There's something about certian very visually information dense console apps
that makes certian bits of my neural network that have been quietly developing
for years very happy. rtorrent is the best example of this
ever (excluding
the unix shell as a whole). It starts out a utter incomprehensible mess, and I
can just feel my brain reconfiguring over several hours so it can understand it
at a glance.
Chunks seen: [C/A/D 39/10/2.98] X downloaded X missing X qu
Peer list 0 7465767364 6546566456 7576655464 3676833757 5654376467
50 5565765774 4785647665 4565464565 5777557464 4865465737
Info 100 4435567665 4547636475 6756567736 5665345373 6356566756
150 5454855548 6766756846 4476585655 5566676764 5665754652
File list 200 3674466375 7474666747 8766756866 5646667647 6677676353
250 5557754755 6755756775 4476686458 6544656687 5777557555
Tracker list 300 5567666653 7675564686 6263555577 6467766443 8635577643
350 7586655656 7765373543 4454677664 6654665666 4344666556
Chunks seen 400 6565665554 7656544673 7636765776 3567556727 6466735257
450 6344246566 7364539664 5366744446 6577564574 3563656833
Transfer list 500 5765366475 6685663564 7466756575 5567636754 4425467555
This is the same part of my brain that is happy out in the woods following
along faint game trails. It's a pity that we've been taught to think of
this kind of UI as "hard" and thus "bad".
12.xxx.75.xx 0.3 0.0 10.2 l/ci/ci 0/0 21Azureus
67.xxx.58.xxx 0.0 0.0 0.0 l/cn/ci 0/0 100uTorrent
* 67.xxx.222.xxx 0.0 0.1 214.2 r/Ui/ci 0/2 88 617Az
24.xxx.89.xx 0.2 0.1 26.5 R/Ui/ui 0/2 30 695uT
65.xx.113.xxx 0.0 0.0 0.0 l/cn/ci 0/0 100Azureus
24.xxx.38.xxx 0.0 0.0 0.0 L/cn/ci 0/0 100Azureus
Does this make your neural networks light up and say "more plz"?
Transfer list: [Size 13]
Peer list 620 [P: 2 F: 0]AAAAaAAAAbbBBBbbbbaC...DdCc.....
59 [P: 2 F: 0]EEEEEeeFff......................
Info 141 [P: 2 F: 0]GGGGGGGGgGGg.GG.................
618 [P: 2 F: 0]HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhh.......
File list 696 [P: 2 F: 0]IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJJIIIIIijjI
26 [P: 2 F: 0]VVii............................
Tracker list 56 [P: 2 F: 0]WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWIWwIwIw
93 [P: 2 F: 0]NNNNNLLLLNNNLNNNNUNNNtXXPPtUUYYP
Chunks seen 313 [P: 2 F: 0]zzww............................
96 [P: 2 F: 0]NzZZUNNXXNNNRRPPZZZZPxXNNnZZXzXP
Transfer list 633 [P: 2 F: 0]ZZZz..Zz........................
694 [P: 2 F: 0]YYYYYyyy........................
109 [P: 2 F: 0]pzzppxxpznnnppuuRRuuxzzrrnn.....
For a project I was looking for a way to use GNU Mailman for mailinglist management (especially its powerful web based moderation, bounce handling and attachment scrubbing features) but storing the mailinglist member information in a SQL database. That's useful when you want to relate mailinglist members to extra information already in a database and functionality on an interactive website, and it's possible on a per-mailinglist basis. This turned out to be not very difficult but just not that clearly documented.
What I used:
- Mailman. I used the 2.1.x version packaged in Debian etch: an "open" system is just one apt-get away!
- The
MySQL Member Adaptor available from rezo.net. There are several versions of MySQLMemberAdaptor around the web, but this one seems the most recent.
This explanation assumes you know how to work with Mailman in a regular setup, and things like creating databases and users under MySQL. Take the following steps:
- Install and set up mailman as you would otherwise.
- Put the MysqlMemberships.py file into the dir that is Mailman's base, this normally already has files like MemberAdaptor.py in it. For Debian this is /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman. You only need to add MysqlMemberships.py, the other files from rezo.net are not needed.
The create table query in MysqlMemberships.py does not work with MySQL 5, I had to apply this patch which I've sent to MySQLMembership's author in the meantime. This patch has been applied by Fil.- Create a database and a MySQL user, and add that information into your mm_cfg.py, like this:
MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_NAME = "mailman"
MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_USER = "mailman"
MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_PASS = "somethingrandom"
MYSQL_MEMBER_DB_HOST = "localhost"
MYSQL_MEMBER_TABLE_TYPE = "wide" # wide means one table per list, flat = one large table
- Create a mailinglist like your normally would (e.g. via newlist). To enable the MySQL backend for just that list, create a file extend.py under /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname with the following content:
from Mailman.MysqlMemberships import MysqlMemberships
def extend(list):
list._memberadaptor = MysqlMemberships(list)
(whitespace is significant in Python).
- It should work now! Upon receiving the first request for your list, the database table will be created automatically, which you can then populate. You may need to restart the mailman qrunner after you make further changes to your setup.
I'm convinced by
The Argument for Posting Ahead [Network Blogging]
so why didn't I set it up for
my recent trip?
Well, a while ago, I had a bit of an email discussion with
Steve
about delayed posting features for
Chronicle
which I think ended with the addition of chronicle-spooler
to the released files.
I initially suggested ignoring a post when its Date
is in the future, like
Wordpress
does, but I think that wouldn't be backwards-compatible
and isn't as flexibile as it could be.
chronicle-spooler works by moving files from a spool dir
into a live dir. I'd forgotten how much it confuses me
when files on a "static" site start moving themselves
around. It means I have to merge before upload, which
isn't a big change, but still annoying.
So, I've added the following lines to chronicle to
skip entries with a Publish header in the future:-
--- chronicle-2.7/bin/chronicle.orig 2008-05-15 10:13:55.000000000 +0100
+++ chronicle-2.7/bin/chronicle 2008-05-15 10:13:43.000000000 +0100
@@ -607,7 +607,8 @@
# Read the entry and store all the data away as a
# hash element keyed upon the (unique) filename.
#
- $results $file = readBlogEntry($file);
+ my $result = readBlogEntry($file);
+ if ($result) $results $file = $result;
#
@@ -1479,7 +1480,7 @@
my $tags = ""; # entry tags.
my $body = ""; # entry body.
my $date = ""; # entry date
- my $publish = ""; # entry publish date - *ignored*
+ my $publish = ""; # entry publish date
open( ENTRY, "<", $filename ) or die "Failed to read $filename $!";
while ( my $line = <ENTRY> )
@@ -1527,6 +1528,14 @@
close(ENTRY);
+ # MJR - embargo stuff until its publish date.
+ # Steve recommends using chronicle-spooler,
+ # but I want uploaded files to stay where I put them,
+ # else I get my local copy confused.
+ if (($publish ne "") && (str2time($publish) > time()))
+ return 0;
+
+
#
# Determine the input format to use.
#
I think that's compatible with chronicle-spooler, too...
If you're a French person and were guessing what I have to do with the
most famous French union, you've just been tricked.
CGT stands for
California Guitar Trio, a band of three virtuose guitar players. We attended their French gig yesterday night at 'Le New Morning', a famous jazz club in Paris.
They came and played with Tony Levin who is, for the skilled music amateurs, one of the top world's bass player (*the* top for me).
That was an amazing concert and great experience. Just try to imagine Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' played by 3 (electrified) acoustic guitar players, just after a 'Prelude and Fugue' by J.S. Bach, played cyclically (one note per player in round-robin order....a playing method invented by Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists). That plus Bohemian Rhapsody, several pieces of their own and a stunning composition by Tony Levin where he proved that he *is* really a virtuose bass player..:-)
I was just stunned, indeed....and, of course, also enjoyed a lot the presence in a very small club of Uncle Tony who I saw many times until now, but only in big arenas in all Peter Gabriel concerts I've attended since about 1980.
CGT will play tonight (15th) on Milan, tomorrow in Roma, on 27th in Toronto, 31th in Rouyn-Noranda (Quebec) and a few times with friends during the Quebec Summer Festival.
Then, they'll play in many places in California and all over USA. If you love eclectic music, just go listening to them.
So, yes, CGT rocks!
So,
Charter will be spying on every web page their customers view,
and collating and using this information in a Big Brotherly fashion. But
it's for advertising, so it's a good thing, right?
Yeah, right. I signed up for fiber to the home from my local ISP today.
$charter_customers--. Oddly, besides not being a privacy nightmare, my
local ISP is
cheaper too. Who'd have thought.
Anyone using
http://kitenet.net/wifi wireless or on the network here: You should
assume Charter is spying on you for now. (BTES will install their
connection on Monday.)
I did this
three years ago,
too. I guess now's the time to go again: I just went through my referer
logs—specifically, keywords people entered in search engines right
before they ended up on my site—, and will try to answer those
questions people seem to have when they end up on my site. Here
goes:
- voorwoord eindwerk: Eh. How about you make your
homework yourself? (to my english readers: "voorwoord eindwerk" is dutch
for "foreword dissertation"... and a few months ago, I noticed that I
accidentally had my brother's dissertation on my website. It's now
removed, and the search hits seem to have stopped, too, but it's still
in my not-so-recent referer logs)
- php accept language: Yes, I did write that. By the
number of people searching for it, you'd think it's the most important
contribution I made to open source. I sure hope not, but anyway.
- wouter verhelst: Yes, you found him, all 1.4% of
you. Perhaps you meant that
other wouter verhelst, however.
- digikam vs f-spot/f-spot vs digikam: I eventually
picked digikam, not f-spot. Make sure you pick the right one from the
beginning, though, since switching currently requires you to re-tag
everything.
- nicknames: My IRC nickname is 'Yoe'. But as I've
explained before, I prefer not being called that elsewhere.
- vim vs emacs: Not sure why you end up on my site
for that. I use both, depending on what I want or need to do. (emacs is
more powerful in some areas, but takes far longer to start...)
- duck with whisky:yes, yes, yes,
very funny.
- nbdmagic: The NBD protocol uses a magic number to
mark the start of a request packet; this defends against the client and
server getting out of sync (which may happen in case of a bug
somewhere). If that happens, the server will kill the connection with a
message "Not enough magic." Please report the bug, or (even better) fix
it :-)
Moving further down, it's fascinating to see what people were looking
for when they ended up on my site. Some of the below, I have absolutely
no clue what happened...:
- belgium driver licence—go to your local municipal office,
please!
- sockets in brainfuck—now, really.
- wouter's mum—look at your own, you dammit you!
- what to do with debian—I should know, how?
- several things related to "android"—I'm not involved in
that
- list of programming languages to learn—that's easy: the list
of programming languages you don't know, yet.
- kernel panic not syncing aiee killing interrupt handler 2.6.24 (and
several other literal panic messages)
- verhelst -meaning—In other words: "anything that has verhelst,
but no meaning". Thanks. I guess.
I guess blogging about technical things for several years has made me
"interesting" enough for some people. Grin.
I usually don't blog about uploads to the
Debian archive but since I don't know any similar software in Debian I do in this case.
nitrogen is a wallpaper selection and setting tool with both a graphical (with image preview) and text based frontend to set wallpapers and restore them later.
That's nothing special, there are some tools doing that.
But nitrogen also provides great multihead and xinerama support and is the only tool in the archive I know that is able to set different wallpapers to different monitors!
From the description:
nitrogen is a graphical wallpaper utility that can be used in two
modes, browser and recall.
Some of the things to look for in nitrogen are:
.
- Multihead and Xinerama support (setting different wallpapers for each monitor)
- Recall mode to restore wallpapers via startup script
- Uses freedesktop.org standard for thumbnails
- Can set GNOME background
- Command line set modes for script usage
- Inotify monitoring of browsed directories
Check it out
Dear
Daniel,
It looks like you are referring to my post, though you got my name wrong so that wasn’t immediately obvious.
Of course this is far worse than the 2003 compromise in terms of the direct, known and quantifiable impact it has on our users. I don’t think I stated otherwise, so I hardly see why your post starts with “I disagree”.
So one of the amazing things about the net is not so much how it makes lots of data available (actually that can be the nightmare of the net) but how it makes it available. And one of the more powerful forms of availability is in the form of visual mapping. So this new tool the
NNDB Mapper is just one such visualization tool that I have to say, is pretty niftfy, though still a little green and beta at least in terms of its data.
Take for example, the
hacker map, which is pretty sparse right now but the great thing about it is 1) one can add data 2) and it generates useful data and links, for example,
to profiles, such as this this one of Kevin Mitnick.
Apparently, he is not linked to anyone, which is ironic (and just wrong) because he it is more correct to say was linked like to an entire generation of hackers, especially those who participated in the Free Kevin movement (and that could perhaps be another field?)..
I wasn't going to comment on the recent
openssl security update, because too many people have already done so.
Personally I thought that Aigars Mahinovs
made the best writeup I've seen so far.
However I would like to say that having 20+ people all mailing
security[at]debian.org to say the webpage we referenced in the security advisory is currently blank is not useful, or ask for details already released in the advisory they replied to, or ask for even more details is not so much fun.
Having people immediately start mailing questions like "Huh? What can I do" is only natural, but you can't expect a response when things are as hectic as they have been recently. Ideally people would sit on their hands and bite their tongues. Realistically that isn't going to happen, and realistically this post will make no difference either...
Had the issue not leaked to unstable so quickly (and inappropriately IMHO) then we'd have had a little more time. But once an issue is reported you need to coordinate with other distributions, and etc. Handling something as severe as this is not fun, and random mails from users are a distraction, and a resource-hog.
I should say I was not in any way involved in the discovery, the reporting, the preparation of the fix(es), or the releasing of the update. I knew it was coming, but everybody else seemed to have it well in hand. When there are mails going back and forth for 5+ days with ever-growing Cc: lists, and mailing lists being involved I figure one more cook wouldn't be useful.
So in conclusion:
a. Bad hole.
b. Fixing this will take years, probably.
c. 50+ mails to the security team within an hour of the advisory going public complaining of missing information is not helpful, not useful, and quite irritating. (Albeit understandable).
d. People who don't know the details of an attack, or issue, shouldn't speculate and start panic, fear, and confusion. Esp. when details are a little vague.
e. I still like pies.
Once again thanks to everybody who was involved and put in an insane amount of work. Yes this is only the start - our users have to suffer the pain of regenerating everything - but we did good.
Really. Debian did good.
It might not look like it right now, but it could have been so much worse, and Debian did do good.
ObQuote: X-Men: The Last Stand
The configuration of this blog has been explained
earlier. There was one thing still missing from this blog --- comments.The comments plugin that comes in the
contrib tarball from the
pyblosxom web site is well-documented and easy enough to install. One modification I made is to remove all the javascript stuff since I don't understand the latter.After all this one still needs some sort of authentication to prevent complete rubbish from cluttering the comments section. The natural candidate was
openid which is supported by a plugin from
snarfed.org.This
seemed easy enough to configure except that there is no version of these libraries in Debian "etch" (which is what
people.imsc.res.in runs). So I downloaded the
latest 2.x.x version of these libraries. Since I rarely install my own python libraries, it took me a while to figure out that I need to run
python setup.py install --home $HOME
in order to install it in my home directory. This also needed the
codebase variable to be set in
config.py.Unfortunately, this still did not work. The plugin
comments_openid.py actually uses the API from the
older 2.0.x version of the python-openid libraries.Some error messages from our web server led me onto a completely different track and I thought that the rewrite rules from the
.htaccess file were in error. This was a
McGuffin and I had to revert to the comment-free version in order to clean-up the mess. Thank goodness for
git!The plugin currently works with the 2.0.x version of the libraries which may be mildly worse than the 2.1.x version.Some other things which are not working are e-mail/rdf notification of comments. I don't know if I will bother to fix that.
Yesterday I received two new machines from
DOLA on-line auctions [1]. I decided to use the first to replace the hardware for my
SE Linux Play Machine [2]. The previous machine I had used for that purpose was a white-box 1.1GHz Celeron and I replaced it with an 800MHz Pentium3 system (
which uses only 35W when slightly active and only 28W when the hard disk spins down [3]).
The next step was to get the machine in question ready for it’s next purpose, I was planning to give it to a friend of a friend. A machine of those specs which was made by Compaq would be very useful to me, but when it’s a white-box I’ll just give it away. So I installed new RAM and a new hard drive in it (both of which had been used in another machine a few hours earlier and seemed to be OK) and turned it on. Nothing happened, I was just checking that it was plugged in correctly when I noticed smoke coming from the PSU… It seems strange that the machine in question had run 24*7 for about 6 months and then suddenly started smoking after being moved to a different room and being turned off overnight.
It is possible that the hard drive was broken and shorted out the PSU (the power cables going to the hard drive are thick enough that it could damage the PSU if it had a short-circuit). What I might do in the future is keep an old and otherwise useless machine on hand for testing hard drives so that if something like that happens then it won’t destroy a machine that is useful. Another possibility is that the dust in the PSU contained some metal fragments and that moving the machine to another room caused them to short something out, but there’s not much I can do with that when I get old machines. I might put an air filter in each room that I use for running computers 24*7 to stop such problems getting worse in future though.
I recently watched the
TED lecture “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do” [4], so I’m going to offer the broken machine to some of my neighbors if they want to let their children take it apart.
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Setting environment variables at X login
I've been asked how to set a variable after gdm has done login.
~/.bashrc is not an option, as it's only run by
shells, but we want the variable to be set in every X application
that is started.
The answer is:
~/.profile for text and graphical sessions~/.xprofile for graphical sessions only
Forget about
~/.xinitrc.
~/.xsession
and
~/.Xsession: at least in gnome-session, they do
not work.
Update: * On IRC, I've been told that
~/.xsessionrc should be used since xorg 1:7.3+9
I am affiliated with a project whose origin is the northern parts of Canada, although whose members span the globe called
What Sort of People Should There Be?. The idea behind this nifty and catchy title is to get a bunch of researchers in various fields, from disability studies to philosophy and everything that comes in between to start asking a series of questions about the role of human enhancement today and eugenics in the past, all within the context of thinking about the experience and politics of disability. I am super excited about the project because it spans the past and present to confront what it means to be human, how we value variation, how we seek to support or erase difference, and lastly something close to my academic heart, the role of technology in facilitating and dampening the politics of possibility and hope when it comes to disability.
The project has recently launched an multi-author
blog and I will be posting there from time to time. If you are interested in this topic, do come by for a visit. I am sure you won’t be disappointed. My most recent post is
here and it covers an interesting article in the New York Times on
Mad Pride, which oddly enough is in the Fashion & Style section.
I won't repeat it here, but there's
DSA-1571-1 waiting for your attention,
especially if you made some material out of
openssl over the last couple of
years or so. Yes, you read it right: COUPLE.
Upgrading to the new OpenSSL is easy. Generating new keys is another story.
To save (or add to, depending on how you handle this) your pain, there is a
simple checker that can currently see if your OpenSSH or OpenVPN public
keys are weak enough to warrant replacement. I await a version that can handle
X.509 certificates too (though I only just generated a new one today, before
the announcement, so that means I have to do it again (and get its CSR to
CACert for signing, etc.)
And yeah, if you're running
openssh-server, consider regenerating your
host RSA and DSA keys, e.g.:
# mv /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ dsa,rsa _key* /some/place/else
# dpkg-reconfigure -plow openssh-server
That should regenerate your keys
and restart openssh-server once the new keys
are installed to
/etc/ssh.
The
hard part (of making sure all the keys of your systems are updated and
tested) is still up to you, however.
UPDATE:
The Debian wiki has up-to-date information regarding other
packages that generate SSH/SSL keys at postinst. Please refer to that while
the
key-rollover page isn't up yet.
UPDATE 2:
openssh-server is updated (with corresponding
DSA-1576-1) that is linked to the updated OpenSSL library. Be sure to
upgrade! The new package also pulls in
openssh-blacklist, a new package
that contains the database needed by the new
ssh-vulnkey for checking SSH
public keys.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young man in your 20s, trying to make your way in the world. You are married and have a young daughter, just old enough to start to talk. You live in a run-down neighborhood, long passed-over by any economic advances. What schools you had access to barely taught anyone much. The few jobs you can reach have fierce competition, even though the pay is low. You worry about your health, but even more about that of your wife and child. Finding food is a constant concern. Although you are still healthy now, and you are willing and able to be a hard worker, there is simply nobody hiring people in your area. Not to mention the gunfights that erupt between gangs or drug dealers. Oh, and did I mention that your wife is 4 months pregnant?
Your top priority is to do your best to keep your family safe. You're afraid that your whole family will starve, or be killed by an errant bullet. You've tried for a long time -- it seems like forever -- to do everything you can think of, with no success. Finally, you decide that the only way you can have the hope for a better life is to move somewhere where the economy is better, and the drug dealers are fewer.
But moving hundreds or thousands of miles away is no easy task when you have no money to move. Somehow, with some luck, ingenuity, and tenacity, you have finally managed to find a way. You have no job offer in your new town, but conditions are so bleak at home that you just can't risk staying there. So the three of you move 1500 miles away.
You arrive with no money, no apartment, and don't know anybody. But you're a hard worker, and have talked yourself into a job. It pays what passes for minimum wage in your new home, but it's a fortune compared to what you made before. It's backbreaking work, and you work long hours. But soon you can afford a cramped apartment, and keep your refrigerator stocked with food. What a luxury!
Pretty soon your new baby son is born. You can afford to feed him, your daughter, your wife, and yourself, every day. When you're really lucky, you even have some money left over to send to your brother back home, who is still struggling to make ends meet there. You seem to have climbed the first rung on the American Dream ladder.
Years pass. Your old home becomes a memory; your daily life revolves around new struggles now. Your oldest child is in school, your wife finds part-time work sometimes too, cleaning houses for rich people. You've been laid off several times, your income isn't guaranteed, and the others in your new home don't take kindly to strangers -- and they still think you're one. But it's better than flying bullets and never knowing where your next meal will come from.
Then one day, while you are at work, federal agents show up. You are arrested and taken to jail. Agents show up at home, too, arresting your wife. It turns out that they realized you entered the country illegally from Ecuador those years ago. Meanwhile, your wife wonders what will happen to your son that was playing in a neighbor's yard while she was arrested, or to your daugther that was at school.
After months in jail, with little contact with each other, and poor medical care, the government decides to deport you to Mexico. Why Mexico? Well, it's cheaper, and there's no documentation showing where you came from. Apparently you "look" Mexican, and they don't believe your story.
After months in jail with no income, you are once again bankrupt. A government bus takes you to Mexico and drops you down someplace there, with your wife and your oldest child. Your younger child was born in the United States, and so is an American citizen and can't be deported. But the government isn't going to give him a free ride on a prison bus (and Mexico wouldn't take him anyway, since everyone knows he's American). You have no idea where he is. You have no idea how you're going to find food in Mexico, no idea how to find your son, no idea where to find refuge from the ever more prevalent drug dealers. Meanwhile, the Americans think you're scum because you wanted to protect your family, and it's going to be much more difficult to get back in to try to reunite your family.
This story is based on true events.
It's truly easy to demonize illegal immigrants, isn't it? Easy to round them up by the thousands, easy to build a bigger fence, easy to lock them away.
Sometimes it seems like this nation built on freedom, supposedly on Christian values, has lost sight of compassion for the lowly. In this country, we would throw in jail parents that didn't do everything humanly possible to find food for their children. We also throw in jail parents that grew up in other countries that are just doing the same.
How sad that we have people going on TV, suggesting we round up millions of Americans that happened to come here illegally, breaking up millions of families, creating an immense foster child problem, a human tragedy on a mass scale. How incredible that some of these people on TV wear the title "senator" or "candidate for president". How stupid do they think we are, suggesting that a poor South American family would somehow be able to navigate the arcane American immigration system and wait the 15 years to get here legally, if they manage to come up with all the necessary money somehow?
Politicians have been pushing our buttons for too long. We aren't a nation of selfish hoarders; we came together through tough times, survived the Depression, put in place the Berlin Airlift that saved countless lives in West Berlin. But the thought of someone with darkish skin coming to this country and building highways is enough to send some people looking for a rifle.
I hope that we will someday do better.
Mark Shuttleworth has written an interesting post about Ubuntu release dates [1]. He claims that free software distributions are better able to meet release dates than proprietary OSs because they are not doing upstream development. The evidence that free software distributions generally do a reasonable job of meeting release dates (and Ubuntu does an excellent job) is clear.
But the really interesting part of his post is where he offers to have Ubuntu collaborate with other distributions on release dates. He states that if two out of Red Hat (presumably Enterprise Linux), Novell (presumably SLES), and Debian will commit to the same release date (within one month) and (possibly more importantly) to having the same versions of major components then he will make Ubuntu do the same.
This is a very significant statement. From my experience working in the Debian project and when employed by Red Hat I know that decisions about which versions of major components to include are not taken lightly, and therefore if the plan is to include a new release of a major software project and that project misses a release date then it forces a difficult decision about whether to use an older version or delay the release. For Ubuntu to not merely collaborate with other distributions but to instead follow the consensus of two different distributions would be a massive compromise. But I agree with Mark that the benefits to the users are clear.
I believe that the Debian project should align it’s release cycles with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I believe that RHEL is being released in a very sensible manner and that the differences of opinion between Debian and Red Hat people about how to manage such things are small. Note that it would not be impossible to have some variations of version numbers of components but still stick mostly to the same versions.
If Debian, Ubuntu, and RHEL released at about the same time with the same versions of the kernel, GCC, and major applications and libraries then it would make it much easier for users who want to port software between distributions and run multiple distributions on the same network or the same hardware.
The
Debian Social Contract [2] states that “Our priorities are our users and free software“. I believe that by using common versions across distributions we would help end-users in configuring software and maintaining networks of Linux systems running different distributions, and also help free software developers by reducing the difficulty in debugging problems.
It seems to me that the best way of achieving the goal that Mark advocates (in the short term at least) is for Debian to follow Red Hat’s release cycle. I think that after getting one release with common versions out there we could then discuss how to organise cooperation between distributions.
I also believe that a longer support cycle would be a good thing for Debian. I’m prepared to do the necessary work for the packages that I maintain and would also be prepared to do some of the work in other areas that is needed (EG back-porting security fixes).
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As some people have guessed, not posting means that I'm doing quite well these days! The major advancements in my life since the last post are:
* Feeling comfortable enough to drive a car.
I finally feel like I can look around enough to shoulder check, although I can't twist enough to back the car up. When it comes time to park in out parking spot, I get Angie to do that bit.
* I'm allowed in the hot tub!
While this one seems like less of a big deal, since sitting in a hot tub in mid-20 degree weather is a bit weird, it's one more thing to do when I'm at home, and really pleasant on my back and shoulder muscles.
* My first HIV test came back negative.
Yay blood transfusion. The doctors consider the risk to be so negligible that they don't actively recommend that people get tested. They do, however, make you sign scary paperwork. So in order to be a responsible partner, and not a hypocrite when I teach OWL, I'm getting tested. One more test at 3 months, one more at 6 months to go.
Otherwise, things are going well. Physical Therapy is continue to put me on harder weights and Therabands almost every week. I'm continuing to reduce my meds at one pill per week (So I think I might be able to have a "Yay, I've got a 5-year visa" celebratory drink when I can back!). I'm still taking the anti-nausea drugs almost every day, but hopefully as I get off the pain killers, that will be less of a problem.
Oh, and I got our Canadian taxes mailed off (yay!). Now if we can only get the accountant to get the US ones off...
We're going up to Vancouver soon. There'll be at least one party for Leif, please email me if you want info. When we get back, I'll be straight into work, so forgive me if I suddenly go silent for a few weeks. =)
Now, back to homework. A course started a month earlier than I thought it did. =(
Yesterday I completed the first successful installation of Debian on a
QNAP TS-209 using a custom debian-installer image with 2.6.25 from
unstable. I made the installer image for QNAP TS-109 and TS-209
available as an
experimental
developer release and today I also uploaded images for the TS-409.
More on my plans to support the QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 in the
upcoming release of Debian (starting with beta3 of debian-installer)
soon.
I'm just back from a trip to Cuba. Sorry for the abrupt disconnect. I expected to have limited connectivity there, whereas I actually had none at all except for 23 minutes! I hope the other members of
the cooperative
and
the editorial team
stepped in suitably well. I'll check in with them now and then start on the emails, but I wanted to put this broadcast out first for those who are watching closely and wondering...
