We are currently having the fun of a perl update in unstable - most packages have been rebuilt and work just fine, now cleaning up the mess starts. Please don't expect perl to enter lenny in the next few days. Also, hold back on the uploads of perl packages or SONAME bumps, thanks. For the moment, I'm keeping my todo list in my hint file. If you would like to help out, just pick one of the bugs listed there and do the work, thanks :)
A common rant against Launchpad is that it s closed: the code
is proprietary, and Canonical
doesn t give raw access to the data they collect via the interface.
Anyway, other people have
taken up this issue, and it s not the point of this post to do
so.
I ve heard two argument why Launchpad is closed: first, it s a
test bed for a product, which Canonical hopes to market to
commercial entities to manage their own release cycles. And second:
it s purposely cross-project and tries to integrate and link
between them. Thus, lots of instances of Launchpad would defeat the
point.
I ll address these points in turn, starting from the back:
While I won t deny a pre-trend towards (back to)
mainframe-like computing, with Google, Amazon, and others
providing rent-a-computer-cycle services. In addition,
environmental concerns cast clouds over the 400W heating appliance
under your desk, which happens to run your word processor and
browser when it doesn t lose track of its countless spare cycles.
Yet, I maintain that centralised services, such as Launchpad are a
thing of the past.
If you ask me, Launchpad got it wrong, even though it s light
years further than its predecessors. It features pleasant graphics
and obviously has had lots of smart thinking and experience shoved
into it, but it s still centralised. It might be a business case,
but it s not what the world needs.
We ve seen massive growth of decentralised approaches to classic
services, from file sharing to version control, from number
crunching to simple web browsing, and yet, there s Launchpad,
single point of entry (and failure) to the world of data
surrounding Free software (at least if you follow their
vision).
What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands
of instances thereof, which all peer with each other,
automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored
wherever it s referenced, so the entire cloud would be
highly-available and failure-proof.
Obviously, this wouldn t render itself well to the (traditional)
software business model Canonical seems to strive for, so they re
unlikely to go down this route.
But we could. It would be a non-competitor.
Update: thanks for the copious feedback I ve received.
Among them was a comment by [Elliot
Murphy]](http://launchpad.net/~statik), who speaks of us and thus
leads me to believe that he s part of the Launchpad team:
We re definitely listening, and we still have lots more improvements we want to make. Our goal is collaboration, not centralization: thats why we build bazaar, are working busily on doing two-way integration with other bug tracker systems, and are building the best API we can. Our goal in the team is to make it trivially easy for you to get all the data that you put into launchpad back out through the API, data portability is very important. There is no big evil business model, but it would be socially irresponsible if we did not work toward making launchpad self-sustaining. It has been a long road, but the launchpad team is steadily working toward a distributed model, one step at a time.While it s definitely nice to hear that data portability is a concern to them, I don t see Debian using Launchpad without the ability to run it on our own servers. I m definitely curious to hear more about the distributed model the team is pursuing. I certainly don t have a problem with self-sustainability, but in the Free software world, I do wonder what that is supposed to achieve. Release early, release often, anyone? Update: Philip Newborough took up the issue and has received a number of noteworthy replies. It made me very happy that he sees my post as a rant about Launchpad which is not lambasting Canonical for their proprietary Launchpad software; I wasn t aiming for any lambasting. NP: Nine Inch Nails: Further Down the Spiral
From http://159.18.52.69/raw/983493
Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 12, in module
from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib
ImportError: No module named ext.reader
Fix/workaround:
+ sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python%s/site-packages/oldxml' % sys.version[:3])
from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib
I had an old Python script doing some XML work and after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 I started getting the above error message and had to use the above fix because the Ubuntu packages of python-xml moved the xml.dom.ext.* to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oldxml for some reason. Have not looked at the latest Debian packages. Does anyone know why such back-compatibility breaking change was introduced? All I find on Google are the people getting bitten by this bug and no reasoning or even discussion behind the change.
I usually don't like me too comments... But this is something that really disappoints me of my otherwise-favorite development framework. I must echo Matt Palmer's comment on Luke Kanies' entry:git bisect, that may change my mind.
On their "get the
facts" site (as if), Microsoft recently posted a set of screencast
demonstrating how much "easier" it is to install Perl and PHP on IIS
than it is on Linux.
Being bored, I had a look at these screencasts. The first covered
installing stuff on Windows; in a 5 minute screencast, they first
explain how you install ActivePerl, and have it handle perl scripts for
a webserver through a CGI interface. This involves way too many steps to
remember for me (including clicking through a wizard, going to the IIS
management interface and enabling it, creating a directory and enabling
that in the IIS interface as a CGI location, and more).
Next, they do the same for PHP. Since they install PHP as a CGI
binary rather than an ISAPI module, the setup isn't as
complex—they conveniently reused many of the settings they'd done
for perl—but it still required quite some steps.
After having watched this screencast, I was wondering how they'd make
it look harder on a Linux system. My guess was that they'd use Slackware
and would compile apache, perl, and php from scratch or some such.
That didn't turn out to be the case, however. They used ubuntu.
To make the process look complicated, they refrained from
using synaptic, instead opening an (almost full-screen) shell window,
in which they use apt-get to install the
libapache2-mod-php5 package. They conveniently also first
installed the wrong version of apache, so that it would do all kinds of
magical and confusing things. Really, however, after having installed
this package, everything works—and they show that.
The perl step should have been ignored. After installing apache on
Debian or any of its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, support for Perl CGI
scripts has already been installed and configured. Configuring
that requires exactly zero steps. However, they still install
libapache2-mod-perl, just to make it look a bit more confusing. It's not
a very bad idea to do this, actually; installing mod_perl makes serving
Perl scripts go quite a bit faster. But if you just want to have apache
serve perl through CGI scripts, as they'd done on the IIS setup, all you
need to do is install ubuntu, and make sure there's an apache installed.
Period.
But that's not all. They cheat. The installation of the perl and php
modules on ubuntu includes the process of downloading the binaries and
their dependencies; on the Windows screencast, the downloads have
already been performed, and are placed on the desktop. This nicely
avoids showing how you need to go to the ActivePerl and PHP websites,
track down installers, download them, wait for your download to
complete, and then manually start the installation process.
To make things even more laughable, they install Perl and PHP as CGI
handlers on Windows, but perform an installation of the same software
through apache's C API. In other words, they told you how to install a
fast and useful Linux system, and how to install a slow and less useful
Windows installation (since a PHP setup that uses CGI will not support
sessions or persistent database connections, amongst other things).
And even with all that cheating and blundering, the Windows
screencast still takes 5 minutes, as compared to the four for
Ubuntu.
I think Mahatma Gandhi forgot one line in his famous quote. It
should have this:
Then they make complete and utter fools of themselves in a vain attempt to still look relevant... right before the "then you win".
Apparently it is a political suicide in USA to make people think. Obama’s ex-preacher Jeremiah Wright is the most sane US preacher that I’ve ever heard. If you read or listen to his sermons in full length and go beyond the Fox News presented soundbites, he is 99% right. The US has long been doing extreme violence to countries around the world, so it is no wonder that such violence came back to US. Russia had the same problem with Afghanistan and Chechnya. If you try to put yourself up as ‘world police’, some people will disagree. Then he damned America’s _government_ for letting Americans down by not caring enough about the people. The only thing that I would smile and shake my head at was the statement that American government invented HIV. I doubt even they have such resources. Read this transcript for example, the sermon is just a great sermon that urges the people think for themselves. And what people put this sermon down for? Using a word ‘Negro’? Having an issue with some specific politicians? He is a pastor, pastors are meant to have a strong opinion a vision and to project that for the congregation to see. “I’m not going to stop thinking just because I love Jesus” is the summary of that sermon if you ask me. And that is the most positive religious message I’ve heard from that side of the pond for a long time. You can agree or disagree with rev. Wright, but you can still go to his sermons and enjoy it because he makes you think. I would talk to most racist bastard, serial killer or even Hitler himself if he could tell me something that would provoke my mind to think and thus improve myself. You don’t have to agree with people to benefit from speaking to them or from listening to what they have to say. Even if someone is 100% wrong and misguided, if his speeches can make you think of some good idea, it is worth it. And rev. Jeremiah Wright is not 100% wrong, from what I’ve heard he is on the money most of the time and only some of his statements I would disagree with. And he is a great speaker. If I would have not been an Obama supporter, I would become one because of Wright.
Or because of the very accurate observation by Obama that in hard times people in rural USA cling to trusted values such as guns and religion. There is nothing wrong with that.
I am amazed how such true statements can be so turned by US press and can actually reduce Obamas rating. I was starting to believe that not all is lost in the US, but if Obama does not get elected, well … it is all lost in the US.
PS. How this related to Debian? Or software is the best choice for the society in the long term. However, that is only true if we assume that people behave rationally and use it, improve it and contribute back improvements for the public good. If the general population is made weary of rational thinking and starts thinking in soundbites and slogans, then there is a ceiling to free software expansion and the whole free software movement can eventually be crushed in the interests of homeland security with strong corporate commercial software backing. (Only government approved software is allowed to run with mandatory government approved back-doors and hardware verification to prevent cyber-terrorism or something, thus also forbidding any compilers and interpreters outside government controls.)
A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what? If Bio-Fuel is not better for the environment, why are politicians and environmentalists getting behind this growing industry? I think it’s because it seems to be the “trendy” thing to do, and we all know what happens when the media promotes a new trend. We get tons of media coverage telling us why it’s a good thing, and hardly any coverage of the negative impacts. Already people from the Bio-Fuel industry are getting on television shouting out that there are many factors contributing to rising food prices, trying to deflect the fact that their destruction of food to fuel vehicles is the main culprit.Actually, I suspect the emphasis on biofuels in the USA and Europe has to do with the fact that it’s the only alternative to fossil-based motor fuels proven to be sustainable and scalable:
The success of FFFVs, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil to get more than 40% of its automobile fuels from sugar cane-based ethanol in 2007.I see no link to the European study in question, but previous studies have suffered from various faults; for example, the assumption that trucks transporting fuel cannot themselves shift to biofuels. I’m sure better analysis of the study is on its way. But that’s not the most interesting thing, to me. More interesting: my general impression that a lot of the climate-change hysteria is just that. If we hear what science seems to be telling us about the environment, and we think that something needs to be done, then we should do things that will actually work. One thing that really works is conservation: use less of the bad stuff we’re using. But we’ve done quite a bit on that front, only to hear that much, much more is required to make a difference. I’m not sure there’s much, much more benefit for us to realize in conservation, at least in the short term. So, to make a real difference, we have to make more radical changes. Can we change our motor fuel? Sure; starting with something that pollutes less, and that even absorbs some of that same pollutant in its production, sounds like a winner. JROBI, again:
It makes no sense whatsoever to create Bio-Fuel when there are much better options on the table - for instance Hydrogen vehicles. When was the last time you heard someone on the news talk about Hydrogen initiatives?I hear it every so often. But most talk, today, focuses on the very real problems with hydrogen as a motor fuel. There are many; just look at the discussions of hydrogen fuel tank technology for a sample. But one of the biggest problems is that of developing an infrastructure for delivering fuel to the customer. No one talks about the problems of setting up an ethanol infrastructure. We already have it. Brazil has demonstrated that the current gasoline infrastructure can easily be adapted to deliver ethanol instead, and that there is a viable migration plan for gradually moving people off fossil fuels. Now, this isn’t to say that the world of ethanol is hunky-dory. It’s arguable that, while ethanol may be sustainable, the corn-based system the USA has adopted isn’t. Some people are talking about sensible tweaks that may solve the food problems while continuing to support biofuels–removing our silly tariff on Brazilian ethanol, for example, or developing alternative feedstocks for ethanol production. The problem is that hysteria seems to be breeding hysteria. Global warming is so severe, we are told, that we need solutions, and we need them immediately. So we develop solutions we can use immediately. But no! These solutions cost; we need something else, and we need it immediately, and we need it cost-free. Practically, this kind of insistence on perfection–that we deploy solutions with no drawbacks, only benefits–has the effect of dampening our enthusiasm for environmental solutions. We tried, our leaders will tell us, but nothing was good enough, so we gave up. And so, rather than do something that helps, or even something that lays the foundation for helping, we continue our use of fossil fuels. Perhaps ethanol is the wrong solution. But if it is, we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the future, as foretold by science, or fervently hope that the global warming deniers are right, because other solutions will arrive too late to do much good.
Ooops. When a room full of computer equipment gains a strong smell, there are a couple of possibilities (!) but the characteristic odour of singed electronics and lack of video output on one box is fairly indicative and all I could do was turn off the power on the UPS. 
localhost:9977 to the
start of your sources.list entries (see the man page). The only difference is the port
number (DebTorrent uses 9988 by default) and that you can use it on all
your sources.list entries, whether they be deb, deb-src, official
Debian archive, or any other archive. Then an apt-get update gets it
started, and you can begin installing packages. Point your web browser
to http://localhost:9977 to see what's going on.
IMPORTANT: as with any P2P program, it works much better if you open
a port through your NAT or firewall. Without this crucial step, you
won't be able to share with any peers, and your lookup of peers to
download from may take longer. Make sure to forward both TCP and UDP
ports 9977, or whichever port you set in the config file. For more
details, see the port forwarding section of the FAQ.
The similarities with DebTorrent are all external, so let's look at how
it differs from DebTorrent internally:
.deb files, is only supported for the
official archive, and breaks downloaders into groups by architectures)6. provides any telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses;
7. promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous;
11. furthers or promotes any criminal activity or enterprise or provides instructional information about illegal activities including, but not limited to making or buying illegal weapons, violating someone's privacy, or providing or creating computer viruses;
After months battling with the reverse cross build of gcc-4.3 to provide libgcc1 (1:4.3.0-3em1) arm , it's finally been uploaded, lintian clean. (emdebian-tools (>= 1.0.0) provides cross-building support in lintian.)
People rarely ask me about my amazing ability to remove fruitfly ovaries in under 10 seconds. "This skill makes me strangely attracted to you" they then inevitably fail to add, thus giving the lie to claims that a PhD in biology is a great way to impress women. In order to avoid future social embarrassment I have therefore decided to provide a step-by-step guide to removing ovaries from any fruitflies you may have to hand.
I have been knocking my head against the wall a while with this bug. It's supposed that this line should create a PID file in /var/run/gkrellmd.pid but there's no PID file created so the daemon cannot be stopped so there's a error while upgrading-removing gkrellmd but is not supposed to be like this the line?:
start)
echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
--exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
echo "$NAME."
;;
It has been a long time since i posted an entry. Many things have happened. Many things have changed. Let’s summarize them.
I no longer live in Finland. I moved out on January the 29th, almost exactly by the day 8 and half years after I moved there. Right now I am in Dublin, Ireland, but you never know for how long. In any case I am enjoying quite much. Not as dark as Finland in winter, not as rainy as people think it is. Yeah, it rains, but it was rainy in Finland too. And here in not as cold.
I no longer work for Nokia. My employer has changed and I am enjoying every single bit of it.
I have not resigned from Debian, although I have not been active for the last months. If you add the new job (hiring process), moving and settling down, you could understand the lack of time. At least I can. Now things are getting stable (I got my ADSL connected only last weekend, and my server at home with all the mail redirected only yesterday) so I am ready to restart with my commitments. Also my employer will allow me to do some Debian work, so I only need my GPG key to be reinstated in the keyring (there is a ticket for it, so I just have to wait).
And finally, if you want to follow where I have been spending some of my time, follow my flickr photostream.
Abstract: Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere. However, geological evidence seemed to indicate that the atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Archaean and Proterozoic were far too low to keep the surface from freezing. With a radiative-convective model including new, updated thermal absorption coefficients, we found that the amount of CO2 necessary to obtain 273 K at the surface is reduced up to an order of magnitude compared to previous studies. For the late Archaean and early Proterozoic period of the Earth, we calculate that CO2 partial pressures of only about 2.9 mb are required to keep its surface from freezing which is compatible with the amount inferred from sediment studies. This conclusion was not significantly changed when we varied model parameters such as relative humidity or surface albedo, obtaining CO2 partial pressures for the late Archaean between 1.5 and 5.5 mb. Thus, the contradiction between sediment data and model results disappears.The suspected composition of the eary Earth (the Archean, when life is believed to have started, 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), has alternated between CO2 and other reducing gases, such as methane. Originally CO2 was thought to be the main greenhouse gas, making life possible. However the high CO2 levels required were a problem; high CO2 levels would have created siderite (FeCO3) in the top layers of soil as iron interacted with CO2 in the oxygen-free air. Since then methane has top billing as the greenhouse gas responsible, with significant hydrogen levels a possibility. Over time, methane has come out on top. And thats what I wrote when I did my literature review for my PhD. Now I'm tidying it up a bit, and that section may be in for a rewrite. But what does it mean for our Climate change models of today?
Next.