Today, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 will be reported.
Have you bet already?
Version 1.2 of reportbug-ng now shows the tags of a bug if available. This was long overdue. Now you can for example, quickly search your bugs for the ones with the moreinfo-tag set and sort the resulting list by the date of the last action. This should give you a quick overview of bugs which may need some action (eg. another reminder to the submitter) or can potentially be safely closed.
In the next step I’ll improve the filter of rng and add a context menu which will allow to manipulate the tags of one or more bugreports and send all the changes in a single mail to control@bugs.debian.org.
Yesterday I attended a lecture by professor D.J. Bernstein, best known for his products like qmail, owner of one of the coolest domain names in the world and for his often controversial but always interesting visions.
His talk focused on why the majority of internet traffic still is not encrypted. We protect our email passwords but the 95% of other things we do is completely unprotected from a sniffer. He then narrowed it down to DNS. The problems with DNSSEC are evident and it's still a question of whether it will ever be implemented (after 15 years the design is still in flux, let alone that it's properly implemented or actually used).
On a more constructive side he presented his own solution: DNSCurve: using elliptic curve cryptography to not only sign but also encrypt DNS traffic, and do so on the fly rather than the cumbersome precomputation approach of DNSSEC. Bernstein shows that the extra cost of on the fly cryptography is, even for root servers, very minor compared to the costs of the entire system, but it does significantly reduce the administrative burden compared to DNSSEC. As usual he has made an interesting case, a worthwhile read.
After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer.
In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least!
Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet...
I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware.
After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this.
Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!
the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.
When I blogged about water-proof keyboards a few months ago I did not
really expect that there will be water-proof mice (no IP classification
though) so soon, too. (Found in an advertisment in the current issue
of the German c’t
magazine.)
But the idea of water-proof mice in general doesn’t seem to be as new
as I initially expected, at least the web design of http://www.waterproofmouse.co.uk/ is very nineties. ;-)
RuggedTech even
has washable, wireless, IP66 (protected against powerful water jets) mice
with a scroll-wheel and completely
silicone sealed IP68 mice (protected against immersion beyond 1m).
I was sure it will be possible.
With current awesome git version it's possible to run a space invaders game.
With only 380 lines of Lua.
Is there any window manager capable of doing this ? 
And don't say it's useless!
Thanks to Gregor "farhaven" Best for wasting his time with that.
Yes, I was away... long and sad story involving health issues. :-( I'm trying to get back, hopefully everything will be fine. Let me publicly apologize to some people that was expecting some work from me and I postponed it, not because of slackness but because I was unable to do it. I'm catching up with a lot of tasks and trying to solve long standing issues, feel free to ping me to get some update on a specific matter. I am really sorry!
Do you know about the poll to choose a slogan for the release of Debian 5.0, also known as "lenny"?
No!? Shame on you! :-)
People behind Debian Art started a discussion to get opinions! After some input they prepared a poll, maybe they should try to use a doodle. Right now, The Universal Operating System is quite popular, but a lot of people did some nice suggestions, and some of them would like to see a slogan some way related to the Toy Story (tm) character Lenny:
The discussion is distributed across three lists: Debian Desktop, Debian Publicity and Debian Curiosa, I would also point to the comments made by Gustavo Noronha da Silva (here) and Andre Felipe Machado (here).
If you didn't say anything so far, please do!
As a beta tester for the new email application from Nokia, you will have to give your mail account password:
Today, I shall be mostly at Listening to the Social Entrepreneur. If you’re in the area and have something to say, leave a comment here to contact me. (Comments won’t appear here until this evening, sorry.)
I’ll write a review post after the event.
Aside: Councils are worried about their Landsbanki deposits - thankfully, Kewstoke isn’t one of them, but ow! Yet another way that the banking problems will increase taxes.
Most package maintainers might have noticed the longstanding l10n NMU campaign.
It started softly back in March, with the goal to tackle as many po-debconf l10n bug report as possible (while we're at it, we also fix other l10n bug reports, of course).
It became more aggressive after the freeze, with shortened reaction delay given to maintainers and shorter timeframes for translators to use an l10n NMU opportunity to send out new/updated translations.
So, *you*.... Will you be spotted by it?
Just look there. If, in this list, your package line is not pink, then you have already been spotted...or you will be. Actually, if you're above "ferm", you have been spotted. If you're below, you *will* be spotted.
How to avoid that 'shame'? Just upload you package and fix the mentioned bugs. Most of them are Swedish translations, after a few Swedish contributors did a giant campaign during summer to revive the Swedish translation effort.
B rk, b rk..... Make the Swedish chef happy! And save me some work. Avoid the radar spot. Upload!
PS: the current rate is about 5 packages per day. Maintainers have 4 days to react when I send the "intent to NMU" mail, then translators have 7 days to send updates. I *will* shorten this down soon by nearly dropping the translation update round and just NMU (or help the maintainer to upload) with what's in the BTS.
In a recent blog post,
Kai
complained about various existing tools for marking up email in HTML.
He also asked for pointers to other tools. Since he didn't specify good tools :-), I took the opportunity to promote my
work in progress plugin for ikiwiki
to do that very thing.
When asked about demo sites, I realized that my blog doesn't actually
use threaded comments, yet, so made a poor demo.
Follow the link and you will find one of
the mailboxes from the
distribution,
mostly a few posts from one of the debian lists.
The basic idea is to use the Email::Thread perl module to get a forest
of thread trees, and then walk those generating output.
I think it would be fairly easy to make a some kind of mutt-like
index using the
essentially same tree walking code. Not that I'm volunteering
immediately mind you, I have to replys to comments on my blog working
(which is the main place I use this plugin right now).
Anand Kumria wrote:
If IBM were to go bankrupt, would the government step in? Unlikely. Investors would lose (money), staff — another word for investors — would lose (jobs), but customers would win (their computers would keep working). Some customers would win more than others (especially those who had the equipment on lease); if no one is collecting, why pay?I’m wondering here where Anand got the idea that once a company went bankrupt, that you don’t need to pay to that company anymore. When a company goes bankrupt, at least in Germany the following happens: A trustee/liquidator is selected. This liquidator is then collecting the information who owes money to the company and who still needs to get (how much) money from it. The liquidator also has to check the option of selling company assets (which might include the contracts of customers that still have to pay) to fulfill the debts of the bankrupt company. After he turned all assets into money, the money is distributed among those who still have to get money from the bankrupt company. Anyway, regarding his main argument that the (average) customer of a company (bank in this case) should never have to pay for the failed speculations of that company, I somehow have to agree with him. Someone putting money into a regular bank account or papers with fixed interest rate should never lose his money. But there are also customers buying bank shares with a chance of higher revenue than with fixed interest rate papers. These should suffer from failure of the bank management, as they more or less explicitly wanted to be tied to the success (or failure) of the bank. However, this is mostly irrelevant, since the failure of so many “investment banks” has side affects that might cost the average inhabitant of the affected countries even more than the discussed rescue plans. One of these effects is that the banks are now much more conservative regarding lease and mortgage plans, effectively leaving many home owners with no option to fulfill previous obligations (remaining debt after a previous mortgage expired can’t be refinanced by a new mortgage), causing them to have to sell their homes to pay the first mortgage. This is in some way stupid because this causes people who were perfectly paying their mortgage rates to loose their house, while the bank which would be giving them a new mortgage could get a new and good customer, improving their income. On the other hand, if the other side effects of the current crisis cause those “good” mortgage customers to loose their jobs, they might turn into bad customers who are unable to pay their rates. All in all, this is a spiral that could cause the whole economy to break down (a small example: The bank is not giving out mortgages, so no one will build new houses so the builders loose their jobs so they don’t pay their mortgage rates anymore,…. - over simplified, but still shows what I mean). Unless the spiral is terminated in time, before too drastic things happen. All in all, I do understand why the politicians try to rescue those banks (or at least the customers of those banks), though I think that in an economy with slightly higher regulation, there wouldn’t be the need for such a rescue plan. I know there are some german banks affected by the crisis as well (among them Hypo Real Estate and others), but the average private customer of such banks shouldn’t loose money due to the regulations we have in place. In general, there should be some security fund which makes sure that private customers never loose money put into regular bank accounts or fixed interest papers, vice-versa, banks should calculate mortgages so that they can be pretty sure their customers are actually able to pay off their rates - it doesn’t make sense if someone starts off having to pay 500$/month for their mortgage and has to pay over 1000$ a few years (as in 2-3 years) later, because the bank raised the interest that much. I have no problem with people loosing money from shares of banks or other companies directly or indirectly through investment funds.
I won’t repeat my frequent anti-Plesk rant, but suffice to say: it’s a pain.
For some reason, we wanted one file back out of a backup. It took me a few minutes to realise it, but Plesk’s backups are essentially MIMEd and gzipped. So, rather than fighting with their mysterious semi-documented backup-unpack tool, just say:-
zcat backupfile sed -n -e '/name="filename.whatever/,/^--_--/p' >filename.whatever
If you don’t know the filename, zless’ing the head of the file should find it from the XML description blocks pretty quickly. Slight editing of the output file will be necessary, to strip MIME and so on, but it’s easier than installing too much else on a webserver.
Does anyone know why this gzipped-MIME is better than tar.gz or something else common and easy-to-use?
$ cat syms.c
static int local(void)
int global(void)
int __attribute__((weak)) weak(void)
$ gcc -o syms -c syms.c
$ readelf --syms ./syms
Symbol table '.symtab' contains 10 entries:
Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
...
5: 00000000 8 FUNC LOCAL DEFAULT 1 local
8: 00000008 8 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 global
9: 00000010 8 FUNC WEAK DEFAULT 1 weak
...
$ cat file1.c
void common_but_not_part_of_api(void)
$ cat file2.c
extern void common_but_not_part_of_api(void);
void api_function(void)
common_but_not_part_of_api();
$ gcc -shared -fPIC -o library file1.c file2.c
$ readelf --syms ./library
Symbol table '.symtab' contains 60 entries:
Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
...
53: 00000424 29 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 11 api_function
55: 0000041c 5 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 11 common_but_not_part_of_api
...
$ cat file1.c
void common_but_not_part_of_api(void)
$ cat file2.c
extern void common_but_not_part_of_api(void);
void __attribute__((visibility("default"))) api_function(void)
common_but_not_part_of_api();
$ gcc -fvisibility=hidden -shared -fPIC -o library file1.c file2.c
$ readelf --syms ./library
Symbol table '.symtab' contains 60 entries:
Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
48: 000003cc 5 FUNC LOCAL HIDDEN 11 common_but_not_part_of_api
54: 000003d4 29 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 11 api_function
In the first example, there was not enough information to tell if
the function would ever be able to be overridden, hence a PLT entry
had to be created and the function called through it (disassemble it
to see the details!). With correct symbol visibility attributes,
there is enough information to know that
common_but_not_part_of_api is never to be overridden, hence
the PLT (and the associated costs of trampolining) can be avoided.
The internal attribute is even stricter; it says that this
function will never be called from outside this module (for
example, we might pass the address of
common_but_not_part_of_api to anyone). This can lead to even
better code, because on many architectures transitioning to another
module might involve flipping global pointer registers or other
similarly expensive operations.
So that's how symbol binding and visibility attributes can work
together to get you the best performance possible from your
program!
Next.