Phillip, my blog has no comments feature for similar reasons as madduck has pointed out. As you may have read, I wrote "[Debian Live will be] first [an] unofficial [project], then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject". As you may have read too, Joey wrote "Debian Live [...] is an official sub-project of Debian". I just created those ressources on my own webserver for beeing quicker and more flexible in the beginning, I would be happy to move everything to debian.org. However, this would need a large amount of time for bureaucracy (especially for a poor little NM like me). Time, which I don't have and neither want to invest nor want to waste at the moment. If you volunteer for that job, feel free to be my guest (to avoid misunderstandings: alioth isn't an option, hosting several ISO images isn't possible on haydn due to lack of bandwith and space). And yes, I agree... I'm unworthy to run something officially because I'm not a DD. I'm patiently stuck in the queue since nearly a year, currently waiting on my AM who has the major PITA to check 75 packages... (my earnest and deepest sympathy to you, rene).

Yeah, yet another blog without commenting feature. Daniel, when can you dare to call your Debian Live project an “official” sub-project? When at least one DD participates? When you got mailing lists on lists.debian.org like debian-edu oder debian-med? Especially considering that the mailing list is hosted on debian-unofficial.org. Oh well...

Christian, so what do you intend to do presenting the following snipplet?

echo “wiggy -1” >>beers.txt

Does he owe you a beer now or do you want to take one away from him on the next possible occasion?

western, my Sun Ultra10 which I used to use as server/gateway/firewall, broke down last weekend. Since western had only one 9G hard disk which was getting full, I wanted to add another disk. The 80G disk that I had bought for my desktop turned out not to be needed (since there were 2 extra disks hidden in the machine anyway), so I added it to the Ultra. However, it didn't get detected; according to Philip, an Ultra10 has a PIO-only IDE interface, which may be the cause of the problem—it's not that unlikely that the newest IDE disks, such as this 80G one, do not support outdated transfer modes such as PIO anymore. So, I decided to take out one of the disks from rock, my desktop, and put in the 80G one instead. 40G is still plenty for a server which until recently had only 9G. Thank $DEITY for LVM Connected the 80G disk as /dev/hdd to rock, and ran the following commands:

rock:~# cfdisk /dev/hdd
[create a partition]
rock:~# pvcreate /dev/hdd1
rock:~# vgextend rock /dev/hdd1
rock:~# pvmove /dev/hde1
rock:~# vgreduce -a

Now shut down the box again, and remove /dev/hde. And no, the hde part is not a typo: rock has four IDE controllers. Meanwhile, however, I was noticing something peculiar about western: its external network card did not get a DHCP lease anymore, for some reason. That card was a 3com 905, with a slightly loose RJ45 connector; by unplugging or reconnecting the cable, it might be that I moved it a bit too much around and broke it. While it's a pity that I lost that 3c905, it's not really much of a problem: put in a different card, boot again, done. The Realtek ne2k-pci board that I put in next didn't work. It did get a DHCP lease, but it couldn't use the connection for some reason. Ne2k boards are crap, so it could be related. I put in yet another card, and booted the machine again, this time without replacing the cover (in case that card wouldn't work either). After it had been running for about 1 minute, the system suddenly shut itself off for no apparent reason. So I put the cover back on and tried to boot. After 10 seconds, even before silo was loaded, the system shut itself off for no apparent reason. I thought maybe it was the card, and even tried the 3c905 again. The system shut itself off for no apparent reason. It hasn't stopped doing that. I finally, on sunday evening, set up rock as a replacement server and put the 9G disk in there too, so that I could at least access the data and config files. But I'd love to get western to boot again. Stupid thing. Any hints are very welcome. Really. I'll even give you a Free Beer at FOSDEM if you give me the hint that fixes it.

Whew! Wow! Yay! It’s been just a couple of days since the Bicol Open Source Forum was held at the Aquinas University, but I can’t just seem to forget it. It’s been a rocking experience, and I wished it were a bit longer:

• I met Irvin (at last) who also gave my a copy of Dapper Flight 3. \o/ Together with Rick, we gave away lots of Ubuntu CDs at the event (I practically went back home to Daet with an empty box
• I also got to chat with fellow speakers Rick Bahague Jr. of CP-Union who presented the state of FOSS and Rage Callao of ASTI-DOST who is working on the Philippines’ very own Bayanihan Linux. Both are really cool guys in their own right, and they also are Debian/Ubuntu users too! Rage was also kind enough to give me his own 16-CD Debian Sarge collection (plus Bayanihan 3.1 and Thin Client Manager); Thanks a lot!!!
• I was surprised at the number of people who attended the forum, as well as their attention to detail during the presentations, and most of all, in their line of questioning: these were mostly non-technical management people, and they all seem to use GNU/Linux in its various incarnations for quite some time now. I hope that these people would continue their adventure into FOSS; especially with (both) regional and local government support, I’m quite excited to see what holds for FOSS in Bicol in the future
• I got involved in the founding of the Bicol Open Source Society that would serve as the overseer and motivator for FOSS projects and events here in Bicol. Included in the org are folks from academe and local govenrment units, and we’re set to have an online meeting sometime next week. Of course, we’re composed of a small number of people for now, but I expect that with some additional visibility (starting with making a new mailing list) I think a lot of Bicolanos in the region and elsewhere will be very interested in joining. Hopefully there would be provincial LUGs soon, and I think this would be a very good prospect for a PLUG roadshow.
• I got to see Bulkang Mayon and the Cagsawa Ruins too with Rick and the DOST folks at the day after the event (too bad Rage had to go ahead.) A couple of van-rides later and I’m back home, trying out a Dapper upgrade, and quite tired but happy.

Thanks a lot to Joseph Cadag and Josephina Abilay of DOST/RITECC for organizing the event and bringing FOSS to the attention of many Bicolanos I look forward for another event like this soon: from what I hear there would be an even bigger one set for July. I guess I should be pinging Marilize of Ubuntu now to reserve some flyers and CDs… …but right now, on the the Dapper upgrade! Break my Breezy and lemme have my jigsaw puzzle

Philipp, Joeys "slides" are published on meetings-archive.debian.net and I now have informed Wolfgang that he can update his page. Unfortunatly Joey's paper is written in german...

Also the round of introductions from the QA meeting in Darmstadt is now online (because of rsync-times you'll only be able to see it in three hours). I did not publish it earlier, because someone said something which should remain private. Instead of saying this in advance, so that the recording could have been stopped, this remark was made after saying these things, and therefore required post-processing.

Then it took me three months until I finally looked at that video to edit it. What I saw made me speechless (and smile), the video was already edited! But as nobody told me that, I didn't know :-) Or maybe I was told this when leaving Darmstadt, but it didn't reach my memory...

Now, about four weeks later, I got over my embarrassment not looking at it earlier...

Hehe Christian At least darcs will be easy to learn Sorry I just couldn’t resist.

Martin, I recall that Joey already did a diagram for the stable security updates, shown at LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe. Funnily enough, Joey did not publish his slides. (He is almost the only one who didn’t, looking at the list of speakers of the two Debian Days.) Oh well... And guess what his own publication on his site lacks... The “Security Processing” part is just empty. Disclaimer: This is not intended to offend Joey in any way.

Martin said:

Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!

No, Martin, that doesn’t mean anything about the Unix philosophy. It only means Windows developers don’t have a clue about Unix.

Amaya, we even watched an episode of Fawlty Towers at school. ‘bout Germans of course, but well, British humour is somewhat... strange (the English lesson was about stereotypes... “Never mention the war!”).

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog Here are the highlights of my trip:

• Feb 1 - Arrived in Manila around 6 in the evening; spent the early part of the evening looking for an internet cafe to check on mail. libmemcache got ACCEPTED, but it FTBFS on powerpc $DEITY, I sure wish I had my desktop with me! (or at least some access to a ppc Looked for someone on #debianPPC to help me solve it (and indeed got the hint by the next day Slept late.
• Feb 2 - Woke up late, checked mail only to be told by Jerome to GO HERE NOW to the Peninsula Manila for the ABT breakfast meeting. After a short tirade with some Ayala traffic enforcers about crossing pedestrian lanes, I was able to arrive (already late) to Garcia Villa, seeing Jerome, Charo, Clair, and Dom, providing a nice representation for both PLUG and Ubuntu-PH. The Inceptions folks (who I met last time at LinuxWorld) were there as well. Mark was already talking when I arrived, while Hande and Malcolm from Canonical were at the back with the local media; and after that, I got to talk with the SABDFL, of all things, about my Debian packaging adventure last night :/ After lunch, we then transferred to the National Computer Center at UP Diliman (Canonical in the chopper, Ubuntu-PH and PLUG in Jerome’s Picanto) to continue the Tour for government representatives and CIOs (which didn’t go quite well in my opinion; imagine crickets signing in the night), NGOs, and academe (which was much better, especially since Doc Pablo Manalastas asked the last question regarding backports.) Mark and company had to leave early, which left us PLUG/Ubuntu-PH people going to the UP Shopping Center for snacks, some talk, and an early wrapup. I however still slept late. Photos by Charo are visible.
• Feb 3 - After doing some errands in the morning, I went to Makati to meet up with Shelley, Markku, and Rommel of Inceptions. I will be doing a project with them

I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

Joey writes about the lack of new tools that fit into the Unix philosophy. My favourite of such things I've written is sponge. It addresses the problem of editing files in-place with Unix tools, namely that if you just redirect output to the file you're trying to edit then the redirection takes effect (clobbering the contents of the file) before the first command in the pipeline gets round to reading from the file. Switches like sed -i and perl -i work around this, but not every command you might want to use in a pipeline has such an option, and you can't use that approach with multiple-command pipelines anyway. I normally use sponge a bit like this:

sed '...' file   grep '...'   sponge file

Since it's so trivial I imagine lots of other people have written something similar (another common name for it seems to be inplace; my name indicates soaking up all the input and then squeezing it all out again); but I do keep meaning to try to get a rewritten version into coreutils at some point.

I'm a fan of the unix tools philosophy, but I sometimes wonder if there's much room for new tools to be added to that toolbox. New programs that fully partake of the philosophy (like rename, netcat, par, bloxsom, grepmail, and xwit) are fairly few and far between compared to all the new programs that don't. I've always wanted to come up with my own general-purpose new unix tool. vidir doesn't quite qualify as a real unix tool, since it doesn't (normally) operate on stdio, but it's as close as I've gotten, and it does seem to fill in a nice hole in the toolbox. The idea is very simple, it just displays the files that are in a directory as lines in a text editor, then you can make any changes you like, and when you quit the editor it renames and/or deletes files to match your changes. No need to worry about quoting issues and the full ad-hoc editing power of a good text editor make cleaning up messy directories fun. Like any good utility, there is plenty of obvious room for improvement, it would be nice if it had a --recursive switch to edit whole directory trees at a time. And it needs to have some support added for swapping pairs of filenames. I challange others to try to make general purpose unix tools..

John, while I agree with you, just hit Ctrl-L in the dialog to specify a filename. It will take some seconds to actually find the file, but it works basically. It would be nice if the Gnome people would re-add it, though.

Licenses are just too nice... Especially if you put special clauses in the context of the application they apply to. SUN states the following in a code example for the Java Micro Edition.

You acknowledge that this software is not designed, licensed or intended
for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any
nuclear facility.

Now consider that the Java Micro Edition usually runs on mobile phones. Well, yes it’s for embedded devices too, but I found it in a GUI example. If I imagine to control a nuclear power plant by just using my phone in the bus, using a nice little Java application... What a threat I would be.

In a little while I’ll be packing my things: clothes (with a few formal attires), a couple of (C/data structures) books, some snacks (Nerds!) and spare change (no bills). I’ve yet to see all of them fit in my backpack, so I’ll probably bring a couple of bags. Tomorrow, I will be bound for Manila yet again, much earlier than usual, for the AsiaBusinessTour on Thursday. And on the 16th, there will be the Bicol Open Source Forum in Legazpi City. Joseph Davidton Cadag invited me to be a speaker; I’ve yet to accept, but I’m leaning to it, especially since this would be a great opportunity to speak more about FOSS to my fellow Bikolanos. Also, its a nice time to meet up with Irvin Piraman who will be giving some Ubuntu CDs in the Forum too. I just hope I can finish my (re)packaging of ecb which I ITA‘d since last August. There is a package of the new upstream version already, but there seems to be a lack of Debian sponsors who can look into Emacs-related packages. sigh

If you support friendship, you should sign now the DebConf6’s abrotman petition! DO IT NOW! Alexander Brotman is a nice guy from Philadelphia, US, who is unsure on coming for DebConf6 since he feels he doesn’t fit the nature of the event. He is a great supporter of the Debian community and he shouldn’t miss the chance to have an official DebConf so near from home. Besides, he is my friend, think on the kittens :’) Support the petition today! http://www.petitiononline.com/abrotman/petition.html