A cautionary tale: Verizon's DSL salespeople are completely incompetent. Several weeks ago, I ordered residential service. I was unable to get the prequalification app on their web site to work for my address, so I called in. I was told (1) I could get a modem for free, and (2) that I didn't need to do anything for the install except plug it in -- they'd just be turning something on at the CO, perhaps even before the date my service was scheduled to begin. These were both, of course, pure fiction. On the install date, while at work, I got a call from a tech who had shown up at my house to rewire something. Luckily, I was able to rendezvous with him later in the day. The service worked briefly and then went down. Over the next few days, I called in, was told to wait at home for 8 hours, no one showed up, I called in again, was told "oh, sorry, it's going to be tomorrow", waited all day the next day, no one showed up again... a week and two actual visits later, I finally had connectivity. I can't really blame them for whatever the line problem was, but to repeatedly treat my time as worthless by making me wait at home for an entire day just in case a tech can get there, even though it's highly unlikely they will, is just offensive. Then, I received my first bill and... was charged for the modem. Calling in again, I was told that the deal I was offered was for online orders only, and even if I specifically confirmed with the sales person that he could get me the same deal since the web site wouldn't let me complete an order (and I already had an old, power-sucking modem anyway), there was no way I could get a refund. So I got an RMA and planned to go shopping for a replacement (people are selling the same model on Craigslist for $10). The RMA came in an email which also told me that if I did not return the equipment within X days I would be charged $100. This is all utter bullshit. Do not use Verizon. If your only other option is Comcast, as it is here, just steal your neighbor's wireless or tether your 3G. They could have left me reasonably happy with the whole botched situation if they had provided a honest estimate of how long it would really take to get someone out (even if it was "days"), or given me access to the same information without having to go through a call center of people only trained to read a script about how to power-cycle your router or whatever. And if they actually apologized for a saleperson convincing me to sign up by lying about what I would be charged. But why would they? What are you going to do, switch to an ISP that treats you like a human being and doesn't fuck with your traffic? Ha. Ha ha ha. Good luck with that.

I am working on a system where a front-end mail server sends mail to what it considers to be a LDA (Local Delivery Agent) which actually sends mail to a back-end server via LMTP. I can t remove that fake LDA from the design because it does a bunch of business specific processing along the way. I am working on changing the back-end from Cyrus to Dovecot. Currently the mail goes from the fake LDA to the Cyrus LMTP server. What I would like to do is to have an LMTP server run on the back-end machine that launches the Dovecot deliver program immediately and then returns an appropriate code. So far I have been experimenting with having Postfix run on the back-end to use deliver as the real LDA. The first problem with this is that the mail will be written to the Postfix queue and then written to the mail store. Doubling the number of writes is a real problem for a system that is going to be write-bottlenecked - it would significantly increase the hardware costs. The second problem is that when an account goes over quota the back-end server would be generating a bounce message. I would prefer the front-end server to generate the bounce on an un-munged message. Basically all I need is a simple daemon (which could even be launched from inetd) that talks LMTP (a very simple cut-down version of SMTP) and executes a single command to receive the data. It might be necessary to serialise running the delivery process, in which case the mail data would have to be stored in memory and there would need to be a semaphore around executing the delivery program. Does anyone know of such a program? If not then I ll have to write it myself (which shouldn t be difficult) and GPL it. If I have to do that then I need a suitable name for it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Yesterday, the choir of which I've been a member for these past few years went to the provincial tournament for the first time in its existence. For those of you unaware with what this is: the "provincial tournament" isn't a tournament in the traditional sense (which would have a winner etc); instead, you get to sing in front of an expert jury which will classify you in one of six categories; the category you're in then determines government subsidy your group gets. This is done for all nonprofessional music groups, and makes for a pretty fair way of deciding who gets what, IMO. Apart from that, it's of course also fun. Anyway, as said this was the first time our choir went to such a "tournament", but of course we weren't alone; apart from us, there were six other choirs, two of which were also part of the Ekerse C-koren: Cantando (the semi-professional choir of our group) and Cantilene (for those between the ages of 18 and 25 (or 16 and 25 for boys). And we did well. Cantilene (who did very well in the most recent edition of the 'Koor van het Jaar' contest) was categorized in the 'superieure afdeling' ('superior category'), with 75% in that category. Cantando did even better than that; they achieved a score of 93%, also in the superieure afdeling. This is the highest category in the whole system, so it deserves some special praise. Caljent , our choir, didn't quite reach that level yet; considering the fact that we've only existed about three years, however, that isn't very surprising. Yet, we did quite well; we were categorized in the 'Uitmuntendheid' category, with a score of 75% in that category. Uitmuntendheid (which would translate to something like 'greatness') is the third possible category, which puts us in the top half of the choirs of the province of Antwerp. Quite an achievement for what is, after all, a fairly new choir. Of course we're all very happy with that especially so our conductor, who was rather surprised when she heard the outcome... For those interested, one of the choir members had a camera with him, and he put the four pieces we sang up on youtube: Credo, Dostoyno Yest, Wals van kwart voor middernacht, and Hodie Christus Natus Est. There're also films of the other choirse, but you'll have to look for those yourself ;-P

Once your new Free Software project has had some traction and is gaining users, you will probably want to supplement its initial homepage with a few extra services. However, the most important aspects of managing a Free Software community have more to do with relating to human beings.
Social Interactions in Small ProjectsIn the early days of your project, support requests usually only come in through personal emails to the lead developer. In order to build your community, make sure new users feel welcome:

• Be friendly and informal in your responses. Feel free to use the person's first name at the beginning of your emails.


• Be responsive to feedback and request for help. Most Free Software developers are quite busy so this is about letting user know that you'll get back to them or thanking them for their suggestions/feedback. Very few people take the time to contact authors to let them know about the problems they run into. It's important to be supportive of the ones who do.
  


• Be calm when responding to negative feedback. It helps to take a full day to cool off before sending a reply. Thank users for writing to you, but remind them that you are not getting paid to work on this project and that you are doing this for fun in your spare time. Some users seem to forget this.

But of course, remember that the main job of a developer/maintainer is to make the software better. Keep this in mind when replying to support requests and allocate your (limited) time accordingly.
More Tools for Growing ProjectsAs your project grows and handling user-reported issues start becoming more of a burden, consider two things: documentation and distributed support.

The obvious place to start documentation-wise is to start collecting responses that you send to users who get in touch with you. This is the original meaning of a FAQ: answers to actual questions sent in by actual users. Fill your FAQ with irrelevant questions and users won't bother reading it and will email you instead.

In addition to providing good documentation, you should also think about creating a mailing list or a forum where users can post their questions (Google Groups provides a nice blend of the two technologies). There are two main advantages to this service:

• the support load is distributed across other users of the software
• questions and answers are archived by search engines

As your project grows even bigger, you will probably also want to look into getting a bug tracker and a wiki.

Have a look at this excellent online book for more ideas.

So I am going to do something that nobody on the Internet is doing lately: post a review of the Kindle 2 after having only used it for three days. Shocking, yes, I know. I had never even seen a Kindle of either model before getting the Kindle 2. I had, though, thought about getting an eInk device for some time. The $359 Kindle 2 price tag caused me significant pause, though in the end I went for it due to the 30-day return policy. On the surface, I thought that it would be weird to have a Kindle. After all, how often am I away from the computer? And there s a small local library a few blocks from where I work. But I had a hunch it might turn out for me like my iPod did: something that didn t sound all that useful from reading about it, but turned out to be tremendously so after having actually used it. Turtleback Delivery I ordered my Kindle 2 with standard shipping, which meant that it went by FedEx Smart Post. Here is my SmartPost rant. There are two words in Smart Post that are misleading. I once had an item take literally a week to make it from St. Louis to Kansas. That is, I kid you not, slower than the Pony Express ran in 1860. This time, my Kindle made it from Kentucky to Kansas in a mere five days. Oh, and it spent more than 24 hours just sitting in St. Louis. The Device Overall, the device is physically quite nice. It is larger and thinner than I had imagined, and the screen also is a bit smaller. It is usually easier to hold than a paperback, due to not having to prevent it from closing too far at the binding edge. The buttons are easy to press, though I could occasionally wish for them to be easier, but that s a minor nit. The Screen The most important consideration for me was the screen. The eInk display as both stunningly awesome and disappointing. This is not the kind of display you get on your computer. Or, for that matter, any other device. It isn t backlit. It reacts to light as paper does. It can be viewed from any angle. And it consumes no power to sustain an image; only to change it. Consequently, it puts up a beautiful portrait of a famous author on the screen when it is put to sleep, and consumes no power to maintain it. The screen s response time isn t anywhere near as good as you d expect from a regular LCD. It flashes to black when you turn a page, and there is no scrolling. On the other hand, this is not really a problem. I found the page turning speed to be more than adequate, and probably faster than I d turn the page on a real book. The resolution of the display has the feeling of being incredible. The whole thing provides a far different, and in my eyes superior, experience to reading on an LCD or CRT screen. My nit is the level of contrast. The background is not really a pure white, but more of a light gray. This results in a contrast level that is quite clearly poorer than that of the printed page. At first I thought this would be a serious problem, though I am growing somewhat more used to it as I read more. Reading Experience Overall, I ve got to say that it is a great device. You can easily get lost in a book reading it on the Kindle. I m reading David Copperfield for the first time, and have beat a rather rapid path through the first five chapters on the Kindle already. And that, I think, is the best thing that could be said about an ebook reader. It stays out of the way and lets you immerse yourself in your reading. The Kindle s smartly-integrated Oxford-American Dictionary was useful too. One thing about a novel written 150 years ago is that there are some words I just haven t ever heard. Nosegay, for instance. You can move a cursor to a word to see a brief pop-up definition appear, or press Enter to see the entire entry. This is nice and so easy that I m looking up words I wouldn t have bothered to if I were reading the book any other way. A nosegay, by the way, is a bouquet of showy flowers. Buying Experience The Kindle has a wireless modem tied to the Sprint network on it. The data charges for this, whatever they may be, are absorbed by Amazon in the cost of the device and/or the books you buy for it. This turned out to be a very smart piece of engineering. I discovered on Amazon s Kindle Daily Post that Random House is offering five mostly highly-rated sci-fi books for free on the Kindle for a limited time. So I went over to the page for each, and made my purchase . It was only a click or two, and I saw a note saying it was being delivered. A few minutes later, I picked up the Kindle off the kitchen counter. Sure enough, my purchases were there ready to read. Impressive. This level of ease of use smells an awful lot like Apple. Actually, I think it s surpassed them. You can delete books from the Kindle and re-download them at any time. You can initiate that operation from either the PC or the Kindle. And you can also browse Amazon s Kindle store directly from the device itself. I haven t subscribed to any magazines or newspapers, but I gather that they deliver each new issue automatically the moment it s released by the publisher, in the middle of the night. I pre-ordered the (free to Kindle) Cook s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library. It makes me way happier than it should to see This item will be auto-delivered to your Kindle on March 26 in the order status. Free Books Amazon s Kindle library has a number of completely free Kindle books as well. These are mostly out-of-copyright books, probably sourced from public etext places like Project Gutenberg, and converted to the Mobipocket format that is the Kindle s native format with a minimum of human intervention. As they are free, you can see them in Amazon s library if you sort by price. And, of course, Amazon will transfer them to the Kindle wirelessly, and maintain a copy of them in your amazon.com account. Unfortunately, as with free etexts in general on the Internet, the quality of these varies. I was very annoyed to find that many free etexts look like they were done on a typewriter, rather than professionally printed. They don t use smart quotes; only the straight ones. When reading on a device that normally shows you a faithful print experience, this is jarring. And I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find a copy of Return of Sherlock Holmes that actually had the graphic figures in Dancing Men. Ah well. Your Own Content Amazon operates a mail server, username@kindle.com. You can email stuff to it, and it will convert it to the Kindle format and wirelessly upload it to your kindle for a fee of $0.10. Alternatively, you can use username@free.kindle.com, which does the same thing at no charge, but emails you back a link to download the converted work to install via USB yourself. I tried it with a number of PDFs. It rejected about a dozen times from only my single mail message a PDF containing graphic images only. However, it does quite well with most text-heavy PDFs notably doing an excellent job with Return of Sherlock Holmes from bookstacks.org the only source I found that was both beautifully typeset and preserved the original figures. Unfortunately, the PDF converter occasionally has troubles identifying what should be a paragraph, particularly in sections of novels dealing with brief dialog. I have also sent it some HTML files to convert, which it also does a great job with. You can also create Mobipocket files yourself and upload them directly. There is a Mobipocket creator, or you can use mobiperl if you are Windows-impaired or prefer something scriptable on Linux. The device presents itself as a USB mass storage device, so you can see it under any OS. There s a documents folder to put your files in. You can back it up with your regular backup tools, too. And it charges over USB. Web Browser I haven t tried it much. It usually works, but seems to be completely down on occasion. It would get by in a pinch, but is not suitable for any serious work. The guys over at XKCD seem to love it; in fact, their blog post was what finally convinced me to try the Kindle in the first place. Final Thoughts I ve ordered a clip-on light and a leather case for the Kindle. The light, I believe, will completely resolve my contrast complaint. The leather case to protect it, of course. I can t really see myself returning the Kindle anymore. It s way too much fun, and it s making it easier to read more again. And really, if Amazon manages to reach out to a whole generation of people and make it easy and fun for them to read again and make a profit doing it, of course they may move up a notch or two from being an evil patent troll company to a positive social force company. Wow, never thought I d say that one.

Just booked the early bird ticket. Only one note: Guido will be there ;)

See ya if you come too!

/me for DPL Given that it is now widespread news, I guess it's time to blog about it: I'm running for DPL in this year elections, i.e.: zack for DPL!. Am I out of my mind?
Possibly It started as a joke at last DebConf, with my (naked or dressed ...) room mates spreading that rumor. Then the idea grows into me ... and now here I am. (IOW: I'm pretending I'm not entirely guilty of inflicting another platform to be read.) Apparently we are just two candidates: me and the "ticket" Steve-Luk. For the moment I've to spare a page where I will collect material about the election, and a couple of feelings:

• Sending the nomination mail is embarrassing: we are used to do only technical stuff in Debian, declaring our will of taking care for a while of our non-technical issues ain't easy.
• Preparing a platform is an intriguing experience. Whining about our problems is a thing. Trying to distill them in an organized list, and think about long term solutions is a totally different one. I suggest to try writing your own "platform" even if you are not candidate, and even when there are no DPL elections around (as Joey and HE did a while ago, IIRC, in the form of blog posts). It can be a rewarding exercise.

Version 1.0 of my platform has been submitted to the secretary, and is now available from my homepage. If you have questions, for me or the other candidates, just post them on -vote: campaigning has just started, I'm confident it will be fun! Update the platform is now available from the vote page

Today is the International Woman's Day (IWD) so I will take advantage of my blog to congratulate all women either into the Debian Project and in General.

The women's history, from my point of view, has been involved of many difficult situations. Women have had to face the inequality in many ways and levels. On the other hand, it has changed a lot but there still happening some cases nowadays.

I got surprised, when I read the article in Wikipedia, by some controversial facts. Sometimes it is a shame our "human" behavior...

One of the recent poor trends in mailing list discussions is to reply to a message with a comment such as FAIL or EPIC FAIL . The FAIL meme has been around for a while and actually does some in some situations, slate has a good article about it [1]. The first example cited in that article is that when Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson testified before the Senate banking committee last month about Paulson s proposed bailout bill, a demonstrator in the audience held up an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper with one word scrawled on it in block letters: FAIL. . This is an effective form of political demonstration, short words generally work well on placards (if only because the letters can be larger and therefore read from a greater distance) and anyone can understand the meaning of FAIL in that context. There are some blogs dedicated to publicising supposed failures, failblog.org and ShipmentOfFail.com are two examples. I cite these as supposed failures because some of the pictures that they contain are obviously staged. It s basically an Internet equivalent of the Funniest Home Videos shows that I never watched because they were not particularly funny. So using the word FAIL on it s own can be an effective form of political protest and can be used for mildly amusing web sites. But where it falls down is when it s applied to a discussion that involves people who are from different cultures or have different levels of background knowledge - which covers most mailing list discussions. Something that might be obviously wrong to some people is often not obvious at all to others. For example being forced to reboot a computer for any reason other than a kernel upgrade seems obviously wrong to me (and to most people who use Linux or other Unix systems) but Windows users seem happy to reboot machines after applying patches or upgrades. So writing a message with FAIL as the only word in a discussion with Windows users would not be productive. It could however be reasonable to forward a link to a page on a Microsoft web site to Linux people for their amusement with FAIL as the only comment - anyone who would find the link in question amusing would require no more explanation. Sometimes when in a debate someone will write a message that only says FAIL , this is a very unconvincing argument that will not convince the opposition or any onlookers. Generally it seems that using FAIL in a discussion with other like-minded people when talking about someone outside your group for the purpose of amusement can be effective. But any other use is going to be a FAIL . As a more general rule single-word messages seem to have little value apart from certain limited situations. I have identified the following seven scenarios where a single word message is useful. Can anyone think of any others?

1. Code review - someone posts code (or design for code) and people who like it will write ACK or something similar.


2. Arranging a meeting - the question who wants to meet for lunch tomorrow has me as a valid answer.


3. Voting - yes and no are valid answers for a poll, but a mailing list or forum probably isn t the best place for it.


4. Citing an example to refute a claim - often a single word won t be a great response but may be adequate to prove a point.


5. Answering a request for a recommendation - if asked to recommend a laptop I might say Thinkpad or if asked to recommend a server I might say HP . Both those answers are poor (I recommend EeePC for netbooks and Dell for small/cheap servers), so while such an answer would be useful it would be below my usual quality standards for email (I prefer to write at least two paragraphs explaining why I recommend something).


6. Informing people that something has been done by replying to a request with the word Done .


7. Agreeing to a contract or proposal with OK or Yes .

Update: I added another two reasonable uses of single word messages,

• [1] http://www.slate.com/id/2202262/pagenum/all/

The listeners of yesterday s episode of Venty s Hackerfunk radio show on Radio LoRa already know and heard it: We made identi.ca talk. And we did it with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as it s published.) A few weeks ago we thought about how we could show microblogging on the radio. With identi.ca s Jabber (XMPP) interface we have real time access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming dents into a speech synthesis system. Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the LUGS IRC (e.g. bones0) pointed us to festival and espeak. We found no support for German in festival, so we went for espeak although festival would have had the advantage of the existence of a festival plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger Pidgin. Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a tail -f of XMPP incoming messages? Something like rsstail, just for XMPP. Although using the IM to IRC gateway Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and using tail -f (or better inotail -f ) on the IRC client s log file (ii comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody had the idea at that time. And since @deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily took it. xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in Python and uses Twisted Words (Debian package python-twisted-words) as XMPP libraries. I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support and for removing things we don t want to hear on the radio as follows, but it worked more or less out of the box.

--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 # author: Carlos A. Perilla 
 # This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
          body = unicode(e.__str__())
          break
 
-    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+#    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+    print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
 
 
 def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
   dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':
-    print "Starting"
+    #print "Starting"
     execfile('tailconf')
-    print USER_HANDLE
+    #print USER_HANDLE
     me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
     myJid = jid.JID(me)
     server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]

So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we successfully ran the following script during the radio show:

./xmpptail.py   while read LINE; do
        if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
                continue;
        fi;
        echo $LINE
        echo $LINE   tee -a xmpp-espeak.log   espeak --stdin -v de;
done

At the end of the show, @rebugger found this howto which describes very detailed how to get festival working together with the non-free ( non-free as in DFSG) MBROLA project which offers also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with espeak for German speech synthesis . Next step would be to use mnoGosearch s mguesser to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many dents sound really funny. ;-) Update, 15:02: Venty gave the whole system the name Identibla .

Hi, I m looking for a tool to create simple websites (5-10 pages), only static content (no PHP). Think of the typical small business or sports club website: text + pictures about what they did/do, nothing really complex. Requirements:

usable by a non-programmer who doesn t want to know about gory technical details (HTML, CSS, etc)

doesn t make it too hard to create a website with a few pages (i.e it should do a bit more than just allowing to create one page)

built-in support for (S)FTP uploading of the website, usable by a non-programmer after someone computer-litterate will have set it up. (that s not an absolute requirement, but would still be nice to have. also, what are the nice graphical tools to do that, currently?) I m asking for two different persons with different needs. So please don t limit your replies to free software (although it would be nice): cheap proprietary applications might be adequate as well. Regarding platform, Linux, Mac OS X or Windows would all be suitable. I don t think that a CMS is the right tool here: the focus should be put on the content (which won t be often modified anyway) and its presentation, not on the ease of modification. For example, I d like to be able to position pictures in a precise way. However, I might be interested in a CMS that is:

easy to setup (for a reasonably computer-literate person)

extremely easy to learn (a couple hours at most, for a non-programmer)

easy to transform into something that looks good In your comments, it would be great if you could include examples of what you did with those tools (yes, links are welcomed!) Thank you.

Yesterday I asked for help because I was missing exif information in my Gallery2 installation. Today I found the reason for this, when I was trying get a random image block displayed in my blog, which fails as well.
There seems a bug in /usr/share/php/adodb/drivers/adodb-postgres7.inc.php:

Warning: pg_query_params() [function.pg-query-params]: Query failed: ERROR: column "g_userid" is of type integer but expression is of type text HINT: You will need to rewrite or cast the expression. in /usr/share/php/adodb/drivers/adodb-postgres7.inc.php on line 113
-1: ERROR: column "g_userid" is of type integer but expression is of type text HINT: You will need to rewrite or cast the expression.



ADOConnection._Execute(
INSERT INTO
g2_ImageBlockCacheMap
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, g2_Entity.g_creationTimestamp, g2_Entity.g_id, FLOOR(RANDOM()
..., Array[45]) % line 1007, file: adodb.inc.php


ADOConnection.Execute(
INSERT INTO
g2_ImageBlockCacheMap
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, g2_Entity.g_creationTimestamp, g2_Entity.g_id, FLOOR(RANDOM()
..., Array[45]) % line 952, file: GalleryStorageExtras.class


GalleryStorageExtras.execute(
INSERT INTO
[ImageBlockCacheMap]
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, [GalleryEntity::creationTimestamp], [GalleryEntity::id],
FLOOR(R..., Array[45]) % line 507,
file: GalleryStorage.class


GalleryStorage.execute(
INSERT INTO
[ImageBlockCacheMap]
SELECT DISTINCT
?, ?, [GalleryEntity::creationTimestamp], [GalleryEntity::id],
FLOOR(R..., Array[45]) % line 742,
file: ImageBlockHelper.class


ImageBlockHelper.cacheViewableTree(17) % line 520, file: ImageBlockHelper.class

Error performing imageblock.LoadImageBlock callback realpath(/usr/share/gallery2/modules/core/classes/../../../) realpath(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/) Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE)

in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage/GalleryStorageExtras.class at line 959 (GalleryCoreApi::error)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage.class at line 507 (GalleryStorageExtras::execute)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 742 (GalleryStorage::execute)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 520 (ImageBlockHelper::cacheViewableTree)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 283 (ImageBlockHelper::fetchViewableData)
in modules/imageblock/classes/ImageBlockHelper.class at line 93 (ImageBlockHelper::_getBlockData)
in modules/imageblock/Callbacks.inc at line 83 (ImageBlockHelper::loadImageBlocks)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 1052 (ImageBlockCallbacks::callback)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%A3^A3EA3E218EA%%ImageBlock.tpl.php at line 5 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::callback)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 983 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%B4^B49B49848CB%%sidebar.tpl.php at line 7 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::block)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 909 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%AD^AD7AD74CEE9%%photo.tpl.php at line 12 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::theme)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1868
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplateAdapter.class at line 909 (Smarty::_smarty_include)
in g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%3A^3A83A818B59%%theme.tpl.php at line 55 (GalleryTemplateAdapter::theme)
in /usr/share/php/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php at line 1262
in modules/core/classes/GallerySmarty.class at line 61 (Smarty::fetch)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplate.class at line 219 (GallerySmarty::fetch)
in main.php at line 521 (GalleryTemplate::fetch)
in main.php at line 104
in main.php at line 88
* in main.php at line 3

file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/module/_all/0/0/GalleryPluginHelper_fetchPluginStatus.inc) getParameter smarty.compile_check for core plugin file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/module/core/0/0/0.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%C7^C79C79EEB7F%%ItemInfo.tpl.php) strftime(%x, 1231148074) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%F3^F3EF3EB483E%%PhotoSizes.tpl.php) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21143.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21080.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/1/9/19996.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/4/4/4457.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/0/0/7.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%5A^5A35A33504B%%Navigator.tpl.php) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21148.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21588.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21127.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/1/21138.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/cache/entity/2/5/25248.inc) file_exists(/var/www/net/gallery.windfluechter.net/g2data/smarty/templates_c/%%626616196/matrix/%%F6^F68F68636C4%%ExifInfo.tpl.php) postgres7 error: [-1: ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block] in EXECUTE(" SELECT g2_Group.g_id, g2_Group.g_groupName FROM g2_UserGroupMap, g2_Group WHERE g2_Group.g_id = g2_UserGroupMap.g_groupId AND g2_UserGroupMap.g_userId = ? ORDER BY g2_Group.g_groupName ")

So, when there's the image block activated in theme setting, some queries like the above are failing and neither the image block nor the exif data block is displayed. The temporary solution is therefor to remove the image block from your theme or deactivate/uninstall the plugin at all. The long term solution will be to wait for an updated gallery2 after I've reported this bug to the BTS... ;)

UPDATE: #518572

I'm working on aptitude's dependency resolver at the moment. Mostly I'm working on some changes to support better UI, but while I have all the code in my head I'd like to try to fix some of the nagging speed problems it has. I've already managed to clear up some simple but large problems with aptitude safe-upgrade, because I could get them to happen on my computer. The problem is, most of these problems don't happen on my computer. I have a half dozen or so specific ideas that might speed aptitude up, but I don't want to just randomly apply tweaks without some baseline tests that I can use to make sure that I'm actually making things better and not just perturbing the code for no reason. Plus, seeing why aptitude is actually running slowly might help when it comes to finding ways to improve its performance. So, this is where you come in. If you are using lenny and aptitude takes a long time to resolve dependencies on your computer outside of aptitude safe-upgrade, I would like to hear from you. All you need to do is to run this command when aptitude is slow, before you upgrade any packages:

$ aptitude-create-state-bundle aptitude-state.tar.bz2

Then, find a way to get the resulting large file to me. Email will work if your outgoing server accepts it; send to dburrows@algebraicthunk.net. That will tar up /etc/apt, /var/lib/apt, /var/cache/apt, and a few other directories: run aptitude-create-state-bundle --print-inputs to see exactly what it will include. Thanks! [UPDATE]: PS: please also include a brief description of the problem that you're seeing so I know what to test. Something like, e.g., when I run aptitude full-upgrade it takes thirty minutes to complete. [UPDATE]: PPS: of course you have to run aptitude-create-state-bundle before you actually upgrade any packages! i.e., you must type n at aptitude's command-line prompt or quit the program if you're using the curses interface. Otherwise, your state snapshot will just tell me what you upgraded to, which is only half the information I need (I also need the state of all packages prior to the upgrade).

I've been working for a while on a new reprepro-based personal Debian repository, replacing the old one that was managed by debarchiver. I was going to hold off on switching until I uploaded every package that was in the old repository, but then I realized that was kind of silly and some of those packages need more attention. So I finally did the cutover today. For details on my personal repository, see my Debian packages page. The new repository is signed with a different key, not my personal key, so that I can automatically sign package uploads. You will now want to install the eyrie-keyring package from the repository or follow the alternative instructions on that page to import the key. The packages in that repository are mostly software I developed that's not of sufficient general interest to upload or packages that aren't up to Debian quality standards for one reason or another. I love reprepro. debarchiver did very well for me for quite a while, and I'm happy to have used it, but reprepro is just very nice. It's great to be able to use package pools and do automatic propagation of new uploads into multiple repositories, too. Now I just need to find time to do more software releases.

all programs that interact with e-mail are broken in one way or another. Please be careful. - Lars Wirzenius

I seem to have a cunning knack of finding problems with configuring server software, particularly involving e-mail, where a) I can t find answers in Google, b) most people I go and ask for help say they d usually ask me such things, and c) if I go onto IRC or mailing lists I end up helping other people and not getting any help with my problem. It s quite likely this is just because I m something of a perfectionist, so the ridiculous crappy hacks people come up with and seem content to entrust their mail to are unacceptable to me for one reason or another. Anyway, in my ongoing quest for the perfect mail system, I ve painted myself into a corner again. (I m currently running with postfix, postgrey, clamav-milter, dspam, dovecot using LDA, managesieve and the cmusieve & antispam plugins. If I can get the current incarnation working, I ve had enough requests to write up a full HOWTO, and seen enough around with pretty questionable content, that I ll probably do it before too long.) I ve got postfix s local transport configured to hand mail to dspam over LMTP, using mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:/dspam/dspam.sock. dspam is configured to listen here, add X-DSPAM-Result and signature headers, and then deliver the mail with dovecot s deliver LDA (which I ve set to 4750 root:dspam). From dspam.conf: ServerParameters "--deliver=innocent,spam -d %u"
ServerDomainSocketPath "/var/spool/postfix/dspam/dspam.sock"
...
Preference "spamAction=tag"
Preference "signatureLocation=headers"
...
TrustedDeliveryAgent "/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver" My dovecot configuration is pretty standard, using PAM for both passdb and userdb, and provides the auth-master socket that deliver needs. The problem I have is that postfix s local transport is qualifying the local username with the FQDN of the machine before delivering it to dspam with LMTP (the local mail transfer protocol), even for locally-originated mail which was only addressed with a bare username! dspam doesn t mangle it or care if the user is local or not, and then cheerfully invokes deliver -d robot101@omega.example.co.uk, which returns EX_NOUSER (addressee unknown) because my username is just robot101. From mail robot101: Mar 6 02:25:40 omega postfix/pickup[13607]: DAA4942F41F: uid=1000 from=<robot101>
Mar 6 02:25:40 omega postfix/cleanup[13637]: DAA4942F41F: message-id=<20090306022540.DAA4942F41F@omega.example.co.uk>
Mar 6 02:25:40 omega postfix/qmgr[12552]: DAA4942F41F: from=<robot101@omega.example.co.uk>, size=339, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Mar 6 02:25:40 omega dovecot: auth(default): passwd(robot101@omega.example.co.uk): unknown user
Mar 6 02:25:40 omega dspam[13527]: Delivery agent returned exit code 67: /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d robot101@omega.example.co.uk
Mar 6 02:25:40 omega postfix/lmtp[13640]: DAA4942F41F: to=<robot101@omega.example.co.uk>, orig_to=<robot101>, relay=omega.example.co.uk[/dspam/dspam.sock], delay=0.08, delays=0.05/0.01/0.01/0.03, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (host omega.example.co.uk[/dspam/dspam.sock] said: 421 4.3.0 <robot101@omega.example.co.uk> Delivered (in reply to end of DATA command)) So, no e-mail for me. Dearest lazyweb, which of the three components is behaving wrongly, and how can I fix it? (And no, I m not just going to switch to GMail. I store my data on hard drives, which are sometimes in servers, not in the cloud . Until about a month ago, most people I knew spoke about clouds which were made of particles of water in the sky, rather than as a data storage media. What if it rains? ;) Update: The problem is fixed! Even though arguably the problem is dspam s for not knowing which users are local or not, it s fixable in dovecot 1.1.x using the auth_username_format = %n option. Thanks so much to Angel Marin for helping me out. Update 2: There s also a patch for dspam floating around which adds a StripRcptDomain option, which makes the LMTP server truncate the e-mail address at the @, so essentially assumes everyone to be a local user. The problem with both of these fixes is that they re both blunt instruments which will break virtual users on the same host. I think the real fix would be something more like a LocalDomains option in dspam, to choose which domains should be considered local and truncated from the e-mail addresses for delivery purposes.

Adam Gehr of DePaul University's Finance Department had organized a panel session about R in Finance at the Midwest Finance Association's 58th Annual Meeting which is happening this week here in Chicago. I just posted my slides on my presentations page. The slides give a brief overview of R, the CRAN network and the by now over 1600 packages, mention the Finance Task View, briefly present four different packages (or package sets) and of course beat the drum for our upcoming R/Finance conference that will take place here in Chicago at the end of next month.

There are times when I hate xkcd. Mostly these are:

1. When reading a discussion on /. and you just know a particular image will be posted. 2. When you spend hours searching for a specific comic that you're certain exists.

The latter is what bit me tonight - I'm certain there exists a cartoon which has a plot of:

Woman says hi. Guy says hi. Woman looks confused. Guy realises she was talking to her phone, not him.

Cannot find the image for the life of me - only phone-related image I could find was tones. I thought I might get lucky if I knocked up a quick hack to search the alt-text on all the images, but sadly not. Still it was a fun project. To be uber-useful we'd need to persuade people to imput the text in each cartoon, along with the number. Given that there are only 550ish cartoons published thus far creating a database would take a person a day, or a group of people a couple of hours. Tempting .. very tempting ..

• http://www.steve.org.uk/xkcd

ObFilm: The Lost Boys. Yay!

It's here! This weekend is again the time to go up to Valls, my friend Frago's town, to meet his friends and enjoy a new edition of their cal otada. Like other years, this will be a crazy event that will cover the whole weekend. I'm looking forward to our traditional cal ot war, and spending tomorrow's night around a big fire in the middle of the country side of Tarragona.

Frago and I, after last year's cal ot war

I meant to blog about this last year but never got around to it. So, better late than never: Tom Tromey has a great blog series about his (and others') ongoing work on integrating Python into GDB. It starts with how to build a Python-enabled GDB, covers defining commands and functions, pretty-printing custom types, and a lot more (or perhaps you just want to jump to the conclusion).

I hope this will reach mainline GDB in my lifetime, it's very promising. There's no timeline on the wiki but the branch is still being actively worked on, so there's hope. :)

I've been converting all my Mercurial repositories to Git. One of the motivations for this was hg's poor handling of branches and tags: branches are just another metadata field on a commit, and tags are entries in a text file called .hgtags that is tracked in the repository(!). Git has its flaws as well, but I prefer its view that branches and tags are just refs, which are pointers that exist at the repository level and are pushed or pulled around in much the same way as the objects they refer to. The excellent hg-to-git.py script included in contrib created Git tags corresponding to my old Mercurial tags, but of course didn't modify the actual commits. So I still had a .hgtags file in my Git repository, and a boilerplate commit of the form "Add tag foo for changeset bar" each time I added to it (recall that .hgtags is just another file. Thankfully, I never had to deal with two branches where I added different tags...). I wanted to remove these. Git has a 'filter-branch' command that can totally rewrite or expunge commits; this is of course a horrible idea for already published code, but there's no harm in using while initially preparing a repository. While I appreciate git's object model and speed, I must agree with its detractors that the user interface is terrible. It took some tinkering to get git-filter-branch to do what I wanted, so I'm writing this to save my notes for next time (and in case someone else is searching for how to do this). Here's the command I arrived at:

git filter-branch \
    --tag-name-filter cat \
    --index-filter 'git update-index --remove .hgtags'
    --commit-filter \
        'if [ $# = 3 ] && git diff-tree --quiet $1 $3; then
             skip_commit "$@"
         else
             git commit-tree "$@"
         fi' \
    HEAD

The tag name filter is always necessary if you want tags to be updated to point to the corresponding commits on the new, rewritten branch. I consider this a UI failure -- when a branch is rewritten, the ref is modified, and the old one moved to refs/original. Tags, on the other hand, stay where they are, without any indication on the new branch that this is where you might want to move that old tag and sign it again or whatever. IMHO they ought to be handled the same as branches. The index filter is simply an efficient way of removing the unwanted file from all commits. This and the tag filter are both covered in the manual page. Writing a commit filter is a little more obscure. After .hgtags is removed from the index, we may end up at one of those useless "Added tag foo" commits and have no changes to record in the commit. By default, of course, filter-branch still records these -- the commit message might be useful, or something. But I want to suppress them. The commit filter is called with a tree -- you're at the point between write-tree and commit-tree (I recommend Git from the bottom up if you're confused here.) It gets that tree ($1), and then "-p PARENT" for each parent, just like commit-tree. So, if this is a normal commit with one parent, there will be 3 arguments. (If there's only one argument, there is no parent, i.e., the first commit, and if there are more, then it's a merge.) This is the only case we want to mess with. If there are no changes between our tree and the parent's tree, then it's one of those no-op commits, and we can skip it (skip_commit, a shell function defined by filter-tree, uses some deep magic to hand us the original parent again next time). I think diffing the index and the parent would work as well, but this seemed clearer. It still feels like a hack, so I'd love to hear from anyone who can suggest improvements. Since this is a special case, maybe it's better off being implemented in hg-to-git.py itself. There's always more than one way to do it. Update: Teemu Likonen points out that the next version of Git (1.6.2, not yet in unstable) will have a --prune-empty option which makes this particular problem totally trivial. I am starting to get the feeling that the Git developers are all reading our minds... :-)