Hello Planet Debian , Steve Kemp wants a solution to magically build uploaded packages. I maintain several small Debian archives and recently needed a solution like this too. The solution needs to provide semi-automated package builds and installation. The full Debian Archive Kit (DAK) was far too heavy for my needs. I ended up creating a couple of wrapper scripts around sbuild and debarchiver to achieve this. The basic flow of packages through my archives goes like this:

1. Packages uploaded to an incoming directory (/home/sbuild/incoming/<dist_name>)
2. process_packages script scans incoming directory for each dist every minute and spawns builds (via sbuild) as necessary
3. Once packages are built site admin is emailed build logs
4. Admin checks packages and runs add-packages to add the packages to the archive
5. add-packages invokes debarchiver to do the heavy lifting and then generates the release files.

There is no support for GPG signed packages at this stage, hence the manual check before packages are added to the archive. The scripts were a quick hack a few months ago, and I’ve just hacked them again to pull all the site specific stuff out into easily modifiable variables at the top of the scripts, so hopefully I haven’t introduced any syntax errors! You will need correctly configured sbuild and debarchiver setups prior to running these scripts. If you want to use them, feel free, I’d love to know if they are useful to anyone but me. If there is some interest I’d be happy to tidy them up, package them properly and maintain them. Get them from:
http://www.mattb.net.nz/debian/misc/process_packages
http://www.mattb.net.nz/debian/misc/add-packages I run process_packages from cron with an entry like

*/1 * * * * sbuild /home/sbuild/bin/process_packages &>/dev/null
My /home/sbuild layout looks like

drwxr-xr-x 2 root sbuild 4.0K Jul 31 11:16 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 sbuild sbuild 12K Oct 26 16:32 build
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Sep 14 12:38 chroots
drwxr-xr-x 4 sbuild sbuild 4.0K Jul 13 09:59 incoming
drwxr-xr-x 2 sbuild sbuild 24K Oct 26 16:31 logs

bin contains the scripts, build contains symlinks to the chroots, and is used as the directory to invoke sbuild from. The resulting .debs are also placed in build. chroots contains the actual distribution chroots, incoming holds a directory for each distribution to process and is scanned by process_packages. logs contains a dump of all the sbuild logs. Debarchiver should be configured to pick up packages out of the build directory. Let me know if I need to provide more details.

This weekend I was in Berlin, at the Berlinux 2005. I have to work until about 17:00 on Fridays so I couldn't attend the first day, instead I arrived at Berlin at about 19:00, just in time for the Social Event :) The Social Event was really nice, well organized with little group tables to sit and chat and very delicious food. Apparently there was also a tuxracer tournament planned but that couldn't be done due to some technical problems (didn't follow that too closely). The evening was very nice anyway I ate a lot and talked to the other attending Debian people. We didn't stay up too long since the exhibition was scheduled to start at 09:00 the next day.
When we got to the Technical University on the next morning the first thing I noticed was a huge transparent hanging over the entrance. Upon closer inspection however it advertised some events for this semester's new students, not Berlinux. Shame. We quickly checked with the Information desk, where we were told to check back with them before giving our talks, since there had been some last minute room changes. Given the quite chaotic organisation in the run-up of this event I must say I wasn't too surprised. (There had been quite a mess regarding the preparation of the talks, many speakers only read on the site when - and that - they were giving their talks, deadlines suddenly popped up and then started wandering ... All in all preparations had been a bit confusing.) Also the planned Berlinux CD had somehow not worked out, so there were no CDs available.
With such good news we went on to the Debian booth to set up the usual stuff. The biggest attraction certainly was Frank Ronneburg's Debian-controlled model railway. Kids had to be forcibly moved on and grown-up men were seen regressing to small children again ;) Unfortunately attendance was rather low anyhow and a lot of the people walking by were regular students on their way to some other events.
At least the talks managed to attract a higher number of people. I can't estimate for shit so I have got no idea how many people attended my talk on user friendly system administration. But I was rather content with the number and so were the other speakers I talked to (The only one who was a bit unfortunate was Alexander 'Tolimar' Schmehl who had to compete with Klaus Knopper giving a talk at the same time.) After the talks were over we killed some more time at the booth, playing with Frank's model railway and Wolfgang Borgert's Nokia 770 (It has Mahjong! Yay!). It should be noted that when we were finally taking down the booth a very brave person walked around with a laptop collecting criticism and suggestions for improvement. There were so many of them that I had to help him out with my Thinkpad's power supply :)

I am not sure how much the Debian project benefited from the whole event since the attendance was so low and we got very few questions. Personally though I quite enjoyed the event. The talk went well (I got a few laughs and good questions afterwards), I met a bunch of new and very interesting people and had a really great Pizza. I hope Berlinux Organisation picks up a few of the suggestions they received. For the moment, my conclusion is that I'd probably give a talk there again, I am however not so sure if I'd go there only to man the Debian booth.

PS: Sadly they didn't have name tags either, so I don't even have something to put on my "trophy board" :(
Hint: Most speaker love souvenirs, give them a piece of paper with their name and your logo on it and they are happy people :)

I used the more conservative flags of -D SAFETY=3 -D NO_MULTIMAP_SHM -D NO_MULTIMAP_FILE -D NO_SINGLEMAP -D NO_TRIVIALMAP for the more exotic architectures and it seems to work for alpha and itanium. The hppa buildd failed in a most strange way and I'm waiting with impatience for the results of the m68k and sparc jury :-).

For USA we might be that: host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] said: 550 Email from your Email Service Provider is currently blocked by Verizon Online's anti-spam system. The email "sender" or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block. (in reply to MAIL FROM command) If you happen to visit the provided URL, you have to "request permission" to send/receive e-mail to/from verizon users. Well, fsck you if you believe I am going to give you the pleasure of having all my personal information just to get a rejection. If you happen to be a Verizon user (like John Potelle, who sent me an abcde wishlist bug for a feature which is already implemented and to whom I was replying to inform him about that fact), consider to move to a less moronic ISP.

Like Jibbering, I also got the BABY BBC spam from Mentorn. As advised, I didn't reply to the spam by email. It had the phone number 0141 204 6620 in it, so I called it and they said they'll reply within a week to say why they thought they had a consenting email list.

I always found Captchas annoying. But since I also had or have problems with guestbook or comment spamming, I understood that people and especially companies saw no other choice against comment or wiki spamming, mass account grabbing, etc. But since most captcha are based on the fact that people can still read deformed or garbled texts in images while machines can’t or at least only with a big effort, there is one big drawback with them: They are even more an insuperable obstacle for blinds or visually handicapped people than for machines. The blind computer science student Sebastian Andres showed at Berlinux how blinds navigate and use the web and where they (must) stop. So because of GMail uses visual captchas as a defense against mass account grabbing, he couldn’t get such a “free” e-mail account. (And yes there exist non-visual captchas. But they’re seldom used.) Thanks Sebastian for this insight.

In Oldenburg, Joey gave me a PARISC box, an Apollo 715/50. It wasn't complete—no RAM, no hard disk, no CD-ROM or other media—but the system itself seemed complete and functional. Unfortunately, it isn't. I added some RAM that I took from my parent's old computer (196MB in total, IIRC) and tried power on the box. Didn't work. When I powered it up, the machine powers up its fan for a short while before shutting it down again; then the fan moves to a lower rate, and the machine appears dead. Well, mostly so; there's no output on the VGA port, and the LEDs don't do anything anymore, either. But those LEDs would appear to be helpful, if one would know what they mean. Unfortunately, the box came without manual, so figuring out exactly what they mean all by myself is going to be painful. Google to the rescue. I found an archive of the comp.sys.apollo newsgroup, with loads of postings from 2000. One of them also mentions failure to boot, no output, and mentions that all LEDs except one are on at the end. That's the same as what happens here, except that in my case the one-but-last one are on, rather than the last one. A reply suggests that the machine couldn't find the boot disk, and that therefore the box can't be booted. So, lemme get this straight: if the boot disk is having issues (or not available, as in my case), Apollo machines simply decide to not do anything? Fuck. Update: okay, turns out the HP Website still has a PDF of the model 715 service manual, which contains an explanation of the LED error messages. Turns out it means "No Memory Found". Hm. Watch this space.

to pass 8th-grade math.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

(Seen on Planet Debian)

But true.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

I spent some time yesterday evaluating and tweaking the Original (Online Remote Image Gallery Initially Not As Lovely) photo gallery for use on my website which is currently running an old version of PHP gallery. This got me thinking about the naming of software, and particularly about the fact that while Original is a nifty name for an online gallery script, choosing an adjective to use as a noun can have some interesting effects later on! Read on for the full story. I’ve been becoming more and more unhappy with PHP gallery for quite some time now, but I hadn’t found a credible replacement until Original came along. For me, PHP gallery has become far too bloated and featureful to the point where it is excruciatingly slow to perform any task (even browsing) on my gallery. I don’t think my gallery is particularly huge, with 26k photos, spanning 113 albums, it’s certainly at the larger end of the scale, but nothing that I wouldn’t expect some well written software to handle. Couple to this the fact that PHP code like gallery is notorious for being a huge security whole in your server and I was keen to get rid of gallery as quick as possible. I should point out that gallery2 might address some of these issues as it is much more modular than gallery 1 ever was. It still wasn’t enough to tempt me to stay with gallery though. Other well-known galleries like coppermine failed the aesthically pleasing test (not that PHP gallery ever passed it either!). So that left Original. Written by Jakub ‘jimmac’ Steiner, a well known GNOME coder it fulfills most of my requirements:

• Pretty
• Easy to add photos to
• Not bloated
• Easy to hack

I took me about 2 hours to get Original set up, themed and working to my satisfaction which did involve hacking the code a bit. Mainly to change the layout of a few of the pages, if you weren’t as pedantic as me you would probably get away with just creating your own stylesheet. Now that I have Original setup and ready for photos I have to somehow get all my photos (and preferably their captions and comments!) out of Gallery and into Original! As part of this I would quite like to narrow down the selection somewhat and have my online gallery being a “best of” collection, rather than the canonical repository of my photo collection. My tool of choice to achieve all this is F-Spot, one of the new bread of Mono apps for GNOME sponsored by Novell. F-Spot already supports creating Original galleries, but doesn’t officially support importing from gallery. More on that in another post. To stay true to the title of this post I want to finish up by pointing out that choosing an adjective “Original” to use as the name (noun) of your software, isn’t the best idea in the world. The first time I tried to export an Original gallery from F-Spot I gave up and concluded that it wasn’t supported. I went to the File > Export menu, Choose “Export to Web Gallery” and stopped. This option seems to only support exporting to the very gallery program that I’m trying to rid myself of! I didn’t really expect to find support for Original anywhere else (seeing as it’s a web gallery), but just to be sure I checked the other options, Export to Flickr, no. Export to CD, no. Export to Folder… Maybe. In the Folder Export dialog there is a set of options title “Export Method”, the options are:

• Use Original.
• Use static HTML.
• Plain Files.

The first (and second) times I looked at that dialog, despite the fact that I was trying to export photos to Original, and was conciously looking for the option, I completely failed to realise that “Use Original” was what I wanted. My mind was reading the caption as “Use original folder structure” rather than “create folder structure for use by the Original gallery script”. I’d like to file a bug on this to get the wording clarified, but I’m having trouble deciding what it should be. Once you know what it is it seems obvious, the O is capital, so it’s not being used as an adjective, but that is a detail easily thrown away by your mind when scanning the dialog! I’m currently favouring a longer caption such as “Use Original Gallery Folder Format” perhaps with Original in quotes. I also think that moving it into the “Web Gallery” export tab rather than the “Folder Export” tab would clear things up immensely. So, fun and games with software names. What other sofatware uses an adjective as a noun, and does it cause as much confusion as this has?

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Slept in far too late this afternoon, easy to do on grey and chilly days. The d-i beta release that I've now been in the final stages of putting together for entirely too long was nearly 100% ready to go last weekend, only waiting on a few obscure architectures to finish building some stuff. Then secure apt entered testing and broke everything, and we had to add fixes to the fixes, and stuff like apt crashing on the alpha platform began to be potential beta blockers. Looks like this may get resolved yet, since mvo rocks, but it's been painful. And I'm still waiting on overly delayed builds for some architectures (cough sparc). The only thing I'm missing here at the farm now is a working oven. Otherwise it's been suprising how quickly I fell back into old modes.

A surprisingly high proportion of ex-UEA people stay in the area after finishing at UEA. Over 40% want to, according to the local chamber of commerce. Eventually, that number falls: with John and Brett leaving, I think I can now count on one hand those from my Norwich years (1994-1998) who I know are still here. Most left some time ago. Why? Small place syndrome? Underpaid work? Both? Possibly. It feels like only in Norfolk could the train station start to expand its car park to cope with demand and the same week most train services to it are cancelled because a Cambridgeshire farmer drove onto the single line stretch, was killed and it takes at least a day for access and safety checks in this sparsely-populated area. From the BBC's picture, the unit involved was one of the commemorative King's Lynn "picture trains". You seldom hear what happens to the damaged trains and injured drivers. I guess the railways and the media doesn't like to worry passengers. Even the Potter's Bar investigation ending only got brief mentions that I saw. Also at the train station, local police put out a picture of people they would "like to interview" about the spate of recent bike thefts. Possibly as a result, they've charged one man. Someone I know had a bike nicked, which meant a long walk to/from work until it was replaced. Very annoying. The sort of petty bike vandalism/theft which annoyed savs is also on the increase here again. I'd've expected nicked bikes to sell better in summer, but maybe the local crims are thick or there are more easy-to-nick bikes in September. At least it's not Fakenham, (which is one of the most boring places on earth, you may remember - original source ) where the headline story is that the kerbs are too high. I'm sorry someone was hurt, but kerbs here seem tiny compared to the ones in Northamptonshire. Probably they've all been lowered for safety there too now. As a result of adding Dave's blog to Planet ALUG, I noticed BritBlog for the first time. I spent a while browsing the other Norfolk-based blogs on it one evening. Unsurprisingly, I knew about most of the ones I found interesting already, apart from Ztroller who links to me... erm, why? Does he read this? Most listings are from blogspot and I still won't add Atom support to my blogging software - I want to read, not edit, so Atom is mostly extra cache filler. I only added Really Simple Syndication as well as RDF Site Summary because it was fairly cheap to do and I didn't know about the obvious way to get RSS 1 from Wordpress. Finally, in local(ish) concerns, Northern Ireland, from Noodles' emptiness:

"while I'm ranting, why is the adjective for someone from the UK "British"? Britain doesn't cover all of the UK. I wasn't born in Britain yet I'm British. Can't I be UKish or something?"

I'd hate to be called UKish. I don't have any particular affection for this Kingdom's political boundaries. If the UK ended tomorrow, would anyone besides its rulers mourn? I'll not thank you if you call me British. I'm English, a midlander and Towcestrian. British nationality is a side-effect. (And why is it so hard to get .gb domains anyway?) It's odd that there's such argument over England's anthem. So there is imagery or irony involved in Jerusalem, depending how you want to view it: who cares? It's rousing (unlike the UK dirge) and mentions England past. Yikes, I've just discovered I'm agreeing with Billy Bragg of all people. As for the UK, why don't we work together with others when we agree and work independently when we don't agree? Unfortunately, few politicians advocate English self-rule, apart from racist bigots and English imperialists. The really depressing thing is that those sort of people would probably easily get a majority in any English legislature, if backed by the mess media. Maybe Britain is diverse enough that it balances the extreme English... diverse we are or de verse it gets... (ouch)

Two new packages this week in emacs-snapshot: the first is savehist.el, a package to save minibuffer histories (grep, compile, shell command, M-x, etc) between sessions; the other is rcirc.el, a spartan IRC client which is noteworthy because it's the first IRC client to be shipped as part of Emacs. The more advanced ERC is to be installed at some later time, for now M-x irc points to rcirc.

Get it from your nearest mirror in about 24 hours, I missed tonight's dinstall by a few minutes (uploading 57M of packages takes some time).

Today it arrived, my Nokia 77O lnternet-Tablet that l got via the Developer-Program. My typing is still slow, so l’ll keep this entry short. The picture was taken wit my new camera and uploaded with the 77O.

Frederico Oliveira talks about some interesting issues regarding the information overload most of us are experiencing. He unsubscribed from several RSS feeds in order to cut down the mass of information. I'm goint to do the same thing, too. My first step was to reduce the amount of daily email, though. I have just finished unsubscribing from 16 mailing lists which I don't really read very often (this automatically reduces the amount of spam I get, too). I'm left with ca. 80 mailing lists now. I'll probably remove some more and concentrate on those which I really need and/or read regularly. The next step is to unsubscribe from several RSS feeds, but that's not that much of an issue. I find tracking RSS feeds easier and more manageable than tracking mailinglists (not sure why). For the statistics freaks, I currently subscribe to ca. 320 feeds, but I read way more of them regularly than I do with mailing lists...

I haven't blogged for a long time and much things happened like then... Even more work than before and HE is now a fresh student:

More news later