After getting back from DebConf and the 1-week trip afterwards, it took me a full week to get out of most of the chaos travelling usually leaves behind. I still haven't unpacked all stuff from the suitcase, but at least managed to wash the dirty clothes. Oh, and I've signed all keys from the KSP - including madduck's, he showed me his proper German ID card when I asked what this funny Transnational Republic was. (Oh, and if you were listed at the KSP, didn't show up, but I've signed your key anyway, that's because we met before and you have a new UID, in case you are wondering.) The pictures I took are still scatered over several home dirs on different hosts, I'll try to sort/rotate/rename them over the next days. (Oh, and DebConf was great, the trip afterwards likewise - I'll try to write a separate blog post on that later...) At the moment I'm slowly starting to get into frontdesk work. I have some notes from Neil's and Enrico's AM BoF and the discussion BoF round around my "NM process future" proposal that I still have to write down once I'm finished with answering my own NMs' mails. Both BoFs went pretty well, the major outcome being that we should discuss much more among AMs on -newmaint and IRC, have older AM reports available for reference by other AMs, and have some sort of "AM report template" that lists the points the DAMs want to see in the report. About the propsal, my feeling is that we shouldn't implement any major NM changes (like the DM idea) until we really understand what the problem with the current process is. (It takes too long, but that can be fixed by throwing out the not-ready applicants more aggressively.) Thanks to all the people who provided very valuable feedback during the BoFs and in the private conversations afterwards. So far, I've assigned a few applicants to AMs, added comments to the database on the level of prior contribution of the new applicants, and worked a bit on the web pages. The major visible change is that the NM graphs are now included on nm.d.o. The 'big' thing I'd like to implement next is to let the applicants write some application email where they list what they've done for Debian so far before the AM assignment, so we can match NM-AM better, and also improve our judgement of the level of prior contribution. Also, we will probably require 2 advocates per applicant in the future, to make sure people have worked with more than a single DD before. Of course, all this must not get excessive, we don't want to make joining Debian harder than it already is. Then there's also the usual 2k+ message backlog waiting in the Debian mailbox...

I'm really excited; I lucked out today and got a new computer. I'd tried to buy a Toshiba Libretto U100 over the weekend, but I had problems with my credit card -- Toshiba Canada wouldn't accept a card issued from a US bank. By the time I had figured out what the problem was, it was too late for an online purchase. So Amita June and I made the rounds of electronics stores in the March Central in Montreal, looking for ultraportable laptops (machines <1.5kg).

Please don't use Planet Debian to discuss techinical topics like adding a "-" in front of dh_clean calls. There are numerous reasons not to do that, but Planet Debian is not the place to disucss them. I'd be glad to elaborate in a proper forum.

So I spent most of yesterday's time on embedding a Ruby interpreter into qmail, and most of today's time on embedding a Lua interpreter into it instead. The latter worked well enough, the former did not and the resulting scripting environment was just weird. Not even the File object did work, I was not able to put some strings into a debugging file. Why I do that? Well, I needed greylisting, which seems to require a bit more policy than expected. There was a patch for qmail-smtpd which called a shell script to check if a certain file is present, representing the greylisting triplet. I first changed the script to sanitise its input variables and it looked to work well. But no, it broke sender verify. Another machine of mine, running exim, was not able to do a proper callout to this server, out of dubious reasons I have not yet fully explored. I wanted more control over the policies when to accept mail (considering that qmail does not implement anything like this by itself), so embedding looked like a good choice. I still hope that Lua provides me enough functions through its libraries, just like Ruby would. And why I use qmail... The commercial web hosting panel I got for free with the server, called Plesk, uses it, so I will stick to it until I find a drop-in replacement. I cannot be bothered to either write a free replacement for the panel which takes some work off me, or to take the challenge and replace qmail on the live server, having no other server equipped with the panel to try it on. Especially considering that I do this hosting for free in my spare time...

Another thing I've been wrong about in the past? JavaScript. I've always held that it was a cheap, lame, ugly knockoff language little better than a spreadsheet macro tool. I'm happy to say that my recent revisiting of JavaScript in the last 2 years has proved me wrong. JS is crazy, bizarre, and convoluted, true, but it's got a fundamental simplicity that I find appealing. The prototype-based inheritance is wacky, too. Anyways, I was interested to see that the ECMAScript 4 working group has published some specs for the next version of the language. It looks pretty cool.

I saw on Planet Debian that Enrico Zini had some trouble using xen-tools:

Installing the base system.   This will take a while!
	
Copying files from host to image.
Finished
Something went wrong with the debootstrap installation
Aborting

This basically means that the invocation of debootstrap failed to leave the system with a /bin/ls present - meaning it failed for some reason. My immediate mad debugging skillz suggest retrying with either –verbose, or –cache=no. The first will hopefully show the problem, the second will most likely fix the problem. I’ve seen this a few times, but haven’t updated the code to check for it. When creating a new Xen instance of, say 4gb, we copy all the packages from the host systems /var/cache/apt/archives so that debootstrap doesn’t redownload things and use up bandidth. If these cached files are >4gb then the new image is 100% full and debootstrap won’t run successfully! In related news I’m currently working on a system called image-server - this is a distributed xen-create-image script. The idea is that you have a central host which is responsible for creating Xen images of Debian, RedHat, Gentoo, and serving them to clients. This isn’t much use for a home user, but as a hosting company wanting to provide Xen instances of semi-arbitary Linux distributions it should come in handy. In other news I want to work on modularising the Xen tools scripts and moving them onto xen-tools.org.

Physical reaction while in Mexico for nearly a month on the food, water or weather: Some major sunburns, neglectible stomach issues. Physical reaction back home: severe stomach issues, for nearly two days now and 'running'. Seems that Dutch food is much more dangerous than Mexican food. That's not what my tourist booklet said, but oh well. I'm glad I didn't have the issues I have now during DebConf, being sick abroad is doubly annoying. Montezuma's Revenge reaches far (if this is in reality a backlash, who knows). At least I don't have a jet-lag this way: I don't get to sleep much at all, let alone at the 'wrong time'.

I think the current brouhaha surrounding PDF functionality in Office 2007 is an excellent object lesson in why software patents shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an Open Standard (and software in general!). I’m not sure if a patent is the tool of choice that Adobe is wielding in this particular example, but even if it’s not Patent’s present a large risk to Open Standards and should be resisted. It’s the same as the distinction between a Shared Source program and Open Source or Free Software. You may have the source code for a shared source program and be able to see how it is implemented and how it operates, but there are restrictions preventing you from doing anything with that information. Likewise a standard shouldn’t be called Open simply because you have details on how it is implemented (although that is undoubtably a critical part of openness). An Open Standard should be one which is openly specified and completely free of any other encumberances (such as patents). Unfortunately I don’t see any of the standards bodies making this a priority. My understanding of the IETF RFC process is that you have to file a statement stating any IP claims but you’re not prevented from standardising somethign that you hold a patent on. W3C and the IEEE seem slightly less prone to this problem as they tend to have committee oriented standards process that require more interaction, but I’m still not aware of any direct efforts to prevent parts of the resulting standard from becoming patent encumbered. If the lack of truly Open Standards can bite Microsoft it can bit any of us. It’s not an issue we should be ignoring.

I was quiet about it for a long time, but here it is: my first Summer of Code status report. For a bigger picture: I am working on a graphical front-end to the bug tracking system Debian uses. Well, at least I am supposed to work on it. First on my list was something else: a Gtk2 graphical front-end for the well-known bug reporting tool "reportbug", which might later be integrated somehow into Debian's Gnome environment. According to the list of milestones I created when I drafted the application in less than an hour (due to the deadline approaching) I need to release a first prototype of such a GUI today. It took more time than expected to work on it, so I have not yet started any work on the main graphical front-end. I started a few days later than expected, due to some delay until the approved applications were published and I also had to learn Python from scratch. This task was not too hard, but I am still often confused by the lack of consistency throughout the language. Compared to Ruby, a language I know reasonably well and in which I already coded much, Python has much more syntactic constructs for primitives and in my opinion this leads to a lack of consistency. But well, one gets used to it... There was once a "original" Gnome front-end, but it is discontinued since some years already. I did not look much at it, neither at the patch in the BTS which should basically bring it to the current Gnome2 libraries. To properly understand the hooks I need to provide for an interface plugin I started from scratch, only reusing the core idea of the old front-end: the use of the GnomeUI Druid. The new GtkAssistant is not yet ready to be deployed, being introduced with the upcoming Gtk 2.10 release. Still I have a weird feeling about the Gnome Druid, because I abuse it just to provide a consistent look. reportbug does not support backing up to a previous question, so the Back button is generally deactivated. I tried to modify core code as few as possible, as I have not yet talked with the reportbug maintainer Chris Lawrence. I will do so in due course. However after the old GUI front-end code was basically discarded (its usage is discouraged with a prominent notice), many changes to the core code did only take the text interface into account. (Well, I just suppose this, I did not do much research into reportbug's past.) So some tiny changes were needed to provide a few more hooks. There are, however, more to come, especially in connection with one input type (select_options, which could often be implemented as presenting a simple yes/no dialogue). The configuration basically works already, as seen below. What does not work are spawing the right editor and getting a filename from the user interface. But those are minor quirks and not too hard to fix. I need to develop in the open, as specified by the Summer of Code ruleset, and now I could do so, after about four rewrites of the GUI code. The main GUI loop is now in a thread, receiving commands from the main thread running the logic and sending the input back through a queue. (I used a pipe-based approach first, using an IO selector provided by glib, but it did not work well enough and this approach is far simpler.) So the current version is not vapourware, but there is still some more work to do to get it really usable. I will put my work into the Summer of Code Subversion repository as soon as the necessary access privileges are synced onto costa, an Alioth machine. Hopefully it will be merged into reportbug when I completely finished off this project.

Benjamin Seidenberg's Blog: New Anti-Spam Measures uses a simple maths test, which should work, but it produced a rambling SQL error for me. I emailed it as requested and got an error back saying Command died with status 1: "/usr/share/doc/spamassassin/examples/filter.sh" That may block all spam, but also blocks other mail, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. [links in permalink version]

A while ago I knocked up some scripts that created LVM snapshots for use with dchroot. Tonight as I was wading through my debian-devel backlog, I discovered that pbuilder can operate in a non-tarball mode, so I was immediately interested in seeing if I could couple the two together. This caused me to iron out a few more issues with the aforementioned scripts, to the point where you can go:

$ sudo create_chroot unstable; pdebuild --auto-debsign -- --no-targz --buildplace /chroots/unstable --bindmounts /var/cache/apt/archives --aptcache ""; \
sudo remove_chroot unstable

And the whole process is a bit faster (I think) than dicking around with tarballs. This is probably throw-away work anyway, given I'm sure cowbuilder will kick-arse, but it was fun... I need to make the create_chroot script take an option to not mount /proc, as at the moment, if you run the create_chroot script and then pdebuild immediately afterwards as indicated above, the latter will fail because pbuilder will fall over because /proc was already mounted in the chroot. I really should go to bed...

I'm terrible at the whole blogging thing, I've been back for two weeks and haven't found the time to summarize my time at DebConf. I had an excellent time. I met a lot of great people and even found a squash partner for the next DebConf. It was really quite unforgettable, so thanks to everyone involved.

Hanging out with sfllaw there, I was exposed to a lot more Ubuntu-esque things that I really had before. Some people there were quite unhappy about Ubuntu. To me, it's just not really that interesting, one because I don't see it as being substantially better or different from Debian and two because it looser stand on freedom. But hey, this is free software, people seem to like it, and I'm glad to see something related to Debian getting money and attention, rather than say RedHat or SUSE. I think a lot of developers would be happier with Ubuntu if it was just easier to ignore.

Then there was that dinner, and the events surrounding it. While I and many others won't miss Ted, I don't think he was treated at all fairly. Being thrown out in the middle of conference when seemly he did nothing wrong there was not very civil. If people could not stand to be around him, they did not have to be around him. He could have just as easily been removed from the project after the conference was over.

Enough griping though. If I came away with anything from the conference, it was a renewed vigor to work on Debian. Now if only my schedule would permit it.

Well, I have just finished setting up my virtual machine in a hosting provider which offers a very nice virtual machine plan called VPS. It’s very nice because they give you full root access so you can install whatever you want to install. Also, it’s Debian based and even the control panel they provide is as I like things to be : minimalist and easy to use. Sure, it works like a charm also. I’m tired because I was fighting the blog system I installed for a long time trying to convince it to get installed in a proper VirtualHost but it kept giving me trouble everytime I tried to access its root page. I gave up and installed it in a directory under my default page and then it worked as expected. Someday I need to take a closer look at it and find out what really went wrong. Well, actually, I know what went wrong and I even knew how one could fix the issue as I already fixed issues like this one lots of time in the past, but this time my tricks didn’t helped. Anyway, mail setup is already working, complete with SSL-based IMAP/POP, SMTP-AUTH through SASL and all the basic services I wanted to have are already working. Now I think I can have some sleep a it’s past 4:00AM. Well, enough for a first post.

While working on Hecl, it has sometimes really surprised me how much it's possible to delve into seemingly trivial details. Just for starters, we've been talking about what to call string commands. Originally, I'd used names like slen and sindex to have something quick and easy to write, but no one seemed to like them that much. Wolfgang implemented a bunch of new string commands (very much appreciated!), and took the Tcl approach of command subcommand, like string index, and also suggested some other things like str.index. I am strongly opposed to the string length style commands though, because I think that's just too much typing for a language that's supposed to get you up and running quickly. The compromise I proposed and implemented was to use more 'C style' commands like strlen, strindex, strfind, and so on. I'm not a big PHP fan, but they seem to have taken a similar approach. It's not too verbose, but you can tell more or less what the command is for. Even more seemingly trivial - indexes for strings and arrays. Hecl takes the Lisp approach rather than the C approach, and utilizes commands instead of syntax, even for list and string access, so to get the second character of the string "foo", you would do: strindex "foo" 1 . Like C, Hecl indexes start at 0. Where things get tricky is in calculating indexes "from the end" - how do you tell the language to "fetch the last character from the string 'foo'"? Tcl lets you write a string like "end" or "end-1", which is handy compared to the process you would go through in a language that doesn't help you out: take the length of the string, and subtract from that as needs be. I prefer the approach that I first saw in Python, though, use -1 for the last character:

>>> "abcde"[-1]
'e'

Ruby takes the same approach. It's nice to be able to just insert a -1 rather than have "end-1", which sort of looks like an expression, but isn't really (Hecl doesn't even have normal infix expressions), especially because you can easily calculate the -1 and insert it as is, instead of having to do some string interpolation like "end-$foo". Where things get tricky is when you want to do something like specify a range, say from the 3rd letter to the end of the string. In Python, they use syntax, specifically by simply not including the end of the range:

>>> "abcde"[3:]
'de'

That doesn't work really well with Hecl - I suppose we could pass in a blank string instead of a number, like so:

strrange "abcde" 3 ""

But that's not very clear, and IMO it's slighly ugly to pass in a string where you want to use a number. I had a look at Ruby's behavior, and found it more to my liking:

irb(main):001:0> "abcde"[3..-1]
=> "de"

The difference with Python is that the second index is inclusive, whereas Python includes the character at the first index, and excludes the second:

>>> "abcde"[3:-1]
'd'

I decided the Ruby approach worked best for Hecl, so now we have:

hecl> strrange abcde 3 -1
de

If you're still reading this, I guess you see what I mean by how much one must delve into what must seem like very unimportant minutiae to... well... normal people!

(Sorry Robert, this is a meta-blog-post. Perhaps I should create a catagory for them?) Since being syndicated on Planet Debian, the amount of comment spam I’ve gotten has risen sharply. No spam has made it onto th site itself, since I moderate the first comment someone makes, but the emails have gotten annoying. Therefore, I put a turing test into place. Blind users will be happy to hear it’s not a CAPTCHA, instead it’s one more field to fill out that asks a very basic math question to prevent spambots from commenting. Users who registered back when I required it won’t even get the field, isn’t that nice?
To the readers of Planet Debian who are probably asking “Why Do I Care?”: If you don’t mind, try out the system to make sure it works. I figure the readership of that site will have a fairly diverse set of browsers and maybe even a few using accessibility ehancements that can confirm that the system has no problems. If you encounter any problems, email me at astronut@dlgeek.net or ping me on IRC (astronut on both freenode and oftc).

This email was sent from LiveJournal / Six Apart through Responsys. You are receiving this email because your LiveJournal preferences indicate you are interested in receiving LJ News by email. If you do not want to receive LJ news by email, please login and edit your preferences: http://www.livejournal.com/editinfo.bml

They don't. I never set a preference for it and there is no such preference on that page. And I could have read that on the front page or news anyway. WTF? Updated: Removed broken preformatting of the quoted text.

In the office just now, daf complained at me that he finds it very annoying when people blog about how they havn’t blogged recently. I apologise, although in my defence, the post was mainly about C (I’ve subsequently learnt that -Wextra will warn me about such errors in future, thanks :D). The question is, is this post also annoying because of this meta-blogging property, or can it be excused as meta-meta-blogging? Although, whilst I am talking about my blog, I found that Ross Burton took a reasonable picture of me at FOSDEM (I’m the one on the left, versus Iain Holmes on the right :D), which I’ve cribbed for my photo on the GUADEC speakers list. I was wondering if in exchange for beer (or cake), anyone would like to make me a hackergotchi for my various Planet appearances? I’ve decided with mjg59 that when referring to Web 2.0, the correct pronounciation of RSS is ‘arse‘ (linked to the definition for people to might spell that word wrongly ;), leading to witty concepts such as ‘arse feeds’, ‘arse readers’, etc. It amused us in the pub anyway.