stupid. Are they trying to be extra clever by giving the all too common phrase "nothing is impossible" a witty twist (and failing at it)? Or are they instead hinting that "impossible" is for others -- wear Adidas and you'll encounter even less possible situations? PS: This post is dedicated to helix.

Enrico Zini: First pratical lesson

Notes after today's training session. Small index of most used shell commands:
  • ls - list directory contents
  • cp - copy files and directories
  • mv - move (rename) files
  • rm - remove files or directories
  • find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
  • cat - concatenate files and print on the standard output
  • more - file perusal filter for crt viewing
  • less - opposite of more (quit with 'q')
  • cd - Change the current directory to DIR. (use "help cd" instead of "man cd")
  • mkdir - make directories
  • rmdir - remove empty directories
Small index of commands useful for combining in pipelines:
  • grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern
  • tail - output the last part of files
  • head - output the first part of files
  • sort - sort lines of text files
  • uniq - report or omit repeated lines
  • sed - stream editor
  • wc - print the number of newlines, words, and bytes in files
Problems found during the lesson:

  • You set the system default locale to Amharic, and the gdm login will be in Amharic input mode. We didn't find out how to switch it back to input roman characters. Right click on the input field to set the input method doesn't work. Since usernames are not in Amharic, you're locked out.

  • So you CTRL+ALT+F1, login and try dpkg-reconfigure locales. On Ubuntu Dapper, it does not work anymore.

  • So you dig and dig and dig and finally find that you can force a locale in /etc/default/gdm (but not in /etc/gdm/locale.conf, nor in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf).

  • Then the internet works for a bit and you look up how to reconfigure locales in Ubuntu. Turns out you have to use localeconf, which is not installed by default, is not in universe and thus not on the CDs, and needs to be downloaded from the Internet.

  • The Ubuntu wiki is all on https, which defeats any attempt of proxy caching.

  • An Internet proxy needs to be configured 3 times: in Gnome, in Firefox and in Synaptic (well, apt). This is especially tricky when you forgot to setup the proxy in Synaptic and seemingly unrelated applications fail, like the Ubuntu language selector, which internally invokes the package manager to download missing langpacks.

  • Some short descriptions in the NAME section of manpages are hard to understand, or wrong. Noted on apt-get, apt-cache and less. Top prize goes to apt-cache: 

    NAME
       apt-cache - APT package handling utility -- cache manipulator
DESCRIPTION
       [...] apt-cache does not manipulate the state of the system but
       does provide operations to search and generate interesting output
       from the package metadata. [...]
    So apt-cache is a manipulator that doesn't manipulate. A possible improvement can be "query the APT package cache".

  • The language selector in Ubuntu Breezy doesn't really exit and keeps the package database locked. This seems to be fixed in Dapper, and probably had been fixed in some Breezy update. System updates here are a problem: my Dapper (with some Universe things in it) wanted to download more than 120Mb of data, and the Uni network was giving me 14Kbps. It's been a nice opportunity to teach about fuser -uva and kill.

  • dict, squid and many other packages from 'main' are not on the normal Ubuntu CDs: is there an easy way to build a CD with them? Or do Ubuntu CDs with extra packages already exist? I'll have to find out.

  • cupsys has documentation outside of /usr/share/doc, in /usr/share/cups/doc-root.

  • man works on all commands, except cd, which is an internal shell command and thus needs help instead of man. I should remember to ponder about autogenerating manpages from help output.

  • Is there an index-like manpage with a list of the core Unix commands and their short descriptions? It there's not, it's easy to generate: 

    #!/bin/sh
DIR=$ 1:-"/bin" 
(
find $DIR   while read FILE
do
   if [ -x $FILE ] && ! [ -d $FILE ]
   then
           LANG=C COLUMNS=2000 man  basename $FILE    \
                 grep ^SYNOPSIS -B 100   grep ^NAME -A 100   \
                 tail -n +2   head -n +2   \
                 grep -v '^[ \t]*$'
   fi
done
)   sort   uniq   sed 's/^ \+//'
    Try running it on /bin and /sbin: it's great!. Also, since it doesn't redirect stderr, it nicely exposes a number of manpage problems.
Lots of bugs to report when I come home: from here it'll take ages, and lots of money on the hotel internet connection, and some are Ubuntu-specific so I'd need to do everything online with Malone. As usual, teaching is one of the best ways to find bugs. I propose an Etch training session a month before release. Other things to do:
  • Find more info about that Wikipedia live CD with Wikipedia browsable without the Internet.
  • Make a collection of Free technical E-books: even those Indian low-cost book editions are too expensive here, so E-books mean a lot.

MJ Ray: HOWTO not melt 9 - Don't use air-con

Air conditioners are doing huge harm to our environment by sucking electricity, which is often generated by releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Even worse, many people are using them stupidly. For example, I used to use one shop with a one-piece air conditioner sat almost in the middle of one wall, with its air hose running along the floor to just outside the front door. [...] The best air conditioners seem to be the two-part type with an insulated coolant hose between. [...] After following the other tips in this series, I hope you won't need air-con any more, but if you do, please use it sensibly. [permalink to longer grumble, comments and other parts]

12 July 2006

Wouter Verhelst: Belpic 2.5.9

Yesterday evening, I noticed that the 2.5 release of support software for the Belgian electronic ID card had come out earlier this week (on 2006-07-04, to be exact). I didn't know, nor notice. Sigh. I knew this release was forthcoming; I had been working with some Zetes developers on the code a few days last month, and they had implemented a number of my suggestions. Always nice to have a working relationship with your upstream. They hadn't implemented everything I had pointed them to (mainly due to lack of time because of a deadline they were running up against), but my suggestions had at least avoided some serious bugs that would otherwise have been in the release. Great improvement over the 2.4 release, which couldn't even be built due to a serious SNAFU in the code. But, now, this isn't happening anymore. The only thing is that Zetes isn't the one doing official releases of the Belpic code; that honour is left to FEDICT. And while Zetes happily talks to me, I can't seem to get anyone inside FEDICT to talk to me. I've sent them some emails in the past, asking them some questions, but I've never had any of them reply to me. Like I said: Sigh. Oh well. So yesterday, late at night, I found out that the new release was out, and I promptly updated my packages. Err, well, at least, I almost did so. I actually postponed it to today, since, well, it was late already. And it is again, now, with my packages almost being finished; I had to redo some bits since, somehow, I seem to have lost my work of last month. Grmbl. Anyway. The packages seem ready now. When I get home, I'll test them just one more time, and then they'll be ready for upload. Whoo!

11 July 2006

Steve Kemp: Some thing

Over the past two days I’ve started two community things: The adverts are basically modelled after Kuro5hin.org’s community adverts - the difference is these are free. (Should remain free, but no promises.) The idea of sharing out a Xen host with a few people means I’d get some seperation and wouldn’t overload my existing host which is getting a little strained with the Debian-Admin site, mostly because of my own lazy coding, and popularity. Still work in progress. I’ve priced a couple of companies for the hardware and support and figure that it can be run just above cost with 6x ( 10 a month). Still waiting for a few people to get back to me about whether they’ll commit to a years worth of cash up front..

10 July 2006

Clint Adams: Though he was the Kirin Rider, Sunekosuri rode him

By the way, anyone who thinks that a lack of Internet connectivity in housing is not a clear disadvantage is on the wrong drugs.

9 July 2006

Barry Hawkins: Debian Graphical Installer excellent work, guys

I recently had to provision a laptop at my client’s site for my use. Certain third-party applications that are key to managing the technology practice there are Windows-only, but I (am fortunately allowed to) refuse to have a Windows-only machine. They are cool enough to let me shrink the corporate WIndows XP image and set up a Debian sid instance for dual-booting. I took my trusty CD of a recent daily snapshot (the fact that I have been able to use daily snapshots of the Debian Installer ISO for several years with little to no trouble is in itself a huge testimony to the quality of that project’s work) and popped it into the media drive of this rather battered Dell Latitude D600. I had heard at DebConf that the graphical installer was now fully part of the daily snapshots, so on a whim I invoked it with the ‘expertgui’ directive at the boot prompt. Wow. Language selection in the graphical Debian Installer If you haven’t seen this, go and burn an ISO of the daily snapshot for your architecture and boot into it. (I won’t even elaborate on the fact that being able to choose from 11 different architectures is massively impressive.) What a beautiful interface, and how amazingly tasteful as far as look-and-feel. It’s very professional-looking, yet not corporate. There’s a button to capture snapshots of the install screens right there on each screen. It may take a minute or two to adjust to having the right line in the display highlighted before clicking the button to continue in more-complex screens, but the annoyance is neglible. I was thoroughly impressed, so much so that I wiped my backup laptop, a ThinkPad T42, and did a reinstall using the graphical interface. You can still pop over to the other virtual terminals just like in the character-based installer; the graphical interface seems to use the fifth virtual terminal. I just popped out of it to the second via Ctrl + Alt + 2 and was able to mount a USB drive with some firmware I needed. I wiped the T42 so I could run the IBM recovery and get XP back on a small partition. Hey, how else am I going to play Warcraft III? (Seriously, though, if anyone has managed to get Warcraft III to run via an emulator, let’s talk.) I found it a study in contrasts, installing XP and then installing Debian immediately after. The first thing I noticed with XP is how little visibility I have into the install process compared to the Debian installer. I suppose I shouldn’t have to since all these vendors have supposedly ensured (stifling audible laughter here) a smooth installation process for me. However, when something does go wrong, I am pretty much out of luck. Second, I have come to take for granted how quickly you can fully provision an OS instance with Debian’s rich package-management system. The benefits of an awesome package management system are painfully obvious as soon as you have to reinstall Windows or OS X, especially if you are a software developer with a whole litany of tools necessary for your work. A graphical installer was the last major impediment to me recommending Debian to my friends and relatives who are too befuddled by a character-based application or installer. This closes a significant gap in the Debian offering, and I wish to sincerely thank those who have poured so much time into the installer project as a whole and have gone the extra distance to create an interface that reaches out to the less-technically-oriented crowd.

Evan Prodromou: 20 Messidor CCXIV

No honking today; I guess there just isn't a big German population in Montreal. But, y'know, fourth place is pretty damn good, Portugal! Nothing to sneeze at. Still ahead of Brazil, for what it's worth. Tomorrow's the big finale, of course. The Paramount Famous Players on Ste. Catherine downtown is going to have a live showing, free for the first 300 people. I dunno... I guess it could be fun, but it seems a little impersonal. I think I'll be watching from Niko's again. It's easy to walk to Little Italy, or Barouf, from there. tags:

Grillr I spent the day putting together household furniture. We stopped by Canadian Tire on Tuesday to buy lawn furniture, and we got a shipment from Ikea on Wednesday. This afternoon cleared out a lot of cardboard boxes from our house. First up was Amita June's big girl bed, which she got as a present for her month birthday. Yeah, Amita turned the big one-oh yesterday (10 months!), and although we've been doing wp:co-sleeping, we want her to start learning to sleep in her own bed. (Most co-sleeping babies want to move out after about 1 year.) She got a toddler bed, which is actually pretty cute, and fits perfectly in her room. Building Ikea furniture isn't really all that fun. First, they optimize for shipping size and storage, not for ease of building (or stability), so you get some really shaky stuff. Second, the instructions have no words -- assumably to avoid translation costs -- so you have to interpret their graphical V lapuk into some kind of reasonable instructions. Fortunately, just about the time I finished building it, Maj and Amita came home from a walk. Amita had just fallen asleep, so we put her in to see how it fit. Looks pretty good to me! [image] After that, I watered my new lawn. The grass seeds I spread on Tuesday are coming up in teensity-tinesity leaves. Huzzah! Then I turned my attention to the wt:Muskoka chairs we got from Canadian Tire. These turned out to be a lot easier, and they were made from cedar wood, so they were pleasant to work with. Maj had invited over some friends for grilling, so she went to the store to buy food while I worked on the Muskokas. The baby hung out with me outside in her playpen. The chairs turned out great, and we had a nice grill. Brenda, Parise and Tony all came over. Brenda and Tony are librarians, and Brenda and Parise grew up together in wt:Moncton. The Muskokas were a hit; here are Brenda and Amita enjoying one. [image] tags:

Fireworks I can hear right now the dull thump thump tha-thump-thump of fireworks going off down at La Ronde, the amusement park in the middle of the St. Laurent River. They're the hosts of the International Fireworks Festival, which happens every summer. It's one of the great things about living in Montreal -- fireworks every Wednesday and Saturday from early June until the end of July. The festival is a competition -- national pyrotechnics teams each provide a half-hour long show on one of the nights, and then at some point after the festival they decide on a winner (I think... I've never actually checked who "won"). The fireworks are first-class, and it's just fun to have explosions over the city all the time. Tonight's team is wt:South Africa -- it's the first time there's been an African national team. Go SA! tags:

Best show ever One of the best music shows I ever went to was a "surprise" event by Camper Van Beethoven at the now-defunct Mint Platter record store on Telegraph Avenue in wt:Berkeley, California around 1990. Probably one of the next best music shows I ever went to was a surprise (for me) when Maj took me to see CVB at the Just pour Rire Theatre in Montreal in 2004, one week after we were married. (The band had recently reformed, and that night their equipment was stolen out of their tour bus in Mtl. Such a shame.) I'm just thinking about it because so many of the shows I love are on the etree section of the Internet Archive. Secret message to every taper I crabbed out because their big boom mike was blocking my view of the stage: sorry. You were right. Thanks. And what reminded me of that? The NPR Live Concert Series, aka All Songs Considered. Man, there's a lot of good music in there. tags:

One So, has anyone offered Kyle Macdonald of One Red Paperclip a marketing job yet? Guy knows his marketing. tags:

Bignose strikes again I'll be honest -- most of the time, I totally don't understand fellow piglogger Michael Bakunin's blog. Here's an excerpt from Gasoline: FD: small short position in one US refiner, and thinking about crack spreads. Does that mean something to some species of animal? I dunno. tags:

8 July 2006

Enrico Zini: Debtags smart search

I did more thinking and prototyping to the debtags smart search ideas. The result is an interactive search session with quite some smartness inside. It shows two groups of tags to choose from. The first group of tags has tags related to the keyword search. The second group has tags that, if choosen, operate a substantial trimming of the result set. We're not yet reading for uploading the new library stack to Debian. If you want to play from subversion repositories, see this mail. I can however show an example interactive session needs to be shared. Notice how I get to a high quality solution in just 2 iterations: 
$ tools/debtags smartsearch image editor
Tag selection:
1) hardware::camera (44/18710)
2) works-with::image:raster (335/18710)
3) hardware::storage:dvd (27/18710)
4) special::meta (86/18710)
5) devel::debian (55/18710)
6) works-with::archive:iso9660 (44/18710)
7) use::typesetting (61/18710)
8) special::not-yet-tagged (5745/18710)
9) devel::library (3727/18710)
10) role::sw:utility (2707/18710)
11) interface::x11 (2434/18710)
12) interface::commandline (2137/18710)
13) x11::application (2040/18710)
14) role::content:data (1573/18710)
18710 packages selected so far.
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): +2 -9 +11
Tag selection:
1) interface::x11 (wanted)
2) works-with::image:raster (wanted)
3) devel::library (unwanted)
4) hardware::camera (10/113)
5) special::meta (1/113)
6) use::typesetting (1/113)
7) works-with::video (8/113)
8) made-of::lang:c++ (2/113)
9) suite::gnome (9/113)
10) uitoolkit::athena (9/113)
11) uitoolkit::gtk (50/113)
12) role::sw:application (41/113)
13) use::viewing (39/113)
14) role::sw:utility (33/113)
15) use::editing (30/113)
16) uitoolkit::qt (23/113)
17) suite::kde (18/113)
113 packages selected so far.
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): +15
Tag selection:
1) interface::x11 (wanted)
2) use::editing (wanted)
3) works-with::image:raster (wanted)
4) devel::library (unwanted)
5) hardware::camera (1/30)
6) special::meta (1/30)
7) works-with::video (3/30)
8) made-of::lang:c++ (1/30)
9) suite::gnome (2/30)
10) uitoolkit::athena (4/30)
11) x11::application (24/30)
12) role::sw:application (15/30)
13) uitoolkit::gtk (11/30)
14) uitoolkit::qt (7/30)
15) suite::gimp (6/30)
16) suite::kde (6/30)
17) x11::application (24/30)
18) role::content:data (5/30)
30 packages selected so far.
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): d
gimp - The GNU Image Manipulation Program
babygimp - An icon editor in Perl-Tk
cinepaint - motion picture image painting and retouching tool
cinepaint-data - data files for CinePaint
digikamimageplugins - image editor plugins for digikam and showfoto
kiconedit - an icon editor for KDE
kchart - a chart drawing program for the KDE Office Suite
gimp-data-extras - An extra set of brushes, palettes, and gradients for The GIMP
scribus - Open Source Desktop Publishing
xpaint - simple paint program for X
puredata - realtime computer music and graphics system
gimp-data - Data files for The GIMP
gimp-python - Python support and plugins for The GIMP
gimp-gap - The GIMP Animation Package
gimp-texturize - generates large textures from a small sample
gnome-iconedit - A small tool to create icons for the gnome-desktop
gpaint - GNU Paint - a small, easy to use paint program for GNOME
gsumi - pressure sensitive "ink" drawing
gtkmorph - Digital image warp and morph (gtk)
gtkmorph-example - digital image warp and morph, examples
xmorph - digital image warp and morph (x11)
imaptool - A tool for creating client-side image maps
junior-art - Debian Jr. Art
kcoloredit - a color palette editor and color picker for KDE
kolourpaint - a simple paint program for KDE
kimagemapeditor - HTML image map editor for KDE
pixmap - A pixmap editor
saods9 - image display tool for astronomy
sppc - Simple Panel Plot Composer
tkpaint - Versatile bitmap/pixmap editing tool
This other section is worth seeing as well: it shows the relevant tags computed for various keyword searches (I cut out the part which is always the same): 
$ tools/debtags smartsearch kernel image
1) admin::boot (132/18710)
2) use::driver (108/18710)
3) admin::kernel (252/18710)
4) protocol::dhcp (24/18710)
5) role::sw:source (79/18710)
6) admin::hardware (161/18710)
7) devel::debian (55/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): k audio editor
1) sound::midi (33/18710)
2) works-with::music-notation (25/18710)
3) works-with::audio:wav (51/18710)
4) works-with::video:oggtheora (5/18710)
5) field::arts (21/18710)
6) sound::mixer (65/18710)
7) sound::recorder (10/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): k package manager
1) x11::window-manager (79/18710)
2) suite::xfce (34/18710)
3) x11::display-manager (10/18710)
4) x11::theme (82/18710)
5) works-with::software:package (110/18710)
6) suite::kde (503/18710)
7) made-of::data:icons (43/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): k debian package
1) suite::debian (282/18710)
2) devel::packaging (75/18710)
3) devel::debian (55/18710)
4) works-with::software:package (110/18710)
5) use::dialing (47/18710)
6) admin::user-management (114/18710)
7) hardware::modem (87/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): k linux kernel
1) admin::kernel (252/18710)
2) role::sw:source (79/18710)
3) use::driver (108/18710)
4) interface::svga (31/18710)
5) hardware::usb (32/18710)
6) admin::filesystem (151/18710)
7) hardware::camera (44/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): k gps
1) field::geography (57/18710)
2) hardware::emulation (98/18710)
3) works-with::image:vector (107/18710)
4) devel::ide (41/18710)
5) works-with::software:running (93/18710)
6) made-of::lang:ada (26/18710)
7) x11::application (2040/18710)
Your choice (+#, -#, =#, K word, View, Done, Quit, ?): q
This thing is getting smart. Can't wait for this to get seriously picked up by some GUI (think adept!).

John Goerzen: Why Is Expensive Software So Crappy?

Today I was listening to Gary McGraw on Frontline Security talking about software security. One of his points was that a large part of security trouble is poor design.

That reminds me how I've been meaning to rant a bit about the really terrible security I've seen in proprietary software lately. Some of this is very expensive software that people pay lots of money for.



Sigh. Although I've seen some poor code out there in the Free Software community, I've never seen anything that even approaches this level of insanity.

Why is the most expensive software the least secure? And what can we do about it when the vendor doesn't care?

Evan Prodromou: 19 Messidor CCXIV

Our male cat, Topaz, had to go to the vet today. He's a formerly feral cat, and while he was living in the wild somebody shot him in the face with a .22. The bullet's still lodged in his upper palate (the X-rays are pretty cool...), but his jaws and skull are all healed up. Badly. A lot of the tissue has grown back in wrong, and it irritates the other parts, and it hurts him a lot. It doesn't look bad from the outside, but the inside's kinda gross. Anyways, he had to go to the kitty doctor and get the bad tissue taken off, as well as a couple of teeth. They're gonna go back in in a couple of weeks; they just got out of his mouth previously six months ago. Poor fella. He's back home now, all dilated eyes and wobbly legs from the anasthesia, but hopefully he's gonna be feeling a little better now. tags:

7 July 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Returning the E60

I went back to the shop today to return the Nokia E60 I had previously sought out. There were just too many gripes with the phone, and even though I could have possibly worked around (some of) them, I was looking for a phone that works, not one that I could tweak to work. Among the most prominent problems were:
  • Lack of STUN support, which means that you cannot do VoIP behind a NAT router without configuring a port-forward (which is often not possible). Nokia is also unlikely to add STUN support because the phone's target audience is clearly large businesses equipping their employees with phones that will work with VoIP locally, and "fall back" to GSM when on the road.
  • Broken WPA2 implementation. I could not get my phone to associate with my WPA2 router. Reasons may be the AES implementation, which seems broken (see below), or just a faulty WPA2 implementation. I can get other devices, including my Palm, to talk to the router over WPA2 just fine.
  • Broken AES (or VPN) implementation, meaning I could not get a VPN connection to either of a Cisco router, a Check Point VPN-1 gateway, a Linux host running FreeS/WAN, or OpenVPN when AES was used. I could connect to all but the OpenVPN client using 3DES.
  • No WLAN reconnects. If your WLAN connection drops while you're using it, you have to exit the programme (or reassociate with the VoIP gateway) to get it back up. This sucks when browsing the web!
  • Sucky battery lifetime. I was playing around with the device, using a fully-charged but two year old battery. After about 2.5 hours, it displayed the first low battery warning. Obviously, WLAN consumes a lot of power, but that's just too much and too fast.
Other than that, the phone seems to have the usual features you expect from an advanced phone that tries to also be a PIM. Believe it or not, I could make phone calls, but there was weird crackling noises to be heard; I am not sure whether the phone's at fault, I do have crazy power lines around my place. One thing that did drive me up the walls was the configuration. To set up VoIP, I had to first configure a WLAN connection (which you cannot do in the "Connection Manager" -- that one seems to be only used to kill connections and associate with unencrypted WLANs) in the system settings (which are to be found under Menu/Tools), then set up a SIP profile, then set up a VoIP connection, and then make sure it's active. If you change WLANs, you have to modify the VoIP connection, it cannot use an existing WLAN connection, or the current best default. I want a VoIP/GSM combo not because I want to spend two minutes to configure VoIP in a foreign network. Also, while we're on a topic related to WLAN: the device does not allow you to connect to a WLAN without starting an application that uses it. Sure, it's power-optimised, but still. Also, neither ESSID nor encryption status are shown anywhere when you're connected, and I did not find out a way to display the phone's IP address. Another beef was with the general device speed. There's a quick access button to write SMS. If you press that, it takes 5-6 seconds until you can type the SMS. I don't need to say more... The display of the E60 (and E70), however, do warrant their own paragraphs: it's gorgeous! Simply gorgeous. Unfortunately, that's not a selling factor for me. So I decided to wait for the next generation of WLAN/VoIP/GSM combos (or at least firmware updates to the E60), and especially the Motorola A910, which runs Linux. I am grateful to the shop manager for being so patient, making sure that I am satisfied rather than trying to make money, and generally just giving me a pleasant shopping experience the way it really should be these days -- given that there are shops out there that won't let you try electronic devices before you buy them. So, if you're ever in Zurich and in need of mobile communication devices or paraphernalia, visit the mobilezone shop in Oerlikon (Einkaufszentrum Neumarkt) and ask for Andreas Iseli! Apart from being next door to my flat, I'm definitely going to go back there next time I need something. PS: to all those who have been toying with the idea of buying (or otherwise drooling over) the E70, do note that the two run the same software, so most of these issues will apply to the E70 as well. However, it's always best to make up your own mind, so find a shop as professional and fair as mine and get your hands on it.

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