I've had a couple of silent phone calls from 01158507616. It seems that Jigsaw Insurance Marketing (UK) Ltd of 3rd floor, 16, King St, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire NG1 2AS are notorious nuisance callers. I've fed them to Ofcom's web-based silent call complaints system and with any luck, the next time I hear about them will be when they are fined. (I don't hear about them when they call. It's just silent.)

Erich commented:

"Pbuilder is great (and cowbuilder even more so). First of all, it makes setting up and upgrading chroots easier (even easier than dchroot etc.), but it will also handle dependencies and do install/removals (well, technically it won't remove stuff, the chroot is just thrown away afterwards). That way, pbuilder helps getting build dependencies right, and ensures the package is currently buildable (not with some library package you still happen to have on your system, but that has been removed from Debian; not uninstallable for some reason etc.). This makes the job easier for porters, since a FTBFS is less likely to be an error in packaging by the maintainer... At some point I had like 6 pbuilder chroots... woody, sarge, unstable, woody with some backports, sarge with SELinux backports, unstable with experimental. Sure, we don't need debhelper either? After all, it just does some cp and mvs, doesn't it? There IS some benefit in having stuff automatized in a standard way; even though we could all do our chroots ourselves, I want to express my thanks to the pbuilder (and cowbuilder) authors and maintainers for making life EASIER for me. A lot easier. I could live without, but I would probably not keep that many chroots."

Ken Bloom added:

"One important feature of a pbuilder chroot is that pbuilder installs build-dependencies as you ask it to build debian packages, and removes them as soon as it finishes building the packages. In this sense, pbuilder is specifically intended to replicate the buildd environment, so you can find out whether your packages will break on a buildd (e.g. whether you've remembered to include all of the build-deps in debian/control, because things will break on the buildds if you forgot to add a build-dep because the build-dep was just lying around on your system (or in your unstable chroot)."

Sven M ller wrote:

"Well, pbuilder has several benefits, but the most important one to me is that it restarts from a clean system (only base packages + build-essentials installed) on each build. Sure this adds to the time needed for the build, but it also makes sure that I get all build-deps right and that the whole build process is as reproducible as possible."

Ben Hutchings commented:

"The major difference between pbuilder's approach and simply building in a chroot'ed installation is that pbuilder tries to build on a minimal system plus the specified build-dependencies. If you always build with pbuilder or similar it's much less likely that you will miss a build-dependency or otherwise produce a package that can't be auto-built elsewhere."

I take the clean chroot point as a clear benefit, but it still strikes me that there are easier ways to do the same thing (rsync --delete) without all the waiting around for pbuilder on my slow mipsel. I guess that's the difference with debhelper: debhelper use doesn't seem to slow me down.

Update: it seems that comment also appeared at Newsome.Org flyte blog and c net. There are more posts apparently by the same author at ZDnet

Even less surprisingly, my request that the Software in the Public Interest board try to repair SPI's member communications was postponed. The request was submitted before the December 2006 meeting and now won't be heard until February at soonest. SPI president Bdale Garbee apologised. At least the Spanish resolution was decided (referred to board 2005-11, resolved 2007-01). Meanwhile, on the mailing lists, SPI board member Ian Jackson flamed me again and proposed a resolution which adds lots of red tape, unnecessarily links submissions to announcements and ignores SPI's email and web problems. On the previous post, Bruce Byfield commented:

"I'm sure my bias creeps into many stories, no matter how fair I try to be, but I really don't have much of an opinion on the domain name issue. My main interest is that it's newsworthy. Under these circumstances, I have a hard time seeing how I could have much of a different view from anyone."

I agree. It's hard to see how the newsforge article could have been much different. Is it newsworthy that SPI's board continued voting without discussion at yesterday's (2007-01-16) meeting? No-one wants meetings to last hours, but it's essential that the board put something of their views into the official proceedings. Votes should not be totally set in advance. Otherwise, how can SPI members oversee? How can they make a well-informed decision whether or not to re-elect a member? Now members have to hope they are on the right mailing lists (open or closed) at the right time because the public record is so incomplete.

Lately I keep seeing people talking about a "crisis" in the ruby community due to the fact that rubinius, jruby, and YARV are all being written. There seems to be some subtle hand-wringing under the covers about divergence between these implementations. The ruby language is in pretty solid form, with a few little problems that should be cleaned up for the 2.0 release, so I don't think it's very likely that any divergence will be particularly damaging.

More importantly though, I think it's a sign that ruby is alive and well, given that there's three different projects that are working to provide an improved implementation for a language that was largely ignored until two or three years ago. Plus the benchmarks for YARV (which was just merged to the ruby trunk) look pretty hot.

Unfortunately for the doomsayers, most of what I've heard and read from the actual ruby community about all three of these projects has been a giant ball of excitement. I think it's really sweet that we'll have ruby running on the JVM, on a sexy Smalltalk style VM, and also a significantly sped up classic interpreter. Now all I want for Christmas is more time to actually write the rails site that's been pounding away inside my head like Athena.

I have upgraded my website/blog/podcast/photoblog/linkblog/whatever to Drupal 5.0-rc1 today (I'll skip 5.0-rc2 for now and wait for the final release of 5.0 for the next upgrade). The upgrade went quite nice, even though I had to upgrade several modules and port quite a bunch of custom hacks I had on my old (Drupal 4.6) site. I first upgraded to 4.7, then to 5.0 (as is the recommended procedure) on a test-site, and after figuring out how to fix or work-around all the issues that appeared, I upgraded the live site. I password-protected the site during the upgrade, that's why it wasn't available for a while today (and caused some problems on Planet Debian it seems, sorry for that!). New features you might enjoy:

• Every blog post, podcast entry, and photo/image has an AJAX-enabled voting/rating box now, thanks to the nice jRating module. Feel free to rate any content over here, I'm eager to know what you think.
• The Service links module provides those tiny images in each post, which allow you to submit the post to del.icio.us, Digg, etc. etc. with a single click.
• I now use the great new standard Drupal-Theme Garland with a custom color map. I really like it.
• Tons of small changes here and there, removing custom hacks which are now obsoleted with the new Drupal release, shuffling some menus around etc. etc.

If you notice any bugs or problems with the site, please let me know.

I wrote SPI gives away opensource.org and opensource.net and Bruce Byfield wrote SPI to transfer domain names to OSI - I think it's interesting to see how differently we view the disagreement. One possible reason for the difference is that the email discussion around this resolution happened on private lists. I saw the December meeting notice a couple of days before the meeting, sent the board a request that they fix member communications and then started a discussion about giving away the opensource domains with:

"SPI still holds the opensource domains because SPI is a membership controlled organisation and OSI was a self-perpetuating board; and OSI had not done enough to balance their bad licence proliferation work. Why isn't that mentioned in the proposal? Why does 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 not mention 2005-07-26.bp.1? Is it good to keep reposting rejected proposals until they pass? Why is the SPI board being asked again to surrender the domains while OSI is unreformed?"

The reason I started the discussion on spi-private was Josh Berkus writing

"If you think it's important that we should drag it onto spi-private, though, I suppose we should."

which rather suggested a private list was the appropriate venue. As Neil wrote:

"Some discussion has occured on the spi-private mailing list as to how the opensource.org resolution has been handled by the board."

That's putting it mildly. I wrote about the lack of public discussion (as mentioned in my previous report):

"I still don't see how some board members reconcile their votes to give away community assets with their promises. How the devil does board expect members to oversee it when board hides its operations from our view?"

There is a report on the discussion at the next meeting, which will hopefully put the reasons on the public record at last. Unsurprisingly, the first January 2007 meeting agenda omitted my member communications request, but board member Jimmy Kaplowitz accepted my reminder.

Our brunch yesterday went super-well. We had about 15 people over, which was far too many for our supposedly mellow evening. But it was great -- we got to catch up with a lot of folks I've been missing over the holidays and haven't gotten to see. I hadn't seen Lucinda Catchlove much for a few months, and Heather Kelley and Damian DiFede made an appearance, too. We got to see John Usher, who's off to do weird things to people's ears at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Niko came with friend Johanie, who made some great black-bean brownies; DJ Ghostbeard was still feeling ill from NYE; and Meg showed off her deep purple hockey bruises. It was also nice to have some new friends come, too. I've been wanting to hang out with MC Turgeon, one of the most experienced bloggers in Quebec, founder of me dia and toiles-du-Web, since we met last year at South by Southwest. She and her partner Chris came over with a nice bottle of wine and got to know everyone there. Actually, she knew a lot of the people already -- she and Anne-Marie had met at Mutek, for example. When Patti came in, she said, "Oh, yeah, I know M-C. We do a lot of panels together." Ah, the panel circuit. Altogether a really good time. Probably the only downside is that our oven was really dirty, and while I was making quiches and roasted potatoes I smoked up the entire house. But it cleared pretty quickly, and with the nice weather we're having, I could even have the kitchen door open to clear the smoke. Unheard of! tags: bruncher mcturgeon montreal cooking

Making a point Speaking of unseasonably warm weather, the Green Party of Canada held a picnic and ice cream social on Mount Royal last Saturday, which would have a couple of feet of snow on it in a regular year. The subject of discussion? Climate change, of course. I dunno -- clever move, but do they have to rub it in? tags: green party picnic climate change

Shameless plugs My friend Allegra has started a great new blog, Sucking-stones. She's got a really good voice and it's now in circulation as one of the blogs I read each morning. Also, my friend Anne-Marie Bergeron has her first travel TV show on 33mag tomorrow. She's got a four-part series on her trip to Iceland which they're going to show. It's in French, but her husband Jeff only cusses in English, so that's probably what you'll hear when they're climbing glaciers and lava floes. Did that get everyone? I hope so. You know what they say: You can plug your friends, and you can plug your ears, but you can't plug your friends' ears. Or something. tags: allegra sucking-stones annemarie jeff 33mag

Chix I was just reading Angela Beesley's end-of-year blog post and realized that I'd missed the establishment of WikiChix. It's a new organization for female wiki participants, in the great tradition *Chix tradition of Linux Chix or Debian Women. All the more galling is that two other blogs I regularly read also covered the new group. Joseph Reagle made a note about gendered spaces and the role they play in any movement (like Open Content and wikis). Biella blogged about his bloggage and put some social-science twist that was a little hard for me to follow. In any event, good luck to WikiChix. I find clubs extremely fun and useful and by nature exclusionary, and nothing to get worked up about. Of course, as one of the two founding members of the Maldekstrulaj Vegeteranaj Esperantistaj Linuxamantoj (Left-handed Vegetarian Esperantist Linux-users Club), I'd probably be pretty hypocritical calling anyone else exclusionary. tags: wikichix wiki angela beesley joseph reagle biella coleman clubs

Kewstoke is connected to the town of Weston-super-Mare by the mile-or-so of Kewstoke Toll Road but since 2005, there has been no toll collector. Unsurprisingly, the number of the least desirable vehicle types (Chelsea tractors/SUVs and light goods) using this coast road has doubled while the toll has been missing. Now the council is looking at putting up the season ticket rates from 5.50 to somewhere between 22.00 and 35.00 if they bring the toll back. A seven-fold increase? The alternative is to abolish to toll: which do you think is more likely? The latest report lists

"Unrestricted access and egress between Kewstoke and Weston-super-Mare"

as a benefit of abolition. Becoming a rat-run between the town centre and M5 is a benefit for who exactly? Certainly no benefit to the residents of Kewstoke or the top end of WsM who get the extra traffic wriggling along small roads with junctions not designed for that flow. Probably no benefit to drivers if they start to rely upon a hazardous road along the cliff-tops, which can be totally closed by just one break-down. It also goes against the Joint Local Transport Plan which says the council will

"direct traffic and particularly freight onto the most appropriate roads. Manage safe travel taking into account the current and desired uses of the network. Improve quality of life for local people."

Are press releases like Toll Road Accidents Reduced trying to convince us that driving along the cliff-tops is safe? More reports can be found among the items of the Strategic Planning and Economic Development Policy and Scrutiny Panel

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

Sven Mueller commented:

"There is a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up. Use pbuilder (w/ or w/o the pdebuild "frontend"). I had refrained from setting up pbuilder for quite a while, and was amazed how easy it was when I eventually did. The only "problem" is that you probably want to make sure that at least "debian/rules clean" works even under Debian/stable. But I personally like to keep my packages buildable under stable anyway (since I usually use backports of them on production systems)."

I tried pbuilder at first and it failed because of the aforementioned debootstrap stable/unstable difference. After I read up on debootstrap, I didn't really see what pbuilder added to the system besides more tarball processing, so I didn't bother trying it again after debootstrap worked. Am I missing out on anything important? Mark Brown commented:

"pbuilder provides management of the chroot environments (you can have several set up and it'll let you choose between and update them) and a convenient front end for building packages in a chroot (you can just point it at a package and say "go build this in a chroot")."

I'm probably being dense, but I still don't see a benefit. A chroot is more-or-less just a tree on the disk so I can have several set up anyway, updating them is just running update inside the chroot and I just mv the package into the chroot and say "go in that chroot and build this". Maybe pbuilder just isn't beneficial for me.

Another problematic meme is the idea that no-one need tolerate anyone - even those who are tolerant (known as the Rabid Right meme). When someone has no tolerance for others (for example, flaming people who expect any attempt at fairness, or who follow different social interaction patterns) then they have no place in a community such as Debian. They should clear off to some hard-hierarchy project - it's not like there's any shortage of Rabid Right hackers in this world. </sarcasm> For what it's worth, I believe life should be fair (idealism) and life is not fair (pragmatism). It is possible for those two beliefs to coexist. Expulsion could be fair, but (IIRC) every expulsion proposed so far would have been unfair and based on personal issues, rather than repeated offences: we may be reaching the point where a fair expulsion could happen. It seems a shame none of those who hold them are willing to use the smaller penalties in a Non-Discriminatory way. The "can't take their job away" meme seems more myth than meme, but it does need sorting out in the few places where it occurs. I doubt it will happen under this DPL.

Happy New Year. Time for my site's annual refresher over the next few weeks. According to some quick greps, last year's top 5 topics by comment volume were: debian, business, media, green issues and England (ID cards, civic info, and so on). Is that what visitors would like to see more?

My main debian builder went off-line a little while ago. I'm trying to find a replacement, but it seems it will take a little while, what with everything else going on. By a builder, I mean an unstable machine capable of building packages. Most of my machines run stable, as they're doing Real Work and "not breaking" is one of debian's best features. Surprisingly, it seems that the debian project machines either don't have chroots on which developers can install build-deps, or I didn't find the right instructions. I was offered a free virtual host for package building, but I don't feel comfortable building packages on a remote server I don't control and whose security I can't really verify. Now, I've built an unstable chroot on one of my company's more secure servers and built the package there. There were a few complications, such as the debootstrap version in stable not being able to build an unstable chroot, but a quick backport fixed that. debootstrap seems a lot slower than I remember. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up?

For various reasons, Software in the Public Interest (SPI) owned the domains opensource.org and opensource.net, which have been managed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for most of their life. This supported various SPI goals and also gave a possibility of community control of opensource.org/net just in case it was ever needed. OSI does not offer much opportunity for community control, as it is a self-appointing board. (Regular readers may remember that the principles of democratic member control, autonomy and concern for community are important to me.) I was watching as the SPI board voted in favour of giving away the opensource domains, proposal 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 on the agenda. The vote happened without any discussion in the meeting. From memory (I guess logs will appear on the SPI site eventually):- David Graham ("SPI must also be involved in the promotion of and education about open source") proposed and voted for this action that stops SPI being involved in this promotion and education about open source; Michael Schultheiss ("I look forward to SPI's future expansion") (amended and?) voted for this action that reduces SPI; Neil McGovern ("achieve a greater degree of involvement [...] from the community in general") voted for this action that lessens SPI's involvement; Jimmy Kaplowitz ("It is important that it continue holding in trust the money and other legal assets belonging to its member projects [...] fulfill some more of its stated corporate purposes, involving education of the general public about free software and about computers in general") voted for this action that drops these assets and reduces involvement in education of the general public; Bdale Garbee ("would like to close this issue one way or another, once and for all") seemed willing to vote for anything which prevented further discussion - of course, only surrendering the domains could close it once and for all, as this is a one-way trapdoor topic - but had apologised for absence from the meeting; Martin "Joey" Schulze had apologised for absence from the meeting; Josh Berkus (nothing obviously relevant in his platform) abstained - consistent but disappointing; I think Branden Robinson was missing. Ian Jackson ("SPI's role is to provide a stable legal entity which can hold assets") voted against this action so that SPI would keep holding these assets. Bravo! Sources: The quotes above are the board's own promises in their election platforms, as listed on the SPI site in 2003 2006 apart from Bdale Garbee's platform which wasn't at the link given in 2004 so that quote is from the minutes of the previous meeting If some board members are willing to give away assets for no good reason, that strikes at one of SPI's core methods: holding assets for the community. What can we trust about this board? Their platforms are full of fine sentiments, but how do their actions reflect their platforms? This may be a mostly-dormant issue until the next election. If you want any of SPI's assets, just ask. If your request is rejected (as SPI rejected the opensource domain give-away before), just keep asking new sets of voters until they agree.

Many people have recently posted in Planet Debian regarding the use, usability and usefulness of having comments enabled in blogs, of using comments as the right way for following discussions, of dealing with spam, and so on.
I'm sorry I'm not linking to more of them, but I'm too lazy to look them up. This is one of the down-sides of not using comments - Ideally, if I were interested on commenting on a topic, I would just leave the comment on the blog that started it. It goes somewhat against Joey's logic of posting both the comment and the posting itself - Of course, we all want everybody and their dogs to read our comments, don't we? And, given we know that (most of) our target readers regularly follow Planet Debian, we continue ranting on our personal blogs (as I'm doing now). Besides, that will rank our page higher. We all want Google to love us, right? Of course, following discussions on a bunch of blogs is not optimal, as it's easier to miss parts of it (hey, would somebody volunteer on writing threading support for Planet? It'd have to be multidimensional, as postings often refer to different threads... Bah :) ). Besides, many of us are syndicated on different planets (and many people read our blogs as individuals as well), so many of my postings start with a stupid amount of background information so the martians understand the terrans. But still, here I am, writing a post that provides nothing but a braindump, serves no purpose, and links to your posting. So there, the world is not ideal. QED.
As always, MJR rants against captchas (and yes, thank you, you have commented on my blog that most captchas are trivially crackable by automated means). They do reduce spam, but they are REALLY not a strong barrier against it. I have thought of some ideas, or thought about implementations for other ideas I've read here and there, but I'm too lazy to implement them on my blogging software. I could switch, but I happen to like Jaws. I would like to contribute to making it better, but have had a permanent lack of time for a long time already :-/ I do get swamped by spam comments, and every now and then mass-delete whatever looks like spam (hundreds to thousands of comments, for crap's sake!), but anyway... It's not too important for me. I like having comments on my entries, but sometimes a long time must pass until I even read them (I read my own blog syndicated via the Planets, on a RSS reader).
BTW, Lucas: I used to have trackbacks enabled. The amount of spam, and the control I have over spam in my blog, makes me favor comments against trackbacks. My trackbacks used to be so wildly abused that it almost made me cry. I hope it is not your case :)

Paul asked:

"Are cookies really that bad? Why are there loads of "cookie policies"? Whatever the cookie stores can usually be stored by the server anyway if the website owners are that desperate or the use of sessions phpid not cookies."

Cookies are that bad - if the developer stores data on the server, they have to do their own housekeeping or suffer the consequences. It's their problem. If the developer craps into my browser's cookie jar, it's my problem. You should have seen some of the rubbish in there before I changed my settings.

...and don't rant about no-comment blogs [etbe] when your blog has stupid eyetests and returns 404 Not Found if someone asks for the audio alternative.

Scott commented on my attempt to upgrade the Ogg player from GNU/Linux:

"I bought my YP-U2 in the US where the installed firmware doesn't do OGG at all. I actually had to flash it to international firmware before I could even mount it in Linux. I found the firmware on the Samsung web site after much searching, and actually installed firmware for a slightly different version of the player to get it to play OGG. Sadly I don't have the URL handy, but I may have the firmware files I used. Additionally, I was required to use Windows to upgrade the flash."

I extracted some sb files that I think may be the firmware, but I don't know what to put where or how to persuade the YP-U2 to load them. Also, I don't own a computer with Windows installed - I may have a valid licence key somewhere, but I really don't know where. Still no sign of the email Samsung promised yesterday.

Anyone know how to upgrade a Samsung YP-U2 Ogg player's firmware from GNU/Linux? Nick at Samsung support says they'll email me some details, but they seemed pretty confused on the phone. The supplier said it was supported in Linux, although now I notice the box doesn't say so and I'm on the other side of the country to them. It seems happy enough as a USB Mass Storage device, right down to backing up the settings, but this is my first firmware update. Unzip, Cabextract and Unshield have extracted lots of files and I guess some or all should go into the system directory, but I've no idea which and how. Help would be very much appreciated. Even better would be some free-as-in-freedom firmware... I knew enough to buy an Ogg player, but I think the firmware debate and my awareness of free firmware for some digital audio players came after I got this one. Simon Brown asked in a comment:

"Why do you want to upgrade the firmware? Mine just works"

Mine is running firmware 1.30 EU which seems to misinterpret some low-bitrate Ogg files and I wanted to see whether that's fixed.